The eighteenth century

In the eighteenth century, women worked with men in a familial situation, operated their own business or trade, worked on their own to support themselves or a family of children and worked to save a dowry. Some women were employers, others were employees. Some work was waged, and some not; some was paid annually, like servants, and some was paid by piece or day rates. Women’s motivations to work varied, and their values and intentions often differed from those who employed them. Work was both a class and a life-cycle issue. Elite women and some of the upper bourgeoisie probably did not engage in work that generated income. The rest of women did, either occasionally or regularly. Women ran businesses, they worked in workshops, servants engaged in farm, domestic and industrial tasks, and they took up tasks such as spinning, making small items for market, hawking and petty shopkeeping. Women taught children, did washing, prepared and sold food. Some activities were so closely related to family or domestic aspects of life that they were seen as casual by-products, and some women took up jobs directly related to their ‘domestic’ skills.

Women of all classes kept house. Elite women’s management was largely delegated, but they still shouldered this responsibility. Further down the social scale, females of all ages cleaned, cooked and maintained the household. Girls assisted, their work mirroring and complementing their mothers’; adolescent girls not needed at home frequently became servants in other homes. Housekeeping encompassed a wide range of tasks as Krunitz’s Encyklopadie (1788) detailed:

Supervision and work in the kitchen and cellar, the rearing of cattle, pigs and poultry, the maintenance, cleaning and production of clothing and linen, bedmaking, brewing, baking, washing, sewing, spinning, weaving and other work with wool and flax, and indeed anything concerning the cleanliness of the house and the maintenance of household equipment.19

It was work without boundaries. Household tasks, however, were relatively minimal and merged with other responsibilities. Food was often simply prepared, relying on bread, cheese and vegetables; cooked meals comprised a single pot of stew. Housing varied radically, as did standards of cleanliness, and cleaning simply was not an important part of housekeeping. Often houses had rough walls, unflagged flooring, thatched roofs and crude furniture. Sometimes, animals shared part of the house. Niemala farmhouse (1786), Finland, contained an entrance, dairy, main room and the inevitable sauna. Family members slept in beds, on benches, on top of the oven and on the floor; in summer, young people slept in storehouses. They cooked on an open fire in pots hanging from hooks or on tripods; smoke went out through a funnel in the roof. They ate meals at a long table, men sitting on benches near the wall, and women on movable ones.20

Maintaining furnishings and food was more substantial in wealthier households, usually delegated to servants. Susannah Whatman wrote private, detailed instructions to cope with regular turnover and achieve proper cleaning, explaining,

If the under servants could be depended on for doing all their business according to the instructions that could be given them, the eye of a Housekeeper would not be necessary to keep everything going on in its proper way. But this is never to be expected, and as the mistress of a large family can neither afford the time, nor have it in her power, to see what her servants are about, she must depend on the Housekeeper to see all her orders are enforced.21

Her instructions for polishing, scouring, cleaning and for pulling blinds and curtains to protect furnishing fabrics demonstrate that she knew the job, often completing tasks herself. Sophie von La Roche, who provided for a large family and boarders, wrote: ‘I go into my kitchen and give instructions, since I myself am versed in the art of cooking. I check up on all work in the house, write my accounts’.22

As more consumer goods became available, the character and quantity of domestic tasks changed, and women increasingly bought things that their mothers would have made. In Paris, earthenware displaced other utensils, including ‘a little Wedgwood pot’, even in homes of the poor, while stoves began to replace the open hearth.23 Tea and coffee became important cultural markers. ‘So coffee-drinking has become a habit, and one so deep-rooted that the working classes will start the day on nothing else’, wrote

Louis-Sebastian Mercier in the 1780s.24 Such criticisms are part of a larger critique of luxury, which characterised women as frivolous and wasteful. In reality, increasing consumerism was an important part of women’s ‘job’, as Vickery has shown. Elizabeth Shackleton kept meticulous accounts, logging specifics about purchases and when commissioning others to buy items ‘sent remarkably detailed orders and specified how the proxy consumer was to be repaid, and the means by which the purchases should be conveyed’.25 It was hardly a frivolous, ephemeral activity, but a vital part of supplying the household, in the style they expected to maintain.

