Conclusion Assessing women's work

Summary

It is difficult to pinpoint the experience of the ‘typical’ or ‘average’ woman worker. The economies of different rural regions both constricted and unlocked opportunities for women to work at different times in the nineteenth century. Patterns of female labour participation do not correspond easily to general categorisation. Continuity and change, formal and informal, public and private, all had some resonance, but depended on a number of factors: where a woman lived, how old she was, her marital status, whether or not she had children, the age of any children she did have, the occupation of her husband and the attitudes of local employers. We have to understand the interrelation between economic change, the lifecycle dimension and ideological shifts, how these affected women's employment at the local level and the generalised trends that emerge from regional analysis to build up a nationwide picture of women's work. By assessing both national printed documentary material and archival evidence at the local level, it has been shown that the model of rural women's labour in the nineteenth century was not as straightforward as some historians have suggested.

No reliable statistics on female labour participation exist for the early nineteenth century. However, printed and non-printed sources reveal several changes in the extent of female employment in the period c1795 to 1850. In some regions and sectors the desirability of female labour grew. Increased arable cultivation led to more women being employed for manual tasks such as hoeing, weeding, stone-picking, and the planting and picking of root crops.