ABSTRACT
Historians of early modern Europe were prominent among those who created women’s and gender history. Women’s historians increasingly moved away from talking about the ‘status of women’ in general, and examined differences and hierarchies among women along many lines and the ways these intersected. They thus viewed gender in conjunction with other social structures and identities. In the early modern economy, women were much less likely than men to have received formal training or an apprenticeship, although surviving apprenticeship contracts indicate that they occasionally were, particularly if learning a trade was combined with being a domestic servant. The amplification of social discipline after the Reformation had an even greater impact on women’s lives. In the 1980s, scholars familiar with studying women increasingly began to discuss the ways in which systems of sexual differentiation affected both women and men, and to use the word ‘gender’ to describe these culturally created and often unstable systems.
