Among Landladies and Brewery Operations : - Women's Participation on the 18th Century Housing Market in Stockholm

Sammanfattning: This thesis investigates women’s participation on the 18th century housing market in Stockholm. General and independent participation, including the distribution of marital status among female buyers and sellers are investigated for four years (1725, 1745, 1765 and 1785). Original hand-written sources, circa 700 of them, have been examined. Some have been quantified and analysed with descriptive statistics and some have undergone qualitative analysis. Institutional theory and theoretical factors, that builds on ideas about women’s work and of never-married and ever-married women, guides the analysis which focuses on development over time and distribution of marital status among independently participating women. The research focus is then narrowed to analyse the women that independently bought property, who they were and how they made use of the properties they bought. If and how they utilised their property for commercial activities, as a strategy for securing their livelihood, is examined. Women participated throughout the investigated period, with some fluctuations related to law changes, both independently and together with others (often their husbands). Marital status had a major impact on women's participation and when it comes to the women who bought property, kept it, and used it to secure their livelihood, an overwhelming majority were widows. The analysis show that previous research may have overestimated wives' independent participation on the housing market. When several sources are examined in parallel, it turns out that many of the wives that shows up in the protocols were actually widows.