Women, Work and Family

Louise A. Tilly, Joan W. Scott

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781136742842
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: History
• Categoría: World History

Women, Work and Family is a classic of women's history and is still the only text on the history of women's work in England and France, providing an excellent introduction to the changing status of women from 1750 to the present.

PART I

The Family Economy in Pre-Industrial England and France

You cannot expect to marry in such a manner as neither of you shall have occasion to work, and none hut a fool will take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by his labour and who will contribute nothing towards it herself.

“A Present for a Servant Maid” (1743), quoted in Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, pp. 1–2.

1

Economy and Demography

In the cities and the countryside of eighteenth-century England and France economic life was organized on a small scale. The visual image one gets from reports of the period is of small farms dotting the country-side and of small shops lining the crowded narrow streets of cities.

During his journey in France, the English journalist Arthur Young observed in the region of the Pyrenees “many small properties . . . the country mostly inclosed and much of it with thorned hedges.” He described the vineyards of the Garonne as “one of the most fertile vales in Europe . . . the towns frequent and opulent; the whole country an incessant village.”¹ In poorer regions, too, Young noted the prevalence of small farms, isolated or grouped in scattered hamlets and villages. In parts of northern England, the picture was similar:

From Wooburn to Newport Pagnell the soil has great variety; for some miles it is quite a light sand, and then a gravel with some light loams: About Wanden the soil is chiefly sand, but few of their farms are very large. . . .²

An English clergyman writing in 1795 recalled that

Formerly many of the lower sort of people occupied tenements of their own, with parcels of land about them, or they rented such of others. On these they raised for themselves a considerable part of their subsistence. . . .³

The center of life for rural people, whatever the size of their holding, was a farm. The center of the farm was the household in which they lived and around which work was organized.

For those engaged in rural and urban manufacturing the household was both a shop and a home. This handloom weaver's recollection of his uncle's house could have been written by many a craftsman or small shopkeeper in England and France:

The row of houses in which my uncle lived faced the morning sun; a nearly paved footpath, and a causey for carts, lay in front of the houses from one end of the row to the other. My uncle's domicile, like all the others, consisted of one principal room called “the house”; on the same floor with this was a loom-shop capable of containing four looms, and in the rear of the house on the same floor, were a small kitchen and a buttery. Over the house and the loom-shop were chambers; and over the kitchen and buttery was another small apartment, and a flight of stairs. . . .⁴

In the craftshop and on the land most productive activity was based in a household, and those laboring often included family members. This form of organization is often referred to as the household or domestic mode of production. It had important consequences for family organization. The labor needs of the household defined the work roles of men, women, and children. Their work, in turn, fed the family. The interdependence of work and residence, of household labor needs, subsistence requirements, and family relationships constituted the “family economy.”

The specific form of the family economy differed for craftsmen and peasants. And in the city and the country there were important differences between the prosperous and the poor, between those families with property and those who were propertyless. Nonetheless, in all cases production and family life were inseparably intertwined. And the household was the center around which resources, labor, and consumption were balanced.

RURAL ECONOMIES

Most people lived in rural areas and worked in agriculture during the eighteenth century. Estimates based on scattered local studies show that in 1750 agriculture employed about 65 percent of all English people and about 75 percent of the French population.⁵ The forms of agricultural organization differed in France and England.

In France, the most typical rural household in the eighteenth century was the peasant household. In the course of the century the pressures of increased population and of high rents and taxes drove many families off the land or left them severely impoverished. Young's description conveys the hardship of their lives:

The farmers, in the greater part of France, are blended with the peasantry; and, in point of wealth, are hardly superior to the common labourers; these poor farmers are metayers, who find nothing towards stocking a farm but labour and implements; and being exceedingly miserable, there is rarely a sufficiency of the latter.⁶

Some families barely subsisted on their land, others not only produced for themselves but marketed a crop of grapes, grains, olives, and the like. Some families manufactured cloth or clothing to supplement their earnings. Others hired themselves out as part-time laborers as well as tilled their own soil. Whatever the expedients they adopted to make ends meet, these rural people remained peasants, and the family's life ultimately was organized around the property, no matter how small the holding.⁷

