Abstract
AbstractOur story opens in 1800 — a critical juncture in the labour history of working-class women. The coming years were to witness an intricate tapestry of change and tradition, as new employment practices and technologies became woven into the work experiences of labouring women. For an older historiographical tradition (as in Alice Clark’s Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, first published in 1919), the nineteenth century represented a pernicious departure in women’s exploitation as capitalism began to fracture the harmonious patterns of pre-industrial production. However, more recent commentators have noted that gender had played a critical role in the workplace in the pre-industrial period also.1 This chapter will consider the ways in which gendered ideologies variously interplayed with economic advances to produce a highly diverse labour market for working women. In many industries, definitions of skilled work became increasingly codified by gender — a development which had complex and divergent implications for the self-perceptions of women themselves; whilst enormous regional and sectoral variations in both employment practices and customs of gendered labour division forewarn against simple analyses of female exploitation in the workplace.
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Notes
Useful overviews of this historiography may be found in Judith Bennett, ’“History that Stands Still”: Women’s Work in the European Past’, Feminist Studies 14 (1988), pp. 269–83;
and Amanda Vickery, ‘The Neglected Century: Writing the History of Eighteenth Century Women’, Gender and History, 3, no. 2 (1991), pp. 211–19.
Jane Humphries, ‘Enclosures, Common Rights and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), pp. 17–42.
See Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England (London: UCL, 1994, first published 1989), ch. 5;
Raphael Samuel, ‘Village Labour’, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), pp. 10–12.
For an overview of women’s declining opportunities, see K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), ch. 1.
Eve Hostettler, ‘Gourlay Steell and the Sexual Division of Labour’, History Workshop Journal, 4 (1977), pp. 95–8;
Jennie Kitteringham, ‘Country Work Girls in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Samuel (ed.), Village Life and Labour 1994 pp. 73–138, the quote is from p. 92.
Sally Alexander, ‘Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century London: A Study of the Years 1820–60s’, (1976) reprinted in Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman: And other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 52–3.
Kitteringham, ‘Country Work Girls’; Barbara W. Robertson, ‘In Bondage: The Female Farm Worker in South-East Scotland’, in Eleanor Gordon and Esther Breitenbach (eds), The World is Ill-Divided: Women’s Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), pp. 117–19.
E. F. Richards, ‘Women in the British Economy since about 1700: An Interpretation’, History, 59 (1974), p. 342 n.;
David Williams, The Rebecca Riots: A Study in Agrarian Discontent (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1955), pp. 100–1.
Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 42.
Ibid., ch. 3; Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Role of Gender in the “First Industrial Nation”: Farming and the Countryside in England, 1780–1850’, in Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 193.
Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work and Family (New York and London: Routledge, 1989, first published 1978), p. 80.
Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 39–42.
Michael Anderson, ‘The Social Implications of Demographic Change’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3 vols, ii, p. 63.
Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London: UCL, 1998), pp. 88–95.
Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave, 1995), pp. 101–16.
For a fine overview, see Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanisation and the Early Phases of Industrialisation in England’, in Patrick Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 64–98.
Maxine Berg, ‘What Difference Did Women’s Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), pp. 22–44.
Berg, ‘Women’s Work, [and] Mechanisation’, p. 82; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures 1700–1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain (London: Routledge, 1994, 2nd edn), p. 151.
A concise treatment of the position of women within protoindustry may be found in Pat Hudson, ‘Proto-Industrialization in England’, in Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman (eds), European Protoindustrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 49–60.
Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest 1800–1850 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 72–3.
Jane Gray, ‘Gender and Plebeian Culture in Ulster’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24, no. 2 (1993), p. 266;
Mary Cullen, ‘Breadwinners and Providers: Women in the Household Economy of Labouring Families, 1835–6’, in Maria Luddy and Cliona Murphy (eds), Women Surviving: Studies in Irish Women’s History in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1989), pp. 85–117.
See J. J. Lee, ‘Women and the Church Since the Famine’, in Margaret MacCurtain and Donncha O Corrain (eds), Women in Irish Society: The Historical Dimension (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1979), pp. 37–45.
Sarah Horrell and Jane Humphries, ‘Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865’, Economic History Review, 48 (1995), pp. 89–117; Richards, ‘Women in the British Economy’, pp. 337–57.
Meg Gomersall, Working-Class Girls in Nineteenth-Century England: Life, Work and Schooling (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1997), pp. 57,115–7.
Jane McDermid, ‘“Intellectual Instruction is Best Left to a Man”: The Feminisation of the Scottish Teaching Profession in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Women’s History Review 6, no. 1 (1997), pp. 95–6; Pinchbeck, Women Workers pp. 232–5.
Pamela Horn, Victorian Countrywomen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), pp. 193, 196–7.
Patricia Hollis (ed.), Women in Public 1850–1900: Documents of the Victorian Women’s Movement (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 46.
Judy Lown, Women and Industrialisation: Gender at Work in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), p. 33.
Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1992), p. 229.
Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 113.
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), p. 208.
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3 vols, ii, pp. 122–3.
Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 234.
Jan Lambertz, ‘Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Industry’, History Workshop Journal, 19 (1985), pp. 29–61.
These developments are clearly charted in Carol E. Morgan, ‘Women, Work and Consciousness in the Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Industry’, Social History, 17 (1992), pp. 23–41.
Sophie Hamilton, ‘Images of Femininity in the Royal Commissions of the 1830s and 1840s’, in Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 79–105;
Robert Gray, ‘Factory Legislation and the Gendering of Jobs in the North of England, 1830–60’, Gender and History, 5 (1993), pp. 70–5.
Angela V. John, By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London: Croom Helm, 1980), ch. 1.
Harriet Bradley, Men’s Work, Women’s Work: A Sociological History of the Sexual Division of Labour in Employment (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), p. 107.
Cited in Jane Humphries, ‘Protective Legislation, the Capitalist State and Working-Class Men: The Case of the 1842 Mines Regulation Act’, Feminist Review, no. 7 (1981), p. 26.
Duncan Bythell, The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Batsford Academic, 1978), pp. 145–6.
E. P. Thompson and Eileen Yeo (eds), The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849–50 (London: Merlin Press, 1971), pp. 147–52;
Helen Rogers, ’“The Good Are Not Always Powerful, Nor the Powerful Always Good”: The Politics of Women’s Needlework in Mid-Victorian London’, Victorian Studies, 40 (1997), pp. 589–623.
Ibid., pp. 3–55; Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family, for example, pp. 87, 125; Bridget Hill, ‘Women, Work and the Census’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), pp. 78–94.
Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work? Landladies and Lodgers in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century England’, in Sandra Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 64–97.
Enid Gauldie, Cruel Habitations: A History of Working-Class Housing 1780–1918 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), ch. 5.
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© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (2001). Work. In: British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_2
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