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.

@EarringsandLipstick I loved it too! They weren't wrong about children being a burden for longer. I didn't fully move out till I was 25!

My great grandmother worked as her husband died when very young. She still had very young children at home to provide for. I think it was more 'taking in washing' type work. I really should ask mum mum about it. My gran (born during First World War) also worked despite having lots of children, they were farmers so I think she just mucked in. My own mum (born 1950's) has always worked too.

Women who were deserted or widowed also had to work even if they had kids. In my family two worked in a shop. Kids came home from school and let themselves in or went next door. Mothers didnt get home till after tea. My great grandmother took in washing & had a lodger from time to time.

All I know anecdotally did - from 1860s to "emancipation of women" in 1970s

In mills/mines/industrial north - most did shift work or relied on elderly relatives for any (very young) childcare.

No career breaks if you wanted a "career" just reliance on family connections and ties

My grandmother worked. She worked from home, making fishing nets. She lived in a fishing town, and that was a common way for working class women to earn money there.

Many other working class women worked in service, made clothes, took in mending/laundry/ironing, sold baked goods/homemade foods etc. Not all jobs required you to leave the home all day, many could be done by women in their own homes.

Widows had extraordinarily tough times.

In Ireland, the state provision for them was very poor, and depended on what their husband had earned. With regards work, with often very small children, it was logistically very hard, unless there was an obliging sister or other female relative.

My mother always worked! She stopped work for 6 weeks when I was born.
I am now retired, and my mother was in her 40s when I was born, so you can probably work out her generation.
So, she worked in the evenings in a factory (where there were lots of other women, who were also working).
She worked because they needed the money.
My parents also had lodgers, for the money, (which I really hated as a child).
My DM went off to work before my DF came home, and older siblings were left to look after younger ones, (for about one or maybe 2 hours) something I would never recommend, for the simple reason that older siblings to do not have the maturity to know how to deal with younger children who misbehave, etc.
My DM was around during the day, and could attend school sports days, etc and was there during the holidays during the day.
My DMIL also worked, returning to teaching as soon as her youngest was at primary school (so she had a few years at home).
In Victorian days, women worked more than is now recognised; ie they would work on the farm, and often do 'kitchen' type of jobs, such as making their own bread, and making their own butter, etc. A lot of work was hard graft.
Apart from factories, women would help in shopwork, but it was often not really classed as a paid job, if their husbands owned the shop.
Prior to the welfare state, women left as widows especially those with children, really had to work. My Grt DGM, worked by taking in washing, etc.

oh my great gran was an unofficial midwife I mean I don't know if she was paid but apparently she attended a lot of births in her Village,

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

I highly recommend Helen McCarthy’s excellent book Double Lives: A history of working motherhood published in 2020.

Thanks for this, sounds like an interesting book.

You could also add "in the UK"... In other countries (well, in mine anyway) there was no law or pressure to stop working when married and with children. I'm talking about women born in the 40s. All the women in my family worked, and my friends' mums did too. In lots of countries, there was such a thing as full-time kindergartens from the 60s, and informal help from nannies, as well as crèches etc.
Sorry but I'm finding this bourgeois "my family was middle-class and it would have been shameful for a woman to work" very irritating. I'd be embarrassed at the sexism. And it really only describes the experiences of a number of households at a very particular time and place in history, so why focus on it?
Women have always worked hard, except perhaps for a tiny subset of populations in certain times and in certain places, when some got convinced it was not appropriate.
Women had to wash clothes in the river, make bread, make their children's clothes - the period in time when they no longer had to do that, yet didn't feel they could work out of the house, can't have been very long.

A lot of women were obliged to give up work by their employers whether they wanted to or not. Whether that was when they got married or when they had their first baby, that was a frequent occurrence. It was also traditionally expected of them, not least by their husbands, who didn't like their wives to work because it looked bad on them. They didn't like people thinking they couldn't support their family on just their wage.

Women didn't always get to choose whether they had a job or not, that was my point really.

Neither of my grandmothers, who had young children in the 50s, worked once they'd had children. Both were working class Midlanders.

My Mum did work as a childminder so we could still be with her. Then got a job when we were school age. I'd consider her and my Dad to be lower middle class.

People are focusing on it because that's what I asked about. It's obvious that pre industrial revolution 99.9% of women would have worked; I'm just interested in whether that changed later. It's a bit of an eye opener to imagine someone having ten kids and having to work a paid job as well.

My grandmother worked as a nanny to the local GP until she married then never worked again. Great grandmothers were the same. Working class but with husbands who had high level of training so not labourers so probably paid well. They owned their own houses which I thought was normal for pre war but I’m not sure it was.
My mum qualified as a nurse in early 1960s after they change the rules re working after marriage. She continue to do night shifts until my youngest DSis was born then became SAHM for 5yrs. She then managed to get early TA job which gave her the flexibility around childcare. Finally returned to nursing when youngest DSis was 12/13. She had always wanted a career and loved returning to nursing.
As a self employed HCP with my own practice I had maternity leave but have always worked. 3-4days a week when DS was little but private nursery care was probably the best it has ever been.
Being self employed in a high earning job meant I was able to make easy compromises and work the hours I wanted to around child care.

