Working For Women?: Gendered Work And Welfare Policies In Twentieth Century Britain

History of women in the United Kingdom

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The reasons include commercial growth, gild formation, changing technologies, new regulations, and widespread prejudices that associated female brewsters with drunkenness and disorder. The taverns still use women to serve it, a low-status, low-skilled, and poorly remunerated tasks.

While the Tudor era presents an abundance of material on the women of the nobility—especially royal wives and queens—historians have recovered scant documentation about the average lives of women. There has, however, been extensive statistical analysis of demographic and population data which includes women, especially in their childbearing roles. The role of women in society was, for the historical era, relatively unconstrained; Spanish and Italian visitors to England commented regularly, and sometimes caustically, on the freedom that women enjoyed in England, in contrast to their home cultures.

England had more well-educated upper class women than was common anywhere in Europe. The Queen's marital status was a major political and diplomatic topic. It also entered into the popular culture. Elizabeth's unmarried status inspired a cult of virginity. In poetry and portraiture, she was depicted as a virgin or a goddess or both, not as a normal woman. In contrast to her father's emphasis on masculinity and physical prowess, Elizabeth emphasized the maternalism theme, saying often that she was married to her kingdom and subjects. She explained "I keep the good will of all my husbands — my good people — for if they did not rest assured of some special love towards them, they would not readily yield me such good obedience," [15] and promised in they would never have a more natural mother than she.

Although medical men did not approve, women healers played a significant role in the medical care of Londoners from cradle to grave during the Elizabethan era. They were hired by parishes and hospitals, as well as by private families. They played central roles in the delivery of nursing care as well as medical, pharmaceutical, and surgical services throughout the city as part of organized systems of health care. They operated nursing homes for the homeless and sick poor, and also looked after abandoned and orphaned children, pregnant women, and lunatics.

After , the workhouse movement undermined many of these roles and the parish nurse became restricted largely to the rearing and nursing of children and infants. Over ninety percent of English women and adults, in general entered marriage in this era at an average age of about 25—26 years for the bride and 27—28 years for the groom. They governed witchcraft and providing penalties for its practice, or—in —rather for pretending to practise it. In Wales, fear of witchcraft mounted around the year There was a growing alarm of women's magic as a weapon aimed against the state and church.

The Church made greater efforts to enforce the canon law of marriage, especially in Wales where tradition allowed a wider range of sexual partnerships. There was a political dimension as well, as accusations of witchcraft were levied against the enemies of Henry VII, who was exerting more and more control over Wales.

The records of the Courts of Great Sessions for Wales, show that Welsh custom was more important than English law. Custom provided a framework of responding to witches and witchcraft in such a way that interpersonal and communal harmony was maintained, Showing to regard to the importance of honour, social place and cultural status. Even when found guilty, execution did not occur.

Becoming king in , James I brought to England and Scotland continental explanations of witchcraft. He set out the much stiffer Witchcraft Act of , which made it a felony under common law. One goal was to divert suspicion away from male homosociality among the elite, and focus fear on female communities and large gatherings of women. He thought they threatened his political power so he laid the foundation for witchcraft and occultism policies, especially in Scotland. The point was that a widespread belief in the conspiracy of witches and a witches' Sabbath with the devil deprived women of political influence.

Occult power was supposedly a womanly trait because women were weaker and more susceptible to the devil. Enlightenment attitudes after made a mockery of beliefs in witches. The Witchcraft Act of marked a complete reversal in attitudes. Penalties for the practice of witchcraft as traditionally constituted, which by that time was considered by many influential figures to be an impossible crime, were replaced by penalties for the pretence of witchcraft.

A person who claimed to have the power to call up spirits, or foretell the future, or cast spells, or discover the whereabouts of stolen goods, was to be punished as a vagrant and a con artist, subject to fines and imprisonment. Historians Keith Thomas and his student Alan Macfarlane revolutionized the study of witchcraft by combining historical research with concepts drawn from anthropology. Older women were the favorite targets because they were marginal, dependent members of the community and therefore more likely to arouse feelings of both hostility and guilt, and less likely to have defenders of importance inside the community.

Witchcraft accusations were the village's reaction to the breakdown of its internal community, coupled with the emergence of a newer set of values that was generating psychic stress. The Reformation closed the convents and monasteries, and called on former monks and nuns to marry. Lay women shared in the religiosity of the Reformation. Historian Alasdair Raffe finds that, "Men and women were thought equally likely to be among the elect Godly men valued the prayers and conversation of their female co-religionists, and this reciprocity made for loving marriages and close friendships between men and women.

For the first time, laywomen gained numerous new religious roles, and took a prominent place in prayer societies. Women's historians have debated the impact of the Industrial Revolution and capitalism generally on the status of women. Clark argues that in 16th century England, women were engaged in many aspects of industry and agriculture. The home was a central unit of production and women played a vital role in running farms, and in operating some trades and landed estates.

For example, they brewed beer, handled the milk and butter, raised chickens and pigs, grew vegetables and fruit, spun flax and wool into thread, sewed and patched clothing, and nursed the sick. Their useful economic roles gave them a sort of equality with their husbands. However, Clark argues, as capitalism expanded in the 17th century, there was more and more division of labor with the husband taking paid labor jobs outside the home, and the wife reduced to unpaid household work.

