Every society throughout history has defined what counts as work and what doesnt. And more often than not, those lines of demarcation are inextricable from considerations of gender.What Is Work? offers a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding labor within the highly gendered realm of household economies. Drawing from scholarship on gender history, economic sociology, family history, civil law, and feminist economics, these essays explore the changing and often contested boundaries between what was and is considered work in different Euro-American contexts over several centuries, with an eye to the ambiguities and biases that have shaped mainstream conceptions of work across all social sectors.

Raffaella Sartiis Associate Professor of Early Modern History and Gender History at the University of Urbino, Italy, and is a member of the editorial collective of Gender& History. Her studies address family and material culture, womens work, domestic service, Mediterranean slavery, masculinity, and graffiti, among other topics. She is the author of numerous publications in nine languages.

List of Figures and Tables

Introduction: What is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present
Raffaella Sarti, Anna Bellavitis, and Manuela Martini

PART I: SETTING THE SCENE: THE FEMINIST CHALLENGES TO THE "DELABORIZATION" OF HOUSEHOLD WORK

Chapter 1.Family Work: A Policy-Relevant Intellectual History
Nancy Folbre

Chapter 2.Productive and Reproductive Work: Uses and Abuses of an Old Dichotomy
Alessandra Pescarolo

Chapter 3.The Home as a Factory: Rethinking the Debate on Housewives Wages in Italy, 1929-1980
Alessandra Gissi

PART II: THE CUNNING HISTORIAN: UNVEILING AND OVERCOMING THE GENDER BIAS OF SOURCES

Chapter 4.The Statistical Construction of Womens Work and the Male Breadwinner Economy in Spain (1856-1930)
Cristina Borderías

Chapter 5.Toiling Women, Non-Working Housewives and Rightful Citizens: Statistical and Legal Constructions of Female Work and Citizenship in Italy
Raffaella Sarti

Chapter 6.The Complexities of Work: Analyzing Mens and Womens Work in the Early Modern World with the Verb-Oriented Method
Maria Ågren

Chapter 7.The Visibility of Womens Work: Logics and Contexts of Documents Production
Margareth Lanzinger

PART III: THE VALUE OF CARE AND UNPAID HOME-BASED WORK: THE ROLE OF THE LAW

Chapter 8.Regulating Home Labours: The ILO and the Feminization of Work
Eileen Boris

Chapter 9.Family-Relations Law between "Stratification" and "Resistance". Housework and Family Law Exceptionalism
Maria Rosaria Marella

Chapter 10.Could Family (Care) Work Be Paid? From French Agricultural Inheritance Law (1939) to Legal Recognition of Excessive Filial Duty (1994)
Florence Weber

PART IV: CONCLUSION

Conclusion:Can We Construct a Holistic Approach to Womens Labor History over theLongue Durée?
Laura Lee Downs

Index