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
Bob Bennett
It is often assumed that industrial Britain, with its large factories and mines employing thousands of people, left little space for individuals running their own businesses. But not everyone was employed as a worker for others. Some exercised a level of agency operating on their own as business proprietors, even if they were also often very constrained.
Richard Smith
Could people afford to retire in the past? There is a belief that until widespread retirement became the norm in the second half of the 20th century, men and women were expected to labour until debility or decrepitude made this impossible.
Attitudes to work in past society
It is widely assumed that in pre-industrial societies people worked only just enough to fulfil their subsistence needs. This implies that people would work less if their incomes rose, a pattern that economists have termed a ‘backward sloping supply curve of labour’.
This theory has been challenged by the alternative notion of an ‘industrious revolution’ in the later 17th and 18th century. This revolution, defined by an intensification of hours worked, allowed people to acquire an expanding range of consumer goods.
But neither theory has addressed how these differing circumstances impacted on the working behaviour of older people.
Sociologists long argued that with a shift away from economies dominated by subsistence agriculture to more economically diversified and increasingly capitalistic labour markets, there would be a negative impact on the labouring lives of the elderly. In increasingly competitive market economies, elderly farmers would be left with unprofitable land, and elderly workers would be pushed out of the labour force.
Measuring labour force participation of elderly males
Figure 1 above is based on data from Cardington (Bedfordshire, 1782) and Corfe Castle (Dorset, 1790).
In neither setting is there any indication that men worked less in their 60s and 70s than earlier in their lives. The data appear to suggest that in the late 18th century the labour force participation rates of elderly males remained close to 80 percent – a level very similar to that found a century later in the 1881 national census. In 1881, older male workers were consistently over-represented in relatively low paid, low status occupations in agriculture, clothing, and general labouring, and underrepresented in high paid and new sectors such as engineering, transport, glass, and electricals.
Evidence for the three centuries before 1881 shows that the efforts expended by many men in old age to retain a presence in the paid labour force was an enduring feature of their lives.
Roland Vivian Pitchforth, Old Stone Waller. Manchester Art Gallery.
Older men of all social levels retained a strong preference for self-sufficiency and independence, but those in possession of significant resources could achieve that status most easily. Elite men as they aged were able to sustain well-paid public activities in administration and governance at both local and national levels. For instance, of the 954 English MPs whose ages could be determined between 1754 and 1784, over a third remained in post after age 60, and of those nearly a half only vacated their positions because of death.
There was an increasing likelihood that poorer men as they aged patched together an ‘economy of makeshifts’ by combining whatever resources and earnings they could gather. This could include pasturage of a cow on the common waste, keeping a pig or poultry, or receiving payment from the overseers of the poor to perform small tasks, such as ridding the parish of vermin or repairing the highway. There was no precise age at which elderly men would cease to engage in these forms of labour.
Measuring labour force participation of elderly females
Elderly females also showed little tendency to stop working after age 50, although with some regional variation depending on what work was available. For example, women in their 50s and 60s in Cardington were almost twice as likely to be employed as those of a similar age in Corfe, reflecting the substantial presence of spinning and lacemaking in Cardington.
George Harvey, Old Spinner. The Stirling Smith Art Gallery & Museum.
An important factor affecting female participation in paid labour was marital status. In Corfe, only 8 per cent of married women over 60 were employed, but 83 percent of elderly widows were listed as in paid employment. In this instance, the loss of a husband would propel women into paid work. In Cardington, women were likely to be in paid employment both during their marriage and in widowhood. Overall, therefore, elderly widows were highly likely to be in some kind of paid employment.
However, because women’s work was frequently ill-defined, encompassing housework and part-time assistance to their husbands, particularly in agriculture and trades such as inn-keeping and retailing, there may have been under-recording of the extent of their income-generating labour, particularly in old age.
Elderly working-class women were expected to continue paid work outside and unpaid work inside the household. They were likely to have secured work charring, taking in laundry, and petty trading. Remuneration was minimal, although elderly women were often more successful than old men in finding informal work outside the home. Like men in labouring jobs, low pay for women of lower social status made it difficult for them to accumulate savings.
John Widdas, An Unidentified Retired Female Servant at Bramham. Leeds Museums and Galleries.
Diaries and correspondence show women in the upper classes actively managing their households and estates. Women from business families and those of the middling sort had opportunities to pursue ventures in later life; many liquidated their late husbands’ assets and loaned cash on interest. A third of elderly female witnesses before London church courts in the 17th and early 18th centuries were maintained by their husband or worked with him, particularly as inn- and shopkeepers.
