342 anna bellavitis
older than 18 years of age. Between the 17th and 18th centuries, the periods
of apprenticeship, while they varied somewhat according to trade and the
age of the apprentices, were between four and five years, except in the
cases of certain trades, such as those pertaining to sewing (tailors, hatters,
etc.) and personal care (barbers, hairdressers, etc.), whose duration was
about two and a half years. at the end of the contract, the youth received
salary but had no guarantee of access to the career represented by the
guild. in fact, in the early modern age, in many sectors, access to the guild
was reserved to the sons and sometimes the widows of master guildsmen:
at the end of the 18th century, more than one-third of apprenticeships in
the shoemakers’ guild were sons of master guildsmen.50
Female apprenticeship was less widespread, but at the end of the 16th
century, there were some 12-year-old female apprentices employed with
contracts longer than six years in some sectors of the silk industry. the
presence of more orphan girls than orphan boys among apprentices seems
to confirm a hypothesis already formulated elsewhere, that is, that female
apprenticeship was a fall-back choice, in situations of social vulnerability.
much more frequent for girls were domestic service contracts, to which
sometimes was added the learning of some specific ability. With the
backing of her older brother, whom she had followed into the capital, a
young girl who arrived from the terraferma would find employment with
a family whose female head was to teach her “all that which a woman
must know,” including silk-weaving and the manufacture of ribbons and
handkerchiefs. Such a mistress could even bear the name of the “mag-
nifica madonna” andriana morosini, widow of the “clarissimo” Gabriel,
and exercise the “business and trade” of silk, for in Venice, as in cologne
in the 15th century, patrician women could “engage in the trade” of silk
fabrics.51
evidently, for generations there had also existed in Venice a solid arti-
san base, particularly in luxury trades, but in these families also the mobil-
ity of young people could be important. in fact, Venetian goldsmiths,
tailors, and silk-workers often sent their sons to learn the trade from other
colleagues in the city, in order to weave networks of relationships but
also because they considered this to be a better way to educate them.
50 Beltrami, Storia della popolazione; Vianello, L’arte; Walter Panciera, “emarginazione
femminile tra politica salariale e modelli di organizzazione del lavoro nell’industria tessile
veneta nel XViii secolo,” in Simonetta cavaciocchi, ed., La donna nell’economia, secc. XIII–
XVIII (Florence, 1990), pp. 585–96.
51 Romano, Housecraft; anna Bellavitis, “apprentissages masculins, apprentissages
féminins à Venise au XVie siècle,” Histoire Urbaine 15 (2006), 49–63, 71.