Eighteenth-century experience had strong echoes in the nineteenth century: the lifecycle patterns of women’s work, the motivations to work pinned to dowries and family support and the continued presence of women in commerce. They congregated in the same areas of work: textiles, garment-making, domestic service and agriculture. Change was gradual and, for most, virtually imperceptible. However, in three key areas their experience was different from the previous century: the growth of domesticity and domestic service, the impact of agricultural ‘improvement’ and the shift to centralised and mechanised manufacture. The construction of domesticity revealed tensions for women who had to work, or wanted to, while for middle-class women, the century brought both restrictions and opportunities. Shifts in location of work also influenced views of work available to women. When work moved away from the home, coupled with pressure on jobs, paid work became men’s property. Lynn Abrams explored the implications of domesticity and family for women in Chapter 2, but while domesticity shaped the context, many women claimed the right to work, utilising the range of choices open to them. Others simply needed to.
Social morality and the cult of the home inevitably shaped the context within which women worked. There was direct continuity in their responsibilities for home and family, but there was a fundamental difference. A clearly formulated and articulated ideology of womanhood was disseminated on an unprecedented scale. Not working was a defining characteristic of this feminine ideal, while masculinity became more unmistakably defined by concepts of male breadwinner and family wage. Family businesses became more visibly identified with males and more firmly embedded in legal and financial practices. Employment reflected bourgeois ideas of gender by the kinds of job each sex was hired for and the pay they received. Thus domestic service was promoted as appropriate female work in an appropriate setting. The family wage ideology created a working-class version of domesticity, so that for working men, respectability came to mean that wives devoted themselves to household affairs. Yet, only the most highly skilled workers earned enough to cover family expenditure, and among peasants and outworkers in insecure and unskilled trades, there was little emulation of a bourgeois ideal.
Housekeeping continued to be a central ‘job’, but housework was virtually created by domesticity and fostered by the technological changes of industrialisation. As Davidoff said, ‘though the activities may be timeless, the context and meaning are not’.57 As the ‘family wage’ became attached to visible men’s work, women’s household work became devalued and invisible in a way that their multifarious activities had not been previously. Though childcare, food preparation, cleaning and clothing remained the essential core of women’s domestic tasks, they changed in context, meaning, scale and duration. The period from about 1780 to 1840 was crucial, marking a transition from Hausmutter, working in partnership with her husband presiding over agricultural estates, to Hausfrau or housewife, the guardian of the private sphere.
In many respects the family home became for a wife what business became for her husband; her job was to maintain and direct a well-run household, just as he ran a firm. The ideological mission of womanhood also charged women with frugality and thrift. Many tasks became more complex, creating new meaning and expectations, so that the way a woman ‘kept house’ defined her and her family. Housekeeping became homemaking. Decoration and display became part of femininity, woman’s identity and correct bourgeois form. Cleanliness took on heightened meaning. Of course, highly ornate furnishings and the array of decorative items compounded cleaning, as did rapidly expanding manufacturing towns with their industrial debris. The reality was that many tasks were laborious and relatively unchanged by technology. Cleaning and polishing were not touched, water and fuel needed fetching, and cooking and laundry only increased in scope and scale. Indeed technological changes at the end of the century addressed the falling number of servants and probably had little effect on housewives’ work.
