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The Women's Harvest: Straw-Plaiting and the Representation of Labouring Women's Employment, c. 1793–1885

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2008

Pamela Sharpe
Pamela Sharpe
Affiliation:
Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK.
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Extract

Increasing attention has recently been given by historians to the many informal ways in which women made economic contributions to rural labouring households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jane Humphries and Peter King have shown how important the exploitation of common rights, by gleaning for example, could be to the family economy. This is not to overlook the fact that certain types of women's and children's employment, such as lace-making and straw-plaiting were formally established in some rural communities. The research which has been carried out into straw-plaiting the hand twisting of straw for use in hat making – in certain agricultural counties of southern England, has shown that the plait work of wives and children could provide a substantial financial boost to the household income of poorly paid agricultural labourers. Indeed there were times when their combined earnings could far outstrip those of the man. Single plaiters were also reputed to be able to collect something of a dowry to put towards their marriages out of their plait earnings. Industries such as straw-plaiting, which employed mainly women and children are, not before time, beginning to be considered as sources of the gain in productivity potential of Britain in the Industrial Revolution era. It seems likely that the income earned in these industries will, at last, be included in measurements of labouring family budgets and standards of living.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , October 1994 , pp. 129 - 142
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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29. Chelmsford Chronicle 23/1/1823 letter from ‘A Day Labourer’.

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61. Chelmsford Chronicle 28/1/1881. The 1870 Education Act obviously also affected child employment. See also VCH p. 378. 62. See for example Pennington and Westover, A Hidden Workforce; Blythell, D., The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1978)Google Scholar; Schmeichen, J., Sweated Industries and Sweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades 1860–1914 (Beckenham, 1984).Google Scholar The debates about sweated industry usually assume that it was only a feature of urban areas.

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