Women’s household tasks slid over into agricultural work, traversing invisible boundaries. Most rural women contributed to their own homestead or, as young women, went in search of work as agricultural servants. It was essentially full-time, unwaged and balanced with household and market tasks such as agricultural produce or textiles. Women were often co-fermiers, sharing responsibility for the farm, signing tenancies and operating in partnership with husbands. Men and women were jointly responsible in Sweden, in many Germanic regions and in France. Women were also farmers and landowners, conducting the whole array of work with hired help, such as Welshwoman Mary Elliot who left a detailed inventory of her active farm.26 They also took on roles usually associated with men. In Wildberg, in 1736, a widow supported a family of four on a fulling mill and land that she worked, while another nearby supported six with a grain mill and land.27 Full-time farm servants lived in and their work echoed that of the farm wife, focusing more exclusively on farm work, such as managing small animals and carrying water. Day labourers were hired for specific tasks or seasons. A large part of their work focused on the barnyard, orchard and garden, which provided vegetables, fruit, nuts and olives for the home, but could generate cash. Similarly, care of chickens, ducks, geese, pigs or even a cow was a female responsibility that, beyond produce for home consumption, could also be turned into market goods. These activities were closely linked to ‘keeping house’ and, like much of women’s work, boundaries between tasks and earning blurred.

The implicit value systems embedded in the unchanging seasonal rhythms of work, joint working and pragmatic ‘substitutability’ shaped a sense of continuities in women’s farm work. Yet real changes began to take place because of new land-holding practices, rotations, crops, commercialisation and the gradual introduction of new tools with gendered notions of usage, the impact falling largely into the next century as ‘improvement’ spread. Innovation and increasingly commercial farming, especially in England, Scotland, the Low Countries and German states, meant changes in the character of fieldwork. In areas with enclosed fields based on grain production, women had less work except at seasonal peaks. But the introduction of turnips, sugar beet and potatoes requiring hoeing and tending six months of the year led to a regular demand for more female field labour. Improved rotations produced new work peaks, which reduced seasonal unemployment, and overall opportunities for women in agricultural work increased. Specialist dairy production also increased employment for women, who were seen as having a special identity with dairying.

Farmers increasingly used day labourers instead of permanent full-time labour. Farm service often turned into day labour and boys tended to retain these better-paid jobs, so that girls were squeezed out. At the same time, girls were turning their backs on farming for ‘better’ jobs as domestic or industrial servants. In Sweden, Johann Sussmilch commented in 1741, ‘among rural migrants to the cities, females

Predominate, because they are less needed in agriculture than men, and they can easily find work as servants in the cities.’28 Often, male workers or tenants had to supply a woman’s labour at haymaking, harvest or at tasks such as weeding. In south-west Scotland, a man had to bring a woman, usually his wife, to agricultural hirings because, ‘he could not be in service without marriage’.29 In much of France, eastern Netherlands and Germanic regions, women frequently provided labour service, perhaps one to three days in a week, and in Denmark even a landless labourer had to guarantee his wife’s labour for sixty to seventy days a year.

Though women were less likely to be regular fieldworkers, seasonal requirements such as haymaking and the harvest drew on a large labour force of men, women and children. The organisation of the Silesian harvest was recorded in 1790:

The cottagers begin their harvest work at sunrise. . . Their wives begin work when the cowherd puts the herd out to pasture and work until six-thirty with the men and the maid. At that time they leave work and go home and prepare the meal, which they bring to the men and the maids in the field, and they eat with them until eleven. Thereafter they remain at work until evening, but they also take a break from two to three.30

The use of the term ‘work’ is interesting. Presumably wives milked those cows, and making the meal surely was work.

As rural space was gendered, so were tasks. On smaller holdings, boundaries were less likely to be preserved, and women undertook virtually any task, regardless of its coding as male. Gendering of tasks was blurred anyway, and different local customs existed. But by and large, fiddly work was coded as female such as tying-up hops and vines, weeding and hoeing, while work associated with masculine attributes such as strength, skill or control were seen as men’s. In grape-growing areas of France and Italy, women trimmed young vines in early summer and tended olives and silkworms. They prepared the soil, planted, winnowed, hoed, weeded and dug root crops. They carried soil, loaded and spread dung and carted produce. In much of southern Europe women spent three to five hours daily watering crops by hand or carrying water to cattle and other livestock in the summer. Working with horses and larger tools, supervision and ‘specialist’ jobs, such as shepherd, carter and stockman were seen as male prerogatives, while specific fieldwork increasingly became identified as men’s work, as did ploughing, hedging and ditching. Thus, most German women were excluded from ploughing, woodcutting and long-distance transportation of agricultural produce. Women usually were barred from mowing and seldom used the scythe anywhere in Europe; threshing was often coded as male.31