Domestic service became a predominant route for girls searching for a livelihood and dowry. Demand grew with urbanisation, a rise in the number of prosperous households, the diffusion of domesticity and a marked increase in young people, while demand for female agricultural labour declined. In Berlin in 1885, servants comprised 32 per cent of employed females, and in 1860s London, a third of females between fifteen and twenty-four years of age. Numbers grew rapidly, but from about 1880, a slow but distinctive decline set in; by 1900, far fewer girls and a smaller proportion of the female workers turned to service.58
Typically she was a countrywoman, aged between mid-teens and mid-twenties. In Hamburg in 1871, two-thirds were between sixteen and twenty-five years old. Between 1825 and 1853, 60 per cent in Versailles, over half in Bordeaux and virtually all in Marseilles came from the countryside.59 Many intended to move permanently to town; others went to accumulate dowries. Larger English aristocratic households recruited from further away, while provincial middle classes tended to hire nearby. In 1851, 75 per cent of Colchester servants came from within a ten-mile radius - walking-distance home on a day off.60 It was common to hire girls for a country house, then take them to town. Elise Blanc started at Chateau Prevange in the Bourbonnais and went to Paris where her ‘chatelains kept an apartment’.61 Well-established networks, relatives and villagers working in cities were important contacts for girls. In 1888, Doris Viersbeck’s aunt in Hamburg helped her advertise and ‘shortlist’ employers, accompanied her to interview and negotiated wages.62 Townspeople preferred country girls because of a latent mistrust of urban ones, whom they saw as independent and more difficult. Thus, women of the Nord (France) sent letters to rural relatives asking for robust, moral and biddable servants.63
Young women saw urban service as secure migration with advantages such as wider horizons, advancement, usually higher wages and the prospect of saving for marriage. The traditional character of domestic service, based on familiar rural service and the availability of positions, explains much of its popularity. It preserved the familial context of work. Thus rural migrants in Rome saw it as a practical solution providing lodging, employment and personal safety.64 With accommodation, board and uniforms, they stood a chance of saving, provided that they did not become ill, pregnant or lose their place. Servants moved regularly, usually for better positions, higher wages or promotion. The first position was often a step to other work; others moved back and forth between service and other occupations. In Halstead, Essex, many female weavers left Courtauld’s silk mill for short periods because of the ‘pull of domestic service’.65
Most servants were maids-of-all-work, the Alleinmddchen. In 1851, 61 per cent of Rochdale (England) servants were the only one in the household; over 75 per cent in 1880s Hamburg were.66 A minority worked in large households or on country estates, experiencing the servant’s hall with its career structure, where service was a finely developed hierarchy of duties and deference. Servants, such as Doris Viersbeck, preferred the large household since they could move up the ladder with commensurate gains in wages and perks.67 The Alleinmddchen was responsible for an onerous burden of cleaning, cooking and helping with laundry. She worked alongside her mistress, but dirtier and heavier tasks always fell to her, so she carried heavy loads of wood, coal and laundry, emptied and washed chamber pots and boiled menstrual rags, nappies and sheets. She was nanny, lady’s maid and valet. Jeanne Bouvier looked after ‘two spoiled and insolent children’, with all the shopping, housework and heavy laundry.68 Away from home, with few friends, they were vulnerable and dependent on the good will and protection of their employers. They lived in and were constantly watched and subject to summonses. Employers thought a sixteen-hour day was reasonable, since housework included so many ‘natural breaks’. Time to themselves and days off were rare; employers regulated outside contacts, sometimes with ‘no followers’ bans. This lack of independent judgement over friendships and family contact further isolated servants. They could be dismissed without cause and replaced if they became ill or infirm. They were susceptible to the demands and ‘charms’ of masters and male servants. Few employers hesitated to fire a servant they suspected was pregnant or even sexually active. References were essential for any new post.
