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Nena Vandeweerdt, "Women and Work Through a Comparative Lens: Gender and the Urban Labor Markets of Premodern Brabant and Biscay" (Leuven UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm the host, Mariam Olugodi. Today I will be talking to Dr. Naina van de Wiet about the book Women and Work through a comparative lens. Dr. Nina Ndewit is a historian specializing in late medieval and early modern socioeconomic history. She earned a PhD from the University of Leuven in Belgium and the University of Canterbury in Spain and recently she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Basque Country. Her work focuses on gender and labor in pre modern cities with particular attention to women economic activities and everyday experiences. Drawing on urban regulations, court records and other archival sources from low countries and northern Spain. Her work challenges long standing assumptions about the structures shaping women's work in pre modern labor markets. More recently she has been exploring how digital humanities can help uncover patterns of interaction in historical urban life. You are welcome to the NBN.
- [02:11]
C
Dr. Neila, thank you. Thank you for having me. Madrid. Alright.
- [02:17]
B
The book dwells on women economic roles in pre modern Europe. If I may ask, what motivates you to explore this aspect of European history?
- [02:26]
C
Yeah, so my fascination with women's roles in Europe's pre modern past began during my second year of my Bachelor's degree at the University of Louvre in Belgium. I became interested in the topic mainly because of how little I knew about it, and because I was genuinely surprised by how many women I kept encountering in late medieval sources. Even though women's economic roles are well established by now in academic research, they remain largely invisible in popular media and at the time as well in the school textbooks. So I started digging into this topic, which led to my master thesis on women in the craft guilds of 15th century Louvre. That thesis was my first deep dive into women's socioeconomic history, and it made me realize just how rich this research field is. For example, the craft guilds, which are an important focus of this book, they have been debated by historians since the 1980s, especially when it comes to gender and access to work. And the sources themselves also really pushed my enthusiasm. I still remember the exhilaration that I felt when I found a set of documents about women in the Loewe butchers guilds. These sources dealt with widows of guild members and with the question of whether they could continue their deceased husband's work or not. Stories like these kept the motivation going, kept me pushing forward. And after finishing my PhD thesis, I knew that I wasn't done with what I had come to think of as my pre modern women. So when I had the opportunity to design a PhD project, I decided to to build on this interest by developing a comparative study between northern and southern Europe. I wanted to explore both the similarities and the differences in women's economic positions across regions, something that back then hadn't not yet been done through a systematic empirical comparison. That initial ambition might have been somewhat naive, I noticed afterwards, but it shaped my project that eventually became this book. So rather than offering definitive answers for all of Europe, the book sheds new light on the gendered structure of the urban economies of Brabant and Biscay, and on how women themselves navigated those structures. At its core, my motivation remains the same, making pre modern women's everyday lives visible as a fundamental part of Europe's history.
- [05:09]
B
Oh, that's interesting. So your interest in exploring modern women, their life, while work experiences actually give birth to this book entitled Women and Works. All right, so in the book you emphasize the concept of guild G U I L D as an eminent entity. Could you tell us about the guild? Who are they?
