CONCLUSIONS
A number of conclusions may be drawn about the nature of women's work in nineteenth-century Europe. Firstly, there was a change in what constituted work for women. At the beginning of our period, across most of Europe, women's work was unspecialised and not as clearly demarcated as it was to become by 1900.
Notions of appropriate work for women became sharper as the century progressed, which meant that although the range of jobs expanded, the opportunities for women were increasingly delineated and the work they did was rewarded accordingly. Secondly, a continuous feature of women’s work was women's flexibility. Whilst men’s identities became more fixed by occupational role and status, women moved in and out of a variety of jobs influenced by the availability of work, the demands of employers and women’s own life stage.135 This flexibility met women’s own needs, but at the same time it was a feature of the female worker exploited by employers who could readily call upon a cheap labour force. Thirdly, the persistence of the association of women with the household and the fuzzy line between housework and paid work has been a continuous theme running through this chapter. It would be difficult to exaggerate the degree to which what we call ‘domestic ideology’ determined women’s place in the labour market from the types of job women were admitted to, to the wages they earned, the status they were accorded and the recognition given to women’s skills. Women’s right to work, to earn an independent living wage, was something that had to be fought for by feminists and labour activists, so entrenched was the notion of the woman as secondary earner and primary care-giver.On the eve of the First World War the range of occupations undertaken by women, especially in the industrialised states, was wider than in 1800. The emergence of the service sector around the turn of the century did open up new kinds of work deemed appropriate for women. But what good is choice if the rewards are no better than before? Women remained concentrated in low-paid, low-status employment with few prospects. Very few had made it into the better-paid and high-status jobs by 1914. The expansion of white-collar and professional work really took place after the war. If anything, what constituted fit work for women became more restricted, so that by 1900, ideas about gender roles and women’s place meant that women were assumed to be temporary workers, with wages reflecting this second- class status.