Gender equality in the work organization of a company town: The case of San Leucio (late 18th–early 19th century)

The company town of San Leucio, created at the behest of King Ferdinand IV of Naples in the vicinity of the Royal Palace of Caserta, represents a socioeconomic experiment of great historical value. In that context, the ruler wanted to enact an Enlightenment-paternalistic code, influenced by the ideas of the Neapolitan intellectual milieu of the second half of the 18th century, which provided for substantial gender equality both in the sphere of human capital formation and on the working level within the spinning mill. Moreover, the distinction between the sexes was also abolished in the social context, eliminating male exclusivity in matters of wills, abolishing dowries, and providing a prototype survivor’s pension for widowhood. The only prerogative left to the male gender concerned the role of the head of the household, although, even in the domestic sphere, women were shown to be skillful managers of silk production. This paper, through a qualitative study of documents in the Historical Archives of the Royal Palace of Caserta, the State Archives of Caserta, and the Diocesan Archives of Caserta, proposes a reconstruction of the organizational model of work in the company town of San Leucio, highlighting the formal and substantive gender equality that emerged from daily work practices, both the official ones, that is, in the Real Fabbrica and the Real Azienda, the two core businesses of this social experiment, and in the domestic sphere, that is, in family silk production, which represented in practice the core of a labor-intensive and family pattern model untethered from the male breadwinner family model.