Women, Work And Sexual Politics In Eighteenth-Century England

Bridget Hill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781135368845
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The author offers a reassessment of how women's experience of work in 18th- century England was affected by industrialization and other elements of economic, social and technological change.; This study focuses on the household, the most important unit of production in the 18th century. Hill examines the work done by the women of the household, not only in "housework" but also in agriculture and manufacturing, and explains what women lost as the household's independence as a unit of economic production was undermined.; Considering the whole range of activities in which women were involved - including many occupations unrecorded in censuses which have, therefore, been largely ignored by historians - Hill charts the increasing sexual division of labour and highlights its implications. She also discusses the role of service in husbandry and apprenticeship, as sources of training for women, and the consequences of their decline.; The final part of the book considers how the changing nature of women's work influenced courtship, marriage and relations between the sexes. Among the topics discussed are the importance of the women's contribution to setting up and maintaining a household; labouring women's attitudes to marriage and divorce and the customary alternatives to them; and the role of spinsters and widows. The author concludes by asking to what extent the industrial revolution improved the overall position of women and the opportunities open to them.; This series aims to re-establish women's history, and to challenge the assumptions of much mainstream history. Focusing on the modern period and encouraging perspectives from other disciplines, it seeks to concentrate upon areas of focal importance in the history of Britain and continental Europe.; Bridget Hill is the author of "Eighteenth-Century Women: An Anthology" and "The First English Feminist".

1

Introduction: Pinchbeck and After

In 1930, when Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution was first published, such a historical project was unprecedented: social history and women's history owe Ivy Pinchbeck a great debt.

Kerry Hamilton, Foreword to Virago's 1981 edition of Ivy Pinchbeck's

Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850

When Ivy Pinchbeck's Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 was first published in 1930, very little was known of the part played by women in the Industrial Revolution, and even less in the pre-industrial period. If, as she claimed, it was ‘often assumed that the woman worker was produced by the Industrial Revolution’ (ibid., p.1),¹ with the advent of the factory and the mill, such a view is no longer tenable. Throughout her study, the point is constantly being driven home that women in the eighteenth century, single or married, worked—and worked hard. Long before the impact of industrialization it was taken for granted that women by their labour made a valuable contribution to the subsistence of their families. In many cases that contribution covered their own and their children's maintenance.

The fact that today any investigation of women's work in the eighteenth century must start with a study that is now over half a century old, and that covers a period ending in the middle of the nineteenth century, is a tribute to the continuing importance of that study and a comment on the paucity of the work that has followed it. It is a book that requires constant rereading. Information and comment are so concentrated that it is all too easy to miss points. There is always something new to be found on going back to it, and whenever you believe you have come up with a new idea, it is worth checking whether Pinchbeck got there first. The sheer volume of primary source material through which she worked carefully and methodically is immensely impressive, and indeed daunting, to those who have come after her. Her bibliography remains valuable for any student of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century working women.

One earlier study of working women demands mention here. Alice Clark's Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) is mainly concerned with the seventeenth century, it is true, but much of it anticipates, and relates closely to, the later century. Clark and Pinchbeck remain by far the best entry into a study of eighteenth-century women. Another product of that remarkable group of women historians that emerged in the period following the First World War was Dorothy George. Her London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925), while not solely concerned with women, contains a great deal about London women and their occupations, about female servants and apprentices.

What has been written about eighteenth-century working women since Pinchbeck wrote?² There have been several general surveys of eighteenth-century agriculture which, while not primarily concerned with women, contain some useful references.³ In 1930 very little was known about service in husbandry, and almost nothing about the role women played within it. Understandably the section of the book Pinchbeck devoted to the subject is brief. The studies of Ann Kussmaul, Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England (1981), and ‘The ambiguous mobility of farm servants’, Economic History Review, 342 (1981), while not confined to female servants, shed light on their work, the terms and conditions of their engagement, and their mobility, and revealed the importance of service in the education and training of the young. On the decline of service there is K.D.M.Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor (1985), chapter 2.

