Question

Compaer the perent status of women with that of the ninwteenth and twenrieth century.

Answer 1

Women and work in the 19th century

Most working class women in Victorian England had no choice but to work in order to help support their families. They worked either in factories, or in domestic service for richer households or in family businesses. Many women also carried out home-based work such as finishing garments and shoes for factories, laundry, or preparation of snacks to sell in the market or streets. This was in addition to their unpaid work at home which included cooking, cleaning, child care and often keeping small animals and growing vegetables and fruit to help feed their families.

However, women’s work has not always been accurately recorded within sources that historians rely on, due to much of women's work being irregular, home-based or within a family-run business. Women's work was often not included within statistics on waged work in official records, altering our perspective on the work women undertook. Often women’s wages were thought of as secondary earnings and less important than men’s wages even though they were crucial to the family’s survival. This is why the census returns from the early years of the 19th century often show a blank space under the occupation column against women’s names – even though we now have evidence from a variety of sources from the 1850s onwards that women engaged in a wide variety of waged work in the UK.
Women's wages

Throughout most of this period women were paid less than their male counterpart working alongside them, which created great financial difficulties for working women. From the 1850s onwards, trade unions began to be established, first among better paid workers and they then expanded to represent a wider range of workers. However, women remained for the most part excluded from trade unions, and unequal pay was the norm. In many cases, women attempted to demand better rights and some were supported by social reformers.

One of the most famous strikes by women workers during the nineteenth century took place during the exceptionally cold July of 1888 at Byrant and May match factory in the East End of London. The strike began when 200 workers left work in protest when the factory owners sacked three workers who had spoken to a social reformer, Annie Besant, about their working conditions.

Besant published an article in her halfpenny weekly paper "The Link" on 23 June 1888, entitled "White Slavery in London". This article about the conditions at the Byrant and May factory highlighted fourteen-hour work days, poor pay of between 4-8 shillings a week, excessive fines and the severe health complications from working with white phosphorus.


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