This is part two of my interview promoting the WHN conference, ‘Performing the Self: Women’s Lives in Historical Perspective’. You can read part one here.
What, if any, are the common misconceptions about women and work in history (I realise this is a fairly broad question, but feel free to take examples from you area of interest)?
The big misconception that I encounter amongst my students is that middle class women in the nineteenth century were lazy, as if the management of a large household, its budget and several staff just happened itself (not to mention her role in furthering her husband’s business). And, yet her husband who may have run a firm with a similar number of staff would be seen as desperately hard-working, having to support his leech of a wife and her luxuries! In turn (this story goes), working class women are often viewed as drudges, desperate to leave the workplace and enter the leisurely-sphere of the household. And, there is probably some truth in this, in that the double burden of paid employment outside the home and unpaid labour in the home would have made a long-working day for working-class women in the nineteenth century. Many working-class women at this time left employment when their husbands experienced increased wages or their children began to work.
However, I think this picture is influenced by modern housework which is nowhere near as demanding as in the past. As is well-recognised, technologies such as indoor plumbing, washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, hoovers, cleaning chemicals- and also plastics in baths, sinks and on worktops that are easier to wipe, central heating and electric lighting that means no smoke on the walls and stain resistant furniture, have reduced domestic labour considerably.
What is perhaps less well-recognised is the removal of food production from the household, so that our meat and vegetables are washed and prepared- even chopped up if so desired- that our stocks are now in dried cubes, our sauces in jars, and our cereals dried in boxes, has hugely reduced female labour in the home. Yet, this has happened because of female labour outside of the home. The factory preparation of food exists because women have moved into the workforce- and interestingly, when women prepare that food in the factory, they contribute to the economy, but when they do so at home, it doesn’t count. This also isn’t entirely new. Historically women and men often bought beer, pies, and other prepared meals when they worked outside of the home, while bread has often been bought rather than made when people could afford it. The out-sourcing of necessary services is not new to the modern economy.
The other big misconception probably revolves around childcare. There is a lot of moaning about mothers ‘abandoning’ new-borns to large, impersonal day-care centres, failing in their God, er, society, ordained duty to breastfeed until the child reaches whatever age is fashionable that week, due to their selfish desire to work. This fails to recognise that women have always worked and that breast-feeding practice is historically very diverse. Many children of all social groups had a wet-nurse in the past- the rich used wet-nurses because it freed women from the burden of childcare and allowed them to regain fertility quickly; poor women used wet-nurses if they had to return to paid employment. Women breastfed their friend’s children if they needed to travel or leave home for any length of time. A lot of these functions have been replaced with bottle-milk (and wetnursing dies out around the same time as bottle-milk provides an alternative).
Similarly, most middle-class and elite children had nannies and nurses that took care of the more menial aspects of childcare, while poor babies may have been cared for by (slightly) older siblings, put into group childcare facilities, sent to school at aged 2 or 3, or swaddled and left to their own devices for hours at a time. The emphasis on motherhood as middle-class woman’s destiny is a product of late-eighteenth-century, but given the ubiquity of nannies and maids for this social group, child-care was not exclusive mother-child bonding 24 hours a day (and may be more akin to the ‘quality time’ of the modern working father)! So to demand this of modern women with a call to ‘nature’ becomes a bit ridiculous.
Do you think that the presumption that women have only really entered the world of work in the past fifty years plays a part in peddling the idea that women are ‘naturally’ better suited to home-making?
Partly. It makes it easier to call on women to leave the workplace if we can pretend they weren’t there in the first place. But, I also think that it is part of a much bigger modelling of gender that is implicated in the nature of the economy. When Britain first industrialised and we see the origins of the modern capitalist economy, economic thinkers envisioned a two sphere economic model- a private, non-economic sphere, and an economic, public sphere, as a way of dealing with the changing functions of the household and the removal of work from it. The private sphere was associated with women, and the public with men. These same thinkers promoted a model of biological determinism (reinforced by later thinkers like Darwin), where gendered behaviour became innate to particular types of bodies and associated with particular social and economic functions. So, that men and women’s social and economic position become ‘natural’. And, while a lot of this thinking has undergone critique over the last few centuries (not least because this same thinking reinforced constructions of racial difference), that the word economy at some level means ‘men’ and the word ‘home’ means women underpins our basic thinking on these issues and is difficult to overcome.
Some would argue that women, thanks to ‘third-wave’ feminism have achieved equal pay and equal rights in the work place? How far do you think those aims have been achieved?
I am optimistic in that structurally we are increasingly building in the legislation and processes that should underpin equal pay and equal rights- and that I would say that most people would give lip service to the idea of equal rights. Yet, I think in some ways because we give lip service to it, we are finding it more difficult to challenge. It is much harder to find people being unfair because they think women deserve less, but we can’t get round the fact that women continue to earn less, continue to be promoted less, and are more likely to live in poverty. I also think it is concerning that several measures of women’s equality have saw a decline in recent years- so continual progress is clearly not happening.
The final part will be appear on Sunday.
Katie Barclay is a working woman; she is a historian of marriage at the University of Warwick.