Relatively good wages were an attraction. While money wages were less than for cotton operatives, the value of room, board and perks meant servants were better compensated for most of the century. McBride estimated the value of Parisian servants’ wages in 1883 at 1,300 to 1,400 francs per year, compared to female cotton spinners earning approximately 780 francs per year. Wages of specialised servants were always higher.69 So, despite difficult conditions and hard work, service held financial promise. They were often paid annually in arrears, which could create capital to invest, loan or save. Saving was difficult, however, between the vagaries of service, the range of wages and sending money to families. They risked never receiving wages if they were fired, quit or if the family fell on hard times. Cora-Elisabeth Millet-Robinet, in La Maison rustique des dames (The Woman’s Country House) explained:
It is preferable to pay them each month, or at least every third month, rather than once a year as is the custom. . . When money is at one’s disposal, it is easy for it to be put to different use than that for which it was set aside, and this can become cause for embarrassment.70
Servants sometimes were paid indirectly. Merchant Pierre Lacoste paid wages directly to a chambermaid’s peasant father.71
Tensions were inherent in the mistress-servant bond. Subjection to employers was a prime feature, and personal service was important to the relationship. They were to obey, follow orders and subsume their thoughts and feelings. German servants associated service with respect, trust and personal devotion, while mistresses used social distance to reinforce their control:
Mother would go down and see her cook in the morning, to give orders and that kind of thing. And thereafter, if she wanted to speak to her for any reason or other bells were rung and the cook would come up. No mistress would ever go downstairs.72
In large households, servants’ quarters reflected nuances of status, mirroring the gender and seniority of the patriarchal household. Numerous jurisdictional quarrels arose because servants persistently breached demarcation lines and used other servants’ equipment.
Women’s agricultural role was little changed, and La Maison rustique des dames described responsibilities reminiscent of the previous century:
[She] should have all of the servant girls on the farm under her immediate supervision. The farmyard - that is, the cowshed, the dairy, the pigsty, and the chicken coop - as well as the gardens, the orchards, and the sheep, are also her responsibility. She must be aware of all the jobs to be done on the farm in order to reinforce her husband in his supervision and to replace him in times of absence or sickness.73
These activities were embedded less in domesticity and more in customary and practical divisions of labour.
Despite agricultural ‘improvement’, farming remained labour intensive, and mechanisation developed slowly. In fact, women’s activity increased. Market gardening, new crops, such as soft fruit in Clydeside and Carse of Gowrie, Scotland, and accelerating urban demand for produce created work that was seen as specifically suited to women. The prevalence of female fieldworkers varied from region to region, even from village to village: demand decreased in south-east England except at peak times, but not in Northumberland and Scotland.74 By 1851, a strong tradition against women field-workers in the Caux reversed with a threefold increase in the number of female day labourers and farm servants. In the Turin hinterland, with a long tradition of female fieldwork, women made up to 70 per cent of the workforce by 1881.75 Sporadic day labour was more economical than permanent workers, and tenants continued to bring women with them as flexible workers. Indeed, farmers thought the labour of employees’ wives and daughters was their clear prerogative. Thus women were in demand, but they became closely identified with specific seasonal tasks whilst men were more readily seen as permanent labour. This accentuated gendered roles, because men and women’s work was different and because women became associated with specific crops and activities - tending and gathering - whereas men strengthened their association with land and stock. Women’s work was no less strenuous, but neither did it incorporate the sense of ownership, status or occupation attached to men’s work.
In Sicily women joined men in fields only at harvest, as did weavers from Marlhes, Scandinavian dairywomen and Bavarian household servants. Increased use of scythes instead of sickles meant men, who supposedly were physically better suited to the heavier scythe, gradually replaced women reapers. Ironically, women were considered more skilled than men with sickles, and one reason for the slow uptake of scythes was difficulty in finding skilled men. Women’s displacement depended on local custom, the size of the workforce and the need for speed and care in cutting. Gradually they lost cutters’ higher wages, but less well-paid work called on women: gathering, binding and stacking. Clearly, notions of strength and skill were conflated, and the allocation of women to reaping and men to mowing was associated with the masculinisation of labour.
