Conclusion

Women worked across the economic spectrum, in most types of workplaces and settings and, throughout the past three centuries, have been central to the economy and to household support. In this time, there were important changes, as the economy shifted from a largely agrarian one with most workplaces dispersed and located in or near homes to one where the workplace and the home are usually quite separate. This however, is less true than we think, with the number of homeworkers, from those assembling Christmas crackers in their kitchens or knitting for the market to academics writing in bedrooms and studies or women running small businesses from home or offering bed and breakfast. The shape of work is different, since most women work in an urban economy and most work is centralised. Women’s work in the countryside is less agricultural and more likely to be service based than it was in 1700, and industrial work is more likely to be in factories. New light industries largely replaced textiles. Service shifted from farm service to domestic service and then took on a whole new meaning as the white-bloused sector provided new opportunities for women.

The demographics of the workforce also changed. From a position where almost all females worked regardless of marital status and age (except for the very elite - depending on how you define work), by the end of the twentieth century, the very youngest were more likely to be in school. Married women have always worked, but their work increasingly became hidden and less recognised as work during the nineteenth century. Many continued to work however, either before and after having children, or by devising work strategies that allowed them to juggle children and work, such as taking in washing or homework. In the twentieth century, housework shifted so that it could take up as little or as much time as women wanted - except in times of stress such as during the wars, when what had to be done was done. In the second half of the century, married women became increasing likely to stay at work until children were born and to return after the youngest reached school age. Many took only statutory maternity leave and returned to work quickly. Single women worked both home and away, so to speak, though the domestic ideal affected middle-class girls significantly. This was precisely the group that pursued the goal of higher education and worthwhile jobs and careers. A mobile group, single women worked before marriage often to save for marriage, but always a significant number of women remained single, either out of choice or circumstance. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, broadly speaking, these women could struggle to survive. With low pay, sometimes dependants to support and the assumptions that women would marry, they utilised a range of strategies and hard work to manage, including joining forces, forming partnerships and sharing costs. Widows fared best if they retained some capital, maybe a trade they had shared with a husband and some ‘social capital’. As wages rose and as more opportunities opened, particularly for educated single women, marital status became less significant in defining the working woman.

Ideas about who was or was not a worker affected whether women could work, what kind of work was truly accessible to them and why and where they were hired. Women were perceived as having a cluster of skills and characteristics, which suited them for particular kinds of work. They were seen as amenable, quiescent and subservient; they were dexterous and patient. Thus, fiddly work that could include everything from weeding and tying up peas and hops to spinning, calico-printing and sewing were therefore appropriate women’s work. Men claimed high status work, whether working with horses to managing and supervising others. Needless to say, these stereotypes relied largely on perceptions of women as women and men as men, not on actual abilities. Men’s taking over mowing with scythes is a pertinent example. Supposedly women were unable to handle this heavy implement, but they were able to cart manure on their backs and to carry water to terraces and, indeed, to use other mowing tools that were equally heavy.

Women’s work was thus often defined in terms of attributes associated with skill and expertise or ones that related to ‘men in charge’. Men tended to believe they had a right to certain work and particularly to work that defined their standing and status, their place as men, that is, their masculinity. Women frequently appeared to acquiesce in these definitions, particularly women who were prepared to take whatever work was available and at whatever wage to ensure that they could contribute to household support or to support themselves. But this probably underestimates the decisions that women made in taking work. We know from testimony sprinkled throughout the period that many women liked working, and that they even enjoyed work that was hard. They also resented soul-destroying, body-breaking work, such as pulling mangolds. But they could be strategic and entrepreneurial, choosing, within the options open to them, when and where they would work and what they were prepared to do. Women alternated domestic service with factories; some left service for sewing; they claimed the typewriter and the work associated with it; they moved to factories with spinning, or they took up something else; they rejected domestic service for shops. They fought for education, breaking bourgeois ideas of femininity and demanded professional status. So while women were often not seen as workers, but as working women, women cast themselves as women workers.