ABSTRACT
W hen I wrote my first book on women’s work, Working Women in Renaissance Germany, the word I worried most about in the title was ‘Renaissance’, as it carried with it much cultural baggage and was not often used to talk about economic developments in Germany; I stuck with it because I wanted a shorthand for the period I was investigating, 1450-1650. In the last ten years, however, feminist and economic analysis (and in particular feminist economic ana lysis) has also led to a rethinking of two other words in my title, ‘women’ and ‘work’. Historians began to analyse the social con struction of gender, and to investigate the interplay between gen der hierarchies and other social hierarchies, such as those of race and class. They emphasized that any use of the word ‘women’ really only m eant some women in any society, so that generalizations or chronological comparisons were never completely accurate; some theorists even suggested dropping the word ‘women’ altogether, as it was either essentialist in its definition (i.e. based on ‘biology’, which was itself a cultural construct) or exclusionary.
