Working Women in History

Yes, this drives me absolutely nuts. Let's face it: working class and artisanal class women throughout history have had to work (often as part of a family unit) or starve. Upper class married women didn't have to work but often held household and did fine needlework, and nuns of course did loads of jobs we would now consider "work". It's only ever been the middle class where women didn't work and until very recently there wasn't any such thing as the middle class.

Women not working in the past is reactionary men's bollox.

The ridiculous thing is that if you ask a person if they think women worked on farms through history, if they worked in factories in the industrial revolution, if they worked in markets selling stuff and taverns and inns and whatever, people will say yes, I think most people will. TV progs show women doing this stuff in the olden days etc and the answer is obviously "yes".

Yet at the same time the idea that women working is a newfangled idea persists. At the same time and even for the same people.

Weird.

YY, it's true - my mate, who is a MNer though I've not seen her on here in donkey's years, did loads of her degree on it. It's the woman as the 'angel in the house'.

I'm a bit rubbish with history stuff but my understanding of this is that it comes from a Victorian idea which caught on enormously about women and men having fundamental differences with women's spheres being home & hearth & babies and men's spheres being everything else. And a sort of fetishisation of women's place in the home etc. So while of course women had always worked this idealised picture of women at home with babies all over them while the man went out and earnt the money became a sort of entrenched and maybe aspirational idea which over-rode what actually was. The whole 1950s thing is that also I guess.

I read a book about it once I think

Anyway sorry for garbled and probably not very accurate post! Anyway I googled and it's this sort of thing wiki

So the fantasy basically erased the reality, for all but a tiny minority of wealthy women.

Not many current historians would agree with that version of the women / war /work narrative. It comes from the 1960s /1970s when male historians thought that the 1960s were the pinnacle of a social revolution for women that had been building from WW1 onwards. It now considered to be largely bollocks by most younger historians.

The old view seems influential though, it is still there in popular history and documentaries etc.

Yep, indeed, scallops.

Just to add to the back-breaking work: prostitution. But ya know women do that coz they lurve it.

Oh ... and as for breaking down the 'delicate women in cushy jobs' thing:

• Women in warfare. Joan of Arc isn't unique. Women followed the camps and if they weren't involved in actual fighting, were involved in going over the battlefield to find dead/wounded men. Women also defended their own homes when attacked - there are archaeological remains of women with defensive wounds that show they were in combat. For example: www.stirlingcastle.gov.uk/home/newsandevents/news/news_item.htm?id=43024

• It was primarily women, not men, who worked march factories. They got 'phossy jaw' which literally made the flesh deform and melt off the bones. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phossy_jaw

• Women miners. In the nineteenth century women worked down mines, sometimes in the most dangerous and cramped parts where adult men couldn't fit. www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1842womenminers.asp

• Women butchers. Women work in this trade in medieval England. I include it not so much because it's physically hard (though it is), but because it's bloody, which is not stereotypically 'feminine'.

To add to that, Margaret Foster makes the excellent point in her account of her maternal ancestors' lives, that the 'ordinary' work of running a household at a time when you might not have water on tap, where you had to carry coal for the fire, etc., would have been backbreaking.

This site has more details about trades. I don't know the provenance of the site, but it looks pretty accurate to me. www.antithetical.org/restlesswind/plinth/wimguild2.html

I think part of the problem is that 'the past' is about the 1950s to a lot of people, so the backlash against women going out to work, in the post-war years when demobbed men wanted the jobs back is seen as "How things were back in the day" and a sort of golden age that we should all aspire to.

Whereas it was really just a tiny blip in the overall pattern of history, which was that both sexes needed to work to keep a family going, and things like 'housework; and 'childcare' just had to happen at the same time as the rest of the working day.

I must be a terrible person. Because I came on to say exactly what chaos has said I would say. It's true.

However, CK, I'll take issue with this, too: What is really meant is that women started to work in the middle-class professions and skilled working-class trades that they had been disbarred from prior to the twentieth century.

There are loads of women in skilled trades, aside from the wool trade, well before the twentieth century. You have medieval women who were artists and illustrators of books, women notaries, women scribes, women teachers. In fact, women were so commonly teachers that it was one of those jobs that people assumed was a woman's job.

It does seem to get worse after the Renaissance, but I am sure people who know more later history would find women in skilled trades afterwards, even if not very many.

I am agreeing with your basic point, though. I just think it's even worse than you say. People make up utter tut about women not working, or not working in skilled trades, because they want to pretend we've made huge progress in the last century.

Well, so we have in some ways, but I think the 'women didn't used to work' story is there to make us feel both pathetically grateful we're now 'allowed' to do so, and guilty we're (supposedly) putting men out of a job and responsible for all the economic ills of the world.

It's a load of shite.

The surname Brewster is a matrilineal one, because women brewed all the beer in Britain, which at a time when the water would probably kill you, saved lives.

I'm sure I'm going to make LRD's teeth itch now, but women during the middle ages did the majority of spinning and weaving of wool, which was the foundation of Britain's wealth. Everyone was expected to work the strips of land they 'owned'. Men tended to be the only ones acknowledged in this though, but, you have to remember that women were seen as chattel, belongings.

In hunter gatherer societies, women do most of the grunt work, they find the majority of foraged food, while men go and hunt, sometimes unsuccessfully, so it is the women's work which keeps the tribe alive.

As far as I'm aware, the idea of the kept woman only really exploded with the explosion of the middle classes during the Victorian era, and even then it was only women of the middle classes and above who didn't work, all other women worked and they did awful jobs, down mines, in sewers etc.

Billy Connelly is an arse, I'm surprised his rather more talented wife doesn't tell him to STFU to be honest.