Labouring Lives ─ Women, work and the demographic transition in the Netherlands, 1880-1960

Labouring Lives unravels the huge changes which have so fundamentally altered the life courses of ordinary women over the past one hundred and fifty years, namely the changes in marriage and fertility patterns. Using dynamic data from Dutch population registers and analytical techniques from the life course approach, the book offers new evidence on women’s changing position in the labour market, their role in pre-nuptial sexuality, and their contribution to marriage and fertility change in the Netherlands between 1880 and 1960. The author reconstructs the socio-economic and demographic worlds of different groups of working and non-working women, and by doing so she is able to locate the various groups driving the changes. Advanced statistical tools enable the author to analyse differences in fertility strategies, stopping versus spacing, employed by various social and cultural groups in the Netherlands. This book leads to conclusions which challenge a number of orthodoxies in the field.

Angelique Janssens is associate professor of economic and social history at the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands). Her research focuses on family history, women’s work and male breadwinning, and child mortality. She also leads a research project investigating the effects of familial factors and the disease environment on mortality and longevity in the Netherlands in the 19th-20th century.