These changes coincided with rises in domestic servants’ wages and contributed to single women leaving fields for service. In England and Wales, between 1851 and 1871, female day labourers fell by 24 per cent and farm servants by 75 per cent.76 To provide day labour in lowland Scotland, farmers built bothies and boarded girls from Ireland and the Highlands. English, French and Belgian farmers relied on gang masters who arranged and paid workers. Often gangs walked long distances and in inclement weather might have no work or pay. In 1867, Elizabeth Dickson from Norfolk told a parliamentary commission:
Some of the work is very hard, pulling turnips and mangolds, . . . and when turnips are being put into the ground putting muck as fast as the plough goes along. . . Drawing mangolds is the hardest; globe mangolds are fit to pull your inside out, . . . I have pulled till my hands have been swelled that you can’t see the knuckles on them. I have come home so exhausted that I have sat down and cried; it would be an hour before I could pull my things off; and I have been obliged to have the table moved up to me because I could not move to it.77
The visibility of gangs played into bourgeois moral concerns. Other women in more isolated circumstances suffered the same hard conditions but without attracting attention. The Belgian Women’s Committee Enquete of 1892 recorded 57,000 women in gangs still working the fields especially during planting and harvest.78
Dairying was unambiguously coded as women’s work: ‘Not only was it improper for a man to milk, it was considered shameful (Sweden)’; ‘Men would not consider it their work to milk a cow (Ireland)’. Churning required skill and experience and folklore granted women natural superior milking skills. They sang ancient charms, and a naked Finnish woman ‘wrapped her vest around the churn’, epitomising the association of female sexuality with dairying.79 Commercial farms relied on dairymaids, housing them and paying some of the highest female wages, compensation not only for long hours and hard labour, but also for skill and responsibility. Bavarian farmers regularly paid bonuses when animals were sold; experience caring for animals was worth money. From 1836, training enabled Danish women to gain independent positions on commercial farms, very high wages, responsibility and confidence. Unusually for Denmark, some published their methods, underlining the value of their skills.80 Since female skill was recognised, masculinisation of dairying indicates something deeper than simple transition to technologically skilled work. Swedish dairymaids gained training between 1858 and 1883 and managed village dairies, but few won expert status. From the 1880s, Sweden created [male] ‘dairy advisers’, so men became managers based on ‘scientific’ knowledge. When sealing milk in containers broke the direct relationship between the skilled worker and the product, that is, women and milk, dairying was recoded as male, modern and expert.81
Women made fishing possible by tending farms, making nets, fetching bait and baiting lines. They had long marketed catches: Marshside women sold shrimps in Lancashire, Newhaven fishwives were renowned in Edinburgh and Scandinavian women were indispensable as sellers and gutters. Processing the catch was women’s work: gutting and packing in brine, pickling or smoking. Scots women following the fleet to process catches enjoyed the freedom of travel and independent wages, returning home with a tidy sum. One recalled, ‘it was a free and easy time, you weren’t restricted - like you know, in a factory where there were bosses.’82 Women in harbours awaited the catch, processing and packing as quickly as possible. An observer timed Wick women gutting twenty-six herring a minute.83 During the 1830s, fishing shifted to commercial organisation, and women became waged labour. Eventually they moved into canning and packing factories, into the unseen sector, as commercialisation changed fishing’s family character.
New domestic industries sprang up as older ones mechanised or centralised, mechanisation often stimulated outwork, and cheaper hand technologies frequently delayed full-scale mechanisation. Old values coexisted with and were used to adapt to structural changes, thus importing old styles of behaviour into new contexts. ‘Perceptions of continuity and discontinuity. . . represent coexisting realities.’84 Thus women continued to be the spinners of Europe. Tuscan filatrici were described in 1811 as women who spun ‘in the hours in which they are resting from their other duties’, confirming the persistent view that women’s work was casual and revealing a perverse sense of what constituted rest and work.85 As spinning centralised and mechanised, pressure shifted to weaving, and women established themselves relatively easily in this ‘male’ trade. In Saxony, in 1872, Auguste Eichler inherited the loom while her brother received the house, and weaver Johanne Schmidt bequeathed her loom to Christiane Luise instead of to Christiane’s four brothers.86
As cottage industry became uneconomic, new women’s jobs materialised as more goods were produced and new domestic and overseas markets developed. Courtaulds deliberately established their silk factory near Halstead, in the 1790s, to capitalise on plentiful surplus female labour.87 However, women who lost jobs in rural industry were not the same ones who gained new jobs. A sharper division of labour emerged, since men and women often worked in distinct economic sectors and at different tasks. Men hung on to skilled ‘artisanal’ work, and women became more overtly ‘operatives’. An individual woman might not see radical changes during her lifetime, but she, her daughter and her mother could have registered important shifts in the choices they could make.
