1750-1900 Document 3 Europe
Gender Roles, Labor and Family in Industrial England and France
Source: Bentley, Jerry H. and Herbert F. Ziegler. Traditions and Encounters. (Boston: McGraw Hill,
2000) pp. 773-774.
The most basic unit of social organization- the family- also underwent fundamental change
during the industrial age. In pre-industrial societies the family was the basic productive unit. Whether
engaged in agriculture, domestic manufacturing, or commerce, family members worked together and
contributed to the welfare of the larger group. Industrialization challenged the family economy and
reshaped family life by moving economic production outside the home and introducing a sharp distinction
between work and family life. During the early years of industrialization, family economies persisted as
fathers, mothers, and children pooled their wages and sometimes even worked together in factories. Over
time, however, it became less common for family members to work in groups. Workers left their homes
each day to labor an average of fourteen hours in factories, and family members led increasingly separate
lives.
Men gained increased stature and responsibility in the industrial age as work dominated public
life. When production moved outside the home, some men became owners or managers of factories while
the majority served as wageworkers. Industrial work seemed to be far more important than the domestic
chores traditionally carried out by women, or even the agricultural and light industrial work performed by
women and children. Mens wages also constituted the bulk of their family's income. Upper class and
middle-class men especially enjoyed increased prestige at home, since they usually were the sole
providers who made their families comfortable existence possible. Like men, women had worked long
hours in pre-industrial times. Agriculture and domestic manufacturing could easily accommodate
womens dual role as mothers and workers, since the workplace was either at home or nearby.
Industrialization dramatically changed the terms of work for women. When industry moved production
from the home to the factory, married women were unable to work unless they left their homes and
children in someone elses care.
Middle-class women generally did not work outside the home. For them, industrialization
brought stringent confinement to the domestic sphere and pressure to conform to new models of behavior
revolving around their roles as mothers and wives.
Industrialization increased the demand for domestic servants as the middle class grew in both
numbers and wealth. In the nineteenth century working women preferred domestic service to work in
mines or even factories. One of every three European women became a domestic servant at some point in
her life. Rural women sometimes had to move long distances to take position in middle-class homes in
cities, where they experienced adventure and independence from family control. Their employers
replaced their parents as guardians, but high demand for servants ensured that women could switch jobs
readily in search of more attractive positions, Young women servants often sent some of their earnings
home, but many also saved wages for personal goals: amassing a dowry, for example, or building funds to
start their own careers as clerks or secretaries.
Work and Home: The Gendered Division of Labor in Industrial England
Source: Anderson, Bonnie S. and Judith P. Zinsser. A History of Their Own, Women in Europe From
Prehistory to the Present, Volume Two. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.) pp. 144, 237-238.
As economic changes continued to shift production out of the home and as increasing numbers of
(middle class) women no longer needed to work for wages outside the home, "work" and "home" came to
be seen as two opposite worlds associated with the two "opposite" sexes. As always, this duality was
seen as both natural and desirable. "Man for the field and woman for the hearth the English poet
Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote in a popular poem of 1847.
This opposition was heightened by education. In the privileged classes, boys were commonly
sent to school while girls were kept at home. "School parted us," wrote the English novelist George Eliot
of herself and her brother. Boys were trained to be physically strong and courageous, to read Latin, to
learn how to support themselves. Girls were given an opposite curriculum: they were to be taught to be
good housewives and mothers, to be religious, obedient, and self-effacing
Working-class wives were also expected to provide food and clothing for their families, as well
as enforce "respectable" behavior. This meant keeping the girls and boys separated from each other.
A woman was expected to defer and, if asked, justified her deference because of her
husbands higher wages and earning capacity. In marriage, "the man should be the head,
the woman the crown. The wife must have her right, but the husband has more rights,"
stated a sixty-nine-year-old East Prussian woman to an investigator in 1909. "I also think
its right that men are better paid than women." A good woman was expected to put her
husband and children first.
The man's diet was consistently better than his womans: a study of Lambeth from 1909-1913
showed that more than twice as much was spent to feed the father as to feed the mother and children.
Mothers were expected to economize by eating less
Grace Foakes of the East End of London wrote in the early twentieth century.
"These women, if they thought up some fresh idea for economizing, would run to tell their
neighbors so that they too could practice it. Here are some of the things thought up by my
mother. When times were very hard she invented a meal which I doubt had ever been tried
before. She cut a slice of bread for each of us, put each slice in a separate mug, then covered each
with boiling water. When the water was absorbed, she would pour off the surplus, add a knob of
margarine and some salt and pepper and mix it all together. She called it "Pepper and Salt Slosh"
and it was surprising how good it tasted, especially if we were cold and hungry.
Observations on Womens Labor in the French Silk Industry
Source: DiCaprio, Lisa and Merry E. Wiesner. Lives and Voices, Sources in European Womens History.
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001.) pp. 276-278.
Julie-Victoire Daubie (1824-1874) was the first woman in France to receive the baccalaureate. In her
activism and writings, she focused on the interrelated themes of womens education, work, and suffrage.
In these excerpts from the section "Quels moyens des subsistence ont les femmes?" ("How Do Women
Earn a Living?"), Daubie discusses how industrialization transformed womens lives at work and at home
with particular reference to women workers in the silk industry in Lyon.
"Before seeking the rational remedies to such serious wrongs, it remains for us to examine the
conditions of the workers who, numbering more than 300,000 in our manufactures, earn an average wage
of one franc per day.
