Antes de nacer sabíamos trabajar. Absentismo escolar y trabajo infantil en el Madrid rural del primer tercio del siglo XX

This article considers children working in the Spanish countryside during the first third of the 20th century, based on the data regarding real schooling, enrolment, drop-out rate and absenteeism along with age and sex. Our study focuses on a village in Madrid (Villamanta), where a seldom used source was unearthed: the school attendance register (1932-33 academic year ). These data were compared to the information on the 1930 Municipal Census, to other local sources, and, also, to from the accounts of women and men who were children at that time. The schooling pattern is not different from that of the Spanish rural world, i.e, early drop-out rate, clear seasonal absenteeism and gender differences. It was based on distributing the time of the girls and boys according to those domestic economies that required revenue from child labour, either directly as labour or indirectly as earnings and in kind. The intensity of the child labour was parallel to school absenteeism. The labour was mainly covered by the productive family units. In Villamanta, there was only a local and regional labour market in the service sector in the case of the girls.