This introductory chapter makes a case for a gender-inclusive approach to the history of work. The ‘early modern’ period witnessed unprecedented growth in parts of Europe and elsewhere, linked both to the global redistribution of resources and to new ways of organizing labour. This chapter surveys the rich scholarship on the history of women’s work in Europe and its implications for narratives of macroeconomic change and assessments of economic performance. It also discusses the insights brought by feminist economics to the conceptualization of work and highlights new methodologies for analysing divisions of labour in the past. Finally, it lays out arguments for why women’s work was as important as men’s in producing change.

Care work is both a pre-condition for economic activity and a form of economic activity in its own right. Its extent, character and distribution has varied from place to place and over time in ways which suggest it is erroneous to assume that care was either a constant or somehow external to the economy. Indeed, rather than presuming that, historically, women’s work was determined by and shaped around the care burden, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the organization of care in early modern Europe was designed to enable women’s (as well as men’s) productive work. This chapter explores the variation in the extent and character of the care burden and the complex distribution of care between familial, commercial, voluntary and state-sponsored domains. Such variation and complexity suggest that women’s – and men’s – contribution of unpaid care work was anything but constant. The burgeoning market for paid care services in early modern Europe allows assessment of the monetary value of unpaid care and the ways in which the allocation of care was part of family strategies to maximize married women’s productive work. Care, therefore, is a necessary variable for the assessment of early modern economic performance.

In 1642, Anne Read's husband died of grief. In the same year, Sir Con Magennis died tormented by his evil deeds and ‘much … affrighted with the apprehension and conceipt that … Mr Tudge [a minister he had slain] was still in his presence’.Early modern people attributed huge consequence to ‘passions’ (they would not have used the word ‘emotion’) like grief, anger and fear. When uncontrolled, ‘passion’ started wars and ended life. Little wonder that contemporaries urged the restraint of potentially damaging feelings. However, there were times when emotions were particularly difficult to check.

John Walter's recent work on the collection of documents called the 1641 Depositions has assisted in building a new understanding of the outbreak of waves of violence in Ireland in 1641–2 and subsequently. The depositions contain testimonies from about 3,000 people, mostly British Protestant settlers, who had been dispossessed of their lands, homes and goods by Catholic rebels. Some had been confronted by crowds of local people, though as the rebellion continued, gentlemen tended to take over the leadership of these attacks. Either way, most of the deponents could identify at least some of those involved. The majority had been threatened with violence, and many bore tales of loss of property, personal injury and the torture and violent deaths of their family members, friends and neighbours. There were also accounts of incidents of desecration of sacred space and iconoclasm and of the deliberate humiliation of victims, who were routinely stripped and insulted. The depositions also contain a later set of ‘examinations’, usually conducted to probe particular crimes that had occurred in the early 1640s. The testimonies here included those of both settler and native witnesses and alleged perpetrators. It is no surprise, therefore, that Nicholas Canny should have described the depositions as ‘a body of material which is emotional’. Historians of the period often reflect on the emotional state of the Gaelic Irish and Old English participants, to paint a picture of simmering humiliation, shame, resentment, hostility, fear, hatred, anxiety and despair that led to outpourings of vengeful rage. Though economic and other grievances are pinpointed as arousing these emotions, they are regularly fathered above all on religion: Inga Jones argues that ‘religion has the capacity to arouse passions which go beyond what political and localist concerns can stimulate, a passion which … could and did spill over into unrestrained slaughter’.

The challenges of finding access to popular political culture have been amply demonstrated and ably met by John Walter's scholarship, not least in his analysis of the records of riot which, he argues, allow ‘subordinate groups, rendered otherwise silent by the inequalities of literacy and preservation of the historical record, to testify to their attitudes and beliefs’. One noteworthy feature of such records is the inclusion of the actions and voices of female participants who played prominent roles in varied forms of popular protest, and most especially in food riots. Women's moral authority in demanding just treatment in the market in times of scarcity has yielded glimpses of female leadership such as Ann Carter's exclamation – as ‘Captain’ of a contingent of rioters in Maldon in Essex in 1629 – that ‘I will be your leader for we will not starve.’ Accounting for the more general presence of women in the crowd that gathered at Maldon to prevent grain shipments, Walter ascribed their motivations to two factors. First was the ‘special licence’ they derived from a gendered division of labour which designated women as ‘provisioners of their families’. Second was the ‘licence afforded them by their ambivalent legal status’, which may have rendered them less vulnerable to formal prosecution. These explanations have proved foundational to approaches to women's direct participation in the politics of subsistence, although historians have disagreed over the wider significance of such examples of female political agency.

On the one hand, the ascription of women 's roles in popular protest to starkly gendered divisions of labour as well as to women 's imprecise legal status has become commonplace. In the English context, the emphasis on women 's domestic responsibilities for purchasing food originated in E. P. Thompson 's attribution of women 's participation in riots both to their involvement in ‘faceto- face marketing ’ which made them most acutely aware of price fluctuations and trading abuses, and to ‘the calculation that they had slightly greater immunity than the men from the retaliation of the authorities ’. In his exploration of the Wealden riots associated with disruption to the cloth trade, Peter Clark similarly ascribed the role of women to their ‘greater immunity from the law than men’ and ‘a special immunity for women who were unable to fulfil their familial role of feeding their household because of food shortage’.