Women on Their Way

This chapter investigates the migration patterns of women aged in their forties to sixties who came to Rome in order to find employment. The urban economy represented an opportunity for women, who employed their agency—their capacity to manipulate and take advantage of resources and social rules ¹ —in a number of ways and, in so doing, contributed to shaping the economy of the city. The chapter focuses on the agency of migrants in the economy of a cosmopolitan city—Rome—that offered job opportunities for both men and women and shows that work was a major reason for women to migrate to the city at every stage of their lives. The presence of labour migrants in early modern towns is very well known. The strong degree of mobility for both men and women has been highlighted by multiple authors, including Lotte van de Pol, who argued that the image of early modern women as sedentary and tied to home and family is not true for the lower classes. ² Nevertheless, as Carmen Sarasúa has pointed out, there were major differences between female and male migratory flows, such as the distance travelled to find work and the age at migration. ³ Compared to men, women migrated over shorter distances—mostly from the countryside to the town—and at a younger age than men, because employment in domestic service required applicants to be very young. Therefore, a typical female migration pattern was a mobility path from a rural area to a town followed by marriage, a pattern that has been defined as a life-cycle migration, deeply connected to the familial context. ⁴