Women and the Birth of Capitalism in Western Europe

"This book has not been translated into English but it’s a real gem. Tine de Moor and Luiten van Zanden are historians, and they describe how the European marriage pattern helped the economy bloom in the late medieval and early modern period. I had never thought about the nuclear family in this way before. It started in the Low Countries, around the Netherlands, and is something we exported to the rest of the Western world. Before that, people just lived together as an extended family, with grandparents, maybe brothers and sisters and their children, all in the same house. But with the change to a nuclear unit, people had to start setting aside money for old age – because they could not rely on living with their children anymore. Also, in the Low Countries, women could inherit money from their parents, which meant that women could start to choose whom to marry. Sometimes they waited, and got a job. Women could just stay home and wait for the best man who came around – they weren’t forced to marry quickly to get their dowry. Yes, and they were very independent. Then the plague broke out [in 1348], and a lot of men died. Lots of hands were needed in the labour market and women got their chance. That’s referred to, by some historians, as the first feminist revolution. Yes."