Pinchbeck was not unaware of great regional differences in the nature and extent of women's employment in agriculture. She saw a divide between employment opportunities in the north and the south. But it was not a theme she developed. Keith Snell's article ‘Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living and women's work in the south and east, 1690–1860’, Economic History Review, 34 (1983), extended and updated in his more recent Annals of the Labouring Poor, chapter 1, has shown how in the south and east the seasonal pattern of employment between men and women diverged. With this divergence a much clearer sexual division of labour emerged in agricultural tasks, leaving women with fewer opportunities for agricultural employment and restricting them to the less prestigious and worst paid of agricultural work. A subsequent volume planned by Snell on the north will make possible a direct comparison between the experience of women in the north and south.

Only briefly mentioned by Pinchbeck was the effect of changing agricultural technology on women's employment and the sexual division of labour. Michael Roberts, in ‘Sickles and scythes: women's work and men's work at harvest time’ (History Workshop Journal, no. 7 (1979)), has looked at the relationship between women's exclusion from the work of reaping and the substitution of the scythe for the sickle in the south. On the nineteenth century, Eve Hostettler's ‘Gourlay Steell and the sexual division of labour’, History Workshop Journal, no. 4 (1977) is an interesting sequel.⁴

Since Pinchbeck wrote there has been no study of textile manufacturing in the eighteenth century which focuses specifically on women workers, although several works on textile manufacturing have been published.⁵ Nor with the exception of Maxine Berg's The Age of Manufactures, 1700–1820 (1985), particularly chapter 6, has there been any comprehensive study of women workers in domestic industry, and most notably in those where female labour was predominant—lace-making, straw-plaiting, and the manufacture of buttons and gloves. There have been two articles of seminal importance, notably Eric Richards's ‘Women in the British economy since about 1700’, History, 59/197 (1974), and N.McKendrick's ‘Home demand and economic growth: a new view of women and children in the Industrial Revolution’, in Historical Perspectives: Studies in English Thought and Society in Honour of J.H.Plumb, edited by N.McKendrick (1974). There are also two collections of essays on early modern England which contain interesting discussions of women's work.⁶

Pinchbeck amassed a formidable body of information. With few of her facts can one quarrel; it is the conclusions she drew that call for some reassessment. My aim in writing this book is to try and provide students of eighteenth-century working women with a synthesis of work done since Pinchbeck wrote and to examine some of those areas of women's work on which she did not concentrate, themes which she broached but had no space to develop. When she wrote, knowledge of the social history of the eighteenth century was limited. If in the last sixty years there has been little added to our knowledge of working women, we do know far more about the changing eighteenth-century social context. Chapter 2 attempts to summarize some of the main work that has changed our understanding.

The working women on whom Pinchbeck's study focused were almost always seen against the background of one particular occupation or employment. But everything we now know of working women in the eighteenth century suggests how often they were involved in more than one occupation. Pinchbeck was not unaware of this aspect of women's work. She drew attention to how often a household combined work in agriculture with work in a local industry. The household was the most important unit of production, and encompassed an economy in which by far the greater part of the work of women was carried out. Because that economy was experiencing development, we need to be aware of the changing role women were called on to play within it. Most pertinent here is the work of Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, ‘Women's work and the family in nineteenth-century Europe’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 17 (1975), and their Women, Work and Family (1978).⁷ The working role of women in the family economy, the changes it underwent in the course of the century, and the consequences for women's work are the subject of chapters 3 and 4.

Pinchbeck only briefly made reference to female service in husbandry, but together with apprenticeship it provided opportunities for the training of women and is the theme of chapter 5. The whole area of female apprenticeship in the eighteenth century is one curiously disregarded by historians. O.J.Dunlop and R.D.Denman's English Apprenticeship and Child Labour: A History (1912), on which Pinchbeck drew, still remains the standard authority. Despite a number of useful county and town studies of apprenticeship, there has been little on female apprenticeship. By far the best and most comprehensive recent study is in Keith Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor (1985), where a chapter is devoted to the apprenticeship of women. I take up this theme in chapter 6.

