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 you are talking about industrial times, women AND children worked. It only became illegal for children to work from 1933. And before then, children age 9-13 were allowed to work during industrial times. You could work a 9 hour day as a 9 year old before 1933!

Well yes. I am mid fifties. My maternal grandmother worked as a sewing machine maker in a factory, then during the war, she had 3 babies and still managed to work doing some kind of manufacturing. My mum and her sisters went to state nursery ( and she had help from her mother). Post War she worked in the telephone exchange. She managed to buy a house. My own mum also worked. Did typing at night to save for a deposit on a house. Always worked full time from when we were school age. We didn't have childcare. She just went to work and left us to it from a young age ( 9, 7 and 6). Dreadful looking back!

Middle class background. My aunts all undertook war service and 2 nursed and continued in nursing. They both married GIs and moved to Canada and continued nursing around their family commitments. Both have daughters born in the 1950s who became doctors. Third aunt became a teacher, stopped with young children before returning to work. On the same side, their mother (my grandmother), born in the 1880s didn’t work and nor did her mother. They were upper class though, the next generation were not really.
On the other side, my grandmother was a Social worker albeit not qualified as one would be now.
I grew up in the 1970s and my mum always worked. All women in the family in caring industries though - teachers, social workers, nurses.

During the Industrial Revolution many women worked - if you look at censuses then there are a lot of women in service (so live in servants) although this would normally stop when they got married.

There were also plenty of women working in the mills - you can see this in the legislation so for example the factory act of 1844 protected women working in factories - no night shifts and maximum 12 hour shifts.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_Acts

This was women of all ages and I'm pretty sure they didn't care whether the women were married or not.

Neither of my grandmother's worked after having children. Both were fairly well off with well paid husbands. My mother was a sahm for several years after having children but went back to work part time when the children were older. She was only able to do this because she worked in the business owned by my grandfather, and was able to work whatever hours she wanted.

Ok what I'm meaning and should have said in my OP was 'did women who were married with children always work' because often on here people say that SAHMs were rare whereas in my family that was the norm. None of my grannys, great grannys, great aunts, etc etc worked once married with children.
I'm interested in the practicalities of managing to work outside the home if you had small children before any kind of formal childcare.

Laundress, seamstress, glovemakers, fanmakers, lacemakers, wool spinners, the list is endless, all jobs carried out by women working from home.
If you look at 19th century census records women were often working piecemeal from home or would be in service.
I remember reading an account of cotton weavers in Lancashire. Babies of the women were looked after older relatives or their older children and would be boroughs to the factory at lunchtime to be breast fed. Alternatively working women would use the services of a wet nurse who ran sort of nurseries. Probably one of the reasons infant mortality was so high historically was because the vast majority of mothers had to work and relied on others to look after their infants.

It depends on how far back you go? The children would have been working in factories or as chimneysweeps or in other roles, just as children work now in cocoa plantations and cotton harvests. Child labour laws are recent. If you go really far back, women were making nets to trap animals, fetching water, prophesying, etc.

When people lived more rurally, family income was more a united effort and endeavour. People living on a farm all have to pitch in, although there is often some division of labour. The phrase “cottage industry” literally comes from the fact that people living in cottages made stuff to sell.

With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, women were often employed rather than men, because they could be paid less.

As the UK became more wealthy, the middle class expanded, because more professional people were needed, and more men were able to “keep” a wife. This then also became aspirational for more lower middle class people and working class people.

One of my grandmothers was quite middle class, and didn’t work, but the other (born middle class, but her father lost the family money when she was 6) was sent to a housekeeping school at 13 to basically learn how to be a servant. (She ended up doing a load of different things in her life, but she pretty much always worked.)

Grandparents were working class, one Gran worked as a cleaner (and worked in munitions factory during WWII before marriage), the other did admin at home (answered phone, did diary, sorted pay packets I think) for my Grandad's business.

My parents benefitted from grammar school system and were first to go to further education, my mum worked as a teacher. My DHs family also working class I think his mum also always worked, grandparents helped with childcare.

My grandma always worked. Her sister looked after my mum for her. I'm not sure if money changed hands or not.

In the northern mill towns there were childminders. Again, George Orwell describes them in the road to Wigan pier.

