Suchergebnisse

In contemporary societies, status as a wage worker is a fundamental

source of social and political identity. Wage labour is also the main source

of income for individuals, conditioning – to a large extent –
access to
property, patterns of consumption, and receipt of public benefits. In Jane

Lewis's words, despite an unequal wage structure between the sexes,
the
'best way of avoiding poverty risks, for both men and women, according

to statistics, is being in the labour market'.Labour markets have
almost always
had gender disparities, with
women in a secondary position in terms of wage levels and promotion
opportunities. In present-day Europe, public policies are the primary
mechanism for counterbalancing women's secondary position in the
labour market and also within the family. But this has not always been

the case. Among the profound changes in the character of European states

during the nineteenth century was their transformation from being one of

the mechanisms reinforcing and organizing labour markets along gender
lines to becoming an institution that has promoted equal-opportunity
policies in the twentieth century and attempted to improve women's

disadvantaged position.

ABSTRACTFoundling hospitals spread across Europe in the 18thand 19thcenturies, taking in hundreds of thousands of children each year. In Spain, the hospitals of major cities had staffs of more than 1,000 external wet nurses, who worked mainly in rural localities. Their cash wages were key for the household economies of the poor rural and urban populations. This article presents a methodology to interpret wet-nurse wages and explains their utility with respect to other occupations for men and women. Our results include a series of nominal and real wages for wet nurses and a calculation of their contributions to family income. The level of wages these institutions could offer was a major determinant in the supply of wet-nurse labour.