Women’s waged work and life cycle in the catalan cork industry, c. 1860-1920

Abstract

This article studies the feminisation process of the cork industry in the Girona region in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It also reconstructs women’s activity rates in 1920. The analysis of the life cycle’s influence on women’s labour-force participation underlines the diversity of local models, depending on labour demand. Whereas in those places where it was weak, only young single women worked, in those towns where labour demand was intense women worked for a wage after their marriage and, although female labour participation was not completely insensitive to variables such as the number of children or family structure (nuclear or stem), it was more decisively determined by the number of male workers in the household.