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“…The Most Free From Objection …” The Sexual Division of Labor and Women's Work in Nineteenth-Century England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Jane Humphries
Jane Humphries
Affiliation:
Member of the Faculty of Economics and Politics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DD, Great Britain.
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Abstract

Most explanations of trends in women's work emphasize women's role in childbearing, along with technological and organizational changes in production. The explanations neglect an important factor: the need to control sexuality in order to secure demographic order. Segregated employment enabled almost all family members to work, while discouraging heterosexual intimacy. Nineteenth-century attitudes illustrate the anxiety felt when unrelated men and women worked together. The argument is tested by correlating regional variation in illegitimacy, as a measure of failed social control, with variation in sex segregation.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 47 , Issue 4 , December 1987 , pp. 929 - 949
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1987

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References

1 Most of the classic studies of poverty mention how vulnerable families were if they had a number of unproductive children: see Rowntree, B. Seebohm, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (New York, 1902);Google ScholarBooth, Charles, Life and Labour of the People in London (London, 1902);Google Scholar and Mayhew, Henry, London Labour and the London Poor (New York, 1968).Google Scholar See also the famous Royal Commissions, for example, Report on the Employment of Children, Young Persons and Women in Agriculture, Parliamentary Papers, 1867–1968. Keith Snell has recently associated destitution with the number of children in a family for his population of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poor inGoogle ScholarAnnals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1985). Illegitimate children were especially burdensome to their mothers' families, because their fathers either did not support them or did so only sporadically, and because mothers had difficulty in feeding their babies and simultaneously gaining their livelihood. These burdens were compounded by the changes in the Bastardy Law in 1834—seeGoogle ScholarActon, William, “Observations on Illegitimacy in London Parishes at St. Marylebone, St. Pancras and St. George's Southwark during the year 1857,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, 22 (12 1859) pp. 491–505;Google ScholarHenriques, Ursula, “Bastardy and the New Poor Law,” Past and Present, 37 (07 1967) pp. 103–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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3 Important surveys of the qualitative evidence supporting this view are to be found in Clark, Alice, Working Life of Women in the 17th Century (London, 1968);Google ScholarPinchbeck, Ivy, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1969);Google ScholarRichards, Eric, “Women in the British Economy Since About 1700: An Interpretation,” History, 59 (10 1974) pp. 337–57;CrossRefGoogle ScholarHutchins, Barbara L., Women in Modern Industry (London, 1915);Google Scholar and Snell, Keith, “Agricultural Seasonal Unemployment, The Standard of Living and Women; Work in the South and East, 1690–1860,” Economic History Review, 34 (08 1981) pp. 407–37.Google ScholarTilly, Louise A. and Scott, Joan W. present evidence for both Britain and France which also relates to this theme in Women, Work and Family (New York, 1978);Google Scholar and relevant evidence is also found in Laslett, Peter, The World We Have Lost (New York, 1965);Google ScholarSpringall, Marion, Labouring Life in Norfolk Villages, 1834–1914 (London, 1936);Google Scholar and Burnett, John, Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1930s (London, 1974).Google Scholar

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6 Let Mi = male employment in industry/occupation i, mi = (Mi/Σ Mi)(100), Fi = female employment in industry/occupation i, fi = (Fi/Σ)(100), and Ti = Mi + Fi = total employment in industry/occupation i, then S = (1/2) Σ / (mi – fi) /. For a theoretical discussion of this and other indices,Google Scholar see Duncan, O. and Duncan, B., “A Methodological Analysis of Segregation Indices,” American Sociological Review, 20 (04 1955) pp. 210–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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9 The classic arguments on the intensification of work with the transition to capitalism are to be found in Thompson, Edward P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963),Google Scholar and “Time, Work, Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, 38 (Dec. 1967) pp. 56–97;Google Scholar see also Marglin, Steven, “What Bosses Do: The Origins and Functions of Hierarchy in Capitalist Production,” Review of Radical Political Economics, 6 (Summer 1974) pp. 60–113. The increasing incompatibility of capitalist employment of women with “reproductive work” has been recently emphasized byCrossRefGoogle ScholarBrenner, Johanna and Ramas, Maria, “Rethinking Women's Oppression,” New Left Review, 144 (03–04 1984) pp. 33–71.Google Scholar

