Women's Work

Page 2 of 7

• 1. Families and households
• 2. The evidence of women's work
• 3. The varieties of women's work
• 4. Women and the family firm
• 5. Women's work, industrialisation and gender
• 6. A double burden
• 7. Find out more
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The evidence of women's work

One of the greatest problems facing the historian of women's work is the absence of reliable information. The census enumerators' books are the most obvious source, especially for the period after 1841 when occupations were included; but in practice such information is vastly more accurate for men than for women for several reasons. Firstly, contradictory and inconsistent instructions were given as to how to classify women's work, particularly where this involved home-working or consisted of helping in a family-run business (such work was sometimes deliberately excluded from the record). Furthermore, women's work was often part-time, casual, and not regarded as important enough to declare.

'Women may have also have preferred to keep their income-earning a secret from their husband.'

Sometimes it was illegal (as with prostitution) or performed in unregulated sweatshops (a further reason for failure to record). Women may have also have preferred to keep their income-earning a secret from their husband. An occupational designation, for whatever reason, meant something very different for men than for women. With the emphasis primarily upon their role as wives and mothers, women workers did not usually see their occupation as a centrally defining characteristic of their lives, and therefore frequently failed to declare it.

Business records can be used to supplement the census and to give an indication of the gender-specific nature of employment and wage earning in certain firms and regions. But the survival of wage books is generally poor and biased in favour of larger firms in the regulated sector - for example factory textile employment, where wages and employment levels were generally much higher than the norm. Trade directories are another useful source but suffer from the fact that they were published irregularly, and record not employment but the names of business proprietorships. Household budgets have recently been used for research on women's work. They have the advantage that they generally record all incomes, including poor relief and self-provisioning, allowing one to assess the contribution of women and juveniles to the family economy. Their disadvantage is that they have patchy survival over time and region, and they have varying levels of detail, accuracy and comparability because they were compiled for differing purposes.

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Published: 2001-01-01