The 1851 census of England and Wales showed that one-third of all women aged 15 and over were engaged in paid work.

And as I said, my non British MIL had to give up her job when she married. That was in 1975. So you're wrong that it was unique to Britain.

Yes, definitely if you were working class. Cleaners and shop workers of my acquaintance, now long dead.

My mum is in her 70s and her and all her friends worked (teachers). Childcare was difficult back then, less availability. Neighbours, family members and unregistered childminders (in my family's case she had a chain smoking husband and a dog, dont think that'd be allowed now).

I guess the upper middle classes have always had status symbol stay at home wives with nannies to relieve the Childcare burden.

My Gran (born 1908) worked in a huge, noisy cotton mill in Lancashire. I was surprised to learn there was a nursery on site for the workers' children. Later she ran a B&B in Blackpool and then a corner shop. Fascinating lady and still very much missed.

There was an expectation that when a woman married she gave up work. My grandma (born 1903) worked in a mill until she got married aged 26. After that my grandad apparently wouldn't let her work because it reflected badly on him if his wife had to work. It was his job to support the family. This despite the fact they were very working class and my grandad was in and out of work during the depression.

During the war, my grandma worked in a factory making aeroplane parts. Best days of her life apparently. But after the war it was back to being a housewife.

I'd find it hard to believe it was a worldwide trend... It sounds to me like an anomaly, from an environment that had had time to forget what peasant/rural life was like, and had acquired strange new expectations. In more rural, egalitarian or socialist countries, women would have naturally worked.

In 19th Century some ggps of both sexes worked on a farm; some were spinners ( women) weavers ( men). The vast majority of people in UK before WW1 and even WW2, were working class and poor - very poor by our standards today. In cities they rented rooms ( no Council houses eg.) and midnight flits were not uncommon when rent couldn't be paid. No state help then in illness, old age, redundancy etc.

On the 1851 census for Manchester my elder great uncles /aunts are under 10 and working as scavengers in the Mill. They are doing that because the family couldn't manage without their wages, pitiful though they were. Working class families which could afford to have a stay at home mother would have been the skilled upper working class so fitters, draughtsmen eg. and maybe with few children.

My grandmother was born 1868 and always worked despite having 12 children. She worked in a funeral Parlour ( her Dad was a cabinet maker so made the coffins I guess), took in washing, went round factories buying leather for my grandfather who was a slipper maker, sewed at home etc. Without her work the family would have starved when my dgf was sacked. Manchester had many working mothers and children because the Cotton industry needed their skilled hands and the ability of youngsters to climb under the machinery.. Children/ babies were looked after by relations, older daughters, neighbours etc. My m in l looked after a series of cousins as well as her younger siblings as both her parents had shops.

My mother worked all her life from 20 when she qualified as a teacher to 60 FT and 61 PT. She was fortunate that WW2 meant that the rule that married women couldn't teach was rescinded - she was a single parent. (Many WW2 babies were in nurseries if necessary to free up women for war work.) After the war we were desperately short of teachers so there was a big campaign to recruit 'married women returners' and also men were offered 6 month emergency training to become teachers. ( There were still 56 in my primary class and poorer areas could hardly get teachers at all so 90 was not unknown in Salford eg.) Housing was often grim and in very short supply because of the bombing etc. Cellars were often occupied. So much for the advantages of the Boomer generation.,

My sister and I (born 1943 and 1946) have always worked FT - the former to 60 then PT for 5 years. Children looked after by grandparents. I worked FT to 67. Had PT mother's help in morning and then worked in evening. (Maternity leave was already there for women teachers in 1950s. 11 weeks before the birth and 7 after.)

The threat of redundancy being ever present for husbands as Industry contracted meant that we, as many women, couldn't risk giving up work.

My working class granny didn't work from 19 when she had her first child. My other granny didn't when her children were young but did later. They were a lot poorer though. My own mum (wife of a factory worker) stopped working when she had her first baby and resumed part time evening work when youngest child was about 9. I can remember only a handful of mums of kids at my primary school working in the 80s.

There were skilled 18th century women glassmakers and other artisans, if I remember museum labels correctly. Also anecdotally, people I've known have had ancestresses doing things like scavenging to sell, washing and preparing corpses for burial, or travelling to work on market stalls.

Op one of the oldest pieces of employment legislation dates from 1830s it's illegal to employ a woman in a factory less than 4 weeks from giving birth.

That should be enough to tell you that families needed the money from the mother for her to even consider factory work less than 4 weeks from giving birth. God love them. That must have been tough, to work with an infant on your back or in a basket in a corner.

Remember families were huge too, it might also be if the mum couldn't work neither could the girls in the family.

There was a time after WW2 when their wasn't enough work. Lots of men returned from the war effort to no jobs. It was in the countries interest to get them back into paid work hence it was common in the 50s and 60s for women to have to give up work upon marriage and to be SAHMs.