Amy Erickson

In the spring of 2020, when the government asked anyone who could conduct their paid employment ‘remotely’ to do so for fear of a novel coronavirus, working from home – or WFH as it came to be known – was a novel concept. It seemed strange because since the 20th century we think of paid work as taking place outside the home – in a factory, an office, a shop, a hospital, a school or university. But in historical terms, working outside a home (not necessarily one’s own, but someone’s home) is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Working outside a home: men

The first census with occupational data was taken in 1851. The EconomiesPast interactive map allows users to interrogate the censuses of 1851-1911. In 1851, the largest industries employing people outside of the home were mining (employing five percent of the adult male labour force), iron and steel production (three percent), building/construction (five percent), transport/communications (five percent) and textile production (nine percent), which was largely although not entirely mechanised in factories by this date. These industries accounted for just over one quarter of the male labour force. 

Even within these categories, some people still worked from home – for example, postmasters (transport and communications), or specialist fustian cutters and stocking seamers (textiles). But overall, only around one quarter of men aged 15 and over were employed in a non-domestic setting. 

Working outside a home: women 

Women were even less likely to work outside of a home than men in 1851. Less than half of all women were employed ‘regularly’ according to the census, but many would have been working unpaid in what were euphemistically described as ‘domestic duties’.  

Women comprised only five percent of the mining labour force, working at the top of mines because they had been excluded from working underground by legislation.  

Women comprised 2.5 percent of the building/construction labour force, working mostly in brickmaking. But they were 50 percent of the total labour force in textiles, where factories were highly localised, largely in northwest England. This image in Edward Baines’ History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835) shows the work force in power loom cotton weaving. 

Around 10 percent of all employed women in Great Britain were working in textiles in 1851 and through the later 19th century. Some proportion of those would have been in the factories of northwest England.

But the largest single occupation for women in the second half of the 19th century was ‘servant’, accounting for around 30 percent of all employed women. Being a servant involved living and working in the employer’s home.  

WFH in the 19th century 

If 25 percent of men, and perhaps 12 percent of women, worked outside of a home in 1851, then more than 80 percent of adults were employed in or near their own or someone else’s home.  

The great majority of the population was employed in market-oriented labour, although this may not have been directly remunerated in the case of family members working in a shop or on a farm. The largest single occupational sector in 1851 was agriculture, which employed around one quarter of the labour force. All manufacturing together employed 43 percent, and all services 30 percent of the labour force. Agriculture – even commercial rather than subsistence agriculture – revolved around the farmer’s home. Labour was provided by family members, by farm servants who lived in the household, and by labourers who were paid by the day and lived somewhere else, in a cottage without land or in some cases on a smallholding.  

As explained in previous posts, England in the mid-19th century was a highly commercialised economy, sometimes described as the ‘workshop of the world’.

A higher proportion of people were employed in manufacturing here than in any other country. But most of that manufacturing took place in workshops attached to an employer’s home, or within the worker’s own home.

This kind of domestic labour came to be deplored as ‘sweated’ labour – a term originating in the 1880s – and was particularly associated with women and immigrants. In 1906 the Sweated Industries exhibition aimed to expose the evils of sweated labour and included photographs of domestic manufactures including nail-making, chain-making, and box-making as well as clothing.

This kind of manufacturing continued almost unseen through the later 20th century, to resurface in the 1970s with married women packing plastic bags or sewing raincoats or assembling Christmas crackers at home. 

Textiles

In earlier centuries, particularly before the mechanisation of spinning and weaving processes in textiles around 1800, the proportion of people working at home would have been even higher than 80 percent. Around 1700, textiles employed 10 percent of the male labour force. These were mostly weavers. We cannot measure the female labour force nationally in 1700, but it is certain that a much higher proportion of women were employed then than in 1851, possibly at a rate comparable with the male labour force participation rate. 

Much of the demand for female labour was in textiles, mostly spinning. Every weaver required between four and ten spinners to supply him with yarn, depending on the fibre (wool, linen, cotton, or silk) and the quality of the cloth. Both the spinning and weaving processes were entirely domestic at this point. 

Shops

Schools, offices and shops were still largely located within homes until the end of the 19th century. Even in London, which was the largest city in Europe by 1700, the proprietors still lived in the upper floors of their shops in the 18th century – even in the most expensive shopping street of Cheapside. 

Not until around 1900 did substantial numbers of shopkeepers live in more ‘genteel’ houses separate from their shops. As respectable work came increasingly to be seen as that which was separate from the home, and the home was meant to be a refuge from work, social class distinctions based on residence sharpened. In the 1930s, the Unitarian foundation for girls’ education, Channing School in Highgate, undoubtedly considered its admission of the daughters of shopkeepers broadminded. But it continued to exclude girls whose parents lived above the shop. 

Work and childcare

In 2020, women, and especially those with children, found WFH particularly difficult because the demands of unpaid labour in the home, including ensuring children’s attention to online schooling, fell upon them disproportionately. How did women who worked from home in the past manage? 

Firstly, some children started work themselves much earlier before the advent of compulsory primary education in the 1880s, sometimes helping their mothers. (See PopulationsPast for child employment figures 1851-1911.)

Secondly, some work, and especially the ubiquitous spinning, could be carried out while minding children, as illustrated in many images of spinning, none so realistic as Geertruydt Roghman’s mid-17th century engraving, where the child is holding a reel of yarn. 

Domestic service

But the main enabler was servants. Just over 15 percent of households in 1851 employed servants. But earlier, from the 16th century up to c.1800, up to one third of all households hired live-in servants.  

Historians identify these figures from population listings – census-type lists for single parishes that sometimes specified all household members. Many more households would have hired day labour. But day labour is only visible in household listings where a head of household was listed as ‘labourer’ (almost all male) or ‘charwoman’ (all female). (The word ‘charwoman’ originated in the 16th century, based on the Anglo-Saxon word for chore or task.)

These servants undertook the domestic labour, like those that Geertruydt Rooghman engraved from behind in the middle of the 17th century in Amsterdam, cooking and burnishing pots.  

Most servants lived in the houses of people who worked in manufacturing (crafts) or in services, rather than in gentry or noble houses. They were not enabling their employers’ luxury but facilitating their employment by performing the ‘unskilled’ domestic labour for which the woman of the house was responsible – but which she paid someone else to do, so that she was free to undertake better–remunerated skilled labour. For more on this, see ‘Women have always worked’. 

Further reading

• Populations Past: www.populationspast.org
• Economies Past: www.economiespast.org 
• McCarthy, H., ‘Flexible Workers: The Politics of Homework in Postindustrial Britain’, Journal of British Studies 61 (2022), 1-25. 
• You, X., ‘Female relatives and domestic service in nineteenth-century England and Wales: Female kin servants revisited’, Economic History Review 77:2 (2024), 444-71. 

Tags: households, industrial revolution, occupations, women's employment, women's history, women's work

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