The Art of Earning a Living: Women’s Work in Stockholm 1650–1750

The project aims to highlight and discuss women’s opportunities to work and earn a living in Stockholm in about 1650–1750, by studying women’s work-related applications and complaints to the city authorities and the Board of Trade.

With a gender analysis that pervades the study, and with inspiration from the so-called verb method that has been developed within the research project Gender and Work at the Department of History in Uppsala of which this study is a part, special emphasis has been placed on how the women in the study, mainly different tradeswomen, acted, but also how they argued. The questions have partly been about what women who lived in the early modern city of Stockholm could work with, and partly about how they perceived and sought to influence their livelihood opportunities.

Women and men did not have the same formal rights to trade. Yet the early modern capital is characterised by wives who sold bread and fruit, fish and meat from sheds and baskets, brokered clothes, distilled spirits and kept taverns - and vigorously argued for their right to support themselves and their families.

The results of this project have primarily been published in a biography in Swedish, by Sofia Ling, Konsten att försörja sig. Kvinnors arbete i Stockholm 1650–1750, (in translation: The Art of Earning a Living: Women’s Work in Stockholm 1650–1750), Stockholmia förlag, 2016.