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Women's Work and the Family in Nineteenth-Century Europe
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 June 2009
Extract
There is a great deal of confusion about the history of women's work outside the home and about the origin and meaning of women's traditional place within the home. Most interpretations of either of these questions depend on assumptions about the other. Usually, women at home in any time period are assumed to be non-productive, the antithesis of women at work. In addition, most general works on women and the family assume that the history of women's employment, like the history of women's legal and political rights, can be understood as a gradual evolution from a traditional place at home to a modern position in the world of work. Some historians cite changes in employment opportunities created by industrialization as the precursors of legal emancipation. Others stress political rights as the source of improved economic status. In both cases, legal-political and economic ‘emancipation’ usually are linked to changes in cultural values. Thus William Goode, whose World Revolution and Family Patterns makes temporal and geographic comparisons of family patterns, remarks on what he calls ‘the statistically unusual status of western women today, that is their high participation in work outside of the home’.
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- Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1975
References
Many people have helped us with comments on earlier drafts of this essay. We especially wish to thank Susan Rogers, Ellen Sewell, William Sewell, Jr., Charles Tilly, Marilyn Young, Richard Sennett, Natalie Davis, Sally Brown, Robert Brown, Lynn Hunt, Lynn Lees, and Maurine Greenwald for their critical readings of this paper.
A version of this paper was co-recipient of the Stephen Allen Kaplan Prize, University of Pennsylvania, 1973, and will appear in a forthcoming volume incorporating the Kaplan Lectures on the Family.
1 Goode, William, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York, 1963), 56.Google Scholar Ivy Pinchbeck makes the opposite point—that occupational changes played a large part in women's emancipation—in the preface to the reprinted edition of her book, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York, 1969), v.Google Scholar
2 Deldycke, T., Gelders, H. and Limbor, J. M., La Population active et sa structure, under the supervision of Bairoch, P. (Brussells, 1969), 29–31.Google Scholar The figures given for Italy indicate that 1881 had even higher proportion of women working. The 1901 census, however, has been shown to be more reliable, especially in designating occupation. In 1881, census categories tended to overestimate the numbers of women working. In 1901, about 32.5 percent of Italian women worked.
3 The percentage of women in ‘middle class’ (white collar) occupations—teachers, nurses, shop assistants, secretaries and civil servants—increased in England between 1881 and 1911, while the percentage of women employed in working class occupations fell.
Holcombe, Lee, Victorian Ladies at Work (Hamden, Conn., 1973), 216.Google Scholar Holcombe shows that although mid-Victorian ideologies about women's place and women's dependent position in the patriarchal family were still being publicized, middle class women were increasingly entering the labor force. The reasons lie in demographic and economic realities, not ideology. The first of these was the surplus of unmarried or ‘redundant women’, in Harriet Martineau's phrase. These women, to whom the sex ratio denied husbands and for whom male mortality denied fathers and brothers, had to work. Furthermore, the expansion of the tertiary sector in England provided jobs for these women and for working class women who could take advantage of increased educational opportunities. In Holcombe's analysis, the development of feminist ideology about women's work accompanied change and justified it. It did not precede it or cause it in any sense.
In France, there was a similar move into ‘middle class’ occupations in the twentieth century. Clark, Francis, The Position of Women in Contemporary France (London, 1937), 74–5,Google Scholar gives the following figures for the percent female in selected occupations:
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6 Calculated from data in Deldycke et al., 174. Agricultural activity was unimportant in England and in the city of Milan, so French figures are made comparable by excluding agriculture.
7 By industrialization we mean the process in which, over time, secondary and tertiary economic activity gain in importance in an economy. This is accompanied by an increased scale of these activities and consequent increasing productivity per capita.
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71 Cf. Shorter, Edward, ‘Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Europe, 1750–1900’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (1971), 237–72;CrossRefGoogle Scholar‘Capitalism, Culture and Sexuality: Some Competing Models’, Social Science Quarterly (1972), 338–56,Google Scholar and, most recently, ‘Female Emancipation, Birth Control and Fertility in European History’, American Historical Review, 78 (1973), 605–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Shorter has argued that the increase in illegitimate fertility which began in the mid-eighteenth to late nineteenth centuries in Europe was preceded by a dramatic change in values. This change, he says, was stimulated by rebellion against parental authority and by exposure to ‘market values’ when young women broke with ‘old traditions’ and went out to work. The change was expressed in a new sexual ‘liberation’ of young working girls. They sought self-fulfillment and self-expression in sexual encounters. In the absence of contraception, they became pregnant and bore illegitimate children. We find Shorter's speculations imaginative but incorrect. He makes unfounded assumptions about pre-industrial family relationships and about patterns of work in these families. The actual historical experience of young women working in the nineteenth century was not what Shorter assumes it was. When one examines their history and finds that peasant values and family interests sent them to work, and when one examines the kinds of work they did and the pay they received, it is impossible to agree with Shorter that their experience was either radically different from that of women in the past, or was in any sense ‘emancipating’.
Shorter cannot demonstrate that attitudes changed; he deduces that they did. We show that the behavior from which Shorter deduced changed values was consonant with older valus operating in changed circumstances. Illegitimacy rose at least partly as a consequence of a compositional change in population—i.e., the increasing presence of many more young women in sexually vulnerable situations as workers in cities, removed from family protection and assistance. Under these circumstances, illicit liaisons can be seen as alternate families and illegitimate children the consequence of an attempt to constitute the family work unit in a situation in which legal marriage sometimes could not be afforded, other times, was not felt necessary. Far from their own parents and the community which could have enforced compliance with an agreement to marriage which preceded sexual relations, women were more likely to bear illegitimate children. This is discussed more fully in the text below. See DePauw, J., ‘Amour illegitime et société à Nantes au XVIIIe siècle’, Annates, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, 27e Année (07–10, 1972), 1155–82,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 1163. De Pauw shows (1166) that promises of marriage in cases of illegitimacy increased as both illegitimacy increased and the unions which produced the bastards increasingly occurred between social equals in the eighteenth century. (In each subsequent version of his argument, Shorter has become less qualified and more insistent about the logic of his argument. Logic, however, ought not to be confused with actual historical experience and Shorter has little solid evidence from the past to support his speculation.) See Tilly, Louise, Scott, Joan and Cohen, Miriam, ‘Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns’, unpublished paper, 1973.Google Scholar
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