- [05:37]
C
Yes. So I mentioned the guilds already in the last question you asked, and it also shows the fact that I immediately mentioned them again here, how central they are to the book. So craft guilds were organizations that brought together people practicing the same occupation. In the book, for example, you will encounter guilds of fishmongers, bakers, or old clothes sellers. These were second hand traders and so on. Other occupations as well, other guilds. Sorry, but guilds were much more than simply groups of people doing the same kind of work. They were well established urban institutions. They held economic, political and social power and played an important role in regulating, or at least attempting to regulate, many aspects of their members professional and everyday lives. And exactly this brings me to the key concept for understanding membership. I think a quote by the Belgian historian Mark Jacobs captures this particularly well. He describes guilds as, and I'll paraphrase here, a collective entity that can recognize people as members and in which members are granted jurisdiction over a specific profession. End quote. So what this means in practice is that guild membership was limited. Guilds defined who was allowed to practice an occupation formally and who was not. Only a select group of urban residents were included. And crucially for this book that also means that a much larger group was excluded. Guilds were male dominated institutions and I would even go a step further and say that they were flagships of patriarchy. It is therefore not surprising that the group of included members was generally not made up of women. Only a small number of guilds allowed women to become members in their own names. And even in those cases they formed only a small minority of the members. As a result, women's affiliation with guilds was most often indirect and linked to their relationship with a male guild member, usually a husband or a father. To end, I'd like to briefly say something about the relevance of guilts for my research field. Because of their strong influence on urban economies and their masculine character, guilds have long attracted the attention of historians studying women's work in pre modern Europe. Broadly speaking, research has focused on two main questions. First, how guilds limited women's economic opportunities through their exclusive and male dominated nature. And second, how women nonetheless played important roles within guild structures, often through their position within the household. So this description applies most clearly to the towns of the southern low countries, such as the ones studied in this book, Antwerp and Mechele. Guilds existed all over Europe, but they did not play the same roles everywhere. Nor did they always possess the same guilds level of power as they did in Brabant. There is of course much more to say about guilds, but I think that this gives a clear introduction to why they are such an unavoidable entity in the whole book.
- [09:09]
B
Thank you very much. What is most intriguing in your exposition is that the guilds are well dominated and the only chances that female had in pre modern Europe to be part of the guild is based on their relationship, maybe as wives or as the authors of members of the guilds who are mostly patriarchal. That's quite a kind of exposition. It let us know the limited opportunities of women to be part of the guilds.
- [09:43]
C
Yes, but it also shows. That's quite interesting. It also shows how being a wife, it was also a standard part or a standard role for a woman that was part of the standard expectations that there were for women. So it goes together that they only had access through this role that was expected of them in the first place. Yes.
- [10:07]
B
All right, this takes me to the next question in the book. What does south not self divide, north to side divide entail? And what impact does it have on this construction of gender dynamics in urban economics?
- [10:24]
C
Yeah, thank you, Mariam. Yeah, thank you for that question. So the north south divide is the second major debate that structures the book, the first being the discussion about the impact of guilt on women's economic opportunities that I just talked about. But the north south divide is in many ways the more problematic of the two. At its core, the concept refers to the long standing idea that women in Northern Europe enjoyed more economic opportunities and greater independence than women in Southern Europe. This interpretation emerged more than 50 years ago and has been repeated frequently in historical scholarship ever since. The argument is usually explained through differences in family structures as well as property and inheritance rights. And the idea is that women who could inherit and own property in their own name had more agency, so that is, they had more capacity to shape their own lives and their societies according to this north south paradigm. This situation. So more agency was more common in Northern Europe than it was in Southern Europe. The research project behind this book initially started from this debate, but during the analysis I consciously moved away from treating the north south divide as a fixed explanatory model. And I'm also not the only historian to do so. One of the main problems with this paradigm is that it is built on broad generalizations and on studies with very different scopes. For example, for a long time, conclusions about Southern Europe were often based on studies focusing on higher social groups groups, while research on Northern Europe more frequently examined middling urban groups. Comparing these different social strata inevitably leads to very different conclusions. Even if you would do that within the same region, it would already give different results. And so as a result, historians have increasingly questioned, and in many cases, and I might add here luckily abandoned the north south divide as a rigid framework. But a more fundamental problem, and one that directly motivated this book, is that this conclusion, this North South Divided conclusion was based on very little to not say none at all. Empirical comparison between north and south scholars rarely used the same scope, comparable sources or consistent methodology across regions. And this, while comparing specific context, can reveal the mechanisms that shape gender dynamics in different regions. So I think that even if the north south thesis itself has passed its news by date, the idea of the comparison remains valid. And I think it's good that I still think that, since I literally wrote a book on it.