Although Pinchbeck acknowledged housework as a responsibility of women over and above their involvement in agriculture and industry and saw home-making as perhaps their most important role, she did not devote much space to it. Social historians with few exceptions have taken housework for granted as part of women's role, without ever enquiring how it influenced the evaluation of the other work they performed. Until recently no serious historical study had been made of it. Since the publication of Caroline Davidson's A Woman's Work is Never Done: A History of Housework 1650–1980 (1982), this is no longer true.⁸ What housework meant in the eighteenth century is considered in chapter 7.

Another group of women workers omitted from Pinchbeck's survey is domestic servants. The reason she gave for excluding them was that her concern was with those ‘women's activities’ that were ‘definitely affected by the industrial and economic reorganisations of the time’ (p. 4). Whether or not female domestic service is really to be seen as unaffected by industrialization, it constituted by far and away the most important occupation for women after agriculture. Although its importance is generally recognized, little work has been done on it. The most authoritative work on domestic service remains Jean J.Hecht, The Domestic Service Class in Eighteenth-Century England (1956).⁹ Also of importance is Theresa McBride's The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820–1920 (1976), which raises points that are as relevant to the eighteenth as to the nineteenth century. Cissie Fairchild's Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (1984), is a stimulating study and has relevance to our own experience. Female domestic service is discussed in chapter 8.

While a great deal—even most—of women's work in the eighteenth century was within their own households, there was also work that was not. Attention has mainly been focused on women's work in textile manufacture and other domestic industries, at the expense of ignoring the wide range of other employments in which women worked. Much of this work was not full-time. A great deal of it was combined with other work, or seasonal. Often it was work on which few commented and that failed to be recorded in the early nineteenth-century censuses. It is these ignored, unrecorded, or invisible occupations of women which are considered in chapter 9.

Pinchbeck saw clearly both how changes in agriculture and domestic industry could transform the nature and extent of women's work and how those same changes were contributing to the undermining of the family economy. That economy had an importance that went far beyond economics or productive work opportunities for women. Relations between the sexes, the degree to which patriarchal power within that unit was oppressive, the nature of courtship, attitudes to, and age at, marriage—all these were influenced by the nature of the family economy and the work contribution each member was able to make to it. So when that economy began to disintegrate, more was involved than a change in the nature of women's work, or where, or even for whom, they worked. In chapter 10 we look at the economics of courtship and marriage, how labouring women regarded marriage, the importance of the contribution they made to the setting up of a separate household, and of the role played by their work skills in maintaining its independence.

Marriage deprived a woman of any legal existence. How far was the law relevant to labouring women, and what, if any, were the consequences for them of the law relating to property in marriage? Many women in the eighteenth century never went through any legal marriage ceremony. Those who did were often deserted, or sometimes sold. Were the customary alternatives to an unacceptable and costly marriage and divorce law to which the labouring population resorted of equal advantage to women and men? These questions are the subject of chapter 11.

Although there has been a great deal written about courtship and marriage in the eighteenth century, there is remarkably little on the plebeian experience.¹⁰ There is J.R.Gillis, For Better, For Worse (1985), a general survey whi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Women’s History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Pinchbeck and After
• 2 The Social Context
• 3 Women’s Work in the Family Economy
• 4 The Undermining of the Family Economy
• 5 Female Servants in Husbandry
• 6 Female Apprenticeship
• 7 Housework
• 8 Domestic Service
• 9 Ignored, Unrecorded, and Invisible: Some Occupations of Women
• 10 The Economics of Courtship and Marriage
• 11 Clarity and Obscurity in the Law Relating to Wives, Property, and Marriage
• 12 Spinsters and Spinsterhood
• 13 Widows
• 14 Conclusion
• Index