Home > Authors > Daryl M. Hafter > Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France
Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France
"In the eighteenth century, French women were active in a wide range of employments--from printmaking to running whole-sale businesses--although social and legal structures frequently limited their capacity to work independently. The contributors to Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century France reveal how women at all levels of society negotiated these structures with determination and ingenuity in order to provide for themselves and their families. Recent historiography on women and work in eighteenth-century France has focused on the model of the "family economy," in which women's work existed as part of the communal effort to keep the family afloat, usually in support of the patriarch's occupation. The ten essays in this volume offer case studies that complicate the conventional model: wives of ship captains managed family businesses in their husbands' extended absences; high-end...
