The crofter is a woman : Gender division of labour in rural semi-landless households, Sweden 1850–1900

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the empirical question of the labour organisation and the gender division of labour in a semi-landless rural group, crofters (Swedish torpare), during the nineteenth century, and thereby also add to the larger question of the role of gender division of labour in the formation of a wagedependent class. The crofters’ households performed contract-defined corvée labour (unpaid duties as payment for the croft) for the landowner alongside subsistence work at their own croft. We triangulated crofters’ contracts, work lists from estate archives and ethnographic questionnaires to understand the gender division of labour on the estates and at the crofts. The results show that men performed a much higher number of corvée days per year compared to women. We found a positive correlation between men’s and women’s corvee days, meaning that crofts with the highest number of corvée days for men also had the highest number for women. Moreover, we found that many core agricultural tasks were done by both men and women. The labour organisation, on the other hand, was clearly gendered – the role as a crofter in the sense of doing corvée labour for a landowner was primarily a male experience, while the role as a crofter in the sense of working one’s own small plot of land was a female experience.