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.

Neither of my grandmothers worked after they got married in the 1930s. Both married to professionals (doctor/ solicitor) and both had a far higher standard of living than the equivalent today (children at boarding school/ daily help etc).

Yeah, but they end up drowning at the end, so...

But they didn’t drown in the fire!😉

Im enjoying this thread with so many snippets of posters’ family histories, I love social history so am also getting a bit of a reading list with the suggestions

I wasn’t saying it was a good thing, there’s a reason child mortality rates were so high

There's a great book called "Can Any Mother Help Me?" by Jenna Bailey (that I often recommend on here) that are accounts from real women in the 20th century. It's an excellent resource book about, often highly educated and intelligent women, not working because it wasn't it deemed socially acceptable. And their frustrations and loneliness this causes them.

It's kind of almost a prototype for this forum. Really fascinating read.

My great grandmother had five kids very close in age and no husband to rely on financially - he was killed in the First World War when they were all under 8. She worked at home as a seamstress and washerwoman.

Also, my grandmother on the same side was a nurse - she continued all through my dad’s childhood and was never a stay-at-home mum.

I am not British by birth, my family is European. Both grandmothers got a degree - in the mid-late 40s - but only one of them worked, the other one was a housewife all her life, even though this was quite unusual in my country in the 60s-80s. Out of my 4 great grandmothers, 2 used to work on the family farms, 2 never worked ( both had maids and cooks to deal with the housework)

Although she has and does get a little confused about what a woman is, Philippa Gregory's Normal Women is an interesting read and discusses in detail what work women did.

Pre industrial revolution it was Cottage industries such as home brewery, baking, cheese making, weaving, spinning all could be done inside the house.

Interestingly as soon as a job becomes professionalised and had a guild the women would often be frozen out and pay would be pushed up by the guilds whilst pushing down women's pay or parts of the task.

Hahaha no. For wc families, esp. big ones, they'd starve.

I'm 58 so grew up in the late 1960s and 1970s. My grandmother would have been a young woman in the late 40s.

My nan cleaned pubs and down in the docks in Liverpool. In later years she suffered terribly with skin conditions on her hands because of harsh cleaning materials, often bleach, and no gloves.

I always remember my mum working, in shops, washing up in pubs, as a dinner lady. Thanks to the encouragement of a young teacher she trained as a nursery nurse in her late 30s and got her first full time job.
But she always worked, same as most of the other women in working class families like ours

My nana left school at 14 in 1935 and worked in a shop, then had a decent job in the war effort and was furious to have that taken off her when the war ended and the men returned. She later worked with disabled children.

Her husband had a decent wage but she wanted to work as well and then he died so it was just as well she had a skill that paid ok as they had two kids still at home.

Other side of family was worse off, that nana also worked as a cleaner and dinner lady, often working when my grandad was struggling to find work.

Most mothers in my circle when I was a child didn’t work outside the home, not when the dcs were small anyway. We had no family anywhere near to help (I don’t know why it’s so often assumed that everyone had family around the corner!) so my Dm just had to manage.

She went back to work when I was 14, and considered old enough to mind my siblings of then around 8 and 10 after school.

Her returning to work meant that the era of there never being any spare cash for anything, ended. Up to a point, anyway - things were still far from lavish.

I think there was a relatively short period in the 50s and 60s where women tended not to work because of the post war austerity and soldiers returning home after the war being given priority for the jobs. Certainly go back in time and women worked on the land or in factories/mills and then with sex equality etc women worked for the 80s onwards.

I was thinking that your right after the war women were encouraged to stop working because the young men returning from war needed jobs.

However that said the less affluent of my Granny's always worked in some capacity. Using a council or government nursery doing home help. And once her kids were bigger went into an electronics factory to work.

My mother worked as a teacher, left to have family and then retrained going back to work once we were all out of infants school, going full time once all in secondary.
Both my grandmothers worked, one in the family shop, the other HAD to work as a single parent (husband had died)