10 Pinchbeck, Women Workers, p. 38, quotes both the Report on Agriculture, Parliamentary papers, 1803, and The Farmer's Magazine on the responsibilities of a farmer's wife in supervising a big household of unmarried servants. Snell's description of “living-in” in its heyday and the consequences of its decay is also relevant (Annals, chap. 2). Arthur Young believed that the decline of live-in service led to the “increased neglect of the Sabbath and looseness of morals … [when] … free from the master's eye” farm servants “sleep where and with whom they please,”Google ScholarGeneral View of the County of Norfolk (London, 1804).Google Scholar

11 This is a major theme of Pinchbeck's classic text, Women Workers (see p. 45, for example). The communications to the Board of Agriculture and the latter's surveys of various British counties in the late 1700s and early 1800s contain a great deal of empirical evidence on the importance of land rights to women's ability to contribute to family subsistence.Google Scholar

12 Snell, Annals, provides the latest contribution.Google Scholar

13 For a description of family labor in precapitalist agriculture, see Clark, , Working Life; Neil Smelser's seminal Social Change in the Industrial Revolution: An Application of Theory to the British Cotton Industry (Chicago, 1959) describes the transition of the family system to the factories, a theme taken up inGoogle ScholarAnderson's, MichaelFamily Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire (Cambridge, 1971). The costs and benefits of a family labor system are defined and developed empirically in the context of the British coalmining industry in the early nineteenth century in the author's “Protective Legislation, the Capitalist State and Working-Class Men; the Case of the 1842 Mines Regulation Act,” Feminist Review, 7 (Spring 1981) pp. 1–35.Google Scholar

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19 See the interpretation offered in Humphries, “Protective Legislation.”Google Scholar

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24 Quoted in John, Angela V., By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London, 1980), p. 46.Google Scholar

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26 See ibid. for a discussion of the family labor system in coalmining.Google Scholar

27 Parliamentary Papers, vol. 16, p. 170.Google Scholar

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31 Parliamentary Papers, vol. 16, p. 248.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 289.Google Scholar

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37 Parliamentary Papers, vol. 17, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar

38 Ibid., p. xviii.Google Scholar

39 Ibid., p. 17.Google Scholar

40 According to Malinowski's Principle of Legitimacy, it is a “universal sociological” law that “no child should be brought into the world without a man and one man at that—assuming the role of sociological father.” The argument developed here provides a materialist interpretation of this imperative. Illegitimate children threaten the social order because they represent procreation without responsibility and this threatens the standard of living of all. As Laslett says: “Only if the familial system is maintained, marriage carefully protected and procreation socially controlled, can the population be kept within the means of subsistence known and seen to be available.”Google ScholarLaslett, Peter, “Introduction: Comparing Illegitimacy over Time and Between Cultures,” in Laslett, Peter, Oosterveen, Karla, and Smith, Richard, eds., Bastardy and its Comparative History (London, 1980), pp. 1–65, quote from p. 5. Note also Laslett's acknowledgment of the functionalism of this position.Google Scholar

41 Farr, William, Vital Statistics (London, 1885); Acton, “Observations.” In reality, the more dramatic threat of infanticide was overshadowed by economic disadvantages. Crucial here was the difficulty of combining work with breastfeeding. As Acton put it “… notwithstanding all the misery of the mothers and the destitution they undergo, previous and subsequent to their confinement, the illegitimate child is born healthy and would survive if the mother could at the same time nourish it and gain her livelihood.”Google ScholarIbid., p. 393.Google Scholar

