Women's wage-earning ability often gave them more influence over wider familial and community decision making. This included decisions about consumption, and has been held partly responsible for the increasing independence and fashion consciousness of young women, and the rise in mass spending on household goods, clothing, furniture, curtains and foodstuffs.
The more women worked for wages the less time they had to produce their own goods for the home. However, there are more examples where working women shouldered the double burden of waged work and the bulk of household responsibilities, and where their role in politics remained marginal. As the 19th century progressed, there was a greater prevalence of gender-specific employment which was often used to enhance control and discipline in the workplace.
Supervisory roles were almost exclusively taken by men, and men also came to operate the most expensive and sophisticated machinery and to monopolise the high status and higher paid jobs even in textiles.
The expansion of heavy industries such as iron, steel, mining, engineering and ship building in the later century also created sectors which employed almost exclusively male labour, which were associated solely with male attributes and which endorsed the male breadwinner ideal. Thus a hardening of gender assumptions in the nineteenth century was closely associated with corresponding changes in the workplace. Women's History in Britain, ed. June Purvis London UCL Press A collection of essays covering a range of topics from women's work and the family to education, health, sexuality and politics.
Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, by Katrina Honeyman Basingstoke Macmillan, A concise volume good on gender, class and industrialisation. The Womens' Library An organisation of historians of women in Britain promoting research and writing on women's history. This website also contains a number of very useful links to other websites associated with the history of women. Spartacus Schoolnet A website directed at schools containing biographies of key women in the history of the British women's movement.
There a several museums which help to recapture the nature of Victorian society and the place of women within it, most obviously the Victoria and Albert Museum in London which has wonderful collections of art and artefacts reflecting the nature of the middle- and upper-class Victorian home.
Smaller museums yield information and evidence of women's work and their patterns of dress and consumption. The new industrial and commercial middle classes of the Victorian era were great patrons of the arts, and some British provincial art galleries contain major collections of the sorts of works which they commissioned as well as work depicting domestic interiors and women. Consult some primary sources detailing the nature of women's work and household activities such as business records, census enumerators' books, trade directories, household budgets and private diaries.
Other guides to archive holdings can be found on the websites of most major repositories. Many collections of working class autobiographies have been published and include several written by women. For a guide see for example, The Autobiography of the Working Class: an annotated critical bibliography vols ed.
Burnett, D. Vincent and J. Mayall, Hassocks Harvester , , Examining surviving Victorian housing from outside and from within can be very revealing particularly if these can be matched to information from Census returns.
It is possible to reconstruct Victorian households at each census point and to imagine where each household member resided within the house. In many major cities there are now organised walks which are helpful in tracing Victorian history and women's history trails.
Details of these can usually be obtained from local history libraries. She specialises in the impact of economic and social change within different local and regional, economic, social and cultural settings. Her books include The Industrial Revolution London, Search term:.
Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. When my female boss saw how unwell I was, she kindly suggested I go home. I told her the next day I must be coming down with a cold. That said, I worry about using a sick day or two every month. What are my rights in this area regarding sick leave?
Should I speak up next time? Am I letting the side down by not coming out and being honest about my period? Something happens to you once a month that is painful and out of your control. You are not alone. And yet, you feel you will be seen as weak or unreliable if you tell someone about it. And other women seem to share your fear. Cooking for the household took a major part of a woman's time. Making garments—spinning yarn, weaving cloth, sewing and mending clothes—also took much time.
During much of the Colonial period, the birth rate was high: soon after the time of the American Revolution, it was still about seven children per mother. Other women worked as servants or were enslaved. Some European women came as indentured servants, required to serve a certain amount of time before having independence. Women who were enslaved, captured from Africa or born to enslaved mothers, often did the same work men did, in the home or in the field. Some work was skilled labor, but much was unskilled field labor or in the household.
Early in Colonial history, Native Americans sometimes were enslaved. The typical white home in 18th century America was engaged in agriculture.
The men were responsible for agricultural labor and the women for "domestic" chores:. Women participated in "men's work" at times. At harvest, it was not unusual for women to also work in the fields. When husbands were away on long journeys, the wives usually took over the farm management.
Unmarried women, or divorced women without property, might work in another household, helping out with household chores of the wife or substituting for the wife if there was not one in the family. Widows and widowers tended to remarry very quickly, though.
Some unmarried or widowed women ran schools or taught in them, or worked as governesses for other families. In cities, where families owned shops or worked in trades, the women often took care of domestic chores including:. They also often worked alongside their husbands, assisting with some tasks in the shop or business, or taking care of customers.
Women could not keep their own wages, so many of the records that might tell us more about women's work don't exist. Many women, especially, but not only widows, owned businesses. Women worked as:. During the American Revolution, many women in Colonial families participated in boycotting British goods, which meant more home manufacture to replace those items.
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