This article analyses the economic activities of urban Flemish women in actual practice, using contracts and court judgements from the mid-fourteenth-century registers of the aldermen of Ghent. These ‘acts’ show that women routinely invested and managed their own property without male representatives and that distinctions of marital status were often far less significant in medieval Ghent than elsewhere in northern Europe. Another conceptualization of the scope of women's economic activity also existed at the time, in which men acted for women, but it was not the dominant norm in mid-fourteenth-century Ghent.

This article examines the relative incidence of poverty among the elderly in nineteenth-century Hertfordshire with special reference to gender. Both national and local sources are employed to highlight the particular difficulties experienced by the elderly, male poor under the New Poor Law, and the short and long term problems they faced as a result of seasonal unemployment and an overstocked labour market. For elderly women, the extent to which their poverty was relieved by employment in cottage industry, almshouse accommodation, the continuing receipt of out-relief and a higher incidence of family support are examined to provide an assessment of the manner in which poverty was gendered in the nineteenth century.

This article evaluates the extent of child farm labour in Spain in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. The first part of the article examines child labour in rural areas. Because under-registration of farm child labour was common in both national and local censuses, the writer examines other evidence, including surveys of child labour on farms and school-enrolment registers listing seasonal and as well as full-time labour. The second part of the article considers the relationship between employment and school absenteeism by age and gender. School attendance is compared by season and by geographic area, and its relation to farming is apparent. All the evidence in the registers demonstrates extensive employment of children over the age of ten in rural Spain.

The following articles by myself and by Andrei Markevich are the first in a series of four analysing income-earning strategies of urban households in twentieth-century Russia and the Soviet Union. The articles deal with a similar set of issues for four subsequent periods. In this issue of Continuity and Change my article covers the early Soviet period from the revolution of 1917 to the start of the Second World War and Andrei Markevich focuses on the war, the post-war Stalin period and the Khruschev years, taking his analysis into the latter half of the 1960s. In the next issue, Victoria Tyazhelnikova will examine the Brezhnev period and Sergei Afontsev the years of reform under Gorbachev and in post-Soviet Russia.

The article examines patterns of work and employment in urban households of the inter-war Soviet Union. Drawing on population censuses and time-budget surveys, it analyses trends in labour participation and gainful employment for men, women and different age-groups from the mid-1920s to the late 1930s. Particular attention is devoted to the division of labour within the household. The single most important change over this period was a substantial increase in labour participation rates, in particular among women. This was a direct result of the state-led industrialization drive of the 1930s, which simultaneously caused a booming demand for labour and a rapid decline of real wages. Households reacted to this challenge by increasing the number of working members per household. Self-employment, targeted by state repression from the late 1920s, practically disappeared, leaving paid employment as the only viable form of gainful employment. Within the household, the increase in female labour participation rates put a heavy strain on women, who came to face a double burden of employment and household duties, including child-care. In three-generation extended households, which were the norm at the time, this resulted in a division of labour between the generations, with the household members of working age concentrating on paid employment and the elderly members of the household on child-care and subsidiary agriculture.

The author studies patterns of income-earning activities of Soviet urban households from the end of 1930s to the end of 1960s. The analysis focuses on the dynamic of and reasons for the increases in the labour participation rate of the Soviet urban population, and in the proportion of households in which two members were employed by the state, and the consequences. The period saw two mass drives to recruit into the state sector adults who had previously been unemployed, the bulk of whom consisted of former housewives, the first drive occurring during the Second World War and the second in the late 1950s and the 1960s. The combined pressures exerted by the law and by material hardship account for the wartime increase in participation in the labour market. On the other hand, the second period of major expansion was much more voluntary and was accompanied by improved living standards. Despite the increase in remunerated employment there were no significant changes in the way tasks within the household were allocated on the basis of gender. This put an increasing strain on women, called the ‘double burden’ (household duties and paid work). The consequences were twofold: a decrease in fertility, and further encouragement for the formation of the many extended and multiple family households present in the urban society of the USSR.