6 - Survival strategies: women, work and the informal economy

Summary

The preceding chapters have shown that women's work in the formal labour market was diminishing in many regions over the course of the nineteenth century. This decrease in female productivity was certainly not uniform, and different patterns of participation have been uncovered depending on region, local occupational structure and custom. Female labour was coming under pressure from a number of sectors. The wider use of agricultural technology in the nineteenth century – first the scythe, then the reaper and reaper-binder – undermined women's role in the harvest. Economic forces – agricultural boom followed by depression – opened up and then closed off avenues of other agricultural labour: by the late 1870s farmers were becoming increasingly unlikely to engage women to weed, pick stones and hoe crops as a cost-cutting device. For women who had traditionally worked in domestic industry, the death-knell was sealed in the 1870s and 1880s by another wave of cheap foreign imports. Ideologically women – especially married women – who worked outside the home were increasingly criticised for not conforming to the model of female propriety and dependency expected of the ideal Victorian woman. Simultaneously however, women themselves were becoming less willing to undertake low-paid, low-status, backbreaking labour – for the farmer, the farmer's wife or the local manufacturer. This is partly linked to the rise in real male wages in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, but also denotes a change in women's attitude towards their work.