The chapter analyzes multiple concepts and arrangement of work from late medieval times to the present in Europe and America taking the household as a vantage point. Households were and are not only the site of female, unpaid and/or (allegedly) unproductive activities. Both women and men, girls and boys performed and perform a wide range of tasks, though often highly gendered: home-based work, care-work, unpaid market work, domestic service, housekeeping. Such activities underwent a “delaborization” from the eighteenth century onward, being increasingly considered different from proper work. Today many of them are not included in the official calculations of GDP. This exclusion represents a serious (and contested) gender bias.
What is Work? Gender at the Crossroads of Home, Family, and Business from the Early Modern Era to the Present. Introduction.
Raffaella Sarti;
2018
Abstract
The chapter analyzes multiple concepts and arrangement of work from late medieval times to the present in Europe and America taking the household as a vantage point. Households were and are not only the site of female, unpaid and/or (allegedly) unproductive activities. Both women and men, girls and boys performed and perform a wide range of tasks, though often highly gendered: home-based work, care-work, unpaid market work, domestic service, housekeeping. Such activities underwent a “delaborization” from the eighteenth century onward, being increasingly considered different from proper work. Today many of them are not included in the official calculations of GDP. This exclusion represents a serious (and contested) gender bias.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
