Le risorse economiche delle donne. Uno sguardo dall’Italia

Since the early 1990’s, the Italian women’s historian Angela Groppi suggested that the issue of women’s work could be improved, asking a number of new questions. Women’s wealth, their opportunities to access welfare institutions, the circulation of goods, the central role they played in urban businesses (although marginalized by the guild system) needed to be taken into consideration in terms of overall resources that women were able to manage in early modern and modern times. When the second volume of the Storia delle donne in Italia, Il lavoro delle donne, edited by Groppi, was published, an amount of fresh research in this perspective provided new insights into female strategies in the economic sphere. In the following years, a lot of research has been carried out in Italy, and even more in a broader context with a comparative, transnational approach. My talk aims to outline just a couple of issues that seem to me quite promising for further new results, especially from an Italian standpoint. The first one deals with the position and strategies of women as economic actors on the marketplace in formal and informal economies, and between licit and illicit trades. The second one takes into account women’s investments in (micro) financial activities.