Middle-class women were confined to an idle domestic existence, supervising servants; lower-class women were forced to take poorly paid jobs. Capitalism, therefore, had a negative effect on more powerful women. In the preindustrial era, production was mostly for home use and women produce much of the needs of the households. The second stage was the "family wage economy" of early industrialization, the entire family depended on the collective wages of its members, including husband, wife and older children.

The third or modern stage is the "family consumer economy," in which the family is the site of consumption, and women are employed in large numbers in retail and clerical jobs to support rising standards of consumption. In the Victorian era, fertility rates increased in every decade until , when the rates started evening out. Another possible explanation is social. In the 19th century, the marriage rate increased, and people were getting married at a very young age until the end of the century, when the average age of marriage started to increase again slowly.

The reasons why people got married younger and more frequently are uncertain. One theory is that greater prosperity allowed people to finance marriage and new households earlier than previously possible. With more births within marriage, it seems inevitable that marriage rates and birth rates would rise together. The evening out of fertility rates at the beginning of the 20th century was mainly the result of a few big changes: The Victorian era is famous for the Victorian standards of personal morality.

Historians generally agree that the middle classes held high personal moral standards and usually followed them , but have debated whether the working classes followed suit. Moralists in the late 19th century such as Henry Mayhew decried the slums for their supposed high levels of cohabitation without marriage and illegitimate births.

By contrast in 21st century Britain, nearly half of all children are born outside marriage, and nine in ten newlyweds have been cohabitating. Historians have begun to analyze the agency of women in overseas missions. At first, missionary societies officially enrolled only men, but women increasingly insisted on playing a variety of roles. Single women typically worked as educators. Wives assisted their missionary husbands in most of his roles. Advocates stopped short of calling for the end of specified gender roles, but they stressed the interconnectedness of the public and private spheres and spoke out against perceptions of women as weak and house-bound.

The middle class typically had one or more servants to handle cooking, cleaning and child care, Industrialisation brought with it a rapidly growing middle class whose increase in numbers had a significant effect on the social strata itself: Identifiable characteristics came to define the middle class home and lifestyle.

Previously, in town and city, residential space was adjacent to or incorporated into the work site, virtually occupying the same geographical space. The difference between private life and commerce was a fluid one distinguished by an informal demarcation of function. In the Victorian era, English family life increasingly became compartmentalised, the home a self-contained structure housing a nuclear family extended according to need and circumstance to include blood relations.

The concept of "privacy" became a hallmark of the middle class life.

History of women in the United Kingdom - Wikipedia

The English home closed up and darkened over the decade s , the cult of domesticity matched by a cult of privacy. Bourgeois existence was a world of interior space, heavily curtained off and wary of intrusion, and opened only by invitation for viewing on occasions such as parties or teas. Domestic life for a working-class family meant the housewife had to handle the chores servants did in wealthier families. A working-class wife was responsible for keeping her family as clean, warm, and dry as possible in housing stock that was often literally rotting around them.

In London, overcrowding was endemic in the slums; a family living in one room was common. Domestic chores for women without servants meant a great deal of washing and cleaning. Coal-dust from home stoves and factories filled the city air, coating windows, clothing, furniture and rugs.

Washing clothing and linens meant scrubbing by hand in a large zinc or copper tub. Some water would be heated and added to the wash tub, and perhaps a handful of soda to soften the water. Curtains were taken down and washed every fortnight; they were often so blackened by coal smoke that they had to be soaked in salted water before being washed. Scrubbing the front wooden doorstep of the home every morning was done to maintain respectability.

Opportunities for leisure activities increased dramatically as real wages continued to grow and hours of work continued to decline. In urban areas, the nine-hour workday became increasingly the norm; the Factory Act limited the workweek to Helped by the Bank Holiday Act of , which created a number of fixed holidays, a system of routine annual vacations came into play, starting with white-collar workers and moving into the working-class.

Middle-class Victorians used the train services to visit the seaside, Large numbers travelling to quiet fishing villages such as Worthing , Brighton , Morecambe and Scarborough began turning them into major tourist centres, and people like Thomas Cook saw tourism and even overseas travel as viable businesses. By the late Victorian era, the leisure industry had emerged in all cities with many women in attendance. It provided scheduled entertainment of suitable length at convenient locales at inexpensive prices.

These included sporting events, music halls, and popular theater. Women were now allowed in some sports, such as archery, tennis, badminton and gymnastics.

The advent of Reformism during the 19th century opened new opportunities for reformers to address issues facing women and launched the feminist movement. They also campaigned for improved female rights in the law, employment, education, and marriage. Property owning women and widows had been allowed to vote in some local elections, but that ended in The Chartist Movement was a large-scale demand for suffrage—but it meant manhood suffrage.

Upper-class women could exert a little backstage political influence in high society. However, in divorce cases, rich women lost control of their children. Before , after divorce rich women lost control of their children as those children would continue in the family unit with the father, as head of the household, and who continued to be responsible for them.

