Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, C. 1650-1850

ISBN-13: 9781472471345 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 280 str.

Johanna Ilmakunnas; Marjatta Rahikainen Vainio-Korhonen

Opis

After four decades of substantial scholarly work, much is now known about women s paid work, their involvement in pecuniary pursuits and their role in the economy in general in the European past. Yet despite this advance, the received image of economically active and career-oriented women in the past still appears slightly unbalanced as much of the research has focused on poor women and women of popular classes who worked because they had to work. This new volume enriches and updates the received image of economically active women in the European past by focussing upon women entering the professions. As is now well known after substantial work in family and household history, many European societies have for centuries been characterised by a great number of women who never married. In many cases these women were of bourgeois or high social status and thus faced a problem when trying to earn a living in a socially and culturally acceptable way, which excluded many of the ways by which poor women and women of popular classes were able to make ends meet. Although this phenomenon has been an essential part of European life for several centuries, the great bulk of scholarly works on the issue of middle class and upper class women s occupations deals with the period after the mid-nineteenth century when their professional opportunities started to multiply. In contrast, the essays in this collection focus primarily on an earlier period when such opportunities might be thought to be more limited."