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Between the fourteenth and mid‐eighteenth centuries, new developments transformed the political and economic landscapes of Europe and Latin America: centralized states and new legal and religious discourses emerged, along with new economic institutions. Historians have argued that these developments led to growing gender divisions and the devaluation of women’s labor (Wiesner, 1986; Howell, 1986; Hanley, 1989). The emergence of centralized states ruled by strong leaders with coherent legal systems and structures, as in France and Britain, allowed kings and their bureaucrats to distinguish more carefully between men’s and women’s rights. After about the sixteenth century in many areas, women lost the ability to dispose freely of their property – with serious implications for their ability to run a business or ply a trade. Yet, as scholars have recently learned, these developments did not have the same consequences everywhere. For example, although German laws attempted to make it illegal for unmarried women to migrate to cities, the same was not true in France or England. New evidence suggests that in many places the opportunities for women’s work increased rather than declined (Crowston, 2008).

In cities and towns, male‐dominated guilds emerged in the fourteenth century as powerful urban institutions that regulated access to trades, professional training (apprenticeships), and production standards. Guilds sometimes admitted women and in some trades in a few cities, women formed their own guilds. In these women’s guilds, they participated fully in production, sold goods, and managed accounts. In the fifteenth century, merchant capitalists began to engage in small‐scale production and trade in towns and rural areas, hiring families to produce goods for the market. This system of domestic production, known as protoindustrialization, constituted a critical stage in the accumulation of merchant capital. Women’s domestic production (such as spinning thread for textile manufacture) played a vital role in this system.

Beginning in the middle of the fifteenth century, protoindustrial production began to threaten urban guild control over production, and guilds tightened regulations and access to trades. Gender divisions sharpened as guilds distinguished more carefully between highly paid skilled male labor and unskilled female labor, but with some geographical differences. Although in Germany and the Low Countries guilds progressively devalued the work of female domestic textile producers, in France the monarchy required urban women producers to organize in guilds. Women labored successfully in both guild and informal non‐guild urban occupations alongside rural, domestic producers in France, England, and Italy. Girls received training in garment‐making and tapestry through informal apprenticeships. Thus, the emergence of strong, centralized states like England or France did not automatically result in the decline of women’s productive activity, and in many locations their economic opportunities expanded (Crowston, 2008).

Even where women and men labored at different tasks in different spatial settings, as in English rural society of the sixteenth century, women’s work –at spinning for example—made a critical contribution to the family economy and could be highly valued (Flather, 2008). At the same time, productive activity became progressively more differentiated by gender in both guild and non‐guild labor, and some forms of women’s labor lost value in market economies. Even in cases where women performed the same work as men, as in tailoring in eighteenth century America, independent (and successful) women earned less than men for producing the same articles of clothing (Miller). In many places, women’s home‐based production for the family as opposed to for the market– from making soap to sewing clothes – gradually fell under the rubric “housewifery” or “social reproduction.” These were activities designed to sustain and reproduce life but were no longer considered “work.” (Quataert, 1985; Wiesner‐Hanks, 1998: 226).

With these developments, class differences emerged more visibly than ever. As middle‐class merchant capitalists prospered, whether in Europe, Asia, or in North America, their wives hired lower‐class women as servants, allowing middle‐class women the leisure to beautify their homes or engage in charitable activities rather than work for wages. Between roughly 1400 and 1750, the growth of merchant capitalism and protoindustrial production, new technologies, tools, and crops, and new ideologies praising women’s domestic non‐productive labor had negative consequences for women. Men took control of skilled labor, assuring that women performed less skilled work and earned less than they did. The mutually reinforcing effects of these new economic systems, ideology, and the emergence of centralized states and bodies of law continued to shape gender divisions and gender inequalities in labor for centuries to come.

