Elise van Nederveen Meerkerk

Reconsidering The “Firstmale-Breadwinner Economy”: Women's Labor Force Participation in the Netherlands, 1600--1900

Abstract This contribution provides methods for estimating developments in womens labor force participation (LFP) in the Netherlands, for both preindustrial and industrializing eras. It explains long-term developments in Dutch LFP and concludes that the existing image of Dutch womens historically low participation in the labor market should be reconsidered. Contrary to what many economic historians have supposed, Dutch womens LFP was not lower, and was perhaps even higher, than elsewhere in the pre-1800 period. As in other Western European countries, the decline of (married) Dutch womens LFP only started in the nineteenth century, though it then probably declined faster than elsewhere. Thus, this study concludes that the Netherlands did not constitute the “first male-breadwinner economy,” as historians and economists have suggested. Scrutinizing the nineteenth-century data in more detail suggests that a complex of demographic, socioeconomic, and cultural changes resulted in this sharp decline of Dutch womens crude activity rates.

'Between Wage Labor and Vocation: Child Labor in Dutch Urban Industry, 1600-1800'

Although child labor was a widespread phenomenon in the pre-industrial Dutch economy, we do not know very much about it. This article aims to expand our knowledge by looking at childrens work in several urban industries in the Dutch Republic. By investigating the kind of economic activities children performed, their starting age, working and living conditions and the amount of training they received, we want to typify pre-industrial child labour more specifically. Did childrens work serve as a necessary source of wage income, or rather as a vocational training for their later participation in the labour market? It will appear that this characterization as ‘work’ or ‘training’ depended largely on the childs age, sex and social background. These distinctions may help further research on the performance of preindustrial economies, in which a demand for flexible labor played a crucial role.

Working on Labor

Using comparative and long-term perspectives the seventeen essays in this collection discuss the development of labor relations and labor migrations in Europe, Asia and the US from the thirteenth century to the present.

Selling Sex in the City : A Global History of Prostitution, 1600s-2000s

Selling Sex in the City offers a worldwide analysis of prostitution that takes a long historical approach which covers a time period from 1600 to the 2000s. The overviews in this volume examine sex work in more than twenty notorious “sin cities” around the world, ranging from Sydney to Singapore and from Casablanca to Chicago. Situated within a comparative framework of local developments, the book takes up themes such as labour relations, coercion, agency, gender, and living and working conditions. Selling Sex in the City thus reveals how prostitution and societal reactions to the trade have been influenced by colonization, industrialization, urbanization, the rise of nation states, imperialism, and war, as well as by revolutions in politics, transport, and communication.