Women in the construction industry in the Middle Ages

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Women in the construction industry in the Middle Ages mostly worked as unskilled workers. Some of them were able to join the corresponding guilds . Businesswomen in the construction industry who belonged to the highest tax bracket have been handed down from Paris . Their use in house and town construction only dwindled with the beginning of modern times , when women were ousted from many of the professions that had been open to them until then.

swell

Examples on women and building in the Middle Ages wore Wolfgang Schoeller composed of chronicles, control and pay bills and invoices. For him, however, the result is that women's work in construction was only of marginal importance. The language itself also gives clues: In Middle High German (from approx. 1050 to 1500) there is the word zuobringerin, which means a handyman in construction.

Building as a metaphor

Illustration from Christine de Pizan's City of Women

In her work “ The Book of the City of Women ” (1404/05), in which the writer Christine de Pizan (1365 – after 1429) describes a utopian place for women, where they are protected from the misogynist slurs of their male contemporaries , writing this book is compared to building a well-fortified medieval city.

Further metaphors for the building of this city are the discussions of the first-person narrator, who is Christine herself, with allegorical female figures such as reason, righteousness and justice, who are used to excavate the earth or to build walls and houses. The numerous exemplary female figures from antiquity , the Bible and their own time, cited as examples against the male misogynist point of view, become the building material with which the city of women is built.

An example of the equation of building and writing comes from the speech given by Mrs. Righteousness to Christine: "... if it is a matter of working with you on the fortification ring and the masonry of the women's city, which my sister Vernunft has already pulled up, then you can too I do not stand back. So take your tool and follow me! Come here, touch the mortar here in the corner, and wall well, to the rhythm of your pen dipping; I want to get enough material for you. With the help of God we will shortly be building the stately royal palaces and the noble homes for the excellent and famous ladies who are to find a place of refuge and a place to stay in this city until the end of time. "

A picture with which the manuscripts for the “City of Women” were equipped shows Christine de Pizan and one of the allegorical women erecting a wall of stone and mortar; Christine holds a ladle in her hand.

Guilds in the construction industry

Women could be admitted to the relevant guilds, e.g. B. according to the 1271 order of bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, cooper, Wagner, Wanner and wood turner of Basel . According to Erika Uitz , this membership of master wives and widows does not mean that these women have necessarily exercised these professions, but that it was mostly about fraternal and sociable duties. In Strasbourg, however, there is evidence that two women joined the masons' guild in 1452 and 1453. They also acquired citizenship of the city. This indicates that they have been accepted as full members in the guild, because the independent citizenship of women was generally a prerequisite for economically independent craftswomen to join the guild.

buildings

Sacred buildings

Medieval chronicles occasionally mention laypeople who helped with secular and especially church buildings. Women are also mentioned among them. In church buildings of the 11th and 12th centuries, especially in northern France and England , examples of the help of women can occasionally be found in the chronicles and other documents. Women from the upper classes in particular were involved. Schöller names the church building of Chartres in 1145, the one in Andres near Boulogne-sur-Mer around 1164 , the building of Notre-Dame-en-Vaux around 1165 in Châlons-sur-Marne, that of Reggio in 1233 and that of Le Mans in 1254. This phenomenon can be classified in the larger context of the participation of lay people in church building out of religious zeal.

Castles and secular buildings

Women not only built churches, but also secular buildings. One poem describes a feud in southern Ireland in the 13th century. The residents of the city of Ross decided to secure their city with moats and walls. Workers were hired to build the wall, but a different part of the population dug the trench every day. On Sunday the women of the city worked on the ditch. Winchester Castle's 1222 payroll shows that there were six women among the workforce named. Among the workers at Marlborough Castle and Royal Mills were women in repairs in 1237/38 and 1238/39, five of whom are named. Mainly they did auxiliary work such as carrying cement and stones, helping with roofing, supporting the stonecutters or collecting stones in the forest. Five women were involved in earthworks on Rockingham Castle in 1279, women were employed as porters in the construction of Caernarvon Castle in Wales in 1316/17, and in Durham around 1337 a woman worked as a mortar mixer. Outside England and Wales there is a reference to women in construction from Mallorca . Women were also employed in the construction of the Castell de Bellver in 1309.

There is an example in France where almost as many women as men were employed on a construction site, namely at the Saint-Front de Périgord College in Toulouse, founded in 1360 . The women carried stones and bricks in baskets on their heads, dug foundation trenches, laid down walls and cleaned the latrines. Their work, though not exactly the same as the men's, was just as difficult. However, their wages were always lower than the men's.

In the German-speaking countries, Würzburg is known in the sources, where women were mainly employed on urban construction sites from 1429 until the 18th century, mainly delivering building materials. In Mühlhausen a woman is known as a clay carrier in the 15th century, in Siegen two women with an average of 19 helpers built the tower of the Nikolaikirche in 1462 . Here, too, the women were paid less than their male colleagues.

In Ingolstadt , 1,521 day laborers were employed in the construction of Liebfrauen . An indirect reference to the work of women in the construction industry is a wage ordinance from Styria . In 1460, it was established here how much wages maids received for carrying stones or mortar. A Bavarian state ordinance of 1553 also stipulates how much wages women who carry stones and mortar should receive.

Craftswomen

Construction craftswomen in Paris

Paris tax rolls show that there were a few walls (maçonne), female carpenters (charpentière) and plasterers (plastrière) in this city who paid taxes at the end of the 13th / beginning of the 14th century. One of the plasterers paid so much taxes in 1292 that she can be considered an entrepreneur. Otherwise, the female construction workers fit into the usual income structure of their male colleagues, i.e. In other words, there were simple craftswomen and those who were among the highest tax brackets.

