Working Women in History

Great thread.

Thanks just put it on my wishlist, also spotted a '13 women artists children should know' book so want that for the kids...

This thread is really interesting, I gave up history in year 9 so really only had the stereotypical overview and I'd like the kids to be more informed!

I have that book turbonerd, it's great!

Exactly squishy!

TeWi, the book is called Women Artists, an illustrated history, by Nancy G. Heller. Third edition is from 1997.

It is shameful though that you have to teach women's history as something "extra". A footnote to the "proper" history as recorded by men. Weird, and important to challenge.

Silencing women is hot stuff still. Here in Norway a church community which has had female ministers for over 50 yrs have just decreed that women are not to teach or speak in congregations where men are present. Happily there was public outcry, but that someone Even thought that this was a-ok is mind boggling.

This thread is really interesting. I've always been annoyed by the language I hear used to describe women's roles in the past; a man who worked the land is a farmer. A woman who works the land is a farmer's wife, for example.

What's the title of the book about women artists turbo? I'd like to read it.

OCR link, if anyone's interested. Needless to say, it's highly class-biased too. www.ocr.org.uk/Images/72188-unit-f961-british-history-period-studies-option-a-medieval-and-early-modern-1035-to-1642-specimen.pdf

There's still a huge bias, though.

I have never taught an undergraduate class without having to go over the 'myth of women in history' stuff. And there's still a need to run 'women's writing' and 'women's history' courses alongside 'regular writing' and 'regular history'. You still get complaints if you teach 'too many' women, and 'too many' might mean as few as 1/4 the number of men.

Looking at test questions from OCR for my period of history, for A Level, 12 out of 18 questions ask you to write about a man or men, mentioned by name in the question. One asks you to write about a man and a woman. Three ask you to write about a woman (Elizabeth !), and two are thematic.

This isn't inevitable. There could have been easy questions on Matilda or Margaret of Anjou, for starters! But the major problem is that, while a good teacher might be able to teach those modules and bring in plenty about women, a bad one (or one who is dealing with a class who are struggling) will have to fall back on heavily male-dominated political history to get the marks.

It's interesting that women are more prominent in history books now than 20 yrs who though. At one point it really was as if history had only happened to men, with the odd Queen and Joan of Arc thrown in for good measure.
I was delighted to find a book about female artists from the renessanse until present day, because when I studied cultural history none of them were talked about. Very important step that I hope will be redressed. It's not an aberration in the world, not a curiosity that women have achieved and contributed! Women have sort of been edited out, and that impression must be corrected.
I find it amusing when people say "feminism gone too far". To me feminism is about equal rights and opportunities, and to say that can ever go to far is an oxymoron.

mexican - I think the 'ebb and flow' bit is not well taught, too. I've come across people who are actually offended if you say the status of women was better in some respect further back in the past, and that we've not just become steadily more liberated.

I have had a lot of discussions with American blokes who are somehow convinced that the US is enormously more progressive and feminist than anywhere else ever, and the trifling issue of abortion rights is a tiny side issue ... they really did not like to hear that any backwards earlier times might actually have been better for women! And I'm sure we do the same in the UK on whatever our achilles heel is.

The thing about the narrative of steady progress towards liberation is that it becomes another stick to beat feminists with. Because it's so easy to say 'oh, you're going too far now, how can you care about x when awful thing y is happening?' To which the answer is, obviously, that progress happens in leaps and bounds (duh).

Speverend Women were employed on Royal Navy ships from the 17th century as nurses and laundresses, I would imagine that they also got involved in any fighting that went on as well, they were phased out over the next 200 years.

Women weren't allowed to join the regular army until 1992, and while in the WRACs, if they became pregnant were dismissed from the service. They could only rise to the rank of Brigadier. Their rank structure was the same as the regulars, but instead of being called Corporal Bloggs, they were called Woman Corporal Bloggs. They had a different military number to the men until 2008.

I remember doing local history research about Dublin the 18th Century and it seems the guilds did a lot to remove women from skilled work between 1750 and 1800.

I think was doing a similar project on women in the war on independence and it was amazing how they dropped out of the history books as the years wore on. Actual first hand accounts of female participation in the uprising says that there were as virtually as many women as men involved, but the more recent the book, the less women figure in this story.

