Las mujeres como partícipes, usufructuarias y propietarias de negocios en la Barcelona de los siglos XVIII y XIX, según la documentación notarial

Abstract

This article demonstrates the benefits of using notarial documentation to gain a fuller perspective on the role of women in business in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Barcelona. Based on these documents, this work reveals that women were active partners in familial artisanal shops, were self-employed in different kinds of business, and participated in mortgage and loan transactions. This article also incluyes three short biographics of women implied in business, in partnership or independents. Women were therefore involved in business, whether through partnership or independently. This contradicts the image of the middle-class woman as disassociated from economic life.

This article proposes the need to consider wives as economically active. This was especially true of artisan women in crafts that conferred lower status and were less remunerative. It was also true of women shopkeepers, who in the census and population registers appear as devoted to «sus labores» (their duties), or other similarly vague descriptions. In fact, many different types of notarial records show that these women worked in business, whether autonomously or as partners with others.