Unmarried Women Taxed in 1700s Berlin

[Chez_Guevara]

I am currently looking at an entry in The Timetables of History for the year 1700.

The narrative states that, in this year, unmarried women were taxed in Berlin. I’ve found two corroborative websites, both of which regrettably fail to expand on this bald statement.

Why did the Berlin authorities take the decision to levy such a tax. Was it perhaps an initiative to encourage childbirth. Did this punitive measure apply to the whole of Prussia. How long was the tax in place.

Many thanks.

[mks57]

At certain times, such as Tudor England, “single woman” has been used as a euphemism for prostitute.

[Freddy_the_Pig]

I don’t have a definitive answer to this question, but it doesn’t appear that anyone else does either. Failing in that, a few observations are in order about seventeenth century Prussia. Charles Adams, in For Good and Evil: The Impact of Taxes on the Course of Civilization, offers the following synopsis of taxation in Prussia:

The Prussians collected three basic taxes. Rural areas paid a land tax based on a percentage of the value of the expected harvest. . . . Inhabitants of towns paid an occupation tax, a kind of license fee to carry on their trade or business. . . . Most revenues came from excises and customs.

The second tax, the occupation tax, is the one that concerns us here. Occupation in early modern Germany was closely tied to the guilds, which usually excluded women and were jealous of their privileges. You can get a good sense of the times from this article:

In 1626, an independent unmarried “lass” in the tiny Black Forest town of Wildberg left service, took independent lodgings, and began to earn her bread by “spinning perpetually at the wheel,” attracting complaints at the community assembly. In 1663, the widowed Anna Barbara Haugin in the nearby village of Güultlingen supported her young family by cultivating crops and selling calves, despite attempts by the community to “deny her the village privileges.” In 1697, Georg Ernst’s widow in Güultlingen lived from her baking, despite being fined by the guild when she “sold a 4-pound loaf for 2½ Kreuzer even though the legal price was 3 Kreuzer.” In 1734, Michel Kuch’s wife in the proto-industrial village of Ebhausen sought to maximize her profits from yarn selling by attending nocturnal spinning bees “to cover her lighting costs,” in the teeth of penalties from the community church court. . . .

And so forth. Finally, during the era between the Thirty Years War and the French Revolution, all European rulers, and especially the militarizing Prussians, were especially concerned to grow their populations, not so much to raise cannon fodder (armies were still relatively small and mercenary) but to maintain their tax base.

Putting it together, I would conjecture three goals of a tax on unmarried women:

1. To reenforce the system by which guilds limited economic competition from women;

2. To “close a loophole” by which unmarried urban women escaped taxation, precisely because of their exclusion from the guilds; and

3. To promote marriage and childbirth.

Alas, I have no information about how long the tax lasted. If it hadn’t disappeared by the Napoleonic Era, which saw a decline in feudal remnants such as the guilds, it probably did so at that time.

[Chez_Guevara]

A welcome and thoughtful response which exemplifies the high standards attainable in this forum.

Thank you.