- [13:35]
B
Okay, thank you very much. So I want to believe that in this book you've been able to cover those lapses which the previous studies left behind. In using the basis of notes out and divides in the specification, or in projecting what work and the work life or access to work by women in the pre modern European setting actually was. I hope you got what I'm trying to say. Your work. I will update this book as covered these lapses in previous studies.
- [14:13]
C
Yes, so I indeed started from the type of lack of this comparison. And then because of this, the ID group actually doing the comparison for once. And then I chose these regions which are Brabant in the north and Biscay in the south, which is in northern Spain. Brabant is in the Low Countries, in what is now Belgium. But through actually then doing the analysis, conducting research, I really moved away from that whole idea of making a North south comparison. Because these two regions are also only two regions. It's not the whole north or the whole south. They're not representative for the whole of Europe, of course. So I think the value lies completely elsewhere of the comparison. I think it is very useful and necessary to do these comparisons, but not because it is a representation of the whole of Europe.
- [15:17]
B
Okay, so that is your impute to correcting previous versions in this area. Okay.
- [15:25]
C
Okay.
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B
Now could you comment on the institutional factors that impact on women economic opportunities in the first half of the 16th century?
- [15:35]
C
Yes. So in the book institutions play a major role. Since I discuss how institutions shaped women's economic opportunities in the two regions, the main institutions that I focus on are gilts, the households and the informal markets. We already discussed guilds in some detail, so I will not really go into them again here. And instead I would like. I would like to focus first on the households, which was especially important in the Brabanting case studies. The household was the smallest and the most basic economic unit. It was usually composed of nuclear family. So this means a married couple and their children, often together with servants and apprentices. So nuclear non related members of the household that also lived together with the family. Each member of the household played a role in its economic organization and in generating income. Wives and then when their husbands had died, widows were crucial in keeping the household running, which meant working for an income, as well as maintaining the actual running of the family and its administration. Many of the labor activities we see, women practicing in Antwerp and Mechele in small scale trades, can best be understood by placing them in the context of this household. What is striking is that this household based organization, which is so crucial for my study field, is much less visible in the Biscayan case study. The division of labor within the household that we see in Brabant does not appear the same way in Bilbao, probably because similar types of work were not organized through guilds there. Instead, in Bilbao the focus shifts to the third institution, the informal markets. And I should immediately add that this was not actually an institution at all, or at least not in a formal sense. Rather, it refers to all kinds of economic activities carried out outside institutional structures like guilds. And I use it as an institution to kind of conceptualize this and being able to analyze it throughout the book. In Bilbao we see large groups of women working in small scale trades, and they were likely even in the majority in some of these sectors. However, the informal nature of their work did not mean that they could just do whatever they wanted. And this brings me to the final overarching institution, and that's the town government. Urban authorities regulated trade, imposed limitations and introduced changes to existing practices. In Bilbao, especially where no guilds mediated this process, we can see a constant tension between women's informal economic activities and the town council's attempts to. To control and regulate them. So these four institutions give me a framework within which to analyze women's work opportunities in the two regions. And they are the guilds, the households, the informal markets, and the overarching town government.
- [18:59]
B
All right, thank you. So, talking about the regulation of the women's economic activities by the town council, or let me say town government, is it only the women activities that are regulated or the guides in general?
- [19:16]
C
So the town governments were responsible for regulating, formally regulating at least the whole urban economy. They had more power than the town government would have nowadays in a European town. But back then they would regulate everything. From the way people had to go to mass on Sundays or other days as well. The period of Lent would be regulated by them, sometimes depending on the circumstances, but also all work in the city. Everything that happened publicly was regulated by them. So most this means the medieval period and pre modern period in general was a very patriarchal society. Very patriarchal period. This means that most regulation was actually about men. It is rather hard to find a lot of clues to what women were actually doing there. So it is a minority and that is why it is so crucial when they appear to him, because it says a lot. The fact that the town government went through the efforts to make regulation about it that meant something probably was going wrong or they wanted to change something that had been a common practice for a long time and then they went through the effort to actually address women.
