Preliminary papers, theses and reports on women's work

You can also view published papers on women's work.

Mistresses and marriage: or, a short history of the Mrs, Amy Louise Erickson

The ubiquitous forms of address for women 'Mrs' and 'Miss' are both abbreviations of 'mistress'. Although mistress is a term with a multiplicity of meanings, in early modern England the mistress most commonly designated the female equivalent of master - that is, a person with capital who directed servants or apprentices. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, there was only Mrs (or Mris, Ms, or other forms of abbreviation), applied to any adult woman who merited the social distinction, without any marital connotation. Miss was reserved for young girls until then. Even when adult single women started to use Miss, Mrs still designated a social or business standing, and not the status of being married, until at least the mid-nineteenth century. This article demonstrates the changes in nomenclature over time, explains why Mrs was never used to accord older single women the same status as a married woman, and argues that the distinctions are important to economic and social historians.

Marital status and economic activity: interpreting spinsters, wives, and widows in pre-census population listings, Amy Louise Erickson

This paper addresses the confusions between marital and occupational status in female descriptors, arguing that in order to calculate female labour force participation rates, we have to be able to read sources like population listings and early censuses in a much more careful way than has been done to date. I show that 'spinster' was used as an occupational descriptor alongside its connotation of an unmarried woman until at least 1801; that 'Mrs' implied business ownership, not marriage; that the general lack of occupational descriptors for married women did not necessarily mean they were unemployed, rather that enumerators omitted wives' occupations by convention; and that 'widow' was used only irregularly in an as yet unidentified pattern. Occupations missing from population listings are identified by different means. The conclusions about how to read population listings also have implications for the interpretation of later census returns.

Prospects and preliminary work on female occupational structure in England from 1500 to the national census, Jacob Field and Amy Erickson

We present here a review of the twelve classes of sources examined to date (July 2009), giving examples of what they might tell us. The sources include early quasi-census material, national tax returns, savings bank depositor records, trade directories, religious 'censuses', court records, ecclesiastical and parochial records, listings of the poor, apprenticeship records, school accounts, hospital accounts, and estate and household accounts. Where particular examples of these sources do not use occupational descriptors for women, we explore how it is possible to use different means of identifying women's work by comparing a body of the same source over time and place.

Identifying women's occupations in early modern London, Amy Louise Erickson

This paper is a preliminary survey of three sources for women's occupations in eighteenth-century London: apprenticeships in the city livery companies; the registers of Christ's Hospital showing apprenticeships; and the records of testimony in the Old Bailey. There is currently only one article in print on the female occupational geography of London in this period (P. Earle, 1989), based on testimony in church court records. In the sources examined here, women worked largely in public, trading and production occupations. This profile is substantially different from the preponderance of domestic service and making/mending textiles which appears in the church court records.