A Cultural History of Work in the Age of Enlightenment by Anne Montenach Deborah Simonton

Author:Anne Montenach, Deborah Simonton [Anne Montenach, Deborah Simonton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Modern, 17th Century, 18th Century
ISBN: 9781350078284
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-09-17T04:00:00+00:00

FIGURE 6.1 “Porters from the town of Venice.” In Cesare Vecellio, Costumes anciens et modernes, Habiti antichi et moderni di tutto il Mondo di Cesare Vecellio, Paris, 1860.

The same multilocal network was part of the migratory system that led Pasiego women to relocate to Madrid for work. In fact, this flow was based on constant group movements from the Pas valley to the capital city. Women moved together from their common birthplace to the city where, thanks to the shared network of information, they knew they were very likely to find employment.59 Nevertheless, it is worth noting that in this case as well mobility was organized within the framework of a connecting network; on arriving in Madrid, Pasiego women could count on the solidarity of other women from the same valleys already living in the city and working there as itinerant vendors. The assistance of these women was especially useful for Pasiego wet-nurses to find employment in Madrid, and their meeting point was the hiring place of Santa Cruz.

PLACES, HOUSES, WORKSHOPS: MOBILE WORKERS AND LOCAL SETTINGS

Besides these multisituated networks, there were other resources that enabled different kinds of workers to hold a job in the city while remaining mobile, either on a seasonal basis or engaging in “multi-annual” migration patterns or life-cycle mobility. One of these resources was the hiring place. Although personal connections were the preferred way to hire someone, seasonal workers did not always have contacts with local employers.60 Hiring places—“marchés aux bras,” defined by Geremek—enabled workers to transcend their lack of local knowledge and locate one of their first jobs in the city.61

In eighteenth-century Madrid, as described by Sarasúa, migrant Pasiego women who had not already found jobs and, consequently, lodgings used to go to the square of Santa Cruz, located in the center of the city, to meet potential employers. Santa Cruz was indeed “an outdoors labour market” that displayed newly arrived women seeking jobs for the convenience of all the inhabitants of the city: a place that a contemporary author defined as “a daily market in human flesh, one whose effect on social custom has yet to be considered.”62 For the same reasons and also to regulate labor relations between employers and wet-nurses, there was an office in eighteenth-century Paris called the Bureau des Nourisses et des Recommanderesses (Figure 6.2). The bureau was composed of officers and physicians in charge of the physical and moral examination of wet-nurses. As Mercier points out, this office was created in response to the intensity of the migratory stream of women coming to Paris in search of positions as wet-nurses.63

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