- [20:39]
D
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- [20:58]
E
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- [21:32]
D
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- [21:39]
B
Alright, apart from institutional factors, which are the specific individual circumstances as discussed in the book, that influence women's economic growth. So apart from the institutional factors, what are the specific individual circumstances as discussed in the book that influence women economic growth?
- [21:58]
C
Yes. So indeed, on one side there's the institutions we just discussed, but of course these institutions did not make up the whole labor market and they did not decide on everything. And I think this is a good moment to introduce one of the women who appears in the book to illustrate how these institutional factors worked in practice and in interplay with individual circumstances. I'll take an example from the Biscayne case Study Bilbao. Although of course, these individual circumstances played a role everywhere. It's just to give one example. So let's go to Bilbao now. The year is 1525, and we meet Toda de la Rea. Toda was a grain broker, which means she occupied an intermediary position between the grain merchants importing goods into Bilbao, the potential buyers, and the town council, which needed to tax the grain that was sold. Toda had been active in this occupation since at least 59, when she received authorization from the town council. At that time, she was probably a younger, unmarried woman. By 1525, however, the situation had changed. The town council decided to centralize the collection of grain taxes. As a result, the women who had previously carried out this work were no longer allowed to do so. Because their occupation was not formally recognized. They had no defense against such changes. Still, they tried. The women took their cases to one of the higher courts in Castile, with Toda Dallarrea taking the lead. By that time she was married and her income was likely essential for the household's survival. In court, the women argued collectively. They claimed that they were honest businesswomen, that local law allowed them to practice their occupation. And they pointed to other female brokers in the town, particularly in the linen trade, to use them as precedents. However, because their work lacked formal recognition by the town council or by an institution, these collective arguments had little effect. The occupation was officially prohibited, but many women continued working. Nonetheless. The need for income outweighed formal regulations. Initially, the town council was lenient towards this. But from 1531 onwards they began imposing fines. And once again the women turned to the higher courts. In the second court case, Toda argued that war had forced her to resume her work as a broker, and she and her husband had lost all other sources of income. Similar arguments appear throughout the case. Absent husbands, hungry, mounts to feed and sheer economic necessity. In the end, these individual circumstances led to reduced fines. In the book, I therefore approach women's economic opportunities as the result of both collective and individual circumstances. Circumstances shaped by institutions historical context. In this example, for example, the war, social status, the need for an income, personal connections, marital status and sector of employment. Only by bringing all of these elements together can we fully understand what structured women's economic positions in the pre modern urban economies. And each individual women a woman had a different set of these circumstances, leading to diverging experiences for everyone.
- [26:00]
B
All right, Dr. Nina. The question I'm going to ask now is quite different debating from the previous one, which is why did you adopt a comparative approach? If I May ask.
- [26:12]
C
Yes. So the comparative approach is definitely the key elements of the whole book. And we already touched on the north south debates and how I was initially motivated by it to design this comparative study. But I think I also made it clear that the value of this comparative approach lies elsewhere. So by comparing two very different regions, the book allows me to analyze more precisely how the institutions that we discussed earlier already actually worked. In other words, the comparison makes it possible to disentangle the specific mechanisms that shaped women's labor opportunities and to see how these mechanisms interacted with one another. Methodologically. This means analyzing women's position within each occupation in each case study as a standalone case study, but doing so in exactly the same way and on the basis of comparable sources in both regions. And this made it possible to identify variation not only between the regions, but also within them. To give a concrete example, throughout the 16th century we can see the fishmongers guild in Mechele increasingly restricting the activities of fishmongers wives. This tendency is not visible in all occupations in a city, nor does it appear in Antwerp's fishmonger strait. Because of this, the book can move beyond the general conclusion that guilds restricted women's work and instead introduce necessary nuance and different explanatory frameworks. More importantly, the same analytical approach can then be applied to two very different regions, in this case Brabant and Biscay. So if we stay with the example of the fishmongers in Lilbao, we see women fishmongers acting collectively to influence town policy. In 1515, for example, they successfully submitted a joint petition to challenge a new regulation. These women were not necessarily prosperous or particularly powerful, but they did operate with a shared occupational identity. And this is something we do not see among fishmongers wives or informal female traders in Brabant. There, the strong influence of the guilds over the traits prevented the emergence of a similar collective identity. So this difference becomes strikingly clear only because of the comparative approach. And to conclude that through an allegory, the comparative approach works a little bit like placing two maps over one another. So only by aligning them can you see where the structures overlap and where they differ from each other. And this way you get more understanding of both maps individually as well.
