Social and Cultural Perspectives on Women's Work: Comment on Loats, Hafter, and DeGroat

Abstract

The essays that make up this forum deal with gender and work identity across three centuries of French In methodology and subject matter, however, Judith DeGroat's essay contrasts sharply with other two. Carol Loats's and Daryl Hafter's essays are representatives of what was once called the new social but now might better be called the old social history. DeGroat's essay falls clearly into genre of the new cultural history, which in another fifteen years will doubtless become in its turn the old cultural history. Loats's and Hafter's essays both demonstrate admirably that there is still plenty of mileage left in old social history paradigm. Both essays deal with work and family experiences of urban skilled workers in institutional context of Old Regime. Both use documents generated by female artisans pursuing their careers and interests as artisans -notarial records of apprenticeship contracts in Loats's case and guild and court records in Hafter's. Carol Loats develops a very specific argument, based largely on quantitative evidence. She finds that many of apprenticeship contracts made by women in seventeenth-century Paris were made by married women whose trades were unrelated to those practiced by their husbands. This pattern, she points out, contrasts sharply with household economy model assumed by most historians who have written on women's work in early modern cities. According to this model, work typically took place in family units, headed by a male whose profession defined family's work activities and status. While men's work identities were supposedly chosen early and lasted for their