THE GEOGRAPHY OF WOMEN'S WORK

Europe’s economic geography was especially diverse and complex in the nineteenth century, as industrial advance took hold at varying rates and in contrasting ways in different places.

It is important to remember that most of Europe was not industrialised for most of the century. Across much of eastern and southern Europe, agriculture remained the most important employer of women well into the 1920s. In Bulgaria, Poland and Romania, around 90 per cent of the female workforce remained on the land in 1910. Elsewhere, including Austria, Hungary and Italy, agriculture accounted for the employment of well over half of all economically active women. Even in Germany, probably the most advanced industrial state by 1914, more than 50 per cent of the female labour force was still employed in agriculture in 1890. In Russia, the female factory labour force amounted to just 3 million or barely 2 per cent of the population in 1914.7 Only in Britain was the proportion of women employed on the land significantly smaller than the numbers in manufacturing and service, with less than 5 per cent of recorded working women in this sector from the 1860s in contrast with more than 40 per cent in manufacturing.

Precise data on women's participation in the labour force is hard to come by. Census enumerators are renowned for their under-recording of women workers, by failing to register female household servants, women who were assistants in family enterprises, and seasonal and casual workers. In Germany, for example, it is important to know that the employment statistics for the years 1882, 1895 and 1907 seriously under-record the number of ‘assisting relatives', many of whom were wives and daughters working on farms. Simi­larly, in Britain in the 1881 census, women who assisted in family businesses were returned as unoccupied if they did not receive a wage. In general, the number of women categorised as unoccupied vastly underestimates the nature of seasonal employment for women. It is unlikely that so many women — 68 per cent of females in the 1901 census for England and Wales — were really economically inactive. The data on women workers underestimates the numbers involved in production by defining as productive activity only work that could be measured, which was visible and which was rewarded by the payment of cash wages. Unremunerated work was not counted. Women were presumed to be dependants, were not counted, and were classified as wives.⁸ However, with these caveats in mind, it is possible to detect some broad trends from the statistics.

For most of the nineteenth century there was no major increase in the pro­portion of women in the paid workforce. The absence of figures for the first half of the century makes it difficult to assess long-term change but, from the 1850s to the 1900s, most countries recorded between 25 and 40 per cent of the labour force as female. It is only in the industrialising states of Britain, Germany, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden that some increase is evident in the last decades of the century. There was little or only moderate increase in the proportion of the workforce who were female in the southern countries of Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece, where industrialisation was not to take off until the twentieth century, and in some states the figures show a decline.

The female labour market was marked by distinctive features of age and marital status. Unmarried and widowed women were far more likely to be recorded as waged workers than married women. It was mostly young unmarried women who took up the jobs in the industrial and service sectors. As women got older and married they often gave up recorded work in indus­try. Percentages of married women in formal employment vary enormously from one country to another. In Norway they accounted for just 4.6 per cent of women employed in full-time work in 1900, whilst in Britain the figure was 9.6 per cent in 1911, in France it was 38 per cent in 1896 and in the pro­vince of Moscow 53 per cent in 1908.9 In factory work, young single women predominated. In Prussia in 1875 more then three-quarters of workers were single and 68 per cent were under the age of 25.¹⁰ The disparity in the labour force between single and married women reminds us of the place of work in a woman's lifecycle. From a working-class girl's teenage years to her early twenties she was likely to be in paid work.

Figure 7.1 Women at work c.1900

Note: The chart shows the distribution of women workers between the three main sectors of female employment. The data are derived from censuses taken between 1895 and 1911. Countries classified women's jobs differently, reducing somewhat the reliability of international comparison. See text.

Source: P. Bairoch, T. Deldycke, H. Gelders and J.-M. Limbor, The Working Population and its Structure (Brussels, 1968). likely to adopt a mixture of paid work, casual labour and home-work with periods of unpaid ‘housework’ and child care.

The statistics can also alert us to the diverse range of jobs undertaken by women in this century. The pioneering English historian of women’s work, Ivy Pinchbeck, listed almost 300 different occupations undertaken by women in 1841. Here we find actors (381 women recorded), anchor smith and chainmakers (103), bankers (7), boot- and shoemakers (10,564), cattle and sheep dealers and ‘salesmen’ (13), furriers (798), leech bleeders and dealers (52), millers (457), opticians (17) pawnbrokers (256), publicans and victuallers (5625), scissor-makers (148), toll collectors (446), undertakers (72) and whip­makers (49), to name just a few.¹² Indeed, there were few occupations that did not employ women, although it is true to say that the vast majority were clustered in four main areas of work: textile manufacture, the needle trades, laundry and domestic service.

