Panel 08: Gendered Experiences of Movement: (In)Mobility, Gender & Work in the Early Modern World (EN)

Chairs: Mariana Meneses Muñoz (CHAM - Centre for the Humanities, NOVA FCSH), Pablo Hernández Sau (Universidad Pablo de Olavide), Helder Carvalhal (International Institute of Social History)

Part I: 16 April, 9:00 am | Room D110

The Silent Language of Cloth: Gender, Mobility, and Work in the Early Modern Mediterranean

Fallah Saad (University of Hassan II Casablanca)

This paper offers a semiotic analysis of gendered appearance as a crucial lens for understanding the complex interplay of mobility, immobility, and work in the Early Modern Mediterranean world (roughly 15th-18th centuries). Drawing on established and recent scholarship in semiotics, gender history, and material culture studies, this analysis deconstructs how clothing and bodily adornment functioned as intricate sign systems. These systems communicated, reinforced, and sometimes challenged prevailing gender norms, social status, and roles related to movement and labor. By examining how different forms of dress signified varying degrees of public presence, travel, and engagement in economic activities, this paper argues that appearance was not merely a passive reflection of gendered experiences but an active, performative medium that shaped and mediated individuals' relationships to mobility and work within diverse Early Modern Mediterranean societies.

Keywords: semiotics; gender; early modern; mobility; material culture

Working under and after captivity: the post-freedom economic standing of freed African women in early modern Portugal

Hélder Carvalhal (International Institute of Social History, KNAW)

This paper examines the economic participation and freedom of work of African women in early modern Portugal, both before and after being released from captivity. During the long sixteenth century, a few thousand Africans disembarked in Portugal from both North and Sub-Saharan Africa, most of those taken by force and often subject to enslaved labour. While demographic details about this group are uneven, it is recognised that a part of these captives were women, and that they mostly performed menial work, either in agriculture, in domestic affairs (within the household), as well as in a few urban unskilled occupations. The literature concerning the female economic roles in early modern Europe stressed that Iberian women enjoyed relative freedom of work and engaged considerably in public life, as perceived by the development of occupations outside the household, participation in legal processes, as well as the ownership of businesses. Yet, this work has been developed having in mind European women as case studies. Little attention has been given to the role of African women in early modern Europe through their respective life cycles. Studies about whether, for instance, African women saw their economic standing improving after being granted freedom are nonexistent. In the same vein, there is no clarification whether post-freedom marriage contributed to a higher economic standing, as it seems to be the case for their European counterparts.

With this purpose in mind, the lifecycles of ca. 100 African women taken to Portugal between 1514 and 1554 will be examined. I will account for their economic standing, occupational insertion, and degree of economic freedom in a set of life events, including pre- and post-freedom periods. Thus, factors such as marriage, increase of household size (reproduction of), and ownership of property will be of paramount importance within the analysis.

Keywords: African women; economic standing; occupations; slavery and freedom; early modern Portugal

The Streets as a Marketplace: Gendered Mobility and the Circuits of Magical Knowledge in 17th-Century Lisbon

Mariana Meneses Muñoz (CHAM, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

This study explores how non-elite women in seventeenth-century Lisbon utilised distinct regimens of mobility to build the social and economic networks essential for their everyday survival. Drawing on the 1637 witchcraft Lisbon's Inquisition trials, this talk analyses their life stories to argue that strategic movement—across streets, between households, and into public spaces—was fundamental to creating semi-intimate circles for collectively producing and circulating magical knowledge. This knowledge, in turn, was commercialised through these very networks, forming an informal economic circuit managed by women. Ultimately, the paper contends that mobility was not merely background activity but a core strategy, enabling these women to transform localised movement into a resource for knowledge acquisition, economic resilience, and social integration across different urban strata.

Keywords: gendered mobility; early modern women’s history; magical knowledge; social networks; Inquisition studies

An Empire of Maids: Women and Mobility in the Mediterranean of the Spanish Monarchy

Verónica Gallego Manzanares (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Between 1580 and 1640, the military and administrative expansion of the Spanish Monarchy generated intense flows of people across its European territories. Alongside the movement of armies and royal officials, numerous women also travelled, particularly those employed in domestic service. Although this phenomenon has been partially explored in the context of the Americas, it has received little attention regarding the Mediterranean territories of the Monarchy. Taking the city of Naples as its point of departure, this paper examines the presence and trajectories of these women within one of the key centres of the imperial framework, where the concentration of military and political power fostered the development of complex networks of dependency and mobility extending across others Mediterranean spaces.

The aim of this study is to reconstruct the labour and social circuits that enabled women’s employment within the households of officers, administrators, and their families, drawing on memorials, council petitions, and judicial sources. It also identifies the most recurrent profiles, their geographic origins, and the conditions under which they entered service. By placing these women at the centre of the analysis, this paper seeks to understand how their participation contributed both to the reproduction of courtly and familial hierarchies and to sustaining the everyday infrastructure of empire. Ultimately, it proposes a reading of the Spanish Monarchy through the mobility of its subaltern actors, revealing how women’s experiences of service and accompaniment to the army shaped the domestic and transnational dimension of imperial power.