The factory became an alternative migratory route for young females, but their income remained important for families and dowries. Jeanne Bouvier told how her mother sent her to a silk factory outside Lyon, and when she did not get a pay rise, she beat her, assuming it was her fault.88 The image of the mill girl obscured the number of married women in factories. Childless wives in Roubaix were most common, and single and married mothers worked reduced hours whilst the youngest was under five years of age. Fewer worked as children grew up; potentially mothers and daughters traded off work. Employers were ambivalent. At Cowan’s paper mill, Penicuik (Scotland), in 1865,
With a view to prevent the neglect of children in their homes, we do not employ the mothers of young children in our works, . . . [excepting] widows or women deserted by their husbands, or having husbands unable to earn a living.89
In contrast, local bourgeoises in Verviers and Ghent worried that women who left lost their skills and taste for work, placing additional burdens on the family. No one expected married women at Courtaulds to give up millwork, even those whose husbands were best paid.90 Demand for female labour could pose problems for families. A Lancashire woman explained:
So large is the demand for female labour, that fifty women can find employment where the man fails. . . . Thus it is quite true that many women do keep their husbands; the men merely doing such jobbing work as they can pick up.91
Many rural families had no choice and migrated to textile towns. Sometimes they changed occupations. In Saint Chamond (France), they replaced factory silk with domestic braids.92
Women homeworkers are most elusive, because they moved in and out of work, because statisticians did not always consider them ‘workers’, and because they were ‘hidden’ at home. Yet women assembled garments, footwear, gloves, umbrellas and numerous other items: artificial flowers, sacks, boxes, tassels, dolls’ clothes and feather decorations. Russian kustar work ranged from lace-making and embroidery to weaving rope sandals and reins and gluing cigarette tubes. It theoretically resolved the work and childcare conundrum, though the long and intensive hours were incongruous with childcare. Sophie Ternyck, a single shirt-maker in Lille, sewed long hours at home, while her seven-year-old son ran errands.93 Many single women apparently preferred the relative freedom of homework to the constraints of domestic service. Homeworkers ranged across social classes including wives and daughters of labourers, tailors, artisans and merchants. Some needy ‘surplus’ bourgeois women turned to sewing as a ‘respectable’ trade. Neither married nor single women fitted a single pattern. They took available work, altering strategies and domestic responsibilities as necessary.
The development of ‘ready-made’, or confection, expanded needlework, but seamstresses challenged tailors’ former superiority. Men saw the root of the problem in structural and ‘skill’ changes caused by ready-made, not with women as seamstresses. The distinction between home and shop was crucial in protecting male control of tailoring and, as Quataert showed, the struggle resulted in attempts to alienate the household from the market economy.94 The shift linked ‘economic deterioration and deskilling. . . with a move from male space (the shop) to female space (the household)’.95 As the ‘dishonourable’ sector grew at the expense of the ‘honourable’ one, the number of women increased, often forcing men to accept lower wages. Outwork virtually destroyed skilled female trades such as millinery, mantua making and dressmaking. Skilled women were less able to resist, because their trade structure undercut craft solidarity. Self-employed, they worked in dispersed locations and usually without the strong collective identity that tailors used to fight confection. Subcontracting created a fundamental gender change in needle trades; men became owners and subcontractors. They had greater access to capital and closely identified with ownership and management; it was easier for them to take control. Thus women lost the distinction between skilled and unskilled workers and their craft status.
