Women have always worked, but the way historians look at this issue is starkly divided into two camps.
The first emphasises the strong and enduring continuity in women's work histories. It focuses on how they have always participated in the labour of the household. Female labour has traditionally been clustered in certain occupations closely related to women's familial and reproductive responsibilities.
And the work carried out by women has, on the whole, been less well rewarded than that done by men. These trends continued through the nineteenth century, despite the upheavals of industrialisation. At the end as at the beginning of the century, women's work was a synonym for unskilled, low-paid and under valued labour. According to Judith Bennett, ‘women were as clustered in low skilled, low status, low paying occupations in 1200 as in 1900.'1 This long-term view stresses continuity rather than change, and plays down the role of industrialisation in influencing both the sexual division of labour and the construction of women's work as low paid and low status. From this perspective, the nineteenth century does not represent a turning point in the history of women's work so much as a continuation of a very long story of female subordination in the workplace.By contrast, the second approach stresses change in women's experience of work. It identifies the nineteenth century as time when the idea emerged of the economically unproductive woman. This perspective emphasises change with the emergence of industrial capitalism — from around 1750 in Britain, later elsewhere in Europe. Restrictions were placed on the types of work available to women, the sexual division of labour was reaffirmed with a vengeance, greater emphasis was placed on women's position within the family, and there was a reduction in women’s status in the labour market.2 The advocates of change see the nineteenth century as a moment when a particular confluence of conditions enlarged the significance of the preexisting subordination of women in jobs. It was a time when ‘the marital status of women took on a new significance as protective legislation, the cult of the family wage, and the ideology of domesticity interacted to emphasise gender inequality in the labour market and to establish a hierarchical structure of employment.3
Something did happen to women’s position in the labour market from the eighteenth century onwards.
There was an intensification of the gendering of work structures and practices, and different values placed on male and female labour across the whole range of occupations. Industrialisation intensified ‘chronic sexual conflict, which was endemic to an economy where women’s labour was necessary yet undervalued’, according to Anna Clark.4 The developing industrial labour market and the ideology of domesticity created new and different employment conditions for women, subordinating them to male breadwinners, downgrading their skill, and marginalising or ‘proletarianising’ female labour. So both continuity and change are vital to understanding women’s diversity of work experiences between 1789 and 1918.