Historiography

Research on women’s work and role inside the household and in the wider economy has now reached a volume and importance which obliges full acknowledgement of its implications for economic and social history more generally. Old questions and debates. . . need to be reassessed in the light of the vital role played by gender.2

In this quote, Pat Hudson and William Lee framed some of the issues that shape writing on women’s work: home and work, the lack of integration between economic and social history and women’s history, the significance of gender and ‘old questions and debates’. Sheilagh Ogilvie recently pointed out three central problems: that we do not yet know enough about the facts of women’s work, that causal explanations have been only partial and often in conflict and that, therefore, we do not know the implications of women’s economic position.3

Pioneers writing about women’s work set out to recover women’s past, and the first studies, such as those by Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck in England and Abensour in France stand as important contributions, often unsurpassed for detail.4 Two generations later and signalling the way forward, Natalie Zemon Davis, Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Olwen Hufton and Ute Gerhard inspired new generations of scholars.5 Particularly important was Louise Tilly and Joan W. Scott’s Women, Work and Family, which explicitly identified and analysed relationships between women’s role expectations, raised and addressed issues of life cycle, demography and familial obligations and linked these to the meanings of work and to women’s decisions about ‘gainful employment’. It is hard now to remember how innovative it was.

At the heart of understanding women’s work in the modern period is capitalism and the industrial revolution. Alice Clark argued that the capitalist economy destroyed family industries, forced workers onto the wage market and moved women from a strong economic position in the seventeenth century to a disadvantaged one with regard to skill, devaluing their equal contribution to the family. As important as her work remains, she also initiated the debate over whether or not the period before capitalist expansion and industrialisation was a golden age for women workers. Ivy Pinchbeck, in contrast, argued that ultimately the industrial revolution led to greater leisure in the home and relieved women from the subordination, monotony and drudgery of the domestic system, while the woman worker outside the home gained better conditions, a greater variety of openings and improved status. In her reading then, industrialisation was the harbinger of a better modern world.

Important and innovative approaches came out of proto-industrial theory that characterised two different stages in economic development: pre-industrialisation and proto-industrialisation.6 It argued for a significant change in household division of labour and greater similarity in men’s and women’s work. Detailed local studies prompted by proto-industrial theory greatly expanded our understanding of the geography of European enterprise, and raised important issues about economic development, familial participation, the role of rural communities, gender relations, affections and household formation. Importantly it stimulated thinking about links between economic theory and gender studies that go beyond measuring women’s participation rates and has influenced much of the research on gender and work.

But as a staged model of industrial development, it disguises the fact that such stages were not universal or uniform; they were reached at different times in different parts of Europe and often in very different ways. As this chapter argues, several patterns coexisted so, for example, the domestic system continued alongside the push to centralised manufacturing, and the two often enjoyed a symbiotic relationship. Like the so-called transition from ‘family economy’ through ‘family wage economy’ to ‘family consumer economy’ used by Tilly and Scott and, more recently by Bridget Hill, such approaches to transition require untangling. For example, we need to be very clear that the family economy also included people working for wages - these were not the invention of a ‘family wage economy’ - and that people worked outside of families in a range of organisational structures and were not always motivated by ‘what is good for the family’.

Proto-industrialisation theory also tends to support a ‘golden age’ approach to women’s work. The implication is that women were involved in a wide range of activities and that industrial capitalism, with its waged labour, family wage and specialisation, destroyed them. Yet the evidence does little to support a golden age. Olwen Hufton in 1983, noted that the ‘bon vieux temps has proved remarkably elusive’.7 More recently, Amanda Vickery vigorously argued that we should be sceptical ‘about a history which blindly insists that women’s status has deteriorated from a past golden age’, and that there ‘was no systematic reduction in the range of employments available to labouring women’ due to early modern capitalism. Such a model ‘rests on the dubious assumption of a lost egalitarian Eden, which has proved elusive to empirical research’.8 Thus, situating and understanding women’s work has been a fundamental part of understanding industrial capitalism.

In parallel, economic historians revised interpretations of the process of British industrialisation, arguing it was not a revolution but a very lengthy organic process. Importantly, they also revised views about continental industrialisation, recasting European transitions in their own context and not in terms of imported British experience. But Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson argued that historians’ use of aggregate quantitative indicators ignored very real transformations.9 In restating a more ‘revolutionary’ view of industrialisation, they argued that the longue duree approach specifically overlooked the impact of women’s labour and wages and therefore excluded many high-productivity industries where the greatest transformations in technical processes or organisation took place.10 Put crudely, if you add in women’s work, the industrial revolution looks very different - sharper, more rapid and more dramatic. Furthermore, the gradualist approach could have serious implications for the history of women’s work by undervaluing opportunities available to women in factories. Thus when industrial change is looked at from a gendered point of view, a different picture emerges. Issues of feminisation have been important to several industries and professions, and we need to look carefully at the dynamics of those processes for what they tell us about work and the operation of gender.

A theme that runs through this chapter is the relationship of gender to skill, status and honour. I have argued that gender and skill are historically specific, defined by multifaceted issues that relate to strength, tools and technology, protection of the workplace, location and men’s property in skill.11 Important examinations of how men operated to redefine and claim the workplace, such as those by Jean H. Quataert, Merry Wiesner and Sonya O. Rose, have helped to articulate some of the cultural issues that define homework, skilled work, ownership of tools and notions of honour in the workplace.12 Gendered workplace patterns were not the result of a simple process of masculine control or patriarchy, and the character of skill and the ways that men and women negotiated their understanding of it profoundly affected the shape of the workforce.

Importantly, historical explanations need to be situated in basic research and need to avoid overarching explanations that actually hide diversity and may remove individual agency from the equation. The past thirty years produced a virtual explosion in writing on women’s work dealing with a range of issues and causal explanations. Many were local studies, focused on particular periods, countries, regions or cultures and, especially, particular towns. There were important studies of women in specific sectors and outside of textiles; we are much better informed about women in printing trades, for example. New work on textiles produced in-depth studies on women in business, particularly entrepreneurial women in fashion trades, and the growth of studies on material culture opened new areas of exploration and showed new ways of thinking about women’s work which is divorced from the labour model of the 1970s. Studies of class re-emerged with a new face and shed light on women’s activities within families and family workshops. We have a much more nuanced picture of work relationships and especially women’s agency; research has pointed up the diversity of female experience, both geographically and chronologically, and in rural and urban settings. If patriarchy, paternalism and a sense of oppression shaped some of the earliest research, then independence, female agency and gender relations shape much of the newer work. More sophisticated explanatory frameworks have been developed, and there has been more detailed study of women’s work situated in a complex of local and regional factors and reflecting the social construction of women’s work within the framework of their lives.13 Importantly, feminist historians have now taken on the project of revising the canon of labour history, integrating the research, ideas and approaches that inform the history of women’s work; Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson’s rewriting of the industrial revolution stands as one example. As Scott said, the complexities and confusions are often the way to arrive at a better sense of what women’s work was and how it was situated.