After 1880 there was a marked increase in the number and proportion of women officially working, that is, in ways that governments recorded: waged or salaried in socially defined workplaces. Women working in the informal economy, as family members or occasionally, tended to be overlooked. The most important change was the shift in the structure of women’s work. The decline of domestic service was fairly dramatic and exacerbated by the First World War, which provided a way out for many disenchanted women. The move away from homework was less clearly marked, influenced by the collapse of textiles and increased mechanisation. Women’s paid work in the countryside also diminished, but unpaid rural wives remained an important workforce. A strong undercurrent promoted women’s responsibility for home, nation and race, while housework became crystallised as ‘occupation housewife’. Political and feminist movements furthered not only awareness of women as workers but also generated more self-esteem in women. Improved educational opportunities opened doors for many, especially in the burgeoning white-collar sector. The wars pointed up women’s abilities and contributed to developing new systems of working.
Three important changes took place in the life cycle of the workforce. First, young single women remained a major part of the workforce but started later because of workplace and educational legislation and because of opportunities for higher educa-tion.105 Second, more single adults joined the workforce as middle-class women came to see work as appropriate. Their work was more often a matter of choice or principle than necessity. Third, married women stayed at work or returned when children were older. They quit less often on marriage - leaving work was more common when children came. Their input rose to unparalleled levels in the post-war period. The pool of single women had shrunk because of earlier marriage, the rising school-leaving age and longer periods in higher education, encouraging employers to target married women and mothers. Smaller families meant that childcare finished earlier. In Scotland, the child-rearing period dropped by ten years between 1900 and 1980. The rising divorce rate, which accelerated in the 1960s, pushed more mothers into the labour market. In 1961, 20.5 per cent of Belgian married women worked, but 48.6 per cent of divorced women did, matching the participation rate of single women, 49.2.106 The increased activity of married women in the workplace was also promoted by the creation of formalised part-time work. While employers used part-time workers to reduce labour costs, it was a boon to women who needed flexibility. The disadvantage was that it was insecure, was not recognised as real work by officialdom, including pension schemes, and was usually poorly paid, though European directives are gradually altering this. Job-sharing was one solution, because ‘real’ jobs are shared.
There is little doubt that the wars brought more women into the workforce through substitution or conscription. However, women did not drop other jobs and flood to the ranks. Their ‘usual’ employment was hit hard. Many domestic servants turned to war work, but others were dismissed, and the fall in demand for luxuries hit millinery and dressmaking. A legacy of the first war was the introduction of new working practices, especially assembly-line work. These procedures would have met with more resistance outside of wartime and only applied to large-scale production, but employing women, virtual novices in engineering industries, created a precedent. Despite backlash, longer term it was another tiny step in women becoming ‘workers’. Perhaps as important as the visibility of female war workers was the effect on women. Some went from their own close-knit communities and rural surroundings into a world of factories, joining women with different stories. A Scotswoman from the central belt reflected on how this experience gave her generation a sense of identity and broadened their horizons. Women came to appreciate their own skills, gained confidence in their abilities and acquired a sense of their right to work.
Subtle shifts took place in the meaning of housework. Standards of living and housing improved, while housework was cast as freedom from drudgery and shifted towards enhanced child welfare. During the first half of the century women often kept house amidst social and economic disruption: war, rationing, depression and poverty. The creativity that post-war shortages brought out in German women was staggering: mending clothes with human hair, washing clothes in potato peelings or ox gall.107 Doctors, social workers, teachers, health visitors and the media socialised women to adopt the pivotal role in family care, education and economic strategies in a consumer world. In 1960, Danish women were brought up to believe that housewife and mother was the fulfilment of their lives, despite demographic changes which meant that children were not on their hands for as long.108
The consumer economy meant women operated as managers on a much bigger and more complex scale with advertisers targeting ‘homemakers’. The availability of goods and services raised expectations and, instead of simplifying housekeeping, complicated it. Despite ‘convenience’ foods, meals had more courses, more variety and involved more preparation. Increases in real wages meant such purchases were increasingly feasible across society, and consumption of milk, butter, meat and luxury goods rose significantly. Women controlled domestic finances, if not all household expenditure. They kept records, dealt with shopkeepers, merchants, insurance companies and other public and private services that proliferated. They became the family’s public representative. In inter-war Artois, the wife was the ‘lookout’, responsible for watching over the survival and well-being of the family; she was the nurse, the ‘clother’, the ‘main-tainer’.109
Dramatic but uneven changes altered the environment in which housework was conducted and the tools and aids employed. For example, as late as 1961, 22 per cent of Britons still did not have hot-water taps. Before 1914, consumer durables such as sewing machines, clocks, bicycles, stoves and cooking utensils became available followed by electrical appliances such as irons, toasters and vacuum cleaners. But Davidoff reminds us, ‘that technical improvements in equipment such as those exemplified by the use of the small electric motor are not of the same order as fundamental changes in the organisation or aims of housework.’110 Appliances had dubious value in saving time. A 1960s UNESCO study concluded, ‘There is little sign. . . that the gains from an abundant labour saving technology [translate] into leisure. Variations in time devoted to household obligations. . . are not spectacularly large’.111 New appliances and better houses encouraged more exacting levels of comfort and hygiene, increasing the amount of work women performed, altering their expectations and increasing time maintaining new products. Rather than release women to pursue other interests, rising standards bound them more closely to the family.
