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3 - Women in the agricultural labour market: female farm servants

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

Nicola Verdon
Affiliation:
University of Reading
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Summary

That so many women were, at some time in their lives, productive farm servants is of importance, because women were to lose much of this productive role in agriculture as a result of the decline of farm service.

So wrote Ann Kussmaul in her classic account of farm service Servants in Husbandry in Early Modern England, which was published in 1981. The arguments she proffered have proved to be highly influential, although in recent years a number of scholars have begun to question her methodology, data and conclusions. While this has certainly widened our appreciation of the complexities of the regional incidence and structure of service, few studies have sought to explore in any detail the gendered experience of farm service. No single survey has explored to what extent women's economic role was undermined after the decline of service in southern England. In addition, the only detailed consideration of the productive functions performed by female servants in regions where the institution continued in the nineteenth century is Judy Gielgud's unpublished research on Northumberland and Cumbria. This chapter seeks to add to our understanding of the second theme. I have chosen to concentrate on the experience of women farm servants in one county: the East Riding of Yorkshire. This county was unique in that it was the only arable county to continue hiring unmarried male and female farm servants as a fundamental component of its labour force into the twentieth century.

Type
Chapter
Information
Rural Women Workers in Nineteenth-Century England
Gender, Work and Wages
, pp. 77 - 97
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
Print publication year: 2002

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