What’s behind a Wage? Female Work in the Silk Spinning Mills of Nineteenth-Century Tyrol

The chapter analyses the determinants of wages in the silk spinning industry, a sector that almost exclusively employed female labour, during the nineteenth century. To this end, it relies on information from labour regulations and business records from Tyrol, on the periphery of the Habsburg Empire, where the increasing concentration of labour in silk factories combined with pioneering social legislation introduced by the Austrian government. After outlining the main technological and organizational developments in Tyrolean silk factories, the chapter illustrates the different tasks performed by girls and women and the apprenticeship rules established to regulate the acquisition of the necessary skills, which could hardly be classified as unskilled labour. Working time is then analysed in terms of the daily hours worked and the length of the season. The lists of employees of a major silk factory provide evidence of the age structure of female workers and allow us to reflect on the possible relationship between work in silk spinning and marriage and motherhood choices. The variability of daily wages according to the tasks performed, skill level, and hours worked emerges, revealing the futility of any attempt to reconstruct average wages. At the same time, the variable lengths of the seasons increased the uncertainty of the annual income received. An initial survey reveals that it was rare to find wives, let alone mothers, among silk spinning employees, which, in addition to the influence of cultural factors, suggests the difficulty of reconciling work in the spinning mill with domestic duties.