The union that ignored women until it needed their money
A study by Mercè Renom refutes the idea that guilds were exclusively male.
BarcelonaHistoriography has traditionally argued that guilds were an exclusively male institution. Only men could be members. But new research refutes this. The shopkeepers' and resellers' guild was mixed for 145 years, between 1624 and 1768. There were master resellers, but what prompted the guild to accept them was not ideas we now consider modern or feminist, but rather the need to balance its books. Years later, women were once again barred from membership.
The lawsuits reveal women's resistance, conflicts, and strategies for survival and empowerment. "When I began the search, I knew I would find the women in one place or another, but not in the more official documents. Since conflicts within guilds were common because they sought out any competition, I started looking at all the lawsuits. And that's where I discovered that there had been women's confraternities in the guild of shopkeepers and resellers," explains the Association of the Old Guild of Resellers of Barcelona, which has published the book Resellers. Gender and work in Barcelona (15th-19th centuries) (Resellers' Publications). "The entry of women and men who, before 1624, had been freely reselling goods allowed the guild to increase its economic capacity. Exam and membership fees also increased, as did control of the sector," explains Renom.
In the markets, there were vendors who were the same farmers selling their products directly. Resellers, on the other hand, bought from the farmers and sold the merchandise to markets or shops. Owning a shop meant having a sufficiently large house, because the shop had to be located at the same address, with storage space and capital to invest in stock. They could sell rice, noodles, honey, oil, prepared foods, cheese, soap, raisins, legumes, sardines and anchovies, dates, and salted tuna, among other products. Most of the women came from open-air stalls, and their offerings had to be more modest, since at the end of the day they had to take their goods home.
The guild's motives
There were many women working in the Middle Ages, and they were also the most vulnerable in times of crisis. The final decades of the 16th century and the first of the 17th were particularly turbulent. On January 31, 1613, resellers complained that thieves and bandits were robbing them on the roads, causing them heavy losses and ruin. Faced with the crisis, the guilds had various responses. The Paraires guild opted to have the wool spun and spun outside the city. The spinners' response was decisive: forty women spinners gathered in front of the Town Hall to demand that working with wool outside the town be prohibited.
"Between 1633 and 1635, the College of the Major Art of Silk in Barcelona began to persecute and confiscate the goods of women who sold veils, ribbons, and buttons independently. They did not want to join the guild. They protested, and the Council of One Hundred defended them with regulations," Renom explains. The women resellers, however, did agree to join the guild. Between 1627 and 1638, 39 women joined the guild, 22 of whom were widows. Many French and quite a few Italians also joined. "Most worked at stalls in the open-air market," the author explains. In some areas of the city, women were the majority.
As members of the guild, they had the right to attend funerals, to a mutual support network, and to have their own shop or market stall. However, they could not hold positions of authority, participate in meetings, or vote. They also could not purchase goods from outside Barcelona or obtain them directly from the network of Catalan markets and fairs; instead, they had to place orders, which increased the cost of purchases. Throughout the 18th century, Barcelona's population doubled, growing from approximately 50,000 to 100,000 inhabitants. Economic and political changes, population growth, and pressure on public spaces generated conflicts. Food stalls increasingly occupied more space and obstructed traffic. On December 31, 1768, the Guild of Shopkeepers and Retailers agreed to restrict membership to only four people per year, none of whom could be women. Most of the new members were sons or sons-in-law of the masters. And in 1769, the guild definitively excluded female resellers.
From then on, those who were already members of a confraternity could lose their rights if they married, unless the husband was a reseller or joined the guild; in this case, they ceased to be the owners of the shop. They didn't remain idle. Esperanza Plaxats had become a master reseller on April 7, 1759, upon her father's death. She ran the shop for fifteen years, until, upon marrying Carlos Pantaleone on June 29, 1774, she was forced to close it because her husband refused to join the guild. The lawsuit lasted two years.
The resistance of the resellers
When the guilds closed their doors, several groups of women resellers protested because they were prohibited from setting up stalls in the town squares. They received fines, were questioned, and at the same time, they couldn't even open shops from home because they lived in precarious conditions. They denounced harassment and mistreatment by the constables. Some women practiced reselling outside the guild and municipal regulations: these were the so-called marmanyeres, who were long persecuted. Many other women participated in family businesses as wives, sisters, daughters, daughters-in-law, servants, or day laborers. Women worked in market stalls, shops, taverns preparing and serving food, or in fishmongers. They represented between 15 and 20% of all shops, a figure that would be much higher if the women of the owner's family were taken into account. Some had considerable capital, but others sought recognition of poverty to avoid fines. "It's not easy to uncover their history. The guild's institutional sources are male-dominated: the positions, the meetings, the power. We have to look for other sources. Political and economic histories have also rendered women invisible. Perhaps other guilds also had women, or had conflicts. We must ask ourselves questions and search for them," Renom concludes.