Working Women in History

[CKDexterHaven]

I was thinking about the way history is taught, and even the way feminism is taught, and how it erases the work of working class women from the story. The narrative seems to go that women first got exposed to the world of work during the two world wars and then the sexual revolution of the 1960s was the first time women got to go out into the world of work. What is really meant is that women started to work in the middle-class professions and skilled working-class trades that they had been disbarred from prior to the twentieth century.

I've read that women do the majority of the world's work today because the majority of that work was gruntwork. It was ever thus. Not only have women done domestic work and service but they worked down mines, they worked in mills and factories, they worked as street hawkers, they nursed plague victims, they gutted fish, they picked crops, they sifted brick-dust, they collected street manure, they worked as bouncers ... all back-breaking, hard, physical, unpleasant labour.

I think the 'women started working in the twentieth century' narrative gives rise to the idea that women were delicate, sheltered, maternal creatures kept by chivalrous, bread-winning men and maybe it would be better for women if things went back that way. It also gives rise to the idea that all society's ills are caused by working women either stealing men's jobs or neglecting the family home when, in reality, not many women could afford to be just housewives. You also get men like Billy Connolly moaning about how manhole covers should never be called personhole covers because women's libbers never want to do the dirty jobs like working down a sewer, ignoring the fact that women have always done and still do a lot of the dirty work.

Any other examples of the jobs women have done in history that break down the myth of the delicate, cushy life of kept women?

Hi owl.

Along similar lines, I was thinking how while the suffragettes did wonderful things, it's hard to get away from how middle/upper class they were, so I think that also slanted how people looked at feminism and work.

Have any of you seen the Mitchell and Kenyon films? I find them very enlightening about how the poor lived, men, women and their children but yes mainly women and children

humble, that's got me thinking about WWI - because I think they promoted the same idea after that, that women should give up the jobs they'd taken on to men coming back. But how did it work economically? Because there was a whole generation of women who never married, wasn't there? Were they encouraged to work, or was it still seen as bad form to 'deprive' men of work?

Cross post - no, will check them out, thanks.

Yes but along the same lines without women like emmeline pankhurst where would any woman be now. It would just be nice to be represented. My gran is a clever woman and despite passing her 11+ and getting a grammar school place was denied the opportunity as her parents were miners too and she had younger brothers that may need to go and they couldn't afford more than one uniform. She left school at 13, had her first baby in her teens, worked and worked and worked. She gas never been represented in any recollection of era's I have read or researched. History should cover all of us. There's nothing wrong with being middle or upper class, but working class women were and are important too. I feel that although things have moved on we still have less of a voice or its an inappropriate one, coupled with desperate celebrityism but maybe that's controversial

Are the Mitchell and Kenyon films the ones where they filmed people leaving their workplaces? I remember the announcer saying some of the men and women leaving the factories, who looked about 70-ish, were only probably in their 40s and then commenting on the low life-expectancies brought on by the hard and dangerous work.

My grandmother was a classic example of working women. She and her husband had a market garden. She worked on it from dawn until dusk, digging, planting etc. Then in season she would bundle up all the produce, getting up at dawn to do it and take it to market to sell by pony and trap. Oh, and she had eight children (+ two who died young) and made all her family's clothes, including her husband's suits.

This was from the late 19th century through the 20th until arthritis stopped her working.

It's extraordinary to think where this woman as a non-worker came from. Bizarre.

Yes, they were filmed in the Edwardian era. They are really interesting if you are interested in social history (and costume )

No idea, LRD. Thinking about my family, the women who had to work (husbands dead or deserted them, or single) always worked. My gran worked after from the 1920s. Both my gran and mum, when they married, had shops so they could work and be at home at the same time.

True, I'm not knocking the suffragettes, just thinking that shaped things.

My granny was also from a mining family (in Wales. Don't think you were allowed to have other jobs than mining if you are born working class in Wales ). But she was very lucky and did go to grammar school, and got her school cert. I wish now I'd talked to her more about her family, but until she was very sick she was too proud to talk about it, which is really sad. I know little snippets that give me a picture, though - like that she got given wedding china because she married 'up' and her sister didn't because her sister married the sort of person her parents expected. When my granny died aged 84 her sister still wanted the wedding china!

I think part of the problem in her generation was people almost didn't want to admit women worked hard because it was seen as bettering yourself if you made out you didn't. So you had people like her who wouldn't really discuss what her mother or aunties did, because she'd got out of all that.

It's sad, I think.

this is long but interesting contemporaneous account of conditions in a mining town. Obviously he's viewing it from a particular slant but it's fairly unbiased I think. Of course there's no acknowledgment that if you were so poor you'd sell your own shit for extra money that disappearing down a whisky bottle seems like a reasonable alternative.

humble - oh, that makes sense, that must have been the case for quite a lot of people.

My gran and grandad lived in a semi detached council house after the war and they bred chickens and rabbits in the back garden and traded them for other rationed food. My gran said they never went hungry :) they even had a pig at one point. Can you imagine!