Several factors promoted the decline in domestic service. Political changes, pressures for women’s emancipation and middle - and working-class activism collaborated to change the climate of opinion and contributed to a more independent spirit amongst servants. Attitudinal shifts joined with rapid expansion of white-collar employment to lead large numbers of young women to take up openings in retail, offices and businesses. For most, an increase in personal freedom, daily contact with other young women and greater opportunities to meet men were influential. Increased education kept girls out of service, while providing skills to improve their prospects. Such educational and occupational changes cost domestic service the status it had held. Service came to be seen as personally degrading and restrictive in comparison with new opportunities. As long as wages remained significantly higher than other jobs, the nuisances of service mattered less, but by 1900, they were no longer much higher. When young women had real choices they left service, not always choosing better-paid or higher-status work. Roman women took up sewing, although wages and living conditions were worse.112 The First World War sealed the fate of domestic service. Many servants took war work with its good pay and the camaraderie of other young women. They became accustomed to having money and to deciding how to spend it and their time. One woman reporting to the London City Exchange after two and a half years in munitions said, ‘I feel so pleased that the war’s over that I’ll take any old job that comes along’, but when offered domestic service, she laughed, ‘Except that!’113
Farm wives were least likely to be recorded as workers by censuses, but they remained the most likely to work in agriculture. As family farms became more labour intensive and as economic factors made hiring help unprofitable, wives assumed an increasing share, including men’s ‘traditional’ fieldwork and using machinery, still fulfilling their established role. They were so central to farm upkeep that farm wives in Weimar Germany worked an average of 12 per cent more hours annually than their husbands, and 40 per cent more than hired help.114 In the 1970s in Baden-Wurttemberg, one man worried: ‘I like farming and my farm is profitable, but when one does not get a wife and the old ones die - that’s the end.’115 In agrarian Norway, women’s farm duties increased because of higher standards of hygiene and quality of dairy products, despite there being no running water in cowsheds.116
A division of labour continued to operate, though boundaries varied between communities. Finns respected the traditional gender split between male responsibility for field and forestry and female responsibility for dairies. But with increased herd size and its centrality to household income, men might work alongside women. However, the herd remained her responsibility. Portuguese men looked after things that grew above the ground (produtos do ar, products of the air) and women for things that grew in or near the earth (produtos da terra, products of the earth). Women were ‘rooted to the ground; they are also considered to be less mobile, for they are attached to a particular stretch of land, their terra’.117 Indeed, while men were prohibited by custom from meddling in her terrain, she helped in his as necessary. Shifts took place in precise tasks, but the broad outlines of gendered division of labour remained. The view persisted that women did jobs requiring dexterity better than men, such as pea-picking and flowercutting, but were less able to match them in jobs needing strength and stamina. So, outside of ‘female’ tasks, women were constrained to the most tedious and repetitive ones and barred from specialised ‘skilled’ ones where men retained a monopoly.