Although many of these developments occurred in Europe, gender divisions also emerged more visibly in other areas of the world, which came into contact with Western European merchant capitalists and empire builders, between roughly 1450 and 1750. In imperial China, women’s work in silk production, harvesting silkworms, producing silk cloth, and harvesting and processing tea took on new importance as these products were traded in Western Europe (Lu, 2004). When the first European explorers came to the city‐states of Central America in the sixteenth century, they encountered sophisticated and complex societies and economies. Although both sexes farmed, men mined and worked gold into ornaments, and women’s cloth production continued to be essential to local economies.

Elsewhere however, growing divisions of labor diminished women’s position. Historians and anthropologists’ observations of North American Native societies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries suggest that European contact and settlement, the appearance of new technologies, the growth of trade, as well as the development of the state, increased gender inequality. Among the Plains Indians of the West, the introduction of horses by the Spanish in the seventeenth century and the development of a market for buffalo hides in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were crucial factors: men’s acquisition of horses allowed them to hunt buffalo more effectively than previously. Instead of participating in collective hunting, women perfected the skills of tanning and processing the hides. Yet, as important as their work was to the economy of the tribe, women lost status in their communities in contrast to men, whose success in hunting and development of military prowess on horseback lent their skills new value (Klein, 1983). Likewise, the growth of state power and control influenced the decline of women’s status as farmers and trappers among the Cherokee in the US, when men used their military expertise to protect their communities from the government’s encroachment on their land.

In many parts of the world, religion continued to influence social attitudes toward the gender dynamics of labor. In China, Confucianism required the separation of the sexes; only work within the home was considered “virtuous.” The Catholic Church’s views of women as the subordinate sex whose vocation should be limited to child‐rearing and the family persisted in Protestantism despite all Christian denominations’ formal acceptance of women’s spiritual equality. Christian missionaries brought these ideas to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, where orthodox Islam already demanded women’s seclusion and segregation from men and severely limited women’s work. Yet these views of women were not determinate everywhere. Muslim women controlled the funds of charitable institutions in Egypt and other Muslim areas (Fay, 2005). In the Songhay Empire of West Africa in the fifteenth century, women freely circulated publicly, unveiled on the street and in markets where they worked as traders and sellers of cooked food. Moreover, the Islamic toleration of polygamy facilitated the development of a family labor system in agriculture where a farmer’s multiple wives could provide a source of labor (Cambridge History of Africa, 1985–86).

Slavery, common throughout the world since ancient times, complicated the meanings of gendered labor. In the early modern period, slavery shaped the economies of sub‐Saharan Africa, North Africa, North America, and parts of Europe. The first African slaves were captives taken in wars and raids and, from roughly 1550 to 1850, were sold across the Atlantic. Men dominated the Atlantic slave trade, whereas women constituted the majority of slaves in Africa itself (Ugo‐Nwokeji, 2001). In Egypt, male slaves (mamluks) served in Ottoman armies, earned their freedom, and acquired property and political positions (Philipp and Haarmann, 1998). African slaves toiled in European cities, where women worked as domestic servants and men as heavy laborers. Slavic peoples (from whom the word “slave” comes) provided coerced, unpaid labor as slaves on the estates of wealthy Europeans and in cities. White Europeans assumed that slave women could be subject to harsh, unrelenting work, just like men, in contrast to elite Western European women. Thus, gender differences in work appeared less profound among enslaved people than among free laborers or even serfs.

Over time, with the development of European empires from the seventeenth century on, racial difference took on increasing importance as the foundation of labor systems. The tobacco and cotton plantations of colonial North America show how race and gender shaped the experience of men and women at work. Although African slave women may have performed more domestic labor than men, both men and women performed backbreaking fieldwork. Racial and gender divisions of labor intersected in other colonial labor regimes, where in the Caribbean, India, Africa, and Indonesia, colonized men and women of color worked as servants, cooks, and housekeepers in the homes of colonial officials and administrators (Gouda, 1995; Stoler, 1991; Franklin, 2012). These systems persisted long after European countries abolished the slave trade and, as scholars have shown, their effects continue to be apparent even in contemporary societies where racial segregation at work persists (Glenn, 1992).