needmorecoffee on Sun 16-Nov-08 17:47:10
"you got an references for that? I'm interested as I love history. I had the feeling in victprian times the mums were at home with 14 children and spent all day with mangles and suchlike. Was there a difference between rural dwellers and city dwellers?"
just found this googling, interesting stuff, but there is much more; note the midwives' evidence in particular. I don't think we want to go back to those days.
Economic Change and Sex Discrimination in the Early English Cotton Factories
Douglas A. Galbi*
Research Associate
Centre for History and Economics
King's College, Cambridge
just a couple of quotes:
"Working class women in early nineteenth century England did physically demanding work. Women were employed in agriÂculture as day laborers and worked at digging, hoeing, trenching, planting, and gathering.[9] Women, sometimes with help from men, did laundry, a strength-intensive job in early nineteenth century England.[10] Some women also worked in the coal mines pulling coal to the surface on sledges.[11] In early nineteenth century England, it would not have been unusual for a woman to have a job that was highly taxing physically."
"Theories that explain sex discrimination based on the significance of marriage, child-bearing and child-rearing to women's work patterns are on particularly weak ground with respect to the early English factory workforce. For many working class women in early nineteenth century England, poverty or the threat of falling into poverty meant that work in the labor market was a crucially important opportunity. Many female factory workers started working at a very young age -- about 40% began working in cotton mills at age ten or younger.[33] Many continued to work after marriage, and some continued to work through pregnancies and while raising young children. Marriage, child-bearing, and child-rearing had a much less significant effect on women's factory work in early nineteenth century England than the existing literature suggests.[34]"
"Nonetheless, she cited an 1844 survey indicating that, in nine Lancashire cotton mills, 27.5% of women of "marriageÂable age" were married.[36]
More comprehensive evidence that Pinchbeck neglected suggest a significantly higher figure. In a sample of 412 cotton mills employing 116,281 workers in 1844, 40% of the females 21 years of age or older were married.[37] Evidence from a cotton factory employing 1220 workers near Ashton-under-Lyne in 1844 shows that 43.5% of the female workers over 21 were married.[38] In a factory survey in 1848 of operaÂtives in factories throughout Lancashire, 50.2% of the female cotton workers ages 20 and older were married.[39]
Several decades later Hewitt (1958) presented some additional evidence but in a different way. She focused on the fraction of female operatives who were married. Using a sample of household surveys from the Census of 1851, Hewitt (1958, p. 15) found that in the main cotton districts of LancaÂshire about 26.9% of the female labor force was married. She also stated that 57.4% of the female operatives were over 20 years of age. Given that most women married later than twenty years of age, Hewitt's figures imply that about 47% of the female operatives over 20 years of age were married.[40]
In thinking about the extent to which marriage caused women to leave the mills, this latter figure is the more relevant statisÂtic. Looking at the share of married women among all females employed ignores the structure of deÂmand for females of different ages. That many girls were employed says little about how marriage afÂfected a woman's likelihood of holding a factory job.
In fact, age-specific marriage incidence rates among women workers in cotton factories were only slightly lower than marriage incidence rates for women in the population as a whole. Table 2 shows marriage incidence rates by age for female cotton workers in Lancashire and for all females in England and Wales.[41] The marriage incidence rate for female factory workers ages 25-29 was 67% as compared to 58% for the population as a whole. At other ages the marriage incidence rate for female factory workers was only about ten percentage points lower than for the female population of England and Wales.[42] This evidence suggests that marriage and family did not strongly constrain factory women's work patterns in mid-nineteenth century England.
One might think that pregnancy significantly hindered women's work capacity. While pregÂnancy must have been a handicap, working class women in early nineteenth century England did not lose many work days due to pregnancy. A Manchester midwife, when asked whether factory women worked up to the time of their confinement, declared:
Many of them up to the very day; some up to the very hour, as I may say. Some have gone to work before breakfast, and I have had them in bed at two o'clock the same day. A girl has gone to work after her breakfast, and I have delivered her, and all over, by twelve o'clock the same forenoon.[43]
According to the midwife, many of the factory women returned to work a fortnight after confinement, and "three weeks they think a great bit." Another Manchester midwife stated that some factory women went back to work after nine or ten days, while some stayed at home "even three weeks or a month." [44] Such behavior was not limited to factory workers. A female coal miner told an investigator that she worked in the pits while pregnant. She gave birth to her baby in the pit and carried the new-born up the pit-shaft in her skirt.[45]
The growth of a family did have different implications for male and female factory workers. Table 3 shows the number of children in the families of the married workers included in a factory survey. The data suggest that, as the number of children increased, a married woman was more likely to withdraw from the factory than was a married man. This isn't surprising. Since women's wages in the mills were on average about half men's wages, wives had a greater incentive to shift to work in the home than husÂbands did.
While some women withdrew from the factories as they had children, others stayed. Table 3 indicates that 71% of married women working in the factories had children, and 41% had 2 or more children. Some married women hired others to help with cleaning the house, washing, cooking, and sewing.[46] A sample of Lancashire households from the Census of 1851 indicated that about 21% of the married women cotton operatives had children under one year of age.[47] Working women with infants could hire nurses young girls or old women to look after their infants.[48] Wet nurses were not used. Instead, working mothers breast-fed infants at breakfast, noon, and in the evenings, and weaned them as quickly as possible.[49]"