Did Women really always work?

[MaggieBroonofGlebeSt]

Genuine question but definitely most interested if possible in actual data not anecdotal. On most threads about SAHMs people will always say that women have always worked apart from the rare recent middle classes who are an outlier.
Is that true? For example I was reading Call the Midwife; none of the women seem to have a job despite being very working class. Reading old books I never read about married women with kids from any background who worked.
In my family I don't know of any married women who worked but fair enough, they were generally wellish off.
All that is anecdotal though!
If women did work, who looked after their kids? I honestly don't see how it would be possible for most women with children.

If women did work, who looked after their kids?

Usually their older children! My grandmother worked in a hotel. My mother was the eldest girl and from the age of about 6 was responsible for her younger siblings. This was late 1940s. She said it was common and all her friends would have their smaller brothers and sisters to look after.

In my family history yes they typically did work and they were working class. Perhaps if they had a very young baby or child they didn't but back then work was easier to find and could be done as and when. My grandmother was a waitress and went back to working nights when my mum was still a baby and my other gran was left widowed with a baby and five other children so she had to work also and relied on the older kids for childcare. My great granny ran a B&B and the other worked in the potteries.

Yes of course they did - where else would they get money from? And the older children looked after the younger ones or they just looked after themselves.

Interesting question!

I guess women in early industries (mills, mining) would take their kids to work but not sure what % of the population that was.

Pre industrial revolution women would work in the home making cheese/farming/weaving but again not sure how may that would be.

So did she work out of school hours?

Household tasks, cleaning, shopping, cooking etc would have taken much longer but maybe people don't consider that to be work 🤔. In the North, certainly, women also continued working in factories and mills. Women on farms contributed to agrucuktural work. In fishing communities women were gutting and cleaning fish. Teachers and civil servants were required to give up work when they got married until the 1950s, I think, but they weren't really working class.

Their husband paid for everything.

from their husbands? There were definitely working class families that survived on one wage, even with large families.

I think it would have been very normal for next door to look after your children or pop in to check on them. Neighbours and families were much closer. They would have all helped each other out.

I definitely consider it to be work!

My mother worked ( I was born in the sixties) , her mother worked ( she - my mother, was born late 1930s)
Both professional women
My mother had a nanny, we had a housekeeper.

Work wasn't always outside the home. Frequently poor women with young children would do piece work and manufacture small goods like match boxes at home. Small children would also help. Poor women would also take in laundry, mind other women's children, sew items to sell etc.

The history of women's work is tricky to track via traditional methods such as the census because MEN fill in the forms and perhaps wouldn't count the informal work women did as a job worth adding to the form

Middle class married women and women with children did not generally work until the late 1960s / 70s. There was previously a civil service ban on married women working and even after that that was abolished it was standard for pregnant women to be dismissed. Obviously there was no maternity pay etc.

What, like they do now ?

Yes. My mam almost always worked. I remember one brief period when she didn’t when my siblings were little, but other than that, she worked. My Nana worked too, nothing flash, pot wash or on the school meals, but she always worked.

My grandma worked as a servant in a big house but stopped that when she got married, and did jobs at home instead, mainly taking in other people’s washing. They also raised chickens and sold eggs/ the whole birds. My other grandma was more middle class - she was a teacher and had to give it up when she got married (I think it was a rule at the time?) and ran a small shop with a family member. 1920s/30s/40s

One of my two grandmothers worked in a school, only whilst her own children were at school (50s/60s). She had only stopped work once pregnant; the other grandmother stopped as soon as she married.

One of my four great-grandmothers (1900s-1930s) worked, but only because her husband walked out on her, leaving her impoverished. All had either stopped paid work on marriage, or never worked outside of the home.

None of my eight great-great grandmothers worked, except that one would be called up to the "big house" a few times a year to do some specialist baking. That's the earliest generation that there's family knowledge of (as opposed to the census etc).

Back to the first census, it seems that the women were not generally working outside of the home.

There was a line of wealthy aristocrats in my family, but most are either middle class or working class, and some very poor. Mostly English, some Welsh and some Scottish.

It's only on Mumsnet that I've read how all women used to work outside of the home, and that certainly wasn't the norm in my family.

working class women have always worked even after marraige granted it was usually around children. both of my grandmothers worked and one gran lost her husband when her youngest was 4 and she had several children but she had to work. my mum also always has jobs when I was growing up she was a single mother from when I was a toddler she had to work.

In my family (working class) yes the women all worked. Mainly in the mill or a factory (1930/40s) I remember my mum telling me that she was at the mill from a very young age, the children were sent into/in-between (not sure) the looms to retrieve lost bobbins.
In the 1970s when I was a child my mum stopped working in the factory and instead did a few cleaning jobs, I remember her taking me with her when my dad who worked shifts wasn't about to watch me.

My mum worked , school hours . My friend looked after her 4 younger sibs definitely at 11 when I met her … and it wasn’t a new thing then . This was early 70s her mum worked full time .

Of course women have always worked. They haven't always worked for money, but they have always worked.

Of course they always worked!

Who looked after the children - older children or other women who were also being paid to work. Same with the housework - having servants was not just for the upper classes, anyone who could afford one had one.

The post war years were very different in the pushing of the role of the non-working housewife. But basically she was now doing all of the household tasks, unpaid and often unthanked, that she would have previously had a servant to do while she did some other work.

I had one GM who worked and one that didn't.

Both working class but one GF had a low paid unskilled job and the other GF was a better paid skilled worker.

That was the difference

GM took jobs (cleaning etc) with unsocial hours to work around kids till they went to school.

Women have always worked, it's just that accounts of it don't attract much interest. Children looked after themselves from a much younger age, were minded by older siblings or by other women, for whom it was work. In agricultural communities, it was everything around the farm. Additional work such as growing and using medicinal herbs. Factories, potteries, domestic work. In fishing communities, redding, baiting, attaching thousands of hooks to lines etc There's tons and tons of material on this, it is fascinating.

My nanna worked in a biscuit factory until the war when she got sent to work in a munitions factory instead. Her parents ran a working men’s club so they both worked together. I’ve worked out my dad’s side of the family tree back to the early 1800s and it doesn’t seem to be unusual for the women to have had something listed as their occupation on the censuses(?) other than housewife. He was the first one to ever go to uni so they’re usually things like maid…