Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 1 (2018), p. 161

Making a living, making a difference comes out of the Gender and Work in Early Modern Sweden (GaW) project at Uppsala University. In collaboration with the team who created the Demographic Database at Umeå, Ågren and her collaborators created a database that would collect a large dataset to analyse work in Sweden between 1550 and 1799. Chapters covering ‘working together’, singleness, marriage and age, have been written by different participants in GaW. The volume achieves a high level of overall intellectual coherence.

The book reaches the important conclusion that no area of work was gender-specific. It also demonstrates that marriage was an enabler for both sexes, conferring social status. New ways of encapsulating work have emerged from the research findings. The first is ‘the two-supporter model’, the book revealing that singleness meant relatively low social authority and high levels of mobility and poverty. The book also uses the concept of ‘ever-married’ to capture the way in which women attained an authority after marriage that endured into widowhood. Widows in Sweden were money-lenders – as has been found in other parts of Europe – and they carried out the early modern equivalent of middle management, including investment in and rental of property.

GaW has turned completely on its head the way in which historians research work. Instead of starting with occupational categories, Ågren chose the anthropologists’ approach of standing ‘on the street corner’ observing human activity. The source was court testimonies. Using a ‘verb-oriented method’ GaW captured 16,182 records of what people said they were actually doing. From this recorded data, GaW created 16 broad work categories: military, teaching, trade, credit, care, administration and justice, and so on. They included theft, which was almost balanced between men and women. The research confirms that prostitution was just an extra work activity for some women.

Like other studies of work, GaW has found the market to be employer-driven (Jane Humphries and Carmen Sarasúa, ‘Off the record’, 2012). Both men and women needed to work and instead of the gendered spatial divisions of public and private, at the centre of employment was a marital household. Young people ‘travelled frequently and far to make a living’ (p. 21), and patriarchy was less important than ‘parentarchy’. In the marital household – which was 90 per cent of the total – work provision meant the elevated authority of anyone taking the surrogate roles of mother/father. The north-western European pattern of late marriage led to many couples experiencing a ‘life-cycle squeeze’ as they struggled to care for the aged while inducting the young into the world of ‘making a living’.

Some of the more nuanced patterns of social status and labour divisions are revealed by GaW’s division of the 16 work categories into sub-categories of doing. For example, managerial work was sub-divided into ‘governing’, ‘ordering’, ‘assigning’, and ‘asking’ and it was found that the figure of roughly a third representing female involvement in managerial work was skewed upwards by women ‘asking’. Similarly, the much smaller percentage of single people found in managerial work tended to be ‘asking’. GaW also found that servants were not regarded as occupying a lowly status and that people readily substituted for one another’s work activity up or down social hierarchies. Elite women can be found caring for servants, for example, in a society that had ‘intersections’ of work practice.

A vast and diverse range of work activities was undertaken, then, by both sexes and all ages in ‘open houses’. There was no gender-idleness. GaW’s new categorizations have helped to value upwards work traditionally associated with women, such as childcare. Furthermore, children can be found substituting at times for adults, carrying post, hauling things and caring for babies. GaW’s findings prompt new ways of theorising the connections between work and social status across gender, age and class: ‘making a living … allowed people to construct sameness in ways that transcended social groups … [and early modern Sweden] was a complex society predicated on both difference and sameness’ (pp. 218–9). The reconceptualization begs cultural comparison with other regions in Europe and a debate about whether or not Europe’s current cultures of work have emerged from past patterns that are regionally specific. Use of the same ethnographic methodology would provide answers.

Importantly for agricultural history, GaW found that both men and women in early modern Sweden were occupied by the widest range of work activities in urban communities. The urban/rural divide is best revealed in a chapter on ‘the fiscal military state’. In some ways, this chapter engages with the historiographies of state power structures (Anderson’s War and society in Europe, 1988; Linda Colley’s Britons, 1993; John Brewer’s Sinews of power, 1989; Peter Dickson’s The fiscal revolution, 1993) more than the volume does with the historiography of work. Sweden’s military development created a quite unique fiscal citizenry which had access to work opportunities, both in town and country, while paying the price of heavy taxation.