Hemma och borta: Kvinnors och mäns arbete i en förindustriell kontext

Abstract

This article uses results from a large historical study on working practices to argue that a marked spatial and gendered separation of home and work is not a historical constant. Based on data extracted from court records from the Swedish city of Västerås and its rural surroundings in the period 1720–1881, the authors show that both women and men carried out a considerable share of their work in homes rather than in dedicated workplaces. Work in homes was multi-faceted rather than specialized, and could be both paid and unpaid. Women were more often observed working in their own homes but did also provide domestic services against payment (washing, cleaning) in other people’s homes. Men tended to work more often in other people’s homes, for instance, as carpenters, painters and in other crafts.

Work away from home usually happened in public places: streets, squares, fields and woods. Some forms of work were particularly likely to occur in such sites, for example trade, transport, agriculture and forestry. Men were conspicuous in places like harbors and customs gates, places that functioned as hubs in economic life. Work caused both women and men to travel away from home, but men travelled further afield, and this gendered difference became more important towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was also when more men started to work in dedicated workplaces such as factories. There are many similarities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century society and the society we live in today. In both cases, women and men often worked/work in spatial proximity. In both cases, the distinction between home and work was/is far from sharp and not stably linked to gender.