Foundling hospitals spread across Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries, taking in hundreds of thousands of children each year. In Spain, the hospitals of major cities had staffs of more than 1,000 external wet nurses, who worked mainly in rural localities. Their cash wages were key for the household economies of the poor rural and urban populations. This article presents a methodology to interpret wet-nurse wages and explains their utility with respect to other occupations for men and women. Our results include a series of nominal and real wages for wet nurses and a calculation of their contributions to family income. The level of wages these institutions could offer was a major determinant in the supply of wet-nurse labour.

El artículo se enmarca en las líneas de investigación actual sobre la mujer en la economía marítima preindustrial. Se trata de un estudio de caso centrado en las capitanas y las patronas durante el auge del corso en Mallorca entre 1635–80. En él se destaca la labor de las mujeres de mar como procuradoras de sus maridos mientras permanecían ausentes, especialmente cuando la situación les exigió demostrar iniciativa e ir más allá de lo estipulado en la procura. Asimismo, se constata un mayor protagonismo en cuatro áreas de la empresa corsaria, mientras ésta se rigió por un modelo de corte familiar.

Challenging current ideas in mainstream scholarship on differences between female labour force participation in southern and north-western Europe and their impact on economic development, this article shows that in Portugal, neither marriage nor widowhood prevented women from participating in the labour market of mid-eighteenth-century. Our research demonstrates that marriage provided women with the resources they needed to work in various capacities in all economic sectors.

This article also argues that single Portuguese women had an incentive to work and did so mostly as wage earners. Finally, the comparison of our dataset on female occupations from tax records with other European cases calls for a revision of the literature and the development of a more nuanced picture of the north-south divide.