Keywords: women; mobility; domestic service; Spanish Monarchy

Part II: 16 April, 11:00 am | Room D110

Women servants in the Spanish emigration to America (XVI-XVII)

Amelia Almorza Hidalgo (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

Spanish emigration to the Americas included many women, who by the late 16th century made up nearly 30% of the migratory contingent. A significant group of these women registered to travel as servants (criadas), accompanying both family groups and men who were travelling alone. Most of the criadas were single women from Seville and Spaniards (although there were also women of African descent and mestizas).

The aim of this study is to analyse what advantages these women found in embarking as maids, what the journey was like, and how they entered the colonial world. Moreover, the emigrants’ need to travel with servants created an opportunity for women of limited means — those who needed to reunite with relatives in the Americas or who sought to make their fortune there — to make the crossing.

Through passenger records and licenses to the Indies issued by the Casa de la Contratación, it is possible to focus on the process of transatlantic mobility of non-elite women and on how this process was shaped by their labour opportunities, gender, social status, and family networks.

Keywords: criadas; women's emigration; servants; Spanish Atlantic; mobility

Gender, enslaved mobilities and mining labour in Mozambique (18th-19th centuries)

Eugénia Rodrigues (Centro de História, Faculdade de Letras Universidade de Lisboa)

This paper explores the mobility experiences of enslaved women involved in gold mining in the Zambezi Valley, in present-day Mozambique, during the early modern period. Gold mining and trade were central to the Portuguese estates in the region, particularly in the Tete district. Following their expulsion from the plateau south of the Zambezi River in the late seventeenth century, Portuguese traders could only access gold through trade with African polities. Consequently, they turned to the Maravi territory north of the river to exploit lower-grade gold deposits. As the Maravi observed cultural taboos that prohibited them from engaging in mining, Portuguese settlers negotiated with local chiefs to gain direct access to and exploit gold mines, known as bares. According to regional labour divisions, mining was primarily the work of women, who, accompanied by men, travelled to the mining sites during the agricultural off-season. These enslaved women navigated a system of seasonal mobility, moving between cultivated fields on Portuguese estates near the Zambezi and distant bares in Maravi territory. Drawing on African mining knowledge, they crushed rock and sifted river sand to extract gold on behalf of their owners, while sometimes keeping a portion for themselves. Amidst im/mobility policies entangled with geometries of power, these women were crucial to the economy, contributing their labour to a range of activities.

Keywords: Gender; work; mining; Zambezi Valley; Mozambique

Alone?: A comparative view of the emigration of single women and widows to the overseas territories of the Iberian crowns (1550–1650)

Margarita Eva Rodríguez García (Universidad Complutense de Madrid)

Historiography has amply demonstrated the importance of female emigration to Spanish overseas territories in the modern age, which exceeded 25% of total emigrants during the second half of the 16th century. In the Portuguese empire, there were significant restrictions on female emigration to overseas territories, compared to the Spanish empire. Even so, a significant number of women, less visible in the documentation, embarked on a journey into the unknown in search of a better life, to start a family or to escape a difficult fate on the peninsula. The aim of this paper is to offer a comparative view of this female emigration to the overseas territories of the Iberian crowns. The focus will be on women who travelled alone, unmarried or widowed, who, voluntarily or forced by circumstances, faced the dangers and uncertainties, but also the possibilities, of the transoceanic journey.

Keywords: Female migration; unmarried women; transoceanic voyages; colonization; gender

The (Fe)male Boulignys. Gender and Imperial (Im)Mobility within the Eighteenth-Century Hispanic World

Pablo Hernández Sau (Universidad Pablo de Olavide)

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the Boulignys — a family of French merchants based in Alicante — became soldiers in Louisiana, diplomats in the Ottoman Empire, and engineers and officers along various Hispanic frontiers such as Oran, Extremadura, and the Catalan Pyrenees. The trajectories of royal “servants” such as the Boulignys not only contributed to sustaining coherence within the empire but also generated distinctive migratory patterns and administrative practices. These were complemented by the gendered roles of their sisters, daughters, and nieces, who served the Bourbon dynasty through their fixity, reproductive labour, and trans-regional displacements. Alongside their male relatives, many of the Bouligny women also moved across the Hispanic world, negotiating their own forms of development by capitalising on experiences of both mobility and immobility.

As studies inspired by the “new mobilities paradigm” have demonstrated, the experience of moving — and of not moving — was shaped by displacements, cultural norms, and embodied perceptions of movement. This presentation adopts a qualitative and gendered approach to the experiences of this “mobile” family in order to assess the significance of increasing itinerancy and the role of mobility within the Spanish Empire, re-centring the role of reclaim both individual and collective displacement, as well as restricted or limited movements. To this end, it analyses the official petitions and private letters of both male and female members of the Bouligny family to explore how gender and imperial (im)mobility intersected in the late eighteenth-century Hispanic world.

Keywords: women; (in)mobility; officials; Spanish empire