Many of the manufacturers require workers to travel long distances and separate mothers from
their families for fifteen hours each day. Different economists have observed that it is the women
workers who work harder than slaves. The boiling water of the basins is also painful to the fingers of the
spinners who pull thread from the silk cocoons. The putrid emanations from the chrysalis cause various
illnesses, called illnesses of the silkworm or of the basin, which lead to long periods of unemployment.
From the carding and preparation of cotton, the women often contract terrible pulmonary tuberculosis
which is called cotton consumption in the creative idiom of the workshop. One might believe that the
constitutions of women, who are generally employed in these deadly forms of work, were especially
suited to resisting their pernicious effects if the statistics of medical science and the reports of hygiene
and public health councils did not show the contrary, that for a given number of workers, women are
more likely than men to contract this lung disease. A similar observation has been made concerning the
manufacture of white lead, the processes requiring the use of mercury and arsenic, and the making of
phosphate matches which cause necrosis of the jawbone, designated as a chemical illness. The industry,
however, employs the weak and the strong without distinction for this work. The department of the Seine
alone employs 1,500 men, women and children in the match factories.
In the workshops for the printing of calico cloth, male workers have the best-paying jobs which
require skill. The women workers employed at Scottish finishing or stiffening of fabrics spend their
twelve hour workdays in temperatures which range from 26 to 40 degrees and suffer greatly from the
frequent shifts of temperature from hot to cold. These are manufactures where the women work in all
seasons, for twelve hours a day, with their feet in water.
Europe: Two Women Miners; From Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, 1842, Vol. XV, p.
84, and ibid., Vol. XVII, p. 108.
Betty Harris, age 37: I was married at 23, and went into a colliery when I was married. I used to
weave when about 12 years old; can neither read nor write. I work for Andrew Knowles, of Little
Bolton (Lancs), and make sometimes 7s a week, sometimes not so much. I am a drawer, and
work from 6 in the morning to 6 at night. Stop about an hour at noon to eat my dinner; have
bread and butter for dinner; I get no drink. I have two children, but they are too young to work. I
worked at drawing when I was in the family way. I know a woman who has gone home and
washed herself, taken to her bed, delivered of a child, and gone to work again under the week.
I have a belt round my waist, and a chain passing between my legs, and I go on my hands and
feet. The road is very steep, and we have to hold by a rope; and when there is no rope, by
anything we can catch hold of. There are six women and about six boys and girls in the pit I
work in; it is very hard work for a woman. The pit is very wet where I work, and the water
comes over our clog-tops always, and I have seen it up to my thighs; it rains in at the roof
terribly. My clothes are wet through almost all day long. I never was ill in my life, but when I
was lying in.
My cousin looks after my children in the day time. I am very tired when I get home at night; I
fall asleep sometimes before I get washed. I am not so strong as I was, and cannot stand my work
so well as I used to. I have drawn till I have bathe skin off me; the belt and chain is worse when
we are in the family way. My feller (husband) has beaten me many a times for not being ready. I
were not used to it at first, and he had little patience.
I have known many a man beat his drawer. I have known men take liberties with the drawers,
and some of the women have bastards.
Patience Kershaw, age 17, Halifax: I go to pit at 5 o'clock in the morning and come out at 5 in
the evening; I get my breakfast, porridge and milk, first; I take my dinner with me, a cake, and
eat it as I go; I do not stop or rest at any time for the purpose, I get nothing else until I get home,
and then have potatoes and meat, not every day meat.
EVIDENCE TAKEN BY
Children's Employment Commission
February 1841
"Miss --- has been for several years in the dress-making business...The common hours of
business are from 8 a.m. til 11 P.M in the winters; in the summer from 6 or half-past 6 A.M. til
12 at night. During the fashionable season, that is from April til the latter end of July, it
frequently happens that the ordinary hours are greatly exceeded; if there is a drawing-room or
grand fete, or mourning to be made, it often happens that the work goes on for 20 hours out of
the 24, occasionally all night....The general result of the long hours and sedentary occupation is
to impair seriously and very frequently to destroy the health of the young women. The digestion
especially suffers, and also the lungs: pain to the side is very common, and the hands and feet die
away from want of circulation and exercise, "never seeing the outside of the door from Sunday to
Sunday." [One cause] is the short time which is allowed by ladies to have their dresses made.
Miss is sure that there are some thousands of young women employed in the business in London
and in the country. If one vacancy were to occur now there would be 20 applicants for it. The
wages generally are very low...Thinks that no men could endure the work enforced from the
dress-makers."
[Source: Hellerstein, Hume & Offen, Victorian Women: A Documentary Accounts of Women's
Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France and the United States, Stanford University Press.]
SONG: THE DISTRESSED SEAMSTRESS
(Sung to the air "Jenny Jones")
You gentles of England, I pray give attention,
Unto those few lines, I'm going to relate,
Concerning the seamstress,I'm going to mention,
Who long time has been, in a sad wretched state,
Laboriously toiling, both night, noon, and morning,
For a wretched subsistence, now mark what I say.
She's quite unprotected, forlorn, and dejected
For sixpence, or eightpence, or tenpence a day.
Come forward you nobles, and grant them assistance,
Give them employ, and a fair price them pay,
And then you will find, the poor hard working seamstress,
From honour and virtue will not go astray.
To shew them compassion pray quickly be stirring,
In delay, there is danger, there's no time to spare,...
The pride of the world is o'er whelmed with care,
Old England's considered, for honour and virtue,
And beauty the glory and pride of the world,
Nor be not hesitating, but boldly step forward,
Suppression and tyranny, far away hurl.
[Source: Roy Palmer, A Ballad History of England:
From 1588 to the Present Day, B.T. Batsford Ltd, London, 1979]
