Marriages are Made in Kitchens: The European Marriage Pattern and Life-Cycle Servanthood in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam

Corinne Boter

Feminist Economics, 2017, vol. 23, issue 2, 68-92

Abstract: Due to methodological difficulties of historical research on women’s labor, little is known of women’s contribution to household incomes in preindustrial economies. This article is the first to use domestic servants’ wages, as documented in account books from the period 1752–1805, to estimate the capital that women could accumulate during their years of service before marriage. As such, it offers a new perspective on women’s contribution to household resources. Results show that servants working for the most well-off households in eighteenth-century Amsterdam could save a marriage budget that was between one-third and half of the capital that an unskilled man could save in the same amount of time. Furthermore, servants’ wages would in theory have been sufficient to support a family of four at the subsistence level, illustrating that women’s wages and potential savings cannot be ignored.

Date: 2017
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/13545701.2016.1195003 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:femeco:v:23:y:2017:i:2:p:68-92

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/RFEC20

DOI: 10.1080/13545701.2016.1195003

Access Statistics for this article

Feminist Economics is currently edited by Diana Strassmann

More articles in Feminist Economics from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().