The Social Construction of Female Labor m Spain (1850-1935)

Abstract

This article shows that discourses about the social value of work, which were gender biased, had a decisive influence when measuring women's participation in the workforce. By exhaustively analyzing the linguistic characteristics of statistic documents (municipal registers), I argue that State institutions, and particularly Spanish liberals during the period 1850-1935, applied the categories of classic economics when classifying the Spanish population. The attribution of a given category of labor to men and women was determined by gender bias and ideals at the time. This article reevaluates the importance of female labor in Spanish industrialization (1800-1935), and states that female labor did not drop during this process. Far from a social reality, this supposed decrease was actually a statistical illusion, which has been created by the discursive nature of quantitative sources.