Amy Erickson

It is commonly assumed that women entered the workforce in significant numbers only after the World Wars of the 20th century. While women may have been occupied with household duties in previous centuries, the assumption goes, they were much less likely than men to engage in paid labour. This blog explains why a) that’s wrong, and b) the issue is much more complicated than simply a progressive increase in women earning their own salary. 

The Woman Shopkeeper, British School. Photo credit: People’s Palace and Winter Gardens, Glasgow, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND.

In 2018 the female labour force participation rate reached a record high of 74 percent. Reliable figures began in 1851, with the first census in which it is possible to discern anything like a labour force participation rate. In 1851, 43 percent of women were reported to be in ‘regular employment’. ‘Regular’ was not defined, so that figure should be taken as a minimum of those engaged in paid employment, with no indication of hours worked.  

Mid-19th century concepts of full-time employment were very different from our own: agricultural work was from dawn (or earlier in the case of milking) to dusk, so varied seasonally; textile factory or mining or blast furnace shifts were 12 hours; shops were open in all daylight hours, six days a week. Today’s full time eight-hour day and 40-hour week would have been considered part-time for the last 500 years.  

If 43 percent of adult women were in regular employment in the mid-19th century, then women constituted nearly one third of the total labour force (not counting unpaid domestic work). Single women and widows were much more often employed than married women, only 10 percent of whom were in regular employment.  

However, while the great majority of women married, and most of those who married had children whose upbringing was certainly their mother’s responsibility, nonetheless more than half of all adult women (usually counted as 15+) were not married at any given point in time. 

The industrial revolution

The effect of the industrial revolution on women’s employment has been hotly debated for the last century. The current consensus is that the effects varied by type of manufacturing. 

The largest manufacturing sector, by number of people employed and by exports, was textiles. The mechanisation of spinning from the late 18th century had a catastrophic effect on women’s employment levels nationwide: yarn that was previously produced by hand by women all over the country was now produced in factories highly concentrated in particular towns, and much of the labour was men’s.  

J. Hinton, The Art of Stocking-Frame-Work Knitting, engraved for the Universal Magazine, 1750. Science Museum Group, © The Board of Trustees of the Science Museum.

The mechanisation of weaving in the early 19th century partially compensated for the earlier technological unemployment caused by the mechanisation of spinning, since factory weaving was largely female. But factory weaving, like factory spinning, was not evenly spread but geographically concentrated: cottons in Lancashire; woollens in West Yorkshire and the West Country; silks in Essex and Cheshire.  

The census evidence, available for the period 1851-1911, shows that female labour force participation rates were demand-led – that is, wherever paid employment was available in the period 1851-1911, women took it. So regional differences were marked. That situation probably applied earlier too.  

The best place to measure employment rates prior to 1851 is London, using court records which asked witnesses how they supported themselves. Around 1700, these records show a minimum of 65 percent of married women in employment, six and a half times the 1851 rate. Nearly all single and widowed women were in employment.  

Married women in employment still bore all of the domestic responsibilities, but they were likely to pay other women to do the required cooking, cleaning, washing, and childcare – either as live-in servants or on a casual daily basis as charwomen. This left the wealthier women who had received skilled training from their parents or an apprenticeship free to operate their trade. Both their activities and the servants’ employment increased the female labour force participation rate.

For married women, the drawback of earning was that technically their husbands owned all of their property, although there were ways around that draconian rule.

Sketch book of Paul Sandby (1745-1809), photo credit: Trustees of the British Museum.

Entrepreneurs

Given sufficient capital, running one’s own business was infinitely preferable for women, whose wages stuck at the biblical ratio of one half to two thirds of men’s wages for over 500 years (Leviticus 27:2-4). Both piecework and entrepreneurship were therefore preferable to wages. The censuses of 1851-1911 suggest that historically women were more likely than men to be entrepreneurs – whether they chose self-employment through necessity or to take advantage of opportunities. 

Before the 19th century, most work was domestic in the sense that it took place in or around someone’s home. Of course, all of the labour that we now refer to as unpaid domestic work was still necessary, but to a large extent women were paid to undertake it. 

Unknown artist; Esther Hammerton (1711-1746).
Hester succeeded her father as sexton at All Saints’ Church in Kingston, which required her to dig graves and ring the bells. By the end of the 18th century, every parish within London’s city walls and several without the walls had employed a women sexton at one time or another.

Labour force participation rates 

In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries, around one third of all households employed servants. By 1851, only 12 percent of households employed servants, which necessitated much more unpaid labour in the home. The mid-19th to the mid-20th century marked a historic low point in what we now call labour force participation rates, and of course saw the campaigns for women’s education, reforms to married women’s property law, and access to the professions of medicine and law.  

It is these campaigns that are often referenced as ‘opening up’ employment for women, but the story is considerably more complicated and by no means a simple progression from bad to better. Investigating women’s employment in the pre-census era puts into perspective the ‘record’ labour force participation rate of 2018: it looks now more like a return to an earlier status quo, rather than an achievement of equality of opportunity. 

Women gutting and salting herring for export in Wick, c.1900, photo credit: Johnston Collection, Wick.

Further reading

Open access

Xuesheng You, ‘The missing half: female labour force participation in Victorian England and Wales’, in The Online Historical Atlas of Occupational Structure and Population Geography in England and Wales 1600-2011, ed. L. Shaw-Taylor, A. Cockerill and M. Satchell (2017). 

Economies Past lets you explore female and male employment by local area 1851-1911. 

On Populations Past you can disaggregate women by marital status and relate their employment to households, to infant and child mortality, and to children’s employment by local area 1851-1911. 

The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs maps women and men in business 1851-1911. 

Paywall

Amy Erickson, ‘Married women’s occupations in eighteenth-century London’, Continuity & Change 23 (2008), 267-307. 

Wanda Henry, ‘Hester Hammerton and women sextons in eighteenth and nineteenth-century England’, Gender & History 31:2 (2019), 404-21. 

Carry van Lieshout, Harry Smith, Piero Montebruno & Robert J. Bennett, ‘Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911’, Social History 44:4 (2019), 440-68. 

Leigh Shaw-Taylor, ‘Diverse experiences: The geography of adult female employment in England and the 1851 census’, in Women’s Work in Industrial England: Regional and Local Perspectives, ed. Nigel Goose (2007). 

Jane Whittle, ‘A critique of approaches to “domestic work”: Women, work and the pre-industrial economy’, Past & Present 243 (2019), 35-70. 

Xuesheng You, ‘Women’s labour force participation in nineteenth-century England and Wales: evidence from the 1881 census enumerators’ books’, Economic History Review 73:1 (2020): 106-33.