Introduction

The world of work changed significantly over the past three centuries. A shift from a rural to an urban society, and a further shift from craft to manufacture and then to white-collar work affected what people were doing, when they did it, how they did it and who they did it with. New ideas and pressures influenced the structures and knowledge base that informed work practices and are reflective of cultural shifts in the notions of work, workplace and worker. Work means a range of things depending on when, where and about whom we are speaking. Sometimes it is a powerful term, other times an indication of drudgery. Probably the most obvious shift for women was when work at home became ‘not work’. This is not only about the location of work, because self-employed persons can work at home and be ‘at work’. It is partly about what the work is, who is doing it and the value placed on that work. Thus domestic roles and relationships with partners and family are central to understanding women’s position in the labour market. Women’s place in society is the result of a complex of ideas about what they are capable of and should do, so that their work, its types, locations and structures are gendered. Similarly, gendered division of labour is historically specific and the relationship between workers is renegotiated as the context changes. But division of labour along sexual lines is not only about dividing work according to ability; it is about power, status, position and gender.

The realms of work and home were not separate and oppositional, but sites of gendered cooperation and conflict. The home was increasingly defined in terms of the female, while the workplace was increasingly constructed as male and shaped by definitions derived from escalating waged labour. Only late in the twentieth century were these notions reworked. The significance of home and family on working woman has been to define her role in terms of status, hierarchy and tasks. They were working women, not women workers. Perception of the female is crucial to defining normative options and routes, but reality meant that women often did things that dominant paradigms did not embrace. Life cycle affected the place and kind of work that women did; young unmarried women were the most mobile, while mothers and wives were usually more tied to one location. The identity of woman as not worker derived from the married woman or mother, notionally with domestic responsibilities, whereas many working females were not married or mothers. The idea of a woman establishing her own working identity challenged social perceptions, because women were identified by

Marital and maternal status, not as workers. These factors meant that women were often seen as casual labourers, assistants, not as real workers, a flexible workforce, ‘a reserve army of labour’. This had specific implications for wages and for how women interacted with the workplace. Eugene Buret in 1840 summed up the dilemma, ‘Woman is industrially speaking, an imperfect worker. If a man doesn’t add his earnings to the insufficient wage of his partner, sex alone constitutes for her the cause of misery.’1 Contemporary views thus denied the fact of women as workers as well as their identity as workers. Within such constraints, numerous women strove to create their own meaning and sense of identity out of work.

Women often worked to a different time discipline from the regulated factory, workshop or office, working when they needed to, juggling several tasks at once. Often it was piecework and low paid, but other times they moved in and out of work depending on their needs. Not only did women take up a range of work across their lives, but much of what they did did not fit standard occupational categories, so that their work was uncharted by many statistical accounts, making them invisible workers. This is because such categories are artificial, created by statisticians for census purposes, and are usually generated by notions of what men do. Additionally the contribution of many women to commercial, farming and industrial activities remained unpaid in family enterprises or as part of an informal economy that is difficult to assess.

Nevertheless, women defined themselves as workers, increasingly so as time passed and work became more clearly crystallised as a specific entity rather than as a collection of activities. The older concept of a trade, with its masculine connotations, became replaced by words such as ‘occupation’, ‘profession’, ‘job’ as people identified themselves and what they did. As time discipline became more centralised, women responded by either remaining in the informal economy or by joining mainstream structures. This chapter will, therefore, explore the issues of the gendered workplace across the period from about 1700, reflecting on contextual factors such as economic and political trends that influenced the redefinitions of work and woman’s place in the European labour market. It will also evaluate her agency in exploiting and accommodating the paradigms that emerged.