Factories relied on outwork, such as fine embroidery in Ayrshire and Ulster and shirtmaking in Toulouse, Berlin and Derry. Derry shirt factories encouraged women to take work home, salaried agents put work out and outstations allowed women to work in situ or to take materials home.96 The system made women particularly vulnerable, since employers dictated pay and completion dates, and ‘unsatisfactory’ work was fined. Sewing machines facilitated decentralisation, but certainly did not cause it. They sped up sewing, raised expectations of productivity and increased hours of work, stress and exhaustion. Women provided their machine and, absorbing overheads, they became an even more attractive workforce. Workshops introduced machines on a large scale after mid-century, well after dispersed homework had taken firm root, so by 1860 garment making was mechanised and centralised like other industries.97 Breaking down the production process meant the skill content deteriorated. Ottilie Baader described how this exacerbated the boring, repetitious character of work and raised the level of alienation:
I then bought myself my own machine [after leaving the factory] and worked at home. ... A session lasted from 6 am to 12 am, with one hour pause for lunch. I got up at 4 am, tidied the flat and prepared the food. I had a small clock in front of me while working, and so it passed that one dozen collars took no longer than another, and nothing gave me greater pleasure than when I could spare a few minutes. . . . Sometimes I had had more than enough of it: year after year at the sewing machine, always just collars and cuffs in front of me, one dozen after another. Life had no value, I was just a work machine and had no future prospects. I saw and heard nothing of what is beautiful in the world: I was simply shut off from that.98
Usually in partnership with men, many women stayed in business well into the century, and Stana Nenadic estimates that women ran a fifth of British businesses.99 Etienne Jouy commented in 1809 that everywhere in the Nord, ‘one generally sees women directing businesses and exercising great authority in the menage’. Pauline Motte-Bredart (1795-1871) virtually ran a cotton enterprise, while her mother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law built business fortunes. Women handled records and bookkeeping, and their understanding of business allowed men to travel, confident in the knowledge that the firm was in good hands. Some women took sales trips, such as Elizabeth Strutt from Derbyshire, whose grasp of business and knowledge of the trade testify to her importance as de facto partner. However, bourgeois ideals and the removal of homes from business environs led many women to relinquish business activities. The daughters, daughters-in-law and granddaughters of Motte-Bredart slowly moved to complete domesticity, to be praised as good, sweet, excellent wives.100
Wives remained essential in family shops, and producers such as butchers, bakers and shoemakers depended on wives and daughters to serve customers. In 1809, Jean Negre authorised his wife ‘to direct and administer his goods and affairs, to receive and furnish receipts for any sums that may be due him for whatever reason, to pursue his debtors... to sell and buy’ in his absence.101 Women with capital often invested in independent enterprises. In her marriage contract to a carpenter, Marie Laplange reserved 600 francs ‘with which she intends to begin a little trade in groceries, mercerie, or something else’.102 Widows of artisans commonly used their portion to do the same. Wedgwood’s archives are replete with orders from women shopkeepers. They retained a commercial niche in grocery and provision trades, regularly keeping inns, boarding houses and running cabarets, cafes and eating houses. Some 6 per cent of female household heads in Davidoff and Hall’s sample ran inns, and every male innkeeper who made a will in Witham (Essex) and Birmingham left his business unconditionally to his wife. These were important commercial activities at the centre of several subsidiary activities. However, inns became less respectable and increasingly stratified by rank, creating a dilemma for women who owned and managed them. The arrival of railways reduced business, and livery stables became more closely associated with the ‘masculine monopoly of horse culture’.103 Women remained street sellers, providing fresh food upon which towns increasingly depended, such as Antoinette Corbieres, a cheese pedlar:
Without a shop, a stall, or even a permanent bench in the market, she made the street her place of business. Along the Grande Rue Montaubon and through the side streets. . . she hawked her wares from a tray that hung around her neck. Between customers she gossiped in doorways with her friends and flirted with the butcher’s son. . . Once a week she walked twenty kilometres to the country town of Molieres, where, on market day, she shared a bench with her sister who sold bread.104
Such women operated networks of information, helping to shape neighbourhoods.