Peasant-worker strategies became permanent approaches to keeping small farms viable. In France in 1980, two-thirds of all farm households benefited from a second income.118 In practice, most migrations were male, reminiscent of the Portuguese woman tied to her terra. These could be long-term or seasonal, or they could fall into a ‘commuter’ pattern. In Portugal in 1979, the proportion of female farmers demonstrates the level of migration. In Couto, 74.2 per cent of self-employed farmers were female, and in Pa§o, 68.6 per cent were.119 Norwegian studies in 1939 and 1949 revealed that women worked more than men on farms, whilst men often had fishing or factory work.120 Similarly, German and Basque men worked early mornings and late evenings on farms, going to outside jobs during the day.121 Thus a major post-war trend was feminisation of agriculture; it was most pronounced on ‘part-time’ farms where women took over work previously performed by men. But in some communities, women took non-farm work. Danish wives working off-farm increased from 6 per cent to 26 per cent between 1960 and 1975; 12 per cent of the latter did no farmwork. Norwegian women increased by a third the hours they worked off-farm between 1979 and 1989, and Dutch women increasingly sought paid jobs: 6 per cent in 1982 and 18 per cent in 19 8 9.122 Women valued such off-farm work for the money, of course, but also for social contact and positive feedback. As Irish women commented, ‘it is a great feeling knowing you are doing something useful and getting paid for it’, and ‘you are more your own person’.123
Some farm women became ‘countrywomen’. In southern England such women held clear gendered notions of division of labour and role specialisation, identified with a myth of rurality and, despite the difficulties of rural areas with limited services, defended their rural heritage.124 They tended to take on tasks removed from direct production, such as bookkeeping, and lived in villages. They controlled and managed household consumption: shopping, freezing and storing became paramount activities. They turned to tourism, running pensions or ‘bed and breakfasts’. In Hartland, Cornwall, wives on medium-sized and big farms took in visitors.125 Similarly women took up country shops, teashops and small cafes and made and marketed ‘rural crafts’. In Artois, women ran the post office, the inn and the grocery.126 They became mediators between the community and visitors, referring them to shops, events, beaches. Women filled the social-welfare gap created by a relative lack of social-service provision in rural areas, including transport. In Froneyri (Iceland), women’s mutual support constituted stepping in during crises, helping when a woman was sick, lending items for parties or picking up shopping. A formal childcare network operated: women worked alternate shifts in the fish factory to take each other’s children.127 This was important work for women and important for their communities.
Homework expanded temporarily with demand from rising incomes, and small artisanal production, such as Parisian luxury trades, lasted well into the century.
Nevertheless, fashion changes forced a decline in these trades and garment making plummeted. In Glasgow, numbers dropped by 27.5 per cent in only ten years, 1901-11.128 Women also rejected it, preferring clerical and shop work. Ultimately, the sector shrank but did not disappear and in the 1970s and 1980s much work was still done at home, mainly clothing, but also artificial flowers, packing Christmas crackers, stuffing toys, pasting jewellery, knitting and carding pins, needles and buttons. Electrical component assembly, inspecting and packing goods, electronic office equipment and ‘teleworking’ created new homework. Though many trades and regions continued to rely on rural outworkers, homeworking became primarily an urban phenomenon. New homeworkers, who worked in fields where they had trained, tended to describe themselves as self-employed. They claimed greater choice and a pricing structure that compensated for overheads, holiday and sick pay. Another change was the number of ethnic minority women reliant on homework. The legacy of a post-colonial world, large numbers seeking work frequently remained at home to avoid issues of cultural and language difference, discriminatory practices, and to meet the sheer need that many in these communities faced.129
The main reason for working at home remained unchanged: women worked because they needed the money and homework met their needs. French government investigations in 1905 and 1911 revealed that married homeworkers provided up to half of family income.130 Primarily homeworkers had family responsibilities. In Parisian needle trades in 1907, half were married, 37 per cent widowed and 16 per cent single; 12 per cent of single women had children.131 Whether or not women undertook homework depended on husbands’ incomes and their reliability. In Glasgow, wives took it up when men were laid off, became ill or worked irregularly. Homeworkers also clustered in localities with concentrations of ‘male’ trades, such as heavy engineering, dock work and shipbuilding, where local work for women was limited.132 Women might stay in homework when a subsistence crisis lifted, but at that point they made deliberate choices about what they were prepared to do.