The composition of the peasant household could vary considerably over the years. At any time those living and working together constituted a “family” whether or not they were related by blood. “The peasant concept of the family includes a number of people constantly eating at one table or having eaten from one pot. . . peasants in France included in the concept of the family the groups of persons locked up for the night behind one lock.”⁸

Although the terms family and household were often used inter-changeably, and although servants took their meals with family members, the number of non-kin in the household of a propertied peasant depended on the composition of his own family. The propertied peasant had to balance labor and consumption. His resource—land—was fixed. The amount of work to be done and thus the number of laborers needed changed in the course of the family's life cycle. A young couple could adequately provide for its own needs, with the assistance perhaps of some day laborers at planting and harvest times. As children were born, they also had to be fed, and the availability of the mother to work away from the hearth decreased. The consumption needs of the family exceeded its labor power, and so at this point outside labor was recruited. Young men and women were added to the household as servants. They usually worked in exchange for room and board, rarely for cash wages. They were available for work because their own families either could not support them or did not need their labor. (One study suggested that 30 percent of all rural workers in England at the end of the seventeenth century were servants, and that 60 percent of all those fifteen to twenty-four years old in rural England were servants.) As the peasant's own children grew up, the need for outside help diminished. When several children lived in the household, there might be more labor available than the size of the landholding warranted. At this point, farmers might rent or buy additional land. More typically, in the land-poor regions of Western Europe, children would leave home to seek employment. They usually worked in other households as servants.⁹

In England some people still supported themselves on small farms during the eighteenth century, but they were a decreasing group. The growth of agricultural capitalism, particularly in the form of sheep-herding to produce wool for sale, led to the enclosure of large areas of land and the gradual, and violently resisted, dispossession of small farmers. Despite their protests and resistance, English peasants lost the struggle to retain their land and their right to farm it.¹⁰ By 1750 land ownership was concentrated “in the hands of a limited class of very large landlords, at the expense both of the lesser gentry and the peasants. . . .”¹¹ One troubled observer described the process in 1795:

The land-owner, to render his income adequate . . . unites several small farms into one, raises the rent to the utmost, and avoids the expence of repairs. The rich farmer also engrosses as many farms as he is able to stock. . . . Thus thousands of families, which formerly gained an independent livelihood on those separate farms, have been gradually reduced to the class of day-labourers. ... It is a fact, that thousands of parishes have not now half the number of farmers which they had formerly. And in proportion as the number of farming families has decreased, the number of poor families has increased.¹²

The dispossessed became agricultural laborers working for wages on the large farms, or they turned to cottage industry. Those involved in cottage industry worked at home on account for a merchant entrepreneur. In England the typical form of cottage or domestic industry was wool and, later, cotton weaving. In both England and France, merchants brought raw materials to rural cottages and then picked up the woven cloth which they then marketed in towns or villages. By having cloth woven in the countryside, the merchants managed to escape the control of the guilds, organizations of urban craftsmen, which closely supervised production in the cities. Although cottage weavers, like agricultural laborers, worked for wages, they worked in their own households, controlling the pace and organization of production. The family was the unit of production and of consumption, the household was the locus of work and residence. The family economy thus existed in the cottages of domestic weavers (and hosiers and nail or chain-metal workers) as it did in the households of propertied peasants.

Agricultural laborers, on the other hand, left home to earn wages elsewhere.

Thus an amazing number of people have been reduced from a comfortable state of partial independence to the precarious condition of hirelings.¹³

Family members often worked together. And the aim of everyone's work was to secure enough to support the family, both by bringing home some cash and by laboring in exchange for food. Among these families family membership meant shared consumption, but not shared production. In this case the family economy became a “family wage economy.” The unit's need for wages, rather than for laborers, defined the work of family members.

WORK IN URBAN SOCIETY

Cities in both England and France had similar economic and occupational structures in the early modern period. They were essentially centers of consumer production and of commerce. The dominant form of activity differed from city to city. Yet city life differed markedly from life in the country. Gathered within city walls was a diverse population linked by an exchange of goods, services and cash.

