Wet-nurses and verbs : Methodological experiences of studying gender and work in early modern Europe

In this essay, we use lactation workas a lens through which to study women’s workin the past. The issues addressed are what countsas work, how to find evidence of women’s work,and how to use the evidence. We present anapproach developed by the Swedish Gender andWork (GaW) project, including a theoreticalfocus on practices and the verb-oriented method,and we illustrate how we combine quantitativeand qualitative analyses by zooming in and outon the data. We conclude with a discussion ofthe shifting analytical usefulness of ‘women’ asa category of historical analysis.
Gender and Work