Maria Ågren (ed.), Making a Living, Making a Difference: Gender and Work in Early Modern European Society

The findings of this multi‐authored book are based on the Gender and Work (GaW) dataset, which comprises 16,182 references to work extracted from court records, accounts, petitions and diaries using a ‘verb‐oriented method’. The authors divided the data into sixteen categories and used it to examine how people made their livings in Sweden between 1550 and 1799. The range of tasks undertaken was wide, and considerable overlap existed between what women and men did. Marital status was a major determinant of what work people performed, especially for women, and households rested on a ‘two‐supported model’ in which both spouses worked, yet it was teams not households which structured much work, and both gender and age impacted on how individuals generated income and managed resources.