Many believed that homework gave them control over their work and time. For more skilled work, bordering on freelance, it was not necessarily a myth, depending on how much women were prepared to contribute to their exploitation. However, homeworking did not support a familial idyll, since labour at home severely impinged on family life. Systems of control meant the employer, not the employee, exercised power, and division of labour left the homeworker discretion over only trivial parts of the work. Those who retained some craft, such as knitters, commented that when they did not have the satisfaction of completion by sewing up garments, ‘they miss it’.133 When employers owned the machines, they operated another level of control, while ‘unsatisfactory’ work was not paid for. Women homeworkers had to balance their perceptions of the benefits of such work and its location against the restrictions it placed on them. Only where financial need was not so great, where they worked at home for other reasons and where their skill or trade allowed room for manoeuvrability, was there an element of discretion.
Manufacturing shifts with new processes and ‘light industries’ relied heavily on a female workforce: in chemicals, electronics, food-processing, pharmaceuticals, electrical equipment, household furnishing, optics and precision engineering. But men took the lion’s share of the new jobs, and openings were not rapid enough to replace traditional jobs. Primarily, industries with an established female workforce augmented their use of female labour, especially those that first adopted new production methods and assembly lines, since it was logical to expand with a proven workforce. Women became less likely to be restricted to a narrow range of work and appeared in increasing numbers across manufacturing. They were no longer marginalised in ‘female’ industries and were less at risk from economic fluctuations and decline in single industries. At Magneti Marelli engineering works in Milan, ‘about half its workforce was female and its management methods rivalled those of many contemporary American firms’. As Willson explained,
This was one of the first examples of a ‘modern industrial workforce’ in Italy, fairly stable and employed in a highly mechanised and ‘scientifically organized’ factory. . . . but the two factors which are most important to explain this pattern were management strategy and the large numbers of women in the labour force.134
New industries had a vested interest in tapping ‘green labour’, a workforce with little industrial heritage and one more likely to accept new conditions of employment and processes. The belief that women were calmer and steadier made them an attractive labour force. Mechanised jobs required less strength and skill and therefore commanded a lower wage, so women remained cheap labour. The concept of woman as worker and woman as woman clearly contributed to shaping their employment.
A key feature of the occupational pattern was its ‘lumpiness’, that is, men were far more likely to produce certain products or work in particular industries and women in others. The automobile industry stands out as retaining its male craft traditions. In Coventry and in the Renault plant in Boulogne-Billancourt, women workers were tiny proportions, as machinists sewing car trims, car cleaners or working in canteens.135 A similar split existed in other industries. Magneti Marelli expanded radio production, increasing recruitment of women, whilst men made accumulator batteries.136 Women did not get ‘technical work’, and specialist equipment and tools were kept for men, although men’s higher-paid manual labour was frequently replaced with machines tended by considerably lower-paid women. Men were associated with repairing and maintaining machinery, whilst women were required to feed it, stop it and start it but not to mess with it. In Armentieres, men maintaining the factory heater were paid better than women operatives.137 Work regarded as skilled was carefully preserved for men and reinforced by segregated workplaces so that women did not appear to be threatening men’s jobs or status. But in many industries, women replaced no one, since the work was new, such as working on wrapping machines in the Dutch margarine industry. In fact further technical changes meant that machines replaced women.138
Young women were enthusiastic about the higher wages and increased freedom that factory work represented. They found ‘more life’ there, a partial escape from parents and looking after younger children. They had money to spend and took pleasure in the collective experience; a young Belfast women said, ‘We were happy. . . You stood all day at your work and sung them songs.’139 In contrast are those who wished to work only until marriage, though often it was not possible. Choice, of course, is complicated. When work was necessary and factories provided the best option, choice was likely to be viewed differently than when marriage had the highest value, factory work was boring and there were few options.
The twentieth century saw the virtual creation of ‘white-collar’ work. Educational improvement led to a better-educated workforce, who could take on tasks requiring literacy and understanding and many wanted ‘something better’ than manual work. Middle-class women formed a much more substantial part of the labour force, directly challenging notions of femininity, and with the growth of feminism they became a more vociferous and significant group. Gender contributed heavily to policies of hiring women in white-collar jobs and shaped the kind of work available. Hiring women meant employers could limit the number of men they hired and still offer them a career path, keeping women in lower-paid jobs without one. A post-office official in 1870 argued that the salaries that attracted only men of an ‘inferior’ class were sufficient to attract ladies of a ‘superior’ class.140 Much work was new, especially selling at counters, typing, telephony, nursing and social work, and many occupations were female from the outset. ‘White-bloused’ workers were involved in the transition of the workplace just as men, but they had fewer opportunities for higher status work. White-bloused work grew as domestic service declined, but they drew on different cohorts. Domestic servants were mainly migrating rural women, and often younger; white-bloused workers were primarily urban. It was precisely their knowledge and confidence in the urban setting that contributed to their desire for clerical work and their usefulness at it. The first female office workers, factory inspectors and professionals tended to be drawn from middle-class families of a good educational standard, usually higher than the men in the same and higher grades. The first sales assistants tended to be modestly educated and drawn from lower middle-class and working-class women.
