Cotton and Copper in Falun 1740–1800. Women and Men at Work

Did industrialisation drive women out of the labour market, transforming households from a dual-earner to a single, male-headed, bread-winner model? Yes, many modern researchers, prominently represented by Claudia Goldin, point in this direction.

But research on this subject has largely been built on indirect evidence and assumption, e.g. from titles in 19th century registers and cadastres.

Much more rarely have we been able to directly observe women’s market work more systematically; more rare still has been the ability to connect it to an entire household’s economy.

Using a unique combination of sources from Falun, a mining town in central Sweden, we will for the first time be able to investigate early modern women’s actual employment and earnings, and directly connect them to their husbands.

We reconstruct household incomes 1740–1800 by linking individual copper miners to cotton spinners, with their respective annual salaries.

The miners were exclusively men, and the spinners were almost exclusively women and children.The aim of project is to investigate the social and gender roles of household members in work, wage-earning, and production.

We also interrogate the state’s vison of these roles and the household more generally, alongside authorities’ ability to enforce this vision locally.

A backbone of the project is women’s paid work and how it changes over the life course of a family, as well as the role of growing children in helping to support the household economy.