The cigar-making women of the rural villages from Buenos Aires, 1869-1895

BARCOS, M, FERNANDA; CONTENTE, CLAUDIA

Paris

Congreso; XIX World Economic History Congress; 2022

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique-École des hautes études en sciences sociales - The International Economic History Association

The history of women's work in Argentina was nourished by different aspects of the disciplinary field such as the history of work, women, the family, historical demography and gender studies. These investigations managed to expose the hierarchical differences marked by sex from "making visible" women in the world of paid work by weighing their weight in the different branches of activity but also highlighting their overwhelming presence in work without salary. All this in parallel to the study of the social dimension because attention was also paid to the different configurations that were made of them in various periods of history.In the case of the province of Buenos Aires, the studies that have taken the question of women's work between the eighteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth have been very enlightening although there is a marked inclination for periods and places, especially the port city. Consequently, an image prevails where women seem to enter the world of rural work abruptly in 1869. While data from pioneering research showed that this was not the case, the issue was not quickly taken up and case studies are lacking; especially in relation to their U-like behavior. From another angle, "country" women have not always been conveniently studied, perhaps the product of tacit but quite frequent ideas about the modernity of the city and the backwardness of the countryside. This assessment is not an exceptional note of historiography about Buenos Aires but rather a general trend.In this work we propose to make a small contribution to the studies on nineteenth-century women's work, especially that of the women who worked in the workshops and factories of the Buenos Aires campaign because it is an aspect that has been little studied, and we consider that rural areas have particularities that allow to enrich the general look. The research was carried out from the analysis of the handwritten records of the first two national population censuses (1869 and 1895) and the First National Economic Census of 1895. Despite the limitations offered by censuses to analyze some aspects of economic behavior, working with handwritten census tracts allows disaggregating all the data and disarming the census operation to find new patterns of analysis on nineteenth-century female labor, especially its weight in the incipient industry.