The varieties of urban life can be illustrated by examining several cities. For the early modern period, we will describe York, England, and Amiens, France. Both these cities were typically “preindustrial” in economy and social structure. York was a Cathedral town, engaged in commerce, while the principal business of Amiens was small-scale, largely artisanal textile manufacture. York was known for its picturesque walls and beautiful buildings.

A nineteenth-century antiquarian wrote:

Within these walls there grew into existence, century after century, a great and beautiful city. The larger portion of the population gathered around the Minster, which was the favourite side, not only for association's sake, but for safety. The area, however, was a very limited one for general use. The Minster, St. Leonard's Hospital, and other religious buildings, all lay within enclosures of their own, a series of stone pens which prevented the extension of the city.... Room and protection were wanted, and health and comfort were sacrificed to secure them. Many of the streets are called gates, or ways, a name which has come down from the old English people. Stone houses were of the utmost rarity. The domestic buildings were flimsy structures of wood, of post and pan work. . . . Before many a house was a clog, or stump of wood, on which its owner often sat and gossiped with his neighbors. . . . They traded under the most rigid rules. For the greater part of their goods they could only charge after the rate of assize laid down by the authorities of the city, and they were rigorously looked to by the masters and searchers of their own trade.¹⁴

Map 1.1
England, Scotland and Wales, showing frequently mentioned cities.

Map 1.2
France, showing frequently mentioned cities. (Borders of 1815–1871,1918–1945.)

Deyon described the diversity which would strike a traveler to late-seventeenth-century Amiens:

It was not a very agreeable looking city once one had penetrated the austere gates, ... a humid and unhealthy city whose canals often doubled as sewers. But it was a buzzing city, where trade in wine, in wheat, in spices and in textiles made a perpetual bustle. Through the streets, ... of the old town, the voyager descended towards the markets and the inns, into the midst of a half-peasant, half-urban crowd, speaking in patois. ... It was a manufacturing town also, in the northern and western quarters, where the venturesome sightseer's senses would be assailed by the rattle of looms, the beating of the fulling mills, the smells of the tanneries and the sight of the shops of wool washers and combers.¹⁵

The specific jobs available to men and women differed according to the economic structure of each city. In York, most manufacture involved luxury products: bell casting, glass painting, and pewter and clock making were among those listed. The cocoa, chocolate, and confectionary business which was to dominate the late-nineteenth-century economy of York had its origins in small eighteenth-century family businesses. In addition, there were jobs connected with the river trade from York to the seaport of Hull. Butter, grain, coal, salt, and wool were regularly shipped through York. And, although the fortunes of the city (once the “second capital” of English society) seemed to be declining by the end of the eighteenth century, it remained a center of handicrafts and trade.

York had no notable manufactures; its economy was based on its importance as a market centre supplied by, and supplying a wide area around the city; and a large part of its population was engaged in producing and distributing both the basic needs of its inhabitants and the luxury goods and services demanded by the gentry for whom York was an important social center.¹⁶

In the provincial capital of Amiens most people were engaged in the woolen trades. Various tax lists enable us to determine the occupations of others in the city, although these lists give but a partial description, since only the wealthier people in the city were taxed. Most artisans and shopkeepers on the lists were in textiles, food, and the building trades. A list from 1722 indicates a number of servants, too.¹⁷

Despite differences in specific trades in each city, the forms of organization were similar. Economic units were small, often overlapping with households. The scale of production was also small, for the quality and quantity of activity in commerce and manufacture were controlled by guild or other forms of regulation and by the availability of only limited amounts of capital. Life was more specialized in urban than in rural society. Food and clothing production, for example, was carried on in separate settings from the households of most urban residents. Rather than make most of what it needed, the urban family bought what it needed in the market or in shops. Shoemakers, for example, made shoes for sale, but they purchased their other clothing and food. Because of this division of labor, urban families were involved in many more consumer activities t...