5 - Alternative employment opportunities: domestic industries

Summary

The availability of an alternative form of female employment could have farreaching repercussions not only on women's work patterns, but also on the agricultural labour market and the general milieu of nineteenth-century village life. In this chapter the significance of cottage industries will be addressed. Although the fortunes of domestic industries were susceptible to seasonal and trade fluctuations in the nineteenth century, the important contributions these industries made to the subsistence of rural labouring families was widely recognised by contemporary social observers. Frederick Morton Eden attributed the low poor rates at Dunstable in the last decade of the eighteenth century to the widespread employment of ‘every woman, who wished to work’ in straw manufacture. William Bennett, writing in 1857, acknowledged that the employment of women and children in the strawplaiting districts of south Bedfordshire was a ‘most welcome addition to the income of the household’. At the close of the century, William Bear, reporting for the Royal Commission on Labour, lamented the decline of rural industries in the same county, arguing that

the total money earnings of the labourers and their families are certainly much less than they were in the times when plaiting and lace-making were fairly remunerative and when every member of a family not a mere infant contributed to the total takings.

Historians too have been aware that cottage trades affected female employment patterns in certain rural areas. Notwithstanding this recognition however, there has been little recent debate on the position of women working in rural industries in the nineteenth century, or the consequences a viable alternative employment opening had on female choice.