Though women had always worked in handicraft production, they were employed in cottage industries on an exceptionally large scale. These industries were small scale, not far removed from the homestead, if at all, and were built on the industries and skills of traditional crafts and domestic manufacture. Domestic industries did not usually require apprenticeship, so women found these easier to enter than regulated trades. Entrepreneurs needed their labour, and the large numbers of women needing an income made them attractive and affordable employees. Women’s motives for taking up proto-industrial work were primarily financial: in order to support themselves and to contribute to household support. Between 50 and 90 per cent of French holdings were insufficient to support even a small family of two or three children, while in places such as the Scottish Highlands subsistence agriculture led women to take up commercial spinning. Most families in the Caux depended on money earned from women’s spinning, and 67.5 per cent of women who married in Auffay spun for cash during all or part of their married life.32 Married women and women with children were unlikely to go into service, so work that could be performed around other tasks was particularly attractive. It was work that could be fitted in and was perceived as ‘casual’. The minister at Keith-Hall, Scotland, believed a woman could knit ‘and do some little things about her house at the same time. Or she can work at her stocking while feeding her cows’.33

As in agriculture, women’s so-called natural abilities and nimble fingers suited them to many of the manipulative tasks associated with cottage industries. They were the spinners of Europe, working in every thread and fabric, and in cloth centres such as Rouen, Aberdeen or Augsburg thousands of urban and rural women spun. Some spun in a family setting within which the whole unit engaged in cloth production, such as in the West Riding of Yorkshire. In Scotland, most spun for linen or woollen merchants while men farmed and fished. Their labour was so important that Aberdeen officials hired a woman to teach others to spin linen, and in the Somme, officials claimed ‘It is necessary that at least one woman and girl per village learns to spin so that she can show the others’.34 The female culture associated with spinning is illustrated by the spinnstuben, ecreignes or veillees, described by Tammy Proctor, where women came together to spin and talk, usually in winter evenings when they could share heat and light. Women also wove, sometimes alternating with men who were seen as skilled master weavers. When demand for spinning fell off with declining textiles, as in Essex, women wove in growing numbers, often competing with men. Increasingly, parents and parish officers apprenticed girls to weaving, such as Colchester sisters Sarah and Dorothy Bardwell put to John Shenton in 1757, or Mary Kemp, just one of many put to bay and say weaving in Halstead in 1769.35 Large numbers of female silk workers worked in labour intensive preparatory stages from emptying, washing and unravelling cocoons to classifying thread or preparing it for looms. Needlecrafts built on skills learnt as girls. So they knitted, especially where needles rather than stocking frames dominated, as in the Shetlands and Russia. They closed shoes, seamed stockings and sewed gloves. Metal wares also relied on female labour. Around Thiers, Basse Auvergne, village women fixed pins to cards; in the English Black Country, their dexterity was particularly valued in button making and japanning. Apprenticed girls were common in buckle making and locksmithing. Women worked in the potteries, usually assisting male potters. A third of the workforce at Wedgwood, women made flowers, painted, enamelled, gilded, burnished, scoured and transferred engravings onto porcelain.36

Cottage industries covered a number of different organisational patterns, and within these women (and men) had varying degrees of control over their own work, its pace and the way it integrated with the rest of their life. This industrial work usually added to rather than substituted for women’s ‘normal’ work, thus increasing the intensity of their labour. Most women worked within familial or small workshop settings where they supported a man who was identified as the producer: the weaver, the cobbler, the glovemaker and the stocking-frame knitter. Thus they were identified as assistants and not primary workers, and further identified as ‘homeworkers’. As such ‘keeping house’ could be seen as their primary task and industrial activities as subsidiary. This is less apt for the metal trades and pottery, or indeed in mining, where women’s tasks were less like ‘natural’ female ones and where the work setting was less likely to be a home. Single women and widows might work in a family setting, but they also worked on their own, in other’s homes or workshops and in clusters of women who pooled their labour.

