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Economic Theory has recently revised during last years the following two basic ideas on the economic working of families: i) family income is the sum of the individual income of each of its members (income pooling); and ii) all family members living in the household have equal access to family resources. Unequal access to family resources among women and men, as well as among elderly, adults and children, is now understood as an input. For instance, women ate less food and of worst quality than men. But it is also understood as an output: women had poorer health, higher epidemic mortality and were smaller than men because they had received less food and poorer medical care. Inequalities in intra-family consumption are currently drawing the attention of academics and international agencies but it is not yet in the Economic History agenda. In this paper we look at some of the resources consumed by Spanish families in the 19th century: food, alcoholic beverages, clothes and shoes. Medical topographies, our main source, suggest that gender inequality structured access to family resources, and that this inequality had a strong impact on the health and well-being of family members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution discusses, from the regional perspective of Bizkaia, Spain, adult women's labor force participation prior to industrialization, including the impact of economic, social, and demographic variables, such as family life cycle, marriage, and the presence of minor children in the household. Women's high level of participation – 68.6 percent for the entire province – varies considerably, depending on local economic conditions. Job opportunities for women and socioeconomic characteristics of households act as first-order explanatory factors. Women in proto-industrial economies, like Bizkaia's, which combined the extraction, transport, and marketing of iron with agriculture and fishing, show greater participation. Demand for women's labor was linked to jobs without recognized qualifications. The association of women's participation with demographic variables is not manifest in the historical data. The results show that supply factors do not explain the variance in women's activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]