Women had long worked in shops and quasi-professions and had handled clerical work in family firms, so they had a heritage in white-collar work. Retailing changed with the development of a wider consumer economy and with new forms of merchandising, notably, the emergence of chain stores and department stores. Tasks were different in that shop assistants maintained stock control, cashiered and sold and displayed goods. They were less likely to make-up goods or develop personal relationships with customers, but new products and a greater range of merchandise led to a need for well-informed sales staff and to in-house training. Related expansion took place in mail - and web-ordering in the late twentieth century. The Army and Navy Stores and the Bon Marche ran services before 1900, but real growth came in the twentieth century. Reliant on technology for handling orders, warehouse work remained labour intensive and exhausting, with women’s pay dependent on the speed they selected goods for dispatch. Offices across the economy demanded more record-keeping and correspondence, and clerical work expanded and created new jobs. Women initially joined smaller public sector offices and businesses already associated with females. Banks, insurance companies, shipping firms and big merchant houses hired them only to a narrow range of tasks. Less than half the women in German banks were entrusted with banking and, at the Prudential, women mainly copied documents connected with new working-class insurance.141 The largest scale employers of female clerks were European civil services. Almost uniformly women first entered telegraphy, and telephonists were virtually female from the outset, except for night work. Gradually women gained other clerical and quasi-administrative jobs. Unquestionably female clerical workers became more visible. The demand for paid work for middle-class women coupled with better access to education and feminism provided the impetus and means for women to become professionals. But clear gendered attitudes and prohibitive practices operated to keep certain areas female and to protect the old liberal professions. Nursing, teaching and social work always had a large female membership while law, medicine, pharmacy, clergy and management remained male dominated.
The First World War gave women opportunities of promotion, formerly blocked by separate promotion structures; some who had left on marriage returned for the war. Afterwards, many kept their jobs and, with the return of full male employment and continued expansion, openings multiplied. Key features after the Second World War were a rapid rise in the number of white-bloused workers, surpassing men, and the introduction of far more married women as marriage bars fell. Gradually more women reached administrative levels, though the ‘glass ceiling’ continued to restrict opportunities, while they slowly gained some parity with men over pay and conditions. The technological explosion altered the character of the workplace, adding new twists to what are very durable constructs about gender and technology. Patterns of career breaks and part-time work coloured the texture of the white-bloused world. A rise in married women’s work marked the post-war workforce, especially women ‘returners’ who took career breaks. White-collar work was no longer the preserve of men, the young unmarried and ‘spinsters’.
Segregation was a feature of the workplace. Within retail, men worked where training was required, where goods were expensive, or where work was rough and heavy; women predominated in light and untrained work with low pay. Of course, pay was low because they were women. Men retained strong continuity between the artisan and the new salesman. Thus they sold jewellery, women’s gloves and stockings, and were butchers and fishmongers, while women sold provisions and women’s clothes. Women’s growing experience and good record as managers during the First World War helped them gain higher status responsible posts and, in 1930s London, female buyers outnumbered men. Nevertheless, segregation persisted. In the 1980s, men still held top jobs in management, training and stock control, and dominated departments with expensive or bulky consumables. Women, more visible on display counters, sold to women.
The desire to preserve exclusivity created structural and cultural barriers that limited access and promotion for women in professions. Suzanne Borel made a highly publicised entry to the French Diplomatic Service, but was not allowed to undertake consular duties abroad ‘on account of having no political rights’. She reflected: ‘Few women are better placed than I to appreciate the cunning, often combined with treachery and persistence, employed by men to place obstacles in the path of those unfortunate women who stray from the beaten track.’142 Simply preventing women’s entry was more effective than arguing they were inappropriate members, and law and medicine simply prohibited them, until statutes, regulations and attitudes changed. Thus perceptions of what it meant to be female were joined with protectiveness of traditionally male professions to restrict not only women’s entry, but their movement within them.