Ten percent of those female witnesses who were widowed had a ‘private income’. Fewer than 10 percent are described as ‘supported by their family’, and a further 10 percent were supported in whole or part by the parish. Hence most elderly females relied on themselves or their husbands rather than their wider families or the parish.
Did the elderly participate in an ‘industrious revolution’?
On average, witnesses appearing in the Session Papers of the Old Bailey and the Northern Assizes increased their working hours by around 20 percent over the course of the 18th century, although it is not clear if this applied to older people as well as to younger. This intensification of working hours may in part have been driven by a desire to acquire the broadening array of consumer goods including the proliferating colonial groceries of tobacco, tea, coffee, and sugar. Alternatively, the drive to work more days and hours might have been falling wages and rising dependency ratios.
The late 18th and early 19th centuries were characterised by a tightening labour market and an unprecedented expansion of the population entering the work force. Under these conditions, elderly men may have been less able to secure additional hours of paid working time, and it would be hard to characterise any resulting unemployment as voluntary ‘retirement’.
Funding retirement
How many people stopped work in old age and were able to enjoy a leisured retirement? We have already noted that old age for many was a time when work could not be avoided or abandoned since it was essential as a source of income. Not working might be more a reflection of lack of suitable employment, or perhaps a physical inability to undertake work as the ageing process took its toll.
However, there were some opportunities to prepare for and guard against the loss of employment at older ages. “Friendly societies” (insurance or savings clubs) grew significantly, and parliamentary returns from 1802-3 record nearly 10,000 such societies with over 700,000 participants. At that time, it was not uncommon to find 40 to 50 percent of the adult male population registered as members of friendly societies in some urban centres.
However, such societies frequently folded – being of modest size, they often matured with too high a ratio of elderly beneficiaries relative to those of working age paying into them. This would leave the elderly even worse off, having paid into a fund that did not generate any returns.
By the late 18th century retirement did have a presence, but this was mainly among the elite. There was a growing sense that a pensioned retirement was something deserved following a lifetime of service, especially service to the state. This was first realised among those who had been in the military as well as the civil service. (This was very different to the idea that support in old age was an entitlement for everyone.)
A Greenwich Pensioner. Wellcome Collection.
Who retired?
Late 19th century Census Enumerator Books (CEBs) of England and Wales differentiate between those described as ‘retired’, those ‘formerly’ in an occupation, and those with ‘pauper’ status. An important study based on CEBs from the West Riding, Cheshire, Glamorgan, Hampshire and Hertfordshire has unearthed some telling patterns of the capacity to retire.
Overall, men were much more often described as ‘retired’ than women. Regionally, far more males were described as ‘retired’ and far fewer described as ‘paupers’ in Cheshire and West Riding. Here wages were higher and the economies more differentiated, enabling the accumulation of savings and the means to leave work voluntarily.
The overall percentages of old men enumerated as ‘retired’ in the CEBs were more substantial than has been previously assumed. In 1891, over 10 percent of all adult males were enumerated as ‘retired’ in these five counties, and in some registration sub-districts the proportion reached 22 percent.
Being in an occupation that conferred status, or one based upon property ownership and invested capital, facilitated a voluntary exit from the workforce. Being an army officer, an innkeeper, or farmer meant that one was far more likely to be ‘retired’. There was a notably negative correlation between the proportions of old men listed as ‘retired’ and those receiving poor relief.
On the contrary, agricultural and general labourers, domestic servants, laundresses, and charwomen were very likely to be listed as ‘formerly’ in an occupation or as ‘paupers’.
British School, An Elderly Garden Labourer. National Trust, Erddig.
Conclusion
The historical evidence does not fully endorse the preference for leisure over labour at any stage in the life cycle, as implied by the theory of the backward bending supply curve of labour. Working until it became physically impossible to do so was the norm.
However, by the late 18th century, small sections of elderly society were in receipt of pensions that would certainly have enabled them to have lived comfortably without any requirement to work.
At the same life-cycle stage, circumstances for the labouring poor were very different. There was a noteworthy deterioration in the value of parish welfare allocated to elderly females, as well as reduced employment chances for older men in areas where capitalist agriculture and de-industrialisation predominated. A modestly comfortable withdrawal from labouring in old age was therefore a limited possibility for most, but by no means all, sections of society.
