Abstract

We continue to read in works of Sociology and History of Contemporary Age (not to mention in written and oral press) that women entered the labour market during the twentieth century or in the late nineteenth and that up until then they were confined to the domestic space. This is a myth urgent to eradicate. Except for orders/privileged classes, who were a tiny part of the population, the Portuguese and European women who lived before the twentieth century fell within the world of paid labour .
Both in  the countryside and the city, they produced, transformed, marketed, sold services. Therefore, it also does not make sense to assert, without further explanation, that the Estado Novo strived for the  "return to home" of Portuguese women .

We will explain how it is possible to research the labour of women in preindustrial, pre-statistical European societies,  historical reenactment difficult to achieve and therefore still an approach to feasible of major developments. We propose to address aspects of women's labour in Coimbra in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, erecting this space in the case study. Focus will be set upon artisans, shopkeepers, market vendors and  maids and still the case of a successful business woman, single and head of the home, which became rich  devoting herself to  retail trade, farming  on the outskirts of the city and loaning.

Bio note

Maria Antónia Lopes Aggregate and a PhD in Modern and Contemporary History at the University of Coimbra, Professor of the Faculty of  Arts and Humanities at the same University, Researcher at the Centre for the History of Society and Culture (UC) and the Collaborator Centre for the Study of Religious History (UCP). Her research field is the social history of Portugal in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries. Among her published works  are  Mulheres, espaço e sociabilidade. A transformação dos papéis femininos em Portugal à luz de fontes literárias (2ª metade do século XVIII) [Women, space and sociability. The transformation of women's roles in Portugal in the light of literary sources (2nd half of the eighteenth century)] ; Pobreza, assistência e controlo social em Coimbra, 1750-1850 [Poverty, welfare and social control in Coimbra, 1750-1850];  História Breve das Misericórdias Portuguesas, 1498-2000  [Brief History of Portuguese Mercy, 1498-2000] (co-authored with Isabel G. Sa);  António Ferrer Correia 1912-2003. Uma fotobiografia (co-autoria com Maria João Padez de Castro)  [Antonio Ferrer Correia 1912-2003. A photo-biography]  (co-authored with Maria João de Castro Padez), Protecção Social em Portugal na Idade Moderna [Social Protection in Portugal in the Modern Age]; Rainhas que o Povo Amou: Estefânia de Hohenzollern e Maria Pia de Saboia [Queens Loved by the People: Stephanie of Hohenzollern and Maria Pia of Savoy]

Articles up for discussion:

Guilhermina Mota, "O trabalho feminino e o comércio em Coimbra (séculos XVII-XVIII). Notas para um estudo" em A Mulher na sociedade portuguesa. Actas do Colóquio, vol. I, Coimbra, IHES, 1986, pp. 351-367.

Maria Antónia Lopes, "Sebastiana da Luz, mercadora coimbrã setecentista (elementos para a história de As mulheres e o trabalho)", Revista de História da Sociedade e da Cultura 5, Coimbra, CHSC, 2005, pp. 133-156.


[Those who wish to participate and previously read the articles up for discussion should send an email to gw@ces.uc.pt]