- [29:19]
B
Thank you. Thank you very much. You mentioned different economics activities that women engage in, such as big trade, red trade, fish trade, informal trading, merchant activities and artisan works. Are those activities in which one did women try most.
- [29:40]
C
Thank you, Mariam, for that question. It is actually a very difficult question to answer, and based on My material alone, I would even say an impossible one. So rather than saying where women thrived most, I can focus on the activities in which women appear most prominently in the sources and suggest why that might be the case as well. So even though I studied the same occupations in both regions, the answer differs for Brabant and Biscay, with one notable exception, and that is the fish trait. I already mentioned the women fishmongers in Bilbao. But what I didn't emphasize yet is the extraordinary level of attention that this group received from the town council. Women fishmongers appear frequently in regulations, in conflicts, and in petitions, and in Mechele and Antwerp, women's activities in the fish trade are likewise far more visible than in other occupations. In Mechele, for instance, we are exceptionally well informed thanks to the survival of a sentence book of the Fishmongers Guild of Mechele. This book records numerous infringements and disputes involving informal female traders, as well as wives and widows of guild members. Urban regulations in Brabant are also particularly detailed when it comes to the fish trade. I don't think that this prominence necessarily means that women in the fish trade in both regions earned more than women in other occupations, but rather, I would suggest two reasons for diversity visibility. First, fishmongering was relatively accessible to women, especially in towns like Antwerp or Bilbao, where fish was a very central part to the urban diets and economy was focused on the sea. And second, fishmongering was an occupation that unfolded almost entirely in public space. Cleaning fish, dealing with waste and spoils of those fish, negotiating prices, and even internal conflicts among fishmongers all happened in full view in public space. Very little could be kept within the privacy of the household in this street. And this constant exposure forced urban authorities to pay close attention to the traits. And that attention in turn made women more visible in these sources. By contrast, artisan work often took place in spaces that were partly private and partly public. And this means that much of women's involvement in those trades simply did not enter the public records. So I think the visibility of women in the sources depends a lot on also where their activities took place, how visible their work was, and in general, also the work of men that practice those traits.
- [32:51]
B
All right. A section of the book explores women's financial statues in relation to taxation. What is the implication of this in the book?
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C
Yes, so I'll keep it short. This is a small part of the book in which I analyze taxation registers from the three regions, and it is mainly a way to address the question of social status, of which financial status through it, taxation is slightly visible. So I study social status in relation to women's work opportunities. And this analysis is a small part of it. I use taxation registers from the three towns to get at least a rough indication of wealth among among the women who appeared as household heads in those registers. So these were mainly widows and single women. So not the whole group of the women I study appears in those registers because only those leading a household would be registered by name there. These sources are deeply flawed, as you might notice from my reply, and they do not allow for very firm conclusions about income or. Or prosperity. But their main value lies in the comparison. Again. Right? And this time, particularly for Bilbao, the list shows a large group of single women clustered at the lower ends of the text scales.
- [34:25]
B
All right, Dr. Nina, of what impact does the historical perspectives of women and work in the studied period to the understanding of the present day practices in Biscay and Brent Bend?
