ABSTRACT
Historians of the early modern European economy have traditionally concentrated on the legalities underpinning economic activity, as shown by the large body of work dealing with the corporate system in this period. Little scholarly attention has been paid to the dark or unofficial side of the pre-industrial economy from a gender perspective. In order to understand the issues, modalities, and spatial configurations of informal and illicit forms of women’s work in a major industrial city during the eighteenth century, the first part of this chapter offers an overview of the official role available to women in the Lyon textile sector which was structured by the guilds and dominated by the Grande Fabrique (Lyon’s silk industry). This essay then analyses the diverse options available to women in the black market by studying three different yet similar activities: informal activities (women working in sectors dominated by the guilds), a felony specific to the Grande Fabrique (piquage d’once, or theft of thread), and finally criminal activities (smuggling of printed cottons). In discussing these developments, this chapter also reviews attitudes towards the way in which women’s work was seen by the women themselves and by the society in which they lived and the nature of relationships that working women developed together and with men or city institutions, including the way they negotiated their presence in the urban space.
