312 Chapter 17protoindustrialization), when entrepreneurs negotiated
contracts with peasant spinners and weavers. An entre-
preneur might provide raw materials and pay peasant
spinners to produce homespun threads; the yarn could
then be delivered to a peasant weaver who also worked
at home. This “putting out” system of textile manufac-
ture stimulated later industrialization by developing
manufacturing skills, marketing networks, and a class of
prosperous provincial entrepreneurs. By some estimates
10 percent of the rural population of Old Regime Eu-
rope was engaged in cottage industry.
Domestic manufacturing, like farming, depended
upon a family economy; that is, everyone worked.
Peasant society generally followed a sexual division of
labor in which, for example, men did most of the plow-
ing and women played an important role in the harvest.
In the production of textiles, women did most of the
spinning and men were more likely to be weavers.
However, the labor of every family member, including
children, was needed if the family were to survive. As
an old poem recalls:
Man, to the Plow
Wife, to the Cow
Girl, to the Yarn
Boy, to the Barn
And your Rent will be netted.Working women were thus essential to the family econ-
omy long before industrialization and urbanization
transformed families and work. A study of peasant
women in eighteenth-century Belgium, for example,
has found that 45 percent of all married women were
listed in government records as farmers and 27 percent
were recorded as spinners; only 6 percent were listed
without an occupation. Unmarried adults were at a dis-
advantage in this rural economy, and widows were
often the poorest members of a rural community.
The rural community of peasant families was typi-
cally a village of fifty to a few hundred people. In parts
of Europe, these villages had corporate structures with
inherited rules and regulations. These might regulate
weights and measures, or they might regulate morality
and behavior such as the control of stray dogs or
mandatory church attendance. Village assemblies, led
by elders or by the heads of the households controlling
most of the land, often held powers such as assigning
land use (as they did in most German states and in Rus-
sia), dictating farming methods and crop rotation, set-
tling disputes, collecting taxes, and even arranging
marriages. Women were usually excluded from partici-
pation, though widows were sometimes accepted. Re-
cent research has identified some exceptionally
democratic villages in which women participated with
full rights.Corporative Society and the Ständestaat
Europeans of the Old Regime lived in highly stratified
societies and generally accepted their fixed place in the
hierarchy. In two-thirds of Europe (France, Savoy, part
of Switzerland, Denmark, the German states, Austria,
Bohemia, Hungary, the Danubian provinces, Poland,
and Russia), law and custom divided people into es-
tates. The division of the population into such bodies,
with separate rights, duties, and laws, is known as cor-
porative society, or by its German name, the Ständestaat.
Corporative society was a legacy of the Middle
Ages. In much of western Europe, the legal basis for it
had disappeared, whereas eastern Europe remained
caste-ridden. Everywhere, hierarchical ideas provided
the foundations of society. The structure of corporative
society resembled a pyramid. Most of the population
(peasants and laborers) formed the base of the pyramid
while a few privileged people (aristocrats and wealthy
town dwellers) sat at the top, with a monarch at the
pinnacle. Everyone was born to a position in the hier-
archy, a position that, according to most churches, was
divinely ordained, and little social mobility was evident
from one order to another.Illustration 17.1
Cottage Industry.The textile industry began in rural cot-
tages, not great factories. This scene depicts a family textile shop
for making knitwear. Note the sexual division of labor: Women
spin and wind yarn while a man operates a knitting frame, mak-
ing stockings.