Defining, classifying and categorising what we count as ‘work’ is not new. The subject has been contested extensively by economists, intellectual thinkers and ordinary people. Although ideologies of productivity, income generation and the family have shifted in their importance over time, gender invariably remains a constant determinant in underpinning attitudes to what constitutes work. What is work? Gender at the crossroads of home, family, and business from the early modern era to the present therefore makes an important contribution to the fields of gender and economic history. The collection covers experiences of gender and work across Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United States as it lays out the contested boundaries of gender and work that have shaped – and continue to shape – popular conceptions, discourse and statistics. It explores the trajectory of how largely female housework and home-based activities came to be invisible as late eighteenth-century economists, statisticians, politicians, and eventually ordinary people, began to render this domestic work as something different from ‘proper work’.

The real value of this edited collection lies in the multi-disciplinary approach taken to understand work, and the detailed deconstruction of the categories and definitions of work offered by the contributors. Understandings of the theoretical, legal, social, economic and political principles upon which gendered understandings of labour have been built are considered throughout. Part I focuses on feminist challenges to what can be termed the ‘delaborisation’ of (predominantly female) housework; Part II explores gender biases in recovering female labour from the historical record; and Part III turns to the role of the law in shaping conceptions of family work.

The importance of housework to the economy is investigated in the first part of this book. Contributions by Nancy Folbre, Alessandra Pescarolo and Alessandra Gissi consider the value ascribed to household work in the past. From the eighteenth century onwards, care and domestic work gradually became associated with duty and moral obligation, rather than with ‘productive’ work and Marxist ideas of surplus labour and capitalism. The ‘productive-unproductive’ labour dichotomy is contextualised and grounded in the political economies of Britain, France and the US by Folbre. Pescarolo explores the important work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, a founder of the Italian collective Lotta Femminista in the 1970s, who reshaped the Marxist theoretical framework and argued that housework was not ‘unproductive’ and that it should be paid. Building on this, Gissi's chapter traces the roots of the domestic wage debate to the 1930s and – perhaps unexpectedly – fascism. In 1930s Italy, Gissi explains, proposals were put forward for wages for housewives: the idea of motherhood and household management as a patriotic duty underlined the economic importance of domestic work. By the 1960s, the wages for housework debate resurfaced, taken up this time by feminists who took issue with Italy's highly deficient social policies towards changing family dynamics. These chapters remind us that theories of work continue to be entrenched in the idea that ‘proper work’ can only occur outside of the domestic realm.

Section II unpicks the historical records from which evidence of work is drawn. The quantification and categorisation of women as ‘housewives’ or dependants in censuses is the subject of enquiry in Cristina Borderías's and Rafaella Sarti's chapters. Borderías's systematic analysis of Spanish population censuses demonstrates that the widely-held belief that female labour participation fell in the late nineteenth century is more likely a fiction of the records. Sarti's chapter notes political shifts that influenced the recording of housewives in censuses when sanctions were imposed on Italy by the League of Nations in 1936 (as a result of the Abyssinian invasion), and the gathering of statistical data to show Italy's ability to feed its population without imports led to fewer women categorised as housewives (and presumably more working in agriculture). Innovative methodologies to uncover the often-invisible work of women are suggested in the chapters by Maria Ågren and Margareth Lanzinger. In the first of these, Ågren outlines the findings of the University of Uppsala's Gender and Work project in which the ‘verb-oriented’ approach was employed to mine qualitative sources such as court records, diaries, accounts and petitions for specific work activities (for example, ‘reaping barley’, or ‘childcare’). This circumvents inherent gender biases in census-like records. Margareth Lanzinger's chapter explores the potential of less conventional sources in understanding the nature of female work. German marital dispensations in which couples of close degrees of kinship could request the right to marry contain contextual evidence of the high skills and knowledge single women might possess that the occupational title ‘maidservant’ could obscure.

Part III considers the idea that, from the late eighteenth century, the domestic sphere was conceived of as ‘a site of love and love-driven free activities’ (p. 265). As the contributors to this section demonstrate, this remains enshrined in law. Eileen Boris's chapter addresses the challenges faced in persuading the largely male representatives of the International Labour Organisation to move beyond recognising paid (but not unpaid) domestic work as ‘proper work’; only recently has unpaid care work been categorised by the ILO as ‘own-use production work’ (p. 284). Maria Rosaria Marella focuses on the place of family relations within the law and the inconsistencies by which family law recognises housework. She shows that only the family business is consistently recognised as having a productive function. This point is further illustrated in Florence Weber's chapter through two cases studies related to French law: the first exploring the absolute legal obligation to support family members in need (irrespective of previous care or finances provided and having no effect on their share of inheritance); and the second centred on the compensation of ‘deferred wages’ and a larger share of inheritance that children remaining as workers on their parents’ farms could receive.

This book is an impressive undertaking. Laura Lee Downs's concluding remarks raise several areas for future enquiry: the question of race looms large here, and while this collection's geographical scope is vast, comparative work between countries would surely yield some interesting findings. This is not to diminish the value of what is a highly stimulating and important book, challenging the reader to consider gender and labour in new ways.