Women's Work

'Man may work from sun to sun, but woman's work is never done.'

When I started researching my family tree, one of things I was particularly keen to do was look at the lives of the women in my family. This turned out to be more difficult than I'd expected, bringing home just how little women were valued as people in their own right.

Both sides of my family were mostly working class, a range of agricultural, horticultural or manual labourers, servants and workers in various trades. I should add that most of my relatives were born, lived and died in the UK; more precisely, in England.

Tracking down female relatives, especially without the information available on the censuses from 1851 onwards, can be very difficult if you don't know where they lived and whom they married (because then, their surname changed), made almost impossible if there are no accessible church records, and/or if they had one or more common names.

Even with the census records, I was struck by the distinct lack of information on the work women were doing. Despite having Queen Victoria on the throne from 1837 to 1901, society was patriarchal, just as it had been for centuries. Women's place in society was to be dutiful daughters, wives and mothers, owned and ruled by men, who labelled them the fairer but weaker sex, considering them less capable, less intelligent. Daughters belonged to their fathers until they married, when they belonged to their husbands. Men were expected to work, earn and provide for their families. Those who didn't, or couldn't, experienced stigma and shame.

The 'work' entered in the occupation column of the census returns is essentially paid work, although there were contradictory and inconsistent instructions on how to classify women's work, especially if done at home. Sometimes, work such as assisting in a family business was deliberately excluded (you can't tell me that a publican's or farmer's wife didn't also work in the bar or the dairy as well as the house!). A lot of women's paid work went unrecorded. It was often piecework, part-time, casual, not considered important enough to record. Illegal work such as prostitution was of course not recorded, but some women kept their earnings secret from their husbands. Some women recorded themselves as 'wife', sometimes adding their husband's occupation, especially if he was away from home for the night of the census. This was usually struck through, not counted. Married women, and society as a whole, often considered their main function as being wives and mothers, (or just wives and housekeepers, if no children came along) and anything else as secondary to their (unpaid) work, even if doing the milking and dairy work, or being the cook, housekeeper and barmaid in the inn, unpaid, was essential to the success of their family lives. Described as 'Home Duties' on the 1921 census, at least the 1939 Register recognised that being a 'housewife' amounted to Unpaid Domestic Duties (UDD).

Schooling became compulsory from the age of five in England and Wales in 1880, with a leaving age of 10. This rose with subsequent education acts to 11 from 1893, when schooling also became free, 12 from 1899 and 14 from 1918. In the years between leaving school and their marriage, most working-class girls went to work as servants, or used skills in sewing clothing or millinery, or worked in the service sector as laundresses. Those who did not marry often stayed in the family home as housekeepers to ageing parents and any single siblings still living at home.

Work in the home involved shopping, cooking, fetching water, clearing out and making up fires, cleaning, making and mending clothing, doing the laundry, bearing and caring for the children, sometimes (literacy and numeracy allowing) also being the family social secretary, budgeting and planning. Girls learned these skills, which were transferable to their work in service or running their own households. It was all seen as 'women's work'; unpaid, unrecorded, not acknowledged as 'real' work at all.

Many men didn't know where to start when it came to looking after themselves (and justified it by dismissing it as 'women's work', unskilled, unimportant and degrading for a man to do!). There was also the issue of coming home exhausted, dirty and hungry after long working hours, then having to get clean, have something to eat, find clean clothes for the next day perhaps. Some men married two or three times so that they had a wife to supply their personal and household needs for most of their adult lives. Likewise, women who were widowed with young children often hoped to find a husband who would also accept their children and then go on to have their own family too.

With decreasing infant mortality and increasing life expectancy, but no birth control, women had no real choice about how many children they had, or when. One to three children, whilst quite usual now, was the exception; five or six was quite usual, and must have been a struggle for working class families with only the father's wage, and that was dependent on the work they could find when the hiring of labourers was often on a daily basis. Some families were very large, with nine or more children. It was also quite usual to have a widowed parent living with their son or daughter's family, and in towns and cities, to take in one or more lodgers, space permitting. Being a wife and mother before all of our modern conveniences would have supplied more than enough work to do, and having daughters to help would have been a blessing. With no labour-saving devices, it would have been a full-time job in itself. 

Some women did double duty, working and maintaining a household and children. In this respect, not a lot has changed in the past 150 years. Women in Britain still manage most of the household work, including administration, such as organising the children's school requirements and birthday parties, as well as working (it now seems impossible for families to manage on just one income, even though we now have a guaranteed minimum wage, child credits, free healthcare and other benefits).

A first cousin 4 x removed (1C4R) Elizabeth Collier/Ratcliffe, was working as a general servant by the time she was 16 in 1851. Ten years later, she'd moved from rural Buckinghamshire to London and was still working as a servant, with her husband-to-be Thomas Ratcliffe working as a footman at the same house. A few years later, they married, when she was already several months pregnant, and had four children in six years. Elizabeth and Thomas continued to work, leaving their first four children with Thomas' parents in Mansfield, as Elizabeth had found a position as a cook (better pay and status than a general servant!). They lost one of the first four, but had another four children by 1876, and had saved enough to start a coffee house, work for themselves, bring the first three children down to London and employ a servant, with the children united. Elizabeth learned cookery from her mother and passed on her knowledge of cookery to her daughters, so that they could get better positions as cooks.

The 1891 Census records the family living in Lambeth, with Thomas working as a waiter, and the youngest four children single and living at home, but all working. There were also four lodgers to look after.

Elizabeth, then 57, made her feelings known by recording her occupation - as 'general slavey to this lot!' The enumerator crossed it out, but it amused me greatly. Thank you, cousin Elizabeth, for recording in that flash of spirit what many women must have thought about their work and place in society. I admire your resilience and determination!

Elizabeth Collier/Ratcliffe, 1834 Medmenham, Buckinghamshire - 1916 Southwark, London

Servant, Cook, Coffee-House keeper and 'General Slavey'