42 Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, English Poor Law History. Part II: The Last Hundred Years (Private Subscription Issue, 1929), p. 247 ff. Struggle over who should bear the burden of this persisting failure of social control provided a major drama within the 1834 Poor Law reform, the Bastardy Clauses, which sought to reduce illegitimacy by privatizing the costs of thoughtless sexual behavior. See Henriques, “Bastardy”;Google ScholarCheckland, S. and Checkland, E., eds., The Poor Law Report of 1834 (Harmondsworth, 1974). William Acton, a powerful opponent of this aspect of the 1834 law, argued, “…parishes should have the same power given them of recovering the sums they have expended, from the fathers of illegitimate children, as they now have from the fathers of legitimate ones. Such an enactment would have a healthy tendency in checking seduction and relieving the rates …,” “Observations,” p. 498. But hostility to bastard children was not a creation of 1834. The Elizabethan poor law had been even harsher. Ursula Henriques notes that with regard to the bastardy clauses, the commissioners were primarily concerned to limit multiplication of the poor, hence their reluctance to encourage the substitution of improvident marriage for bastardy.Google Scholar

43 For the definitive discussion of the trends in illegitimacy over time in Great Britain, see Laslett, et al., Bastardy.Google Scholar

44 The individualist perspective is that of Shorter, Edward, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution and Social Change in Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 2 (Autumn 1971) pp. 237–72; my position is closer to that of of Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

45 Leffingwell, Albert, Illegitimacy and the Influence of Seasons Upon Conduct (London, 1892);Google ScholarLumley, William G., “Observations on the Statistics of Illegitimacy,” Journal of the Statistical Society, 25 (1862) pp. 221–55. Regional variation in Scottish illegitimacy has recently attracted attention,Google Scholar see Leneman, Leah and Mitchison, Rosalind, “Scottish Illegitimacy Ratios in the Early Modern Period,” Economic History Review, 40 (02 1987) pp. 41–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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47 For a discussion of the data problems involved here, see Laslett et al., Bastardy;Google ScholarLaslett, Peter and Oosterveen, Karla, “Long Term Trends in Bastardy in England: A Study of the Illegitimacy Figures in the Parish Registers and in the Reports of the Registrar General; 1461–1960,” Population Studies, 27 (07 1973) pp. 255–86;Google Scholar and Shorter, Edward, Van de Walle, Etienne, and Knodel, John, “The Decline of Non-Married Fertility in Europe,” Population Studies, 25 (11 1971) pp. 375–94.Google ScholarOther authors have sought to associate the incidence of illegitimacy with particular employments. Domestic servants have been identified as particularly at risk, see Gillis, John, “Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801–1900” in Newton, Ryan, and Walkowitz, eds., Sex and Class. My argument suggests that female servants faced additional risk through their necessary interaction with other male workers around the house, male employers, and male visitors. The particular risks of upper-level servants might derive from their greater authority and so greater likelihood of unsupervised interchange. Note, however, that if the hypothesis is that domestic and personal service left women particularly at risk of bastard-bearing, the coefficient on the proportion of female employment in domestic and personal service is not only insignificant but also sometimes has the wrong sign. Although there are recognized problems with census enumeration of domestic servants,Google Scholar see Higgs, Edward, “Domestic Service and Household Production,” in John, , ed., Unequal Opportunities, and “Women's Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth Century Censuses,” History Workshop, 23 (Spring 1987) pp. 59–80, the suggested universal over-recording would not affect the sign or significance of the coefficient.Google Scholar

48 Note that the correlation coefficient between the share of agricultural employment and S is a modest 0.25. Nor is S picking up the effects of employment for women per se, given the insignificant (but positive) relationship between female participation rates and illegitimacy. As to be expected, S and participation are negatively related, but the relationship is not strong: the correlation coefficient is -0.21.Google Scholar

49 For the qualitative evidence, see Caird, J., English Agriculture in 1850–1 (London, 1852);Google Scholar Springall, Labouring Life; Razzell, P. E. and Wainwright, R., The Victorian Working Class: Selections from Letters to the Morning Chronicle, (London, 1973), esp. letter xxi;Google ScholarPeacock, A. J., “Village Radicalism in East Anglia, 1800–50,” in Dunbabin, J.P.D., ed., Rural Discontent in Nineteenth Century Britain (London, 1974); and Snell, Annals.Google Scholar

50 Richards, Women in the British Economy, p. 338.Google Scholar

51 Hoggart, Richard, The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life, with Special Reference to Publications and Entertainments (London, 1957).Google Scholar