Alexander Wakelam

An earlier blog in this series challenged the notion that women only entered the workforce in significant numbers after the World Wars of the 20th century. It showed that, in 1851, the census recorded 43 percent of adult women were employed, the majority of whom were engaged in some form of domestic service. Given that in 1550-1750 around one third of all households employed servants, and by comparison in 1851 only 12 percent of households did so, the adult female employment rate in the 16th to 18th centuries would have been even higher than the 43 percent figure recorded for 1851.

One consequence of the decline in domestic service (which continued throughout the 19th and into the 20th century) was the need for more unpaid labour in the home. Despite this, we unfortunately know relatively little about such labour, since it was mostly invisible to official sources.  

E. Degas, Laundry girls ironing, 1884.

However, a rare view of women engaged in unpaid labour at home comes from the recently digitised 1921 Census of England and Wales. This shows us that patterns of women’s non-paid work were as varied in the past as their paid work; not all decisions were purely about money or the patriarchy. Understanding why women chose or were required to manage the home – a task that could be as exhausting as paid employment outside of it – helps reveal cultural ideas about the place of women in society and the family, and what “work” meant to them, particularly in an industrialised economy. 

Evidence from the census 

Censuses prior to 1921 essentially focused on capturing details of paid occupations together with very specific types of unpaid assistance, such as on farms. For example, in 1911 the instructions to householders on how to complete their census entry stated: ‘The occupations of women engaged in any business or profession, including women regularly engaged in assisting relatives in trade or business, must be fully stated. No entry should be made in the case of wives, daughters, or other female relatives wholly engaged in domestic duties at home.’ The occupation section of women engaged in domestic duties were thus simply left blank.  

This was reversed in the 1921 census. The government now asked householders: ‘For a member of a private household (such as householder’s wife) who is mainly occupied in unpaid domestic duties at home, write ‘Home Duties’.’ Indeed, examination of the original census schedules for 1921 reveal many cases where enumerators have ‘corrected’ the form by writing in “Home Duties” where it appears to have been omitted. 

L. R. Garside, Woman in a Kitchen. Pannett Art Gallery.

Despite having gone to some effort to specifically collect this data on women engaged in home duties, for reasons unknown (but probably cost), the Census Office in London later decided not to analyse and publish this information. The original forms suggest that these women were going to be grouped with all those ‘retired from work’ but were ultimately excluded even from this group.  

However, examining the transcriptions of the 1921 census materials captured by FindMyPast, and made available to Campop as part of the ESRC-funded I-CeM project, it is possible for the first time to construct a picture of those women who were recorded as providing unpaid domestic support in the form of home duties.  

Of the 12,858,643 women aged 15 to 60 in the 1921 Census, around 49 percent were reportedly engaged in ‘Home Duties’. This rose to 74 percent for the 6,317,968 married women. Indeed, as Figure 1 (below) sets out, unpaid domestic work was very much a feature of the experience of married women.

Figure 1. Percentage of women per age group in home duties by marital status.

Before marriage, most women, after finishing school, were engaged in waged labour (either outside or in the home) particularly after their mid to late teens, when some girls were apparently expected to take on domestic duties. For some, this was not merely aiding but replacing their mother: 21 percent of 17-year-olds whose mother had died were engaged in home duties, compared with 15 percent of all girls their age and 9 percent of those who had lost a father.  

Marriage and home duties

That home duties were primarily associated with married life is unsurprising. Particularly when children were too young to be occupied all day at school and for those who could not afford paid help, looking after the house was invariably a required task. The share of married women in home duties certainly increased during the prime years of childbearing in a woman’s late twenties and early thirties.  

However, as Figure 2 (below) shows, whilst the percentage of married women undertaking home duties increased between the birth of the first and second child, the share of married women who were already engaged in home duties before their first child was born was very high.

Figure 2. Share of married women in home duties by total children.

Even amongst the youngest wives without any children, around 70 percent were not working, rising to 75 percent after the first birth. Those with more than three children (particularly if young) were more likely to be in work – either reflecting their existing poverty or their need to feed more mouths – but still, 67 percent of the approximate 10,500 married women under 30 already with six children were occupied within the home. 

