Female employment from the household. Towards a comprehensive analysis of work-life articulation

Research on women’s employment has proliferated over recent decades, often under a perspective that conceptualizes female labour market activity as independent of male presences and absences in the productive and reproductive spheres. In the face of these approaches, the article argues the need to focus on the couple as the unit of analysis of work-life articulation. After referring to the main theoretical arguments that, from a gender perspective within labour studies, have pointed out the relevance of placing the household as the central space for the analysis of the sexual division of labour, the article reviews different empirical contributions that have incorporated such perspective in the international literature. Next, the state of the art in the Spanish literature is presented, before arguing the desirability of applying such framework of analysis to the study of employment and care work in Spanish households, which are at present undergoing major transformations.

Analysis of a socio-professional group underestimated: officials of notaries in Southern Spain according to the cadastre of Ensenada.

This paper tries to show the reality of one of the trades more important for historians, the officials of the notaries. The work of these officials has allowed us to have great historical sources; we refer to the notarial documentation and documenta-tion of the City Council. They were the executive arm of the pub-lic notaries. Nevertheless, the approach to this figure seems diffi-cult, since we do not find lavish allusions of them or any of their obligations in the documentation preserved. However, we have one of the most important historical sources by middle of Eight-eenth century; this is known as the Cadastre of Ensenada. We have been able to approach this type of job through analysis and study of the Cadastre, so we know who were those men who did this huge undertaking and what was his salary for performing their tasks. In addition, we proceeded to the consultation of doc-umentation kept in local files to have a more accurate understand-ing of the real situation of those officials.