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women’s employment « Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Top of the Campops: 60 things you didn't know about family, marriage, work, and death since the middle ages

Posts Tagged ‘women’s employment’

Working from home in the past

Thursday, January 23rd, 2025

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.

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Who are these people? Reconstructing life courses using record linking.

Thursday, December 19th, 2024

Emma Diduch

In the autumn of 1896, the employees of the Strutt cotton spinning mills in Belper lined up wearing their Sunday best for a series of photographs marking the firm’s upcoming merger into the English Sewing Cotton Company. The images which survive in the Derbyshire Record Office offer a fascinating glimpse into the lives of ordinary working people – there are friends holding hands, children scowling into the camera, a row of three sisters in matching dresses – and they also spark questions about work in the Strutt Mills and the community surrounding the factory. Did these workers make good wages and have long careers in the mill? Were these children sent to work at a young age to help support their families? Would these young women soon leave the factory to get married? 

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Women have always worked – for pay

Thursday, August 8th, 2024

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. 

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