By 1921, women transitioning from being in paid employment to domestic management was not merely about the need to care for children. Rather it appears that it was expected of women – it was cultural rather than practical. In addition, given the high rate of home duties amongst older married women and widows over the age of 60, women seemingly did not return to work once children were able to look after themselves. The census clerks apparently were accurate in describing women in ‘Home Duties’ as retired from gainful employment. 

Geographical and class variations

Whether a married woman was in paid employment or looking after the home varied by geography and class, reflecting both economic needs but also local cultures. For some occupational groups, there was a clear culture of women remaining in the home. For example, very few wives of miners or those processing the minerals they dug up worked (3.3 percent in each case), reflecting the highly masculine culture of mining towns. In these locations, high male wages enabled couples to marry early, at the same time condemning women to lives of domesticity and repeated births.  

Esther Grainger, Portrait of a Miner’s Wife. National Museum Wales.

These couples, on the surface, shared much with fellow members of the northern working classes in nearby textile areas such as in the West Riding of Yorkshire. However, the textile areas had a fundamentally different culture of domesticity. High levels of female employment in the textile mills normalised the expectation that some married women with children would continue to work outside the home.  

Within these different cultures of work, levels of class separation also differed. The wives of coal miners exhibited similar rates of domestic duties (79.8 percent) to the wives of their foremen (82.4 percent) and employers (81.1 percent), but a clear difference appeared in the households of textile workers between wives of workers (64.1 percent), foremen (75.0 percent), and employers (82.2 percent). 

Employers in general tended to have higher rates of wives in domestic duties than their workers, although no gap between workers and employers was as large as in textiles.

The exception were bakers, as well as other makers of food and drink, of whom only some 60 percent of wives were in domestic duties, though the remainder predominantly worked in the family business such as running the shop. Their male employees were much less likely to be married than their employers, and 75 percent of their wives were at home. This reflected a general pattern amongst small business employers that, even if they exhibited higher rates of home duties than their workers, many had wives in work, often within the family business.  

Cultural norms

It seems probable that the concept of a non-working wife had become aspirational by the 1920s, associated with business success and also a level of sophistication that new members of the middle classes would be keen to emulate.  

The famously pretentious semi-bourgeois class of clerks – often resident in London’s expanding suburbs, an immortalised in Diary of a Nobody (1892) – exhibited this behaviour clearly. Nearly 84 percent of the wives of employer clerks were in home duties (higher than any other group within the 1921 occupational system), as were 82 percent of employees. Many of these clerks lived in areas of low rates of married women in home duties, further suggesting they were attempting to separate themselves from other members of the lower-middle classes in their local area.  

The only other group of employees with a higher rate of wives performing home duties appear at the opposite end of the class spectrum: agricultural labourers (83 percent). In this latter case, it would seem that the lack of employment opportunities, together with high fertility rates, kept wives at home, rather than a desire to demonstrate sophistication. Thus, whilst social position and class can be seen to have influenced the incidence of married women engaged in domestic duties, the situation was far from straight–forward.  

Conclusion

What women in ‘home duties’ were precisely engaged in still remains a mystery, reflecting the regular obstruction of women’s everyday activity from the record across history. For some, surely ‘home duties’ reflected hard physical labour (particularly in washing), as well as hours of childcare exceeding the length of the factory day.

John French Sloan, A woman’s work (1912).

For others, particularly the aspirational bourgeois, the activities of “home duties” involved little actual housework. 5.1 percent of wives in home duties had servants to assist them, a rate which doubled for clerks’ wives to 11.7 percent. For them, household “work” involved little physical action. Though this may have given some of these women the opportunity to spend their hours in cultural activities or socialising, for others it possibly reflected crushing boredom.  

This was, however, a societal order about to be shaken to its core. Economic downturn approached, followed by war, and then the breaking down of social restrictions over the following decades. By 2021, 75.6 percent of mothers with dependent children were in work – a striking reversal of the c.75 percent who had been out of work only a century earlier. 

Further reading

• Few, J., A History of Women’s Work – The Evolution of Women’s Working Lives (2025). 
• Griffin, E., Breadwinner – An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy (2020), Part I. 
• You, X., ‘Working with Husband? “Occupation’s Wife” and Married Women’s Employment in the Censuses in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911’, Social Science History 44:4 (2020).
• https://www.campop.geog.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/icem/census1921.html