Anna Bellavitis’s long list of publications has focused on labor, gender, and urban history of the early modern world so it is no surprise that she has now published a book combining these interests: Il lavoro delle donne nella città dell’Europa moderna. Her work appears as the sixth in the series Storia delle donne e di genere, a collaboration that premiered in 2013 between the Società Italiana delle Storiche and Viella, and one that aims at a broad yet historically minded Italian audience.

Bellavitis synthesizes published work covering a lengthy early modern period and a wide-ranging territorial scope; by doing so she demonstrates her interest in and mastery of a vast European bibliography. The majority of secondary sources, on which the book is based, are studies of women working in Italy yet many also highlight such women in France, England, Germany, the Low Countries, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Greece, and across Europe generally. Bellavitis also includes some previously unpublished primary sources from her own research within Venetian archives. Her work adds allusions to our times, linking to the contemporary world in an attempt to help readers consider our society’s ideas and practices regarding gendered divisions of labor.

Bellavitis paints a colorful European picture, one filled with women active in most all fields. Her text is divided into four sections, beginning with an essay on the problematic nature of the study of women and a description of the challenge of finding adequate sources to illuminate women’s labor practices. Section 2 addresses women’s education and rights to acquire skills to practice or teach a trade; she also discusses women’s rights to take action, to own one’s business or one’s dowry, and to be associated with a guild. Here she walks us through relatively familiar territory with information on the lives of well-known women who achieved greatness in the arts. Part 3 focuses on the culture of workshops and apprenticeships, family-run businesses such as publishing houses, and businesswomen in general. She explains that working with one’s parents from childhood was the most common way to acquire a trade; more than any other force, one’s family determined the work destinies for both males and females. Bellavitis further explains that most women (and most men) worked not to gain socioeconomic independence but merely to survive. Her final chapter might seem most familiar as it covers women’s work based on the female body and the so-called female nature, i.e., women as servants, cooks, nurses, wet nurses, midwives, and prostitutes. However, she helps debunk myths including the idea that women predominantly worked using their bodies, from within their homes, or that women’s domestic tasks were not true work. She makes readers understand that although some jobs were ordinarily performed by women, there was no clear-cut division of gendered labor. However precarious or invisible they may have been in their often-underground economies, it is clear that women have always worked both within their homes and beyond them.

Bellavitis explains that women have been responsible for juggling reproduction with production, in the past as today. She shows that, for women, one’s gendered identity has always prevailed over one’s professional identity: instead of being described specifically as glassmakers, e.g., women were/are considered as women who work as glassmakers. She explains that in order to have constructed the fictitious situation of female inferiority, women were considered unspecialized (even when they were specialized), women’s access to education or apprenticeships was controlled, and they were often persuaded of their inferior worth on multiple levels. Further, domestic work was not paid but considered natural for them, as it remains even today, since most women are the ones who just do it. She concludes that the study of women’s work crosses borders as it is at once domestic and public, legal and illegal, and overall malleable.

The cover image on this book features a detail from a dynamic sixteenth-century painting by van Swanenburg of Dutch women (and men) busy at work in a spinning factory. One of the only drawbacks to this publication is that no other images are included to help guide a broad audience through their introductory pursuit of historical materials. Having said that, Bellavitis’s didactic text will certainly spark much additional interest in this field.