In 1908 a national non-contributory, but far from generous, old age pension was introduced for all citizens aged 70 and over with an annual income of £21 or less, not in receipt of poor relief and of good character. However, it would not be until the mid-20th century that an adequate nationwide old age pension was in place, and retirement rather than labouring throughout most of an extended old age became the norm.
Further reading
Amy Erickson
This year’s International Women’s Day (IWD) theme is Accelerate Action – a call for ‘swift and decisive steps’ to advance gender equality across the personal and professional spheres. Since 2001, IWD has been a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to ‘advancing and celebrating’ women’s equality, but its history goes much further back.
The history of IWD
IWD originated in 1908 with demands for better working conditions: women marched in New York City and Chicago demanding shorter hours, better pay, their own union, and full suffrage. In 1909, 400 immigrant women at the Triangle Shirtwaist (blouse) Factory in New York went on strike. Clara Lemlich (Ukrainian, speaking in Yiddish) led the largest industry-wide walkout in the city’s history, an ‘uprising’ of 20,000 women garment workers. This resulted in the first permanent trade unions for women in the USA.
Theresa Malkiel (Russian), head of the Woman’s Committee of the Socialist Party of America, proposed the first National Woman’s Day on 28 February 1910. In the same year, at the International Socialist Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, attended by over 100 women from 17 countries, German activists Luise Zietz and Clara Zetkin proposed an International Women’s Day to campaign for equal political and labour rights. This proposal broke with the mainstream socialist argument that working-class women must seek progress through supporting working-class men.
Theresa Malkiel, c.1910.
On 19 March 1911, more than one million people attended IWD rallies in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. One week later, the Triangle Factory fire in New York City killed more than 140 mostly Jewish women workers, sharpening demands to improve working conditions in the US.
Factory employment provided opportunities for workers to share information and to organise protests on a large scale. But factory work was not the most common form of employment at this time, and many working women were not included in these types of networks. Although women have always worked for pay, this was rarely in a large place like a factory; in an earlier blog, we explored the prevalence of women working from home (either their own or someone else’s), or in small shops and workshops.
Olwen Hufton characterised women’s work prior to c.1900 as an ‘economy of makeshifts’, picking up odd jobs as and when to make ends meet. This undoubtedly describes the labour of that half of the population of both sexes who had few or no assets. And women were always in a worse position than men because their wages were lower.
However, among that half of the population which had assets of any kind, the picture is more complicated. This post explores the least-known form of women’s work: business ownership, often known as entrepreneurship. It argues that a better understanding of the diversity of women’s past economic roles can only help to ‘Accelerate Action’, as this year’s IWD theme asks.
Female entrepreneurs in the past
The British Business Census of Entrepreneurs is based on the England and Wales census data from 1851-1911. It uses the original meaning of ‘entrepreneur’ as someone who takes the risk of business upon themselves – that is, who is self-employed, or employs others. Carry van Lieshout and colleagues have found that around one third of late-19th-century entrepreneurs were female. The great majority of these, like the majority of male entrepreneurs, ran small businesses.
Women were probably more likely to be entrepreneurs of necessity (needing to work from home with small children) than to be opportunity entrepreneurs, spotting gaps in the market that could profitably be filled. But there were certainly those as well. In a culture where women’s wages stagnated between one half and two thirds of men’s wages over centuries, small business offered the possibility of self-sufficiency.
Eighteenth-century evidence from account books, guild records, and business cards shows women in business even at elite levels in the City of London. This evidence of women in business was discovered in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when history was developing as a field of study in universities. Historians then were surprised to find women working in an apparently self-determined way outside of the low-paid, low-skilled jobs of service and factory work which dominated their own day.
However, when interest in women’s history reappeared at the end of 20th century, the focus was on history from below. The earlier work was dismissed as being too rosy and overly optimistic. Hufton in 1984 argued that ‘the success stories of women in business are restricted to a handful of women … and these success stories are usually closely associated with the performance of husband or father’. Research in the 21st century has shown that certainly many women inherited businesses from their father or mother or husband, but there is no evidence that familial influence was any greater than with men who inherited businesses from their father or mother or wife.
A handful of women?
The Sleepe sisters, whose mid-18th century business cards are represented here, all learned their trade of fan-making from their mother. Their father was a musician.
Business cards of Martha Sleepe, Mary Sansom, and Esther Sleepe. British Museum.