To get an impression of the situation, here are a few figures: Of 10,000 taxable persons in Paris in 1297, 1,548 were women.

year 1292 1296 1297 1300 1313
Bricklayer 104 32 107 129 74
Masons 0 1 1 1 2
year 1292 1296 1297 1300 1313
Carpenters 95 31 66 108 72
Housewives 0 0 2 4th 1

Source: Tax rolls from Paris (after Schöller 1994, 307 f.)

Other jobs by women in construction

In addition to carrying building materials and stirring mortar, women are also employed in other handyman services, such as lime burners, clay wall makers, roofers and quarry workers. From court records from 1437, we know of a maid who was injured while a servant was digging clay from a clay pit. From the year 1567/68 it is known from Chester that women operated construction cranes. In Siegen they pedaled . Glazing can also be counted among the construction auxiliary trades. Erika Uitz names women glaziers from Nuremberg .

The number of women involved in construction work is likely to have been higher than the sources indicate, as only male job titles were often used in payrolls and on invoices and unskilled workers were mostly not listed by name. Sometimes even more women than men may have been employed, e.g. B. in Linlithgow , Scotland , where 1,302 140 women and 103 men carried out earthworks. One reason will have been that women could be paid cheaper than men. Another reason could be a shortage of male labor after epidemics and in wartime. In Toulouse, a few years after the plague pandemic of 1348/49, almost as many women as men were employed in the construction of the Collège de Périgord, and in Würzburg, during a feud in the 1460s, the city ordered up to 283 women to do various jobs such as construction of walls and the digging of moats.

In the early modern period there were several guild regulations prohibiting employing women, for example in 1557 in Lüneburg or 1592 in Nuremberg. This is related to the displacement of women from many professions that were open to them in the Middle Ages since the early modern period .

literature

  • Beate Hennig: Of nobility and fuss. Female status and job titles in Middle High German literature at the time of the Hanseatic League . In: Barbara Vogel, Ulrike Weckel (ed.): Women in the Estates Society. Living and working in the city from the late Middle Ages to modern times . Contributions to German and European history. 4. pp. 117-146. Hamburg: Krämer 1991. ISBN 3-926952-25-3 .
  • Christine de Pizan: The book of the city of women . Translated from the Middle French, with a commentary and an introduction by Margarete Zimmermann. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag 1987. 2. Erw. Edition. ISBN 3-922166-22-9 .
  • Wolfgang Schöller: Women's work in the medieval construction industry. In: Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 76, 1994, pp. 305-320. ISSN  0003-9233 .
  • Erika Uitz: The woman in the medieval city. Stuttgart: Abent 1988. ISBN 3-926243-02-3 .
  • Margarete Zimmermann: Introduction . In: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Women. Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag 1987. 2. Erw. Edition. Pp. 9-33. ISBN 3-922166-22-9 .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schöller, Frauenarbeit p. 320.
  2. ↑ Beate Hennig: Of nobility and craft. Female status and job titles in Middle High German literature at the time of the Hanseatic League. In: Barbara Vogel, Ulrike Weckel (ed.): Women in the Estates Society. Living and working in the city from the late Middle Ages to modern times. Pp. 117-146. Hamburg: Krämer Hamburg 1991.
  3. ↑ Margarete Zimmermann: Introduction. In: Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Women. Translated from Central French, with a commentary and an introduction by Margarete Zimmermann, Orlanda Frauenverlag, Berlin 1987, 2nd expanded edition, pp. 9–33. ISBN 3-922166-22-9 , p. 23 f.
  4. ↑ Margarete Zimmermann, 1987, p. 24.
  5. ↑ Christine de Pizan: The book of the city of women. Translated from Central French, with a commentary and an introduction by Margarete Zimmermann, Orlanda Frauenverlag, Berlin 1987, 2nd expanded edition. ISBN 3-922166-22-9 , p. 131.
  6. ↑ Christine de Pizan, 1987, p. 34.
  7. ↑ Erika Uitz: The woman in the medieval city. Publishing house Dr. Bernhard Abend, Stuttgart 1988. ISBN 3-926243-02-3 , p. 62
  8. ↑ Erika Uitz, 1988, p. 62.
  9. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller: Women's work in the medieval construction industry. Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 76, 1994, pp. 305-320. ISSN  0003-9233 , 306.
  10. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 305 f.
  11. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 311.
  12. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 311 f.
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 312.
  14. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 312.
  15. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 313
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 313.
  17. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 314.
  18. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 314.
  19. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 314 f.
  20. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 307.
  21. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 311.
  22. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 310 f.
  23. ↑ Erika Uitz: The woman in the medieval city. Stuttgart: Abend 1988. ISBN 3-926243-02-3 , p. 62.
  24. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller: Women's work in the medieval construction industry. Archives for cultural history 76, 1994, 305-320. ISSN  0003-9233 , 315.
  25. ↑ Erika Uitz: The woman in the medieval city. Stuttgart: Abend 1988. ISBN 3-926243-02-3 , 62.
  26. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller: Women's work in the medieval construction industry. Archive for cultural history. 76, 1994, pp. 305-320. ISSN  0003-9233 , 316.
  27. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 317.
  28. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 318 f.
  29. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 317.
  30. ↑ Wolfgang Schöller, 1994, p. 319.