My own grandmother was widowed very young and worked in a mill while bringing up 6 children. Virtually all the working class women in the town worked in the same mill. My other grandmother travelled abroad to work as a governess but gave this up when she got married.

One of my favourite ever books is London Labour and the London Poor (the full unabridged version). Sometimes it seems couched as a morality tale but I love it because it's so rare to actually hear the voices of poor people direct from history.

See it on mn all the time.someone parroting that women didn't work,and stayed home
Housewifery is a mc postwar phenomena.and before that prosperous women didn't work
Typically poor women worked,and until factories and education acts kids worked too

A couple of points on here about women giving up work when they married / not letting being married stop them working.

It's that in some jobs/industries, when you got married you were no longer employable - you were sacked. I think it was more things like hospital jobs and clerical jobs maybe? So women had to stop what they were doing whether they wanted to or not, if they wanted to marry, which was kind of rubbish if it was a job you loved and had been doing for years etc etc.

I think even after that was got over, women could work on marriage but were chucked out when they got pregnant? Not sure about that.

Ooh google look at this in the US:

"In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, 26 states had laws prohibiting the employment of married women. The sentiment behind the laws was that a married woman – who presumably had a husband to take care of her – should not "steal" a job from a man. It was acceptable for single women to find jobs, but usually these were lower-paying jobs that were typically considered "women’s work" – thus white women worked as salesgirls, beauticians, schoolteachers, secretaries, and nurses. The job market for African American women was even more restricted, with most black women who worked serving as maids, cooks, or laundresses."

From here. Only read first bit I admit so don't know if the whole thing is interesting!

Hmm so the common perception that until recently women "didn't work" has been fed by the victorian "feminine ideals", the fact that work women did was discounted as being actual work, and when it wasn't it was glossed over in a massive group effort of cognitive dissonance, combined with the fact that at certain times women were not allowed to work in certain jobs or at certain points of their lives.

My mum went to grammar school and did really well but was told she could only be a teacher or secretary. As she was fairly shy she didn't think teaching was for her. She became a secretary and then an MD's PA and flew all over Europe with him on business. She wasn't sacked when she got married but when she became pregnant with my sister.
Very sad all that potential was wasted as she then did a variety of fairly low level admin jobs till she retired

She paid for me to go to Uni on those wages and I have never forgotten that. I have worked really hard to get a professional & well paid career. Hated it when I was made redundant after dd2 (history almost repeating itself and was a sahm for a 2 years (with some freelancing). Luckily I am back in a career role now.

If you look in the obit section in any local paper, you'll see that every single woman worked outside the home, and many had large families too. A 'career' was less frequent, as nature and type of work seemed to adapt over a lifespan.

This was described as new ('portfolio') only when men did it too.

the 'women started working in the twentieth century' narrative

When I learnt history at school, I learnt all about women in the mines, women working in the factories, spinning, agricultural work - I don't think the teaching of history (as opposed to the teaching feminism side of things) has brushed over it, at least in more recent years, though it may be that I was being taught all this in the '80s and '90s, mostly by women, some of whom were active second-wave feminists, and I had the option of taking courses in women's history and "herstory". Probably I focussed more on it because of being female, and also, I have been about to bore people about conditions in Welsh collieries before the 1842 Mines Act since I was about 11 or 12, before we did it in school, and I read extracts from the Royal Commission leading up to it... I do recognise there might be parts of my upbringing which weren't common to others my age!

In some professions, marriage bars lasted into the 1970s. When we were clearing my parents' home after they were dead, I found a tax return form from about 1973 or '74 - it included a section on any dependent adult daughters. I think a lot of it has been institutional - women's earnings were seen as pin money, a bit extra, rather than as essential to a family's financial survival, and regulations reflected expectations and male ideals, rather than reality.

I boggle at some of my forbears - who lived in those Cotswoldy villages where a 2 bed cottage costs a fortune now. That they had huge families, no labour saving devices, a farm labourer as a husband, and they still found time between the cooking, cleaning, child rearing, laundry etc to have a JOB as well. I would like to say I think of that when I am having a bad day....

I remember doing local history research about Dublin the 18th Century and it seems the guilds did a lot to remove women from skilled work between 1750 and 1800.

I think was doing a similar project on women in the war on independence and it was amazing how they dropped out of the history books as the years wore on. Actual first hand accounts of female participation in the uprising says that there were as virtually as many women as men involved, but the more recent the book, the less women figure in this story.

I'm sure that has been the way with writing history throughout time.

The other thing I noticed was how the rights of women have ebbed and flowed. Women were given much more equal status in 1910, whereas by the 1950s we were considered to be empty-headed figures of fashion.

Speverend Women were employed on Royal Navy ships from the 17th century as nurses and laundresses, I would imagine that they also got involved in any fighting that went on as well, they were phased out over the next 200 years.

Women weren't allowed to join the regular army until 1992, and while in the WRACs, if they became pregnant were dismissed from the service. They could only rise to the rank of Brigadier. Their rank structure was the same as the regulars, but instead of being called Corporal Bloggs, they were called Woman Corporal Bloggs. They had a different military number to the men until 2008.