I'm sure that has been the way with writing history throughout time.

The other thing I noticed was how the rights of women have ebbed and flowed. Women were given much more equal status in 1910, whereas by the 1950s we were considered to be empty-headed figures of fashion.

I boggle at some of my forbears - who lived in those Cotswoldy villages where a 2 bed cottage costs a fortune now. That they had huge families, no labour saving devices, a farm labourer as a husband, and they still found time between the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, laundry etc to have a JOB as well. I would like to say I think of that when I am having a bad day....

the 'women started working in the twentieth century' narrative

When I learnt history at school, I learnt all about women in the mines, women working in the factories, spinning, agricultural work - I don't think the teaching of history (as opposed to the teaching feminism side of things) has brushed over it, at least in more recent years, though it may be that I was being taught all this in the '80s and '90s, mostly by women, some of whom were active second-wave feminists, and I had the option of taking courses in women's history and "herstory". Probably I focussed more on it because of being female, and also, I have been about to bore people about conditions in Welsh collieries before the 1842 Mines Act since I was about 11 or 12, before we did it in school, and I read extracts from the Royal Commission leading up to it... I do recognise there might be parts of my upbringing which weren't common to others my age!

In some professions, marriage bars lasted into the 1970s. When we were clearing my parents' home after they were dead, I found a tax return form from about 1973 or '74 - it included a section on any dependent adult daughters. I think a lot of it has been institutional - women's earnings were seen as pin money, a bit extra, rather than as essential to a family's financial survival, and regulations reflected expectations and male ideals, rather than reality.

If you look in the obit section in any local paper, you'll see that every single woman worked outside the home, and many had large families too. A 'career' was less frequent, as nature and type of work seemed to adapt over a lifespan.

This was described as new ('portfolio') only when men did it too.

My mum went to grammar school and did really well but was told she could only be a teacher or secretary. As she was fairly shy she didn't think teaching was for her. She became a secretary and then an MD's PA and flew all over Europe with him on business. She wasn't sacked when she got married but when she became pregnant with my sister.
Very sad all that potential was wasted as she then did a variety of fairly low level admin jobs till she retired

She paid for me to go to Uni on those wages and I have never forgotten that. I have worked really hard to get a professional & well paid career. Hated it when I was made redundant after dd2 (history almost repeating itself and was a sahm for a 2 years (with some freelancing). Luckily I am back in a career role now.

Hmm so the common perception that until recently women "didn't work" has been fed by the victorian "feminine ideals", the fact that work women did was discounted as being actual work, and when it wasn't it was glossed over in a massive group effort of cognitive dissonance, combined with the fact that at certain times women were not allowed to work in certain jobs or at certain points of their lives.

Ooh google look at this in the US:

"In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, 26 states had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. The sentiment behind the laws was that a married woman – who presumably had a husband to take care of her – should not "steal" a job from a man. It was acceptable for single women to find jobs, but usually these were lower-paying jobs that were typically considered "women’s work" – thus white women worked as salesgirls, beauticians, schoolteachers, secretaries, and nurses. The job market for African American women was even more restricted, with most black women who worked serving as maids, cooks, or laundresses."

From here. Only read first bit I admit so don't know if the whole thing is interesting!

A couple of points on here about women giving up work when they married / not letting being married stop them working.

It's that in some jobs/industries, when you got married you were no longer employable - you were sacked. I think it was more things like hospital jobs and clerical jobs maybe? So women had to stop what they were doing whether they wanted to or not, if they wanted to marry, which was kind of rubbish if it was a job you loved and had been doing for years etc etc.

I think even after that was got over, women could work on marriage but were chucked out when they got pregnant? Not sure about that.

See it on mn all the time.someone parroting that women didn't work,and stayed home
Housewifery is a mc postwar phenomena.and before that prosperous women didn't work
Typically poor women worked,and until factories and education acts kids worked too

My gran and grandad lived in a semi detached council house after the war and they bred chickens and rabbits in the back garden and traded them for other rationed food. My gran said they never went hungry :) they even had a pig at one point. Can you imagine!

humble - oh, that makes sense, that must have been the case for quite a lot of people.