My mum returned to teaching part time once her youngest child was in primary school, then full time once we were all in secondary - these two things would have been at opposite ends of the 80s. She certainly didn’t stop working when she got married, only when she started having babies. Think she’d have lost her marbles not working and having adult conversation and a sense of purpose and identity outside of wife and mother! All her friends from teacher training college (late 60s) also continued to work after marriage and returned to work at some point post-babies if they had them.

Most women who worked outside the home, as well as many who didn't, had 'help'

This was even the case in relatively low-income houses - it was due to sheer extent of the labour required to run homes. (And still left plenty of work for the woman too!)

My grandmothers both did, one was a postwoman and the other worked in a sweet factory.

I think the practicalities were kin care. So older siblings or younger aunts or grandparents. Neighbours would watch children too. Plus you could literally leave babies in prams in the street or asleep in empty houses.
My nan says working class dads were quite used to putting kids to bed if their wife was at work in the evening or fixing breakfast.

I had middle class grandparents on the other side. It was stop work on marriage, hands off dads for them.

My MIL was a teacher in late 50’s and it was absolutely expected that she would give up work as soon as she got married. But she’s pretty steely and she told her headteacher that she wasn’t going to give it up and anyway they needed the money. So she carried on - but many women did get told to leave. Because it was absolutely assumed they’d straightaway have babies then leave. But she waited a while, then went back to work for lots of the kids childhood, sometimes part time. A neighbour across the road would look after them after school, or grandparents.

I'm interested in the practicalities of managing to work outside the home if you had small children before any kind of formal childcare.

There were always childcare options - varying by need & class. So nannies to housekeeper-types, nursery-type settings to family networks.

Of course they weren't regulated or necessarily all that safe - the approach to looking after children was very different & much more communal.

One of the key aspects of women with children working (as it still is today, in many cases), is financial need. Most women you refer to here, worked due to need. They weren't sitting around weighing up pros & cons, and childcare options.

For my dissertation I researched the history of a northern industrial town and found this interesting passage on women working that suggested at least in this particular town women were a big part of the textile workforce:

"In all of these communities, the sexes mixed fairly freely. Nelson was spared the rigid sexual divisions of labour and leisure that were to be found in Victorian society more generally. What was a source of division in other towns - men and women neither worked nor played together - was less marked in Nelson. The relative openness of weaving, in gender terms, goes a long way towards explaining this state of affairs. It enabled women to work on roughly equal terms with men and was not seen as exclusively ‘women’s work’. Women’s contribution to the economy as wage-earners was recognised and valued. Moreover, women were able to work at the mills after marriage, which meant that family life developed in a less paternalist fashion, with men prepared to take on some of the domestic duties. All this gave Nelsonian women a certain self-confidence not always seen elsewhere, encouraging them to participate in the life of the community."

Same research uncovered this quote from a letter to local newspaper about changing child labour laws:

Nelson Leader, 1914, (8 May): ‘If children go to school until they are 14 or 15 how soon will they be able to earn their own living? Certainly not before they are 16 or 17 years, and how are the weaving parents going to make ends meet with a family of children to keep up to 16 before they cease to be a burden.'

my grandfather was a miner it was poory paid and dangerous he died of a lung disease young maybe 40 as I said before my gran had to work 2 jobs at points in her life the youngest kids were looked after by their Gm and the rest fended for themselves/looked after siblings.

In Scotland plenty of tenement flats which were by no means posh had a cubbyhole for a maid.

Really interesting!

Love the letter!

A lot of women worked up until they had children, and then again when their children were old enough to take care of themselves.

In Scotland plenty of tenement flats which were by no means posh had a cubbyhole for a maid.

That's fascinating!

Yes women worked. Check the census data. I highly recommend looking at your own family tree.

Women had to work even when they had children. Kids were not looked after in the same way they are now. Latch key kids let themselves in after school from a young age, siblings were expected to look out for each other, children played in gangs together to entertain each other. Communities looked out for the children. Babies were cared for by relatives.

www.striking-women.org/module/women-and-work/19th-and-early-20th-century#:~:text=According%20to%20the%201911%20census,chain%20making%20and%20shoe%20stitching.

Yes all of them worked in my family. Mainly as nurses or what we would call community carers these days. They would often reduce their hours once they became married but only stopped working during "babe in arms" times when siblings took over their jobs for a while.
Others worked in family shops or businesses and one worked cleaning tables at the pub once her children were adults.