Abstract
Within the ubiquitous nineteenth-century discourse of separate spheres, women were portrayed as financially, intellectually and emotionally dependent upon their male kin. They were encouraged to perceive themselves as ‘relative creatures’, whose path in life was to nurture the family and to provide unstinting support for the head of the household. Furthermore, as the great exponent of domestic ideology, Sarah Ellis, proclaimed, if a woman did engage in paid work she, ‘ceases to be a lady’.1 However, as the following discussion will indicate, for countless middle-class families, such injunctions remained but an ideal. Much of the work performed by women — both in the upper and middle classes — such as social work, domestic labour, estate management and participation in family businesses was unpaid and non-contractual. As such, it has remained outside classic definitions of employment. Yet, women, even in the highest social classes, made a considerable contribution to the economic and domestic well-being of both their families and their communities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Quoted in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), p. 315; see also Family Fortunes ch. 3 for a rich discussion of domestic ideology.
Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 130–6;
K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 28–42;
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998), ch. 4.
Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 40 and passim.
Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution: A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (London: University of London Institute of Education, 1979), p. 30.
See Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Rationalization of Housework’, in Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), pp. 73–102.
See A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), ch. 1.
Patricia Hollis (ed.), Women in Public 1850–1900: Documents of the Victorian Women’s Movement (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1979), p. 45.
June Purvis, A History of Women’s Education in England (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1991), p. 66ff.
Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess (London: Hambledon Press, 1993).
M. Smith, Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist: A Fragment of a Life, with Letters from Jane Welsh Carlyle and Thomas Carlyle ed. George Coward (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1892), 2 vols.
See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago Press, 1985) ch. 5 for a stimulating account of the professional subculture which developed in the new schools.
For full details, see Anne Summers, Angels and Citizens: British Women as Military Nurses 1854–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988), chs 1–2.
Sally Alexander, ‘Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century London’, (1976) reprinted in Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London: Virago Press, 1994), p. 28.
Useful material on these issues may be found in 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, iii, chs 1–2.
Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire (London: Pimlico, 1994; first published Hutchinson, 1983), p. 93–4.
Quoted in Dominic David Alessio, ‘Domesticating “the Heart of the Wild”: Female Personifications of the Colonies 1886–1940’, Women’s History Review 6, no. 2 (1997), p. 249. See also Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen.
Marion Amies, ‘The Victorian Governess and Colonial Ideals of Womanhood’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1988), pp. 537–65.
For full details on Gillies, see Charlotte Yeldham, Margaret Gillies RWS, Unitarian Painter of Mind and Emotion 1803–1887 (Lampeter: Edwin Mellor Press, 1997).
Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1995), p. 92.
Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism, 1850–1900 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 82–90. The quote is from p. 89.
Quoted in Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1989), p. 78.
Bridget Hill, ‘Women, Work and the Census’, History Workshop Journal, 35 (1993), p. 82;
Catherine Hall, ‘Strains in the “Firm of Wife, Children and Friends”: Middle-Class Women and Employment in Early-Nineteenth- Century England’, in Catherine Hall, White Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 176.
Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society, Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 210.
A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth- Century Married Life (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 84, 114.
Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Viking, 1996), p. 237.
M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), pp. 165–6.
Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (London: Virago, 1981, first published 1930), pp. 33–5.
Pamela Horn, Victorian Countrywomen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991),p. 112.
Judy Lown, Women and Industrialisation: Gender at Work in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), pp. 29, 102, 146, 149, 164.
Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860 (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 71–2, 88.
Angela V. John, ‘Beyond Paternalism: The Ironmaster’s Wife in the Industrial Community’, in Angela V. John (ed.), Our Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History, 1830–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), p. 48.
Quoted in Pamela Horn, Ladies of the Manor: Wives and Daughters in Country- House Society, 1830–1918 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1991), pp. 184–5; Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society p. 63.
Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), p. 19; Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society p. 120.
Penelope Lane, ‘Women in the Regional Economy: The East Midlands, 1700–1830’, (Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Warwick, 1999), chs 2 and 3; Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society p. 222.
Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980, first published 1952), p. 30.
Hannah Barker, ‘Women and Business in Eighteenth Century Manchester’, unpublished paper delivered at ‘On the Town: Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth Century England, 1660–1820’, conference held at the University of Leicester, 29 May 1999.
Pamela Sharpe and Stanley D. Chapman, ‘Women’s Employment and Industrial Organisation: Commercial Lace Embroidery in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland and England’, Women’s History Review 5, no. 3 (1996), pp. 332, 338.
Fiona Bowie, Deborah Kirkwood and Shirley Ardener (eds), Women and Missions: Past and Present: Anthropological and Historical Perceptions (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993), chs 2–4.
Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 43–56.
There is a substantial literature on the work of Mary Carpenter. For a summary, see Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians pp. 174–8; and Seth Koven, ‘Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840–1914’, in Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (eds), Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 96–106.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), pp. 175–6.
Copyright information
© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
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_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_5
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-67630-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-3754-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)