Women were also entrepreneurial. Some worked directly for putting-out manufacturers as in the Caux, Augsburg or across Scotland. In Rouen,

If [a spinner] has enough money to pay for three pounds of raw cotton, she buys no more. She works with this small amount, and works with care. When the cotton is spun she sells it that much more advantageously as her work is perfect. From the proceeds, she subtracts enough for her subsistence, and if her small capital has now increased, she buys a larger amount of raw material.37

In the Nagold valley, Wurttemberg, they supplied both the wool and the yarn, buying directly from the Ducal court.38 A distinctive feature of lace making in Ireland, the English Midlands, Normandy, Picardy, Flanders and Belgium was that women controlled all stages of production, whilst in most other domestic industries women were limited to preparatory or finishing tasks dependent on male workers. Marchandes could make comfortable profits at the height of the trade between 1730 and 1770; village women did less well, earning as little as two sous per day.39

Female wages were restricted partly because of the expectation that women did not require the same income as a man - that they were supplementing his income - and partly because plenty of women were available for hire. Hufton estimated that a woman’s earning power was between a third and a half of her husband’s for a working day of fifteen to sixteen hours.40 If a rate did not suit a woman, the merchant simply replaced her. Married women were particularly vulnerable since increasing subsistence pressures often drove them to increase their work effort simply to maintain their income, in other words, to ‘exploit’ their own labour. For example, following a bad harvest in 1782, Aberdeenshire hand knitters redoubled efforts to maintain family income in the face of a slump in demand and competition from stocking-frame knitters and overseas workers, all of which drove prices down.41 This willingness and necessity to work for the rates offered contributed to holding down the level of pay for female industrial work. As ‘casual, supplementary’ work, it never gained recognition as a primary source of income, affecting both the level of wages and the perceptions of women’s income as ‘pin money’. However, even to produce enough to support herself required a strenuous effort and was not ‘casual’ or ‘supplementary’.

Within towns, women installed themselves in a range of activities, sometimes using the corporate structure, other times in unregulated, tolerated or ‘female’ work. This was true in cities and towns, large and small, where women worked for others, in partnership and for themselves. But the urban scene was not uniform, shaped by local trends and varying degrees of state intervention. Entrenched and gendered divisions of labour together with political and economic structures of towns inhibited women’s access to business. Yet, they commonly participated in the commercial world, their economic role and status as traders was widely recognised, and the fluidity of growing commercial towns meant an expanding range of work opened to them. It was a period of flux for corporate communities. Community and guild were intertwined, as in Aberdeen, Frankfurt am Main, Helsinki or Wildberg where merchants held office in both town and guild.42 Guilds regulated workplaces, embedded masculinity into artisanal work and, as the protectors of skilled labour, positioned themselves in opposition to domestic industry. But new working practices and pressure from ‘untrained’, ‘unskilled’ and ‘dishonourable’ labour challenged the solidarity, occupational controls and standing of guildsmen. This uncertainty about status heightened their need to maintain social distinctions. At the same time, the commercial world was being cast as masculine. Defoe advised men to learn the business, speak the language of business and value his credit: ‘[if] a man is slandered in his character, or reputation, it is injurious; . . . but if this happens to a tradesman, he is immediately blasted and undone’.43 Business reputation was equally important to the female trader, and her ability to navigate the commercial world required a consciousness of the terrain.

Many women brought commercial experience to marriage, and wives’ skills as accountants, negotiators and saleswomen were invaluable. They were important in trading networks, sold goods, managed orders and raw materials, oversaw accounts and frequently made the workshop viable. They also placed business activities first, farming out childcare, food preparation and laundry. Men valued their contribution and defended their right to share in the workshop. Dorcas Lackinton’s bookkeeping ‘was a very fortunate circumstance to us both’, wrote her husband, London bookseller James Lackington, ‘accordingly, when I was out on business, my shop was well attended. This constant attention, and good usage, procured me many customers’.44 A wife’s constant presence, proximity to the work, powerful influence over day-to-day matters and considerable authority over workers gave her standing, despite an ambiguity in her position. Her prominence and authority rested on custom and marriage, and she was only as powerful as these intangibles allowed. She could become a target for grievances against the shop or her husband, grievances that often had a highly gendered flavour.45

Numerous widows continued family businesses. Often it was the simplest way to maintain the family of a former colleague, but they had few rights. They hired workers for tasks they could not perform because of lack of skills or customary restrictions. Thus some printers’ widows kept bookselling but resigned printing. Others did not: ‘from London to Vienna we find the widow’s imprimatur on eighteenth-century books’.46 In Paris, Mademoiselle de Silly printed Haydn’s Symphony No. 38 in 1779; the Gottingen University publisher Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht owed its survival to Anna, determined widow of the founder. Agnes Campbell was the wealthiest Scottish bookseller, largest printer in Edinburgh and Printer to King and Church by 1717.47 Of course, women managers required good knowledge of business. In 1764 Margaret Craig advertised that she would continue as a merchant, claiming the ‘goodwill of customers’, reassuring them that ‘they may depend on being well and readily served’ and she would ‘carefully obey’ commissions from the country.48 She literally set out her stall as a competent businesswoman, casting her business in the same language as men to claim her place in the commercial community.

Women were the milliners, mantua makers and seamstresses of eighteenth-century towns making all sorts of goods including underwear, children’s clothes and grave-cloths as well as high-class millinery demanded by European fashion. Women established themselves in these niches, also the main areas where women formed corporations. Fifty-six per cent of English apprentice mistresses were mantua makers and milliners. Lucia Reeves and Co., a large firm of Essex milliners, operated in Colchester High Street for some twenty years. It was typical of the high-status concern: conscientiously run, regularly apprenticing new girls and successful enough to employ at least two women and two apprentices.49 Guildswomen in Paris and provincial French towns strongly supported the corporate system, which gave them concrete economic benefits and better legal rights, using the privileges and structures to protect their trade. They gained a corporate identity and a notion of female honour that derived from the female nature of their trades and the independence that it allowed them to enjoy. These women scorned the skills of women in patriarchal workshops, taking pride in their legal and professional autonomy. And yet, not all women joined corporations, often because of prohibitive costs. In Clermont-Ferrand, seamstresses proudly declared themselves free of guild control and resisted tailors’ attempts to incorporate them.50 It was a good business enterprise for an able employer, attracting women with capital and some social standing; for the less fortunate, especially employees, prospects were much less promising. Certainly women were vulnerable in such seasonal trades, subject to periods of slack employment and low wages.

Women also moved around the community taking available work. Increasingly workshops employed unskilled labour and subcontractors. Women made many cheap unregulated items, such as brushes, combs, candles, soap, needles and pins, wooden bowls and spoons, without threatening craftsmen’s status. Also, domestic industries operated in towns, employing women in silk making in Coventry and London, buttonmaking in Birmingham and lace making in Antwerp, Lyon and Beaulieu.

Women frequently worked in provisioning trades and kept inns and lodgings. Innkeeping was regarded as suitable for women and they could make a good living, but they operated on the margins of respectability and had to struggle to maintain and defend their reputation, using courts when necessary. When Mrs Warrand moved to the centre of Forres (Scotland), she claimed prestige from the location, the previous possessor, the laird of Macleod and the elegance with which she fitted out the inn. She traded on ‘the discretion and civility which has all along been the characteristick [sic] of her House’.51 Again, hers is the language of business, and the reference to discretion and civility is a specific allusion to the demeanour expected of Defoe’s honest and ‘complete tradesman’. Women dominated the marketplace as vendors of virtually any commodity. They sold from baskets, such as Fisherrow and Newhaven fishwives who walked into Edinburgh. They were highly visible as petty traders and shopkeepers: luckenbooth keepers of Edinburgh, women of Parisian boutiques and women such as Helene Amalie Ascherfeld, who expanded her deceased husband’s grocery business.52 Maria Borgstrom, widow of a custom collector and mother-in-law of a wealthy Helsinki merchant, earned a living selling her beer.53 Such trading activities were accepted as extensions of women’s ‘natural’ responsibility for provisioning.