Women’s charitable activity expanded parallel to their departure from workplaces. Individuals, such as Florence Nightingale, Octavia Hill, Elizabeth Fry, Josephine Butler, Flora Tristan, Amalie Sieveking, and groups such as the Societe Maternelle of Paris and the Rheinisch-Westfalischer Diakonissenverein (Rhenish-Westfalian Association of
Deaconesses) at Kaiserwerth, assisted the poor, sick, needy and vulnerable. Philanthropy was justified within contemporary moral codes and active religion played an important part. But philanthropy gave women a sense of purpose and accomplishment, where the domestic ideal seemed vacuous, selfish and unproductive. This role had to be fought for, and women took criticism for abandoning families to traipse through the dirt and debris of society. Philanthropy changed women. They gained confidence and learned skills: management, fund-raising, research, finance, communication and campaigning. They also acquired a view of the world and imagined new horizons. Taking part was not easy and required women to overcome their own fears and prejudices, while widening their social consciences. Philanthropy became more politicised, with campaigns for middle-class work, better education, better working conditions, the women’s movement and suffrage. Many bourgeois women had to work, especially surplus female relatives. Being governesses and companions was deemed appropriate, as private, domestic and consistent with women’s caring role. From mid-century, opportunities such as teaching, nursing and clerical work emerged offering new scope, which are taken up in the next section.
Women worked for a number of reasons, the primary one being the need for survival. Thus they took up whatever work was available, which they balanced against needs that were not purely economic. Where there were choices, they made decisions based on complex considerations including pay, location, family responsibilities and personal preferences. Thus girls often chose between domestic service, factory work and urban trades, sometimes moving between all three. Their choice could depend on their point in the life cycle, on the economic state of industry and agriculture and on the point in time. If this seems obvious, it serves as a reminder that generalities sometimes obscure the range of individual choice.
During the century after the French Revolution, when hiring workers for wages became far more the norm, attitudes to women workers were shaped by conflicting notions of womanhood and sexuality on the one hand and by the needs of capitalism and of working-class families for paid labour on the other. As female employment became more visible, more clearly ‘women for hire’, and clashed with emergent notions of domesticity, it became grounds for debate. In many people’s eyes, ‘women’ were not ‘workers’; the terms were mutually exclusive. This view shaped the context of women’s work and contributed to perceptions of women as casual temporary employees, who could and should be treated and paid differently from men. They were seen as docile, malleable creatures, subject to a well-established patriarchal regime, subordinate to men and masters. The belief in different male and female natures coincided with a belief in different abilities, so that women were seen as nimble-fingered, dexterous, careful, meticulous and quick. The combination of cheapness, docility and ‘special skills’ made them desirable employees.
Construction of the family wage was central to gender stereotyping and to defining women’s work as secondary. The family wage was a particular issue for skilled men, inheritors of the artisan, who constituted the first trade unions. These men believed that a family wage, by which they meant their wage, would reduce competition for jobs. The aim was to remove women from those areas where they did the same work or worked in the same industries as men and where they were seen to be undercutting men’s wages, status and control. It was important to ensure that women’s work remained less well paid and inferior to men’s. Men’s position would then be enhanced absolutely, but also in relation to employers. This argument is reminiscent of claims for protection of skill and status deriving from guilds and artisan crafts. On one hand, it was not about women, but about protecting male craft position and independence vis-a-vis the capitalist who wished to control labour supply. On the other hand, it clearly was about gender, because women workers were the targets. The ideal of a family wage bolstered patriarchy because it was firmly attached to the image of a breadwinning male supporting a dependent wife. So, when women worked, it should be appropriate work. First, it simply meant work that men did not want. Second, it meant work that suited the feminine frame and delicacy and was situated in an appropriate place, usually the home. Thus, gendered attitudes about work took on new life, sublimation and permeated society much more widely during the century.
World History
