Raffaella Sarti

Who cares for me? Grandparents, nannies and babysitters caring for children in contemporary Italy

This paper illustrates the factors and features of the revival of paid care and domestic work in Italy. While Italy is experiencing a boom in the recourse to carers for the elderly, there is not a corresponding expansion in paid private childcare, in spite of growing female employment and limited public services for children. One of the reasons for this is the growing involvement of grandparents in childcare. In Italy, a country characterised by a “Mediterranean welfare regime”, people also have recourse to their own mothers (and fathers) to care for their children, in spite of the fact that they can afford to pay for childminding and babysitting. Thus it is not only (migrant) domestic workers who frequently rely on their parents to care for their own children, an issue widely discussed in the literature on global care chains. Their employers, too, may rely on them. Grandparents, however, have turned out to play an important role in childcare not only in Italy but also in Western countries with better childcare services. Focusing on these issues, the paper contributes both to the debate on global care chains and to that on the role of the family within different welfare systems.

The true servant: Self-definition of male domestics in an Italian city (Bologna, 17th–19th centuries)

Some historians have classed as servants only people living with their masters; some have excluded farm servants; some have included married domestics living with their own families. The archive of the Bolognese Confraternity of San Vitale, also known as Università dei Servitori, is analyzed in this article to show how one group of servants defined a “true” servant. Their solution was to exclude from their association people who performed what they deemed “filthy” tasks. They also excluded women, giving us a particular insight in the history of gender and masculinity. In their view, the “true” servants were bourgeois (and locally born) men rather than lower class (migrant) women who are often identified as the stereotypical servants. Moreover, most members of the association were married, they had their own families in Bologna and did not always live with their masters. This makes possible the analysis of married male servants living with their own families, a category of servant that has received less attention than life-cycle servants.

Historians, Social Scientists, Servants, and Domestic Workers: Fifty Years of Research on Domestic and Care Work

Historical research on domestic servants has a long tradition. Research, however, has become more systematic from the 1960s onwards thanks to social historians, historians focusing on the family, historical demographers and (particularly from the 1970s) womens and gender historians. For a long time, scholars assumed that domestic service (especially by live-in workers) would decline, or even disappear, because of household modernization, social progress, and development of the welfare state. The (largely unexpected) “revival” of paid domestic and care work in the past three decades has prompted sociologists and other social scientists to focus on the theme, opening new opportunities for exchange between historians and social scientists. This article provides a review of the research on these issues at a global level, though with a focus on Europe and the (former) European colonies, over the past fifty years, illustrating the different approaches and their results.

E uomini a casa

The article provides a short overview of recent research on male domesticity. Domesticity has for a long time been analysed as a female arena. Things changed when the focus - thanks to gender history - was directed to both women and men, to femininity and masculinity as cultural and social constructions. Some historians then went ‘back’ to his-story from a new perspective, looking at the history of men not as unmarked but as a particular one, and one that must also be dissected into its several components, avoiding the inclusion of all men into an undifferenciated category of patriarchy. This has led to studying men in the different arenas where they were acting, including the domestic.

‘The Purgatory of Servants’: (In)Subordination, Wages, Gender and Marital Status of Servants in England and Italy in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

Over the last fifty years, historians have been trying to understand differences between the characteristics of servants and their working conditions in different regions of pre-industrial and industrial Europe, differences which seem to be crucial to explaining discrepancies among those regions with respect to important aspects of life, such as the presence of the so-called European marriage pattern, the strength of family ties, the role of the family in providing assistance to its members in need of care. However, modern scholars are not the first to be interested in such diversity of domestic service: so were people who lived in early modern times. So far, their opinions have been neglected, yet they offer precious evidence of how our ancestors imagined European diversity, a crucial theme not only for cultural and social historians but also for contemporaries trying to understand continuities and discontinuities in representations of Europe. I will give examples of the ideas circulating in early modern Europe about servants and servant-keeping in Britain and Italy, making reference to other countries, too, especially France. The sources used are mainly printed texts, particularly travel books, a literary genre that often expresses prejudices and stereotypes. I will evaluate the perspectives of the authors used, drawing on my previous studies on the social history of domestic service, especially as regards the key issues of marriage and family formation.

Melhor o cozinheiro? Um percurso sobre a dimensão de gênero da preparação da comida (Europa ocidental, séculos XVI-XIX)

This paper analyses the preparation of food in Western Europe (16th-19th centuries), focusing on its gendered dimension. Three main variables are considered: social stratification, geography and time. It suggests that in Italy, Spain and France in early modern times the cooks employed at the courts and by the aristocracy were generally men; a feminization of the preparation of food started in France from the 18th century onwards. In Central and Northern Europe women were much more involved in the preparation of food in the upper classes, too, even though the fashion for French cuisine in the 17th and 18th centuries implied a growing recourse to male cooks. The paper suggests explanations of these differences and trends over time and discusses the role of nurturing and cooking for the definition of the female identity in different contexts.

Fare e disfare famiglia. Introduzione

Fare e disfare famiglia. Relazioni familiari in Italia in eta moderna e contemporanea. Dossier di Storicamente.org

Wie das „Mädchens von Spinges“ zu Katharina Lanz wurde

Helden sind meist männlich. Doch gelangten auch einige Frauen zu Heldinnenruhm – die bekannteste unter ihnen ist sicher Jeanne d’Arc. Wie aber wird man zu einer Heldin? Kriegerische Auseinandersetzungen, das Verteidigen von Religion und Nation konstituierten klassische Ausgangspunkte von heldenhaften Karrieren. Für Frauen ließ sich das Agieren in solchen Zusammenhängen, das männlich definierte Tugenden wie Wagemut und Tapferkeit erforderte, allerdings nicht so leicht in ein gesellschaftlich akzeptiertes und weitertradiertes Narrativ gießen. Kriegszeiten setzten Geschlechterordnungen außer Kraft, war der Krieg jedoch zu Ende, folgte deren Re-Institutionalisierung auf den Fuß. Gerade das 19. Jahrhundert war davon geprägt, Tugenden als weiblich oder männlich zu definieren, sie zu naturalisieren und qua Geschlecht in den Körper einzuschreiben. Der adäquate Platz einer Frau war der häusliche Herd1 – und die Zeit für eine kämpferische Heldin damit eigentlich schlecht.2 Das „Mädchen von Spinges“, später als Katharina Lanz bekannt, hat es dennoch und als einzige Frau geschafft, Aufnahme in das Pantheon der „Helden der Tiroler Freiheitskämpfe 1797–1809“3 zu finden.4 Was waren die Voraussetzungen und spezifischen Kontexte dafür? Wer waren die Akteure, die sie zur Heldin gemacht haben?5