All three sisters, like their mother, were located in Cheapside, the most expensive shopping street in London. Mary Sleepe married John Sansom, who worked in imported woods, so produced the only known card representing husband and wife in different businesses (middle image above, showing Mary Sleepe at the top of the card, and John Sansom below). Being listed first, Mary appears to have had more name recognition than her husband. When Esther Sleepe married Charles Burney, a musician like her father,, she simply changed her surname and address on her new business card (below).
Trade card for Esther Burney fan shop, 1745–1820. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Examples of businesswomen like those in the Sleepe family have previously been thought of as very rare exceptions. But a rapidly growing body of research over the last 20 years has found more and more substantial businesswomen, to the point where they can no longer be thought of even as unusual. They are connected to some of the 18th century’s best-known names. The Sleepes were the novelist Frances Burney’s mother, aunts and grandmother. William Hogarth’s sisters ran a children’s clothing shop, his mother sold medicines, and his principal patron was Mary Edwards, who managed large estates of her own. After his death, his widow Jane Hogarth managed the print business for 25 years.
Caricaturist James Gillray’s printer (and landlady and personal support) was Hannah Humphrey. Poet and scholar Thomas Gray’s mother and aunt were milliners who paid for his education at Eton and Cambridge. Elizabeth Baring founded Baring’s Bank with her sons; Eleanor Coade invented coadestone, which decorates some of the most prominent buildings in Britain and around the world; ‘bluestocking’ Elisabeth Montagu was also a colliery owner; Mary Blackstone, mother of the jurist William, was a silk mercer; Elizabeth Howland, daughter of East India Company chairman Josiah Child, built Howland Docks in Surrey. Wealthy gentlewoman Ellen Morewood saw no conflict between having her portrait painted by George Romney and running her Derbyshire colliery and ironstone extraction operation.
George Romney, Ellen Morewood (1790).
Thousands of businesswomen are of course unknown today: printers, dressmakers, school proprietors, and actresses and playwrights who were also theatre shareholders. At the gentry and aristocratic end, women running estates were not ‘remarkable’ or even ‘unusual’, as National Trust houses would have us believe. It was a regular occurrence.
Why this matters today
Some historians see women in business as agents of their own destiny; others see them as capitalist collaborators. We do not know how they saw themselves, or whether they were in fact exploited or exploitative. Without taking a moral position, their existence is significant because it must change the way we see women in the past: there is no suggestion that women should restrict their market activities until the end of the 18th century, and then it is only for a tiny slice of the population. This history must also change the way we see business: a mixed-sex market is quite different to the all-male market that has often been assumed as the norm.
Most women in high-prestige, highly paid jobs today, believe that they are newcomers in their fields. They accept limits on their expectations because they believe that improvements will take time. To think of oneself instead as the inheritor of a long line of antecedent female businesswomen and entrepreneurs might severely limit ones patience with the status quo. Feeling exceptional is not as empowering as feeling part of a longer history.
Conclusion
A better understanding of women’s past economic roles and the history of women’s work is crucial if we are to ‘Accelerate Action’, as this year’s IWD theme asks. In the West, IWD fell into abeyance after the First World War because of its association with communism. In the late 1960s, second-wave feminism revived IWD as a day of protest, and the date was fixed on March 8 in Europe and the US. In 1975 the day was adopted by the United Nations, as ‘a time to reflect on progress made’ and ‘celebrate acts of courage and determination’ by ordinary women.
History suggests that critical thinking is just as important as celebration.
National Federation of Women Workers Banner; People’s History Museum.
Further reading
Free online
Paywall
Charmian Mansell
When Downton Abbey first aired on 26 September 2010, the public was immediately hooked. It wasn’t just the glamour, the affluence, and the scandals of the aristocratic Crawley family living in the big house that drew viewers in. It was also the cast of servants working tirelessly below stairs that captivated audiences.
The show gave airtime to the lives of men and women who lit fires, carried luggage, mopped floors, cooked food, served food, made beds, and did laundry, all in the service of the Earl and Countess of Grantham and their three daughters.
Downton Abbey dramatizes service in the Crawley’s country house in the early 20th century. But what if we turn the clock back a few hundred years? What was service like in the centuries before Downton? Here are five ways in which pre-industrial English service was not as Mr Carson (the butler), Anna (the lady’s maid), or Daisy (the kitchen maid), experienced it.
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.
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?
© 2025 University of Cambridge
The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure