Sources

Working women are often described as difficult subjects to find in the sources. This is a problem of both perception and recording. They often were not recorded as workers simply because they were women and not conceptualised as workers. The British censuses have been challenged on this point regularly. Certainly women’s work was under-recorded for most of the life of the census. But the purpose of the census was not to record work in the first place, though that function changed as it moved into the twentieth century. Men completed census returns, male heads of household who saw female family members as dependants, not as workers. And census-takers would not have challenged this.14 Because women were less likely to be wage-earners, and more likely to work at several jobs, or seasonal work, or move around the economy, they were also less visible workers. For example, the census lists virtually none of the fish-gutters of the Sutherland coast. Working women’s low status and humble origins did not help, but working women of the middling orders were not well recorded either.

They left few records of their own and, significantly, their voices are frequently missing, especially in the period before the explosion of government inquiries or near universal literacy. For the most part, where we have testimony from the earlier part of this period is where women engaged with officialdom that recorded their situation and sometimes their words. These contacts were likeliest in cases of crime, dispute or poverty, but they reflect the unusual, not the norm, and both under-represent and misrepresent women. Yet useful and valuable research has come from them, and in the nineteenth century, formal shifts in relationships between servants and masters in Hamburg could be studied through police court cases.15 Similarly English poor law settlement examinations have provided potted biographies, though women’s voices cannot be clearly extracted. Verbatim transcripts have been used effectively, but these are few and far between and rarely allow a comparative or long-term picture to be created.16 Sources are often from an external and male gaze, since working women were least likely to write or leave written reflections. Investigations and enquetes of nineteenth-century Europe provided a specific kind of lens through which to view women workers. Some of these were governmental; others resulted from a social conscience that led individuals or groups to undertake them. While these had their own agendas, nevertheless, they produced a body of information on working women and frequently gave us their voices, even if mediated.

Diaries, letters and autobiographies exist throughout the period, weighted toward the elite, of course. More work could be done on family papers, especially letters, household records and accounts; Amanda Vickery and Bonnie Smith have shown how profitable this can be.17 Women also wrote about women. Tract and prescriptive literature provide valuable insights to the context within which work was couched, as do magazines and journals that run throughout this period. Women were observers, actors and commentators on their world, and they were writers and publishers of newspapers and magazines. The activities of eighteenth-century publican Mrs McGhie were chronicled almost exclusively in the Aberdeen Journal.18 Also, better literacy together with the emergence of women’s and labour movements fostered more personal accounts from a wider socio-economic spectrum. By the twentieth century there was an explosion in information and, building on older traditions of enquiry, oral history developed as a way to capture the views and histories of people who would not normally have written it down. It allowed historians to directly interrogate the subject and ask the questions that most of us cannot ask our subjects.

The history of women’s work also benefits from an economic and social history that is far more sophisticated in finding, reading and utilising sources, and in understanding the economic and household context within which people worked. A range of corporate records, trade directories, town directories and official and semi-official records are a source of statistical, economic and demographic information. Recent studies have used complex sets of sources, including oral history, company records, indentures, insurance records, tax records, parental guides, newspapers and town records. So women are not actually hard to find, but creativity and frustration are dual features of the research. Women can tell us about their work, but we have to be aware of the opportunities and pitfalls of a range of seemingly innocuous and not obviously useful records to find them, and then we have to interpret the record.