14th Berkshire Conference on the History of Women Van Nederveen Meerkerk Minneapolis, 12-15 June 2008 Counting women in. Female labour market participation in the Dutch textile industry, c. 1600-1800 First draft, not to be cited without the author’s permission Dr. Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk Leiden University* e.j.v.van.nederveen@hum.leidenuniv.nl Introduction In the historiography, two contrasting views exist about the relationship between female labour market participation and pre-industrial economic development. 1 On the one hand, historians such as Hans Medick, Jan de Vries and Jan Luiten van Zanden have argued that proto-industrialization, economic specialization and commercialization would have been favourable for women’s participation in the labour market, and, the other way around, that risen female economic activity stimulated the economy even further. 2 Some authors even go as far as to argue that the widespread entrance of (young) women in the labour market would have enabled processes of economic modernization. 3 On the other hand, there are historians such as Simon Schama and Hettie Pott-Buter, who have argued that pre-industrial economic growth led to rising incomes, which would have decreased the need for women to contribute to the family budget by being active in the labour market. Especially in the prosperous Dutch Republic, this ‘bourgeois’ ideal of domesticity would have already trickled down to the lower strata of society as early as in the seventeenth century. In their view, economic and cultural developments went hand in hand in lowering the labour participation of women, and this is even used to historically explain the relatively low percentages of women in the Dutch labour market in the twentieth century. 4 As appealing as the grand hypotheses of previous historians may have been, so far, nobody has attempted to test them empirically by establishing the numbers and percentages of working women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the Dutch Republic as a whole. 5 This lack of a firm quantitative basis is usually explained by the * This paper presentation was partly made possible by the Leids Universitair Fonds (LUF). Many thanks to Jan Luiten van Zanden and Lex Heerma van Voss for their comments on earlier versions of this paper. 1 Instead of using the term ‘female labour force participation’, I choose to refer here to ‘female labour market participation’, because ‘labour force’ implies the working population between age 15 and 65. In my view, this is an unworkable definition for the pre-industrial labour market, in which young and old participated just the same. I do wish to refer to the labour market, in order to exclude non-market work, which I certainly do not want to discard as being of little importance, but which is too complicated to study with the currently available data and methods. In the future, I hope some more work will be done on these particularly interesting and important issues, such as unpaid domestic housework and child care. 2 Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm, Industrialisation before industrialisation, 61-62; De Vries, ‘The Industrial Revolution’, 255-258; Noordegraaf and Van Zanden, ‘Early modern economic growth’, 426. 3 De Moor and Van Zanden, Vrouwen, 10, 103. 4 Schama, The embarrassment of riches, 407; Pott-Buter, Facts and fairy tales, 48, 282. 5 Indeed, this is also the case for many other regions. See e.g. Ogilvie, ‘Women and labour markets’, 25-28. 1