4 - Women in the agricultural labour market: female day labourers

Summary

The position occupied by women workers in the nineteenth-century agricultural day labour force in England is the focus of this chapter. This is a remarkably complex issue. An appreciation of local and regional distinctions in farming systems and hiring patterns, and how these changed over the century, are essential to understanding the level of women's involvement in agriculture. But we also have to be mindful of a variety of more intangible ideological and lifecycle factors, and assess how these also affected women's access to work. Judging the relationship between all these components – and measuring their relative importance – is no easy matter. Attempting to do this for the whole of England over a significant length of time is perhaps over-ambitious. Yet it is well overdue. We saw in Chapter 1 that there is comparatively little published research on women's employment as agricultural day labourers in the nineteenth-century English countryside. For many historians, the publication of Keith Snell's highly influential study of agricultural seasonal change and women's work offered a neat solution to the issue. Recent research has suggested that this is far from correct and there is still much that remains inconclusive about the subject. This chapter aims to do a number of things. By bringing together previous analyses of women's agricultural employment and introducing new research, an overview of the continuities and changes in female participation as day labourers in the nineteenth-century English agricultural workforce will be attempted.