Women proactively claimed white-collar work. Feminists saw these jobs as liberation, opportunity and independence, and there were far more applicants than jobs. Paquet-Mille’s, Nouveau guide pratique des jeunes filles dans le choix d’une profession (New Practical Guide for Girls in the Choice of a Profession) argued: ‘The French woman. . . has understood that she will attain her true social freedom only by knowledge and work.’143 They claimed typewriting as suitable, even relying on stereotypes: ‘Women as a rule are quick workers; . . . and a sedentary occupation being suitable to them, they can perfectly work well for long hours when necessary.’144 As new work, it avoided competition with men, and promised respectable prospects for middle-class women. Strict discipline and sexually segregated employment were positive features, and typists took considerable pride in work. Jo Brouwer, a Dutch typist, exclaimed, ‘I was as happy as Larry and thought it truly made an impression when, with an aristocratic air, I announced that I had now become an office gentleman [sic].’145 Weimar shop assistants regarded themselves as ‘a cut above’ factory workers who ‘did not know how to behave’, while clerks and secretaries regarded themselves as above shop assistants, because their work was more worthwhile and better remunerated.146 Women’s entry was not uncontested, but it is important that women perceived clerking as a viable option, that they were not simply ‘recruited’ or ‘introduced’ but that many voices claimed white-collar work for them at a time when the workplace was undergoing radical redefinition.
Women’s manufacturing work involved the production of lighter, smaller articles, often in a mechanised or automated setting, usually routine, boring and part of a fragmented work process. The fact that it was paid less than men’s work is a virtual truism that had as much to do with the worker as the work. There is a clear link between the attributes of women accustomed to sewing piecework to the new assembly processes. The relationship of women to machines was not straightforward. On the one hand mechanisation supposedly allowed more women to be employed and to replace skilled, and expensive, men. On the other, women were not supposed to understand the machines and were only there to tend and operate them. Yet machinery could be used to determine both ‘skill’ and ‘deskilling’, and often provided an opportunity to regender work. Indeed, women’s work cannot be disentangled from their sex, since perceptions of what women could do were inextricably tied to what employers and male workers perceived women to be. Specialisation was common in manufacturing, but also typified white-collar work, where it helped to solidify hierarchical structures, restricting promotion between levels. Tasks and ranks became more closely associated with different levels of education, and bridging the gaps became more difficult.
Natural difference between men and women formed the focus of views of women as workers across the working world. Work was contested on two levels. First, what was appropriate for women to do to retain their gentility with regard to mixing with men, and whether to work or not; and second, what abilities and character women had and what they were capable of. So, while white-collar work was ‘suitable’ for females, particularly middle-class women with no means of support, careful decisions were made about where they worked, such as those first working in French urban post offices. They were not placed in working-class areas nor near railway stations, which were unsuitable for ‘naturally high strung’ women.147 In the dispute surrounding Norwegian women telegraphers’ fight for equal pay in 1898, gender was invoked to women’s disadvantage. The Director reported that women were less competent than men, particularly on complicated equipment and in technical aspects of the work, despite equal training, equal workloads and, on the whole, better marks on training courses. One anonymous female telegrapher retorted, ‘The primary reason why female telegraphers manifest little interest in the technical aspects of their work is that our lords and masters, men, have since time immemorial regarded themselves as the only ones competent in this field.’148 Within the tertiary sector women and men were separated, occupationally and physically, by practices of segregation and stratification. Pay scales and grading were designed so as to provide two quite separate gendered hierarchies, preventing women from moving into administrative and higher-grade work. Although professions and careers opened, ‘the glass ceiling’ tended to operate an unwritten rule preventing women from reaching the highest echelons. One of the debates throughout the period was ‘equal pay for equal work’, but where that was achieved, other forms of discrimination operated to prevent the equal participation of women in work. Not the least of these is that women were still not perceived first as workers. Masculinity is tied up with men’s work, while women’s femininity is still tied to her domestic role. It was not all promise and success, but the shift in kinds of work and new opportunities were important milestones for women.
World History
