Gender and work in sixteenth-century Pari

The sixteenth century was a critical period in the history of Western Europe, a period of economic, political, religious, and intellectual changes. What were women's economic roles and how were they changing? Did change open up economic opportunities previously closed to women, or did women experience a contraction of opportunity, and reduced autonomy in comparison to earlier centuries?;Searching for answers to these questions, I used contracts for apprenticeship and service, formalized before notaries, to examine what kinds of work women did in sixteenth-century Paris. I collected data from 2102 such contracts, from the period 1540 to 1558; 301 placed young women or girls into apprenticeship or service, and 1801 placed young men or boys.;My analysis of these and other sources leads me to three conclusions. First, women worked in a narrow range of occupations, heavily concentrated in the clothing/accessories category, but evident in all but three of 14 categories of artisanal work. Second, there existed a contradiction between the rules under which women theoretically operated, such as Parisian custom, guild rules, and the ideological rules about "men's work" and "women's work," and women's behavior, which broke or ignored those rules. My third finding is that notaries used language which marginalized the work of women, despite evidence that many women artisans practiced trades very different from those of their husbands. In these cases, women's work probably dominated both their households and the lives of many household members.;From my evidence, I conclude that women's economic opportunities were definitely contracting, as ideas about the meanings of being male and being female made it more difficult for women to enter many trades, and to make a decent living from their work. Nevertheless, women continued to be economically active as artisans, with no evident reduction in how much of the work of Paris was done by women. A changing gender ideology sought to exclude women from a man's world of economics and politics, and that exclusion affected their options, but not their level of participation in economic activity.