Working Women in Renaissance Germany

by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

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Genres: Feminism, Renaissance, Nonfiction, History

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1986

About the author

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks (Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) taught first at Augustana College in Illinois, and since 1985 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she is currently UWM Distinguished Professor in the department of history. She is the coeditor of the Sixteenth Century Journal and the author or editor of more than twenty books, most recently The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds and Gender in History. She is the former Chief Reader for Advanced Placement World History.

Reviews

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this study, Merry Wiesner traces the changes and continuities in women's opportunities to economically support themselves and their dependents in the cities of Germany from roughly the 16th to the 18th century. Through a comparative survey of the major production and service sectors across a handful of southern German municipalities, a picture emerges of women's work during this period as a primary rhetorical and legislative battleground upon which city councils and trade guilds contested preeminence of civic authority. While each bloc had its own reasons for wishing to restrict women's independence – the councils to enforce stability through their ideas of public morality and proper social hierarchy, the guilds to limit economic competition while ensuring a supply of exploitable labor – the case-by-case exceptions decreed by the councils demonstrated their ultimacy, both legal and economic. It was this agonistic political backdrop against which women themselves argued, with varying success, for their own traditional rights to self-sufficiency.