Two types of female worker characterise the world of women’s work in industrialising Europe: the domestic servant and the mill girl. For the majority of European women at the start of the nineteenth century, their first experience of paid work was as a servant in somebody else’s home. Farm service was the most common destination of most young girls in rural parts of Europe. Female farm servants were both tied to another household enterprise and, in the case of lowland Scotland, north-east England and parts of Scandinavia, defined by their relationship to a man. The bondagers, as they were known, were female farmworkers provided by a male worker as a condition of the bond he made with a farmer.¹⁴ Although this form of almost feudal service was not a widespread phenomenon, the treatment of female labour as a supplement to male wage-earning emerged as a common feature of women’s work experience. By the nineteenth century, women were seen as dependants rather than independent wage-earners and thus the prominent place of service in all its forms in women’s employment opportunities should not surprise us. Service was the ultimate dependant status. A job in service contradicted the desire of a man for independence; conversely it was seen as ideal work for a woman in the gap between dependence on her father and dependence on a husband. Although the period of peak demand for female domestic servants covers the middle decades of the nineteenth century, in some respects this form of employment may be seen as an integral feature of long-term continuity in women's work. As Bonnie Smith points out, service ‘carried forward the old moral economy into a world of new values’.¹⁵ In the towns and cities of industrialising states, domestic service accounted for up to 50 per cent of all female paid labour.

Conversely, whilst the domestic servant merged into the background of urban life, the independent female worker in manufacture was highly visible. The ‘mill girl’ — most employees were below the age of 30 — came to represent the stereotypical non-domestic female worker. She was single, independent and liberated from the restraints imposed by home and family. Across Europe the sheer numbers of women employed by the textile trades fuelled this image of the woman worker whose identity was no longer located in the domestic sphere. In the Rhineland, the new mechanised woollen, flax, linen and silk mills depended on female labour.¹⁷ Similarly, in Russia on the eve of the First World War, women constituted more than 60 per cent of the textile workforce, in northern France workers in the cotton spinning mills were overwhelmingly female, and in Lancashire more the half of textile workers were women.¹⁸ The mill girl was held up as a spectre of family and societal dislocation. ‘This mass of girls’, as one horror-struck German observer described them, ‘detached from their families and homes and thrust from rural isolation into the midst of strangers in the city’ came to represent ‘complete social and economic decay’.¹⁹ It was the mill girls’ apparent rejec­tion of the traditional female role that lay at the heart of this fear. In northern Germany, it was noted in 1855 that the rise of factory employment and the emergence of young workers who gained early independence owing to relatively high wages, was playing havoc with gender roles. Young working women were said to ‘no longer learn the job of housewife, and when they marry they have no pleasure in it and instead of taking care of the house they are becoming accustomed to pursue other amusements.’²⁰ Clearly the mill girl had a lot to be responsible for, representing both the transition to the industrial state and, at the same time, the perceived loss of a world in which home and work existed in a symbiotic relationship.

The rise of the visible woman factory worker in the nineteenth century coincided with public antagonism to the very idea of women engaging in waged labour. The outburst of historian and moralist Jules Michelet — ‘The woman worker, what a blasphemous word!' — was a rather extreme expres­sion of disgust at the phenomenon of the female factory labour force, but his sentiments were echoed by many others who believed the social fabric was at risk from the apparent increase in women's paid work outside the home.²¹ The mill girl was, of course, a chimera, a fantasy in the minds of contemporary critics whose shock at the sight of hoards of young women on the streets with money to spend on clothes and amusements, blinded them to the more enduring continuity between home and work in the lives of most labouring women. And, were it not for the labours of thousands of working women, the industrial revolution would not have occurred in the way it did. As Maxine Berg has argued for England, ‘those industries at the forefront of techno­logical and organisational innovation were also mainly industries employing women's labour.'²² This was not only because employers regarded women (and children) as cheap labour. Rather, manufacturers believed that women's ‘natural' dexterity, their ability to adapt to new techniques and their ‘female' working patterns were advantageous, whilst male protective practices were seen as problematic and more likely to develop into resistance to the new production regimes.²³ However, the demand of employers for female labour and women's need to earn a living collided with the notion of woman as primarily a mother and housewife. ‘The ideology of virtue sealed working women's poverty and allowed the Industrial Revolution to succeed.'²⁴