To serve the master or the husband. Women to Ría de Bilbao during the first industrialization

Abstract

The formation of contemporary industrial societies can not be understood, nowadays, without the presence of huge contingents of immigrants who arrived at the new cities to carve out a professional and familiar future. Within this important process, women' participation was determining as much as in volume, presence in regular or submerged labour market, like helping to their families integration in new hostile spaces. This article tries to rescue this silence that classic historiography has imposed to women in a double condition of immigrants and workers.