The independent woman was frequently the most vulnerable to economic vicissitudes, but with opportunity, ability and perseverance, she could achieve income and independence, as Pamela Sharpe demonstrated in her reconstruction of the business life of Hester Pinney.54 Female partnerships were important to businesswomen, and letters and journals show that, for some, working independently or in partnership was worth striving for. Women with little family status, capital and recognised skills moved on and off charitable rolls. Low wages often forced them to turn to whatever was available, frequently undertaking several things at once and ‘making shift’. The difficulties of coping alone meant that many single and widowed women did not succeed. However, networks of friends, family or colleagues could give widows an advantage over spinsters. Remarriage was another option. Much of the animosity towards female workers was directed at ‘masterless’ women, women who appeared to challenge the rights and privileges of the corporate community. The Merchant Company of Edinburgh, for example, complained about the female shopkeepers, since ‘they have no title to the privilege of trade in this city, which is hurtfull to the trading burgesses’.55 Indeed, anxiety about ‘unbridled women’ was partly due to the visibility of independent female traders, outwith the control of a male, women who did not assume the natural state.

Women’s work centred on the need to support hearth and home; this was seen as natural to the world around them and largely to women themselves. It carried with it a number of implications. Importantly, it meant that if necessary, married women took up a wide range of tasks to bring in income, from sale of produce to producing goods for sale, working for others or going begging. For most women, household tasks carried little ideological baggage and were simply a central part of their activities. However, domestic tasks contributed to making home a recognised female space, where they were in charge, frequently controlling finances. Housing architecture with a large central and communal room built around the fireplace where the women presided was fundamental to this social construction. They were often pivotal in decisions about household strategies, mediating with the outside world and, through market activities, contributing to immediate household needs.

When men were away, as fishermen, agricultural workers, soldiers or carters, women moved into the vacuum. When extra hands were needed, as at haying or harvest, women ‘mucked in’. They worked side by side with husbands and substituted for them either short term, taking turns at a loom, or long term, managing an entire business. This contribution was so essential and so closely associated with women that men frequently applied to remarry quickly saying they could not manage without a wife. In Sweden, over half of widowers remarried, especially young men most likely to need labour, housekeeper and mother, since ‘for all households to function well, ideally they had to have a full “crew”’.56 However, if some work was interchangeable, ideas about it were not; a wife temporarily took on his work. When her husband was able, she should leave it to him and get on with her work. A wife’s role in a partnership depended on her abilities, but coding tasks as ‘skilled’ or as men’s work could prevent women from undertaking them. The picture is one of overlapping gender-specific boundaries, while local and regional factors affected divisions of labour.

The notion that women functioned only within the family economy is flawed in that numerous women operated throughout the economy in a way that, while compatible with family needs, was not necessarily predicated on family work, or even a shared location of work. Yet women’s activities were still perceived as additional - add-ons, by-employments and, therefore, casual. The fact that women’s work was task oriented, fitted in and around her ‘main’ household chores, made her not only a flexible worker but also a ‘casual’ or supplementary worker - indeed without the identity of ‘worker’. Within the household and workshop, the principles of male head of household and male control of the workshop fundamentally underpinned the premise that men’s work was high-status work and that female work was supplementary and supportive. She was his assistant. This had an important impact on wages, since her earnings were seen as ‘pin money’, and depressed wages for women who did not contribute to a family pot.

However, women negotiated such constraints, either taking up new trades, or operating in parallel, and domestic industries provided opportunities for them. As men’s independent work status was threatened and with it their personal value, they sought to protect their position. Thus it became important not only to define skill and status vis-a-vis men who were poachers, but against women. As shifting definitions of status came together with re-evaluations of femininity, women were more frequently perceived as unsuited for work, particularly skilled work. An important characteristic of skill is that it is a linguistic device to claim and maintain control and exclusivity in the workplace. Relying on masculine honour and standing, vulnerable men, especially journeymen, identified women as challenging their status. They fell back on masculinity, their patriarchal role and the guild as a ‘family’ organisation to bolster their economic claims.

Most men and women did not go ‘out to work’. Their community and neighbourhood was their milieu and their contacts and networks were a source of strength. But women were not limited by locality. They were foremost amongst migrants, and their movement into towns populated urban spaces, bringing workers to crafts, trades, shopkeeping and service. Many towns generated a commercial, outward-looking character, and women were a fundamental part of that, as workers, consumers and entrepreneurs. Their standing and position together with financial backing and need or ambition determined how they operated in the employment nexus. Their ingenuity and ability helped them make their way, supporting themselves and, usually, dependants. In the process some became very wealthy, such as Agnes Campbell, Hester Pinney and Amalia Aschenfeld. Others were not so successful, and they relied on a makeshift economy or charity. Women workers operated across the spectrum and were not confined by ideology, personal interest or social class to a domestic space or a domesticated role.