The ideal of femininity spread in the nineteenth century tried to lock women in the home, but that was an ideal that could only be realized for the middle and upper classes, since working families, as a general rule, could not subsist on the salary of the husband. In these cases, the money that the women brought home or what they contributed with their production was one more, and indispensable, part of the family economy. Despite this, the Women's work was always conceived as secondary and complementary to that of husband, so wages were often lower than men's and in many occasions it was not recorded in the censuses and registers.
In rural areas, work used to be organized in family production units, in which all the members of the family, both men and women, contributed their grain of sand. like women. However, generally only the father of the family and male children,
thus excluding the female sex in the official data. In addition to working on their own land, women were also hired as laborers by landowners with large fields of cultivation in their possession.