- [34:37]
C
Yes, thank you, Mariam. That is really a lovely question. I think that the first step though is to answer this question is to move away from a narrow focus on just Biscay and Brabant and to zoom out women's participation in labor markets nowadays more generally. Although pre modern societies obviously form a part of the historical foundations of these two regions, drawing the direct line from the late medieval and early modern period to present day practices would probably require a different research project altogether. So that would be a bit much to answer and research in the first place. But that set the value of studying women's work in the past lies in tracing direct continuities, lies less, sorry, in tracing these direct continuities and more in understanding the mechanisms that shape economics. Women's economic opportunities. While guilds no longer structure labor markets nowadays, other overlapping frameworks that appear in the book still do. For example, the informal economy, family structures, governing bodies, corporate institutions, and enduring patriarchal norms. These are just a few that we can still find nowadays. What the historical perspective shows very clearly is that women's economic opportunities have never been determined by a single factor. Instead, they emerge from the interaction between institutions, regulations, social values and individual circumstances. Recognizing this complexity helps us avoid simplistic explanations. And that is important both for the past and for the present. It encourages a more nuanced understanding of why inequalities persistent even in very different economic systems all over the world.
- [36:49]
B
Thank you very much. And this leads to the last question. Can you give an account of the book Women and Work through a comparative lens in a few words and the key message you intend to pass across.
- [37:02]
C
Thank You? Yes. So this book studies how local urban context shaped women's work. And to do that, I have compared women's activities in small scale trades in two very different regions. We already mentioned them. The towns of Antwerp and Mechele in Brabant, that's a region in present day Belgium. And Bilbao, that's a town in Biscay, which is in northern Spain. And so if we look at Brabant, we see that women's work was strongly shaped by those guilts that we discussed, and that because of this, or there is a close relation with the importance of the household and women's connections to a family, to a male guild member. Guilt structures could bring limitations. But at the same time, some women found stable ways to work within the guild system. So that is a little bit the conclusion for Brabant. If we then look at Bilbao, this presents a contrasting picture. Because in this town, small scale traits was not dominated by guilds. Actually, they didn't exist there at all for those traits. But it functioned mostly through informal organization. And this informal organization created substantial roles for women in the daily provisioning of the towns of the town. Sorry. So women in Bilbao interacted directly with the town council, which was the entity that organized or regulated their work. But because of the informality of their work, they were not bound to one institution. It also made their position more so, women's positions more vulnerable. When the council imposed restrictions, remember the example, they had no collective defense to stand on. So by comparing these two settings, the book shows that institutions did not either only limit or only enable women's work, and instead it shows the interaction between institutions and individual circumstances and how this interaction shaped women's lived experiences. So the key message to take from this, I hope, first of all, that the book encourages historians to move away from debates about whether women's situation were better or worse somewhere. Because that question is not only difficult to answer, but also not particularly productive or useful at all. Because what does better and worse actually mean? Too often these discussions start from present day values. So instead, I hope that the book invites readers to approach women's work in the past as something that existed in a broad gray area. Women were neither free economic actors operating without restrictions, nor were they uniformly oppressed and powerless. They navigated constraints, but they also made choices, negotiating, negotiated and adapted. And the same is true for the overlapping institutions within which those women worked. Guilds and town governments were neither straightforward obstacles to women's work, nor simple facilitators of it. Both dynamics could and did exist at the same time, and through a comparative approach. My aim was to bring these coexisting realities into focus and to show how women's economic opportunities emerged from the interaction between institutions and sorry, from the interaction between institutions and individual circumstances, of course. So if the book has one central message, it is that women's work in the past cannot be understood through a single lens.
- [41:07]
B
It was nice to have you on the new books on europeanstudies.com Tonina See you again.
- [41:14]
C
Thank you for having me. Mariam.
- [41:28]
D
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