Caroline Norton was one such woman, her personal tragedy where she was denied access to her three sons after a divorce, led her to a life of intense campaigning which successfully led to the passing of the Custody of Infants Act and then introduced the Tender years doctrine for child custody arrangement. Under the doctrine the Act also established a presumption of maternal custody for children under the age of seven years maintaining the responsibility for financial support to the father.

Traditionally, poor people used desertion, and for poor men even the practice of selling wives in the market, as a substitute for divorce.

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It was very difficult to secure divorce on the grounds of adultery, desertion, or cruelty. The first key legislative victory came with the Matrimonial Causes Act of It passed over the strenuous opposition of the highly traditional Church of England. The new law made divorce a civil affair of the courts, rather than a Church matter, with a new civil court in London handling all cases. A woman who obtained a judicial separation took the status of a feme sole, with full control of her own civil rights.

Additional amendments came in , which allowed for separations handled by local justices of the peace. The Church of England blocked further reforms until the final breakthrough came with the Matrimonial Causes Act A series of four laws called the Married Women's Property Act passed Parliament from to that effectively removed the restrictions that kept wealthy married women from controlling their own property.

They now had practically equal status with their husbands, and a status superior to women anywhere else in Europe. Bullough argues that prostitution in 18th-century Britain was a convenience to men of all social statuses, and economic necessity for many poor women, and was tolerated by society. The evangelical movement of the nineteenth century denounced the prostitutes and their clients as sinners, and denounced society for tolerating it.

The "regulationist policy" was to isolate, segregate, and control prostitution. The main goal was to protect working men, soldiers and sailors near ports and army bases from catching venereal disease. Young women officially became prostitutes and were trapped for life in the system. After a nationwide crusade led by Josephine Butler and the Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts , Parliament repealed the acts and ended legalised prostitution.

Butler became a sort of saviour to the girls she helped free. The age of consent for young women was raised from 12 to 16, undercutting the supply of young prostitutes who were in highest demand. The new moral code meant that respectable men dared not be caught. Though he disagrees with some of Cunningham's analysis Miles Taylor, in his analysis of the changing image of John Bull, comes to conclusions which similarly support my argument.

Past and Present , , p. For the silk weavers patriotism was not an unconditional devotion to King and state, but predicated on the protection that power provided the poor. Barbalet, Citizenship , p. He emphasizes that the international as a realm of threat to national rulers usually serves as a trigger for repression, though it can lead to an inclusive reformism and the extension of rights.

That this was a developing bourgeois nationalism can be seen in the glossing of the tension between the inherent superiority of the British and the supposed blindness of markets to national origin. See also Pymlot , J.

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In a recent essay Jurgen Habermas argues that inclusive citizenship claims defined by nationalism stand in tension with the liberal social-contract ontology of the citizen as external to the state: While this contradiction may predominate in the annals of theoretical political debate, the case of the weavers' claims-making suggests that the relationship between nationalist and social-contract discourses is more historically mutable and based in contemporary social conflicts. International Review of Social History , 38 , Supplement , pp.

As Barbara Taylor and Dorothy Thompson argue, this discourse of domesticity was not simply passively accepted by working-class women, but was actively negotiated to find avenues of participation among increasingly narrowed options: Women's Politics — Oxford , , pp. Deborah Valenze analyzes how the emergent discourse of middle-class domesticity opened working-class life to the prognostications of middle-class moralists and reformers: Weekly Free Press , 3 May The Spitalfields weavers used this.

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List of feminist literature

Abstract views Abstract views reflect the number of visits to the article landing page. Introduction to segregation in employment Walby, S. Gender segregation at work. Open University Press p. Segregation in employment in social and economic theory Walby, S. Approaches to the study of gender relations in unemployment and employment Walby, S. New approaches to economic life. Gender relations and job loss: Localities, class, and gender Murgatroyd, L. Gender, class and work. The social construction of rape Walby, S.

Women's unemployment, patriarchy and capitalism Walby, S. Seducing the public by rape reports Hay, A. PhD Supervision Interests Research students are welcome in all areas of my research interests including: Journal article Untangling the concept of coercive control: Journal article Measuring violence to end violence: Journal article The concept and measurement of violence against women and men Walby, S. Book Study on comprehensive policy review of anti-trafficking projects funded by the European Commission: Commissioned report Study on the gender dimension of trafficking in human beings Walby, S.

Other report Is violence increasing or decreasing?: Journal article Crisis Walby, S. Book Mainstreaming domestic and gender-based violence into sociology and the criminology of violence Walby, S. Other report The decline in the rate of domestic violence has stopped: Other report Overview of the worldwide best practices for rape prevention and for assisting women victims of rape Walby, S. Commissioned report Finance versus democracy?: Journal article Violence and society: Journal article Intersectionality and the quality of the gender equality architecture Walby, S.

Journal article Sen and the measurement of justice and capabilities: Journal article Beyond the politics of location Walby, S. Editorial Measuring the impact of cuts in public expenditure on the provision of services to prevent violence against women Towers, J. Commissioned report Measuring the impact of cuts in public expenditure on the provision of services to prevent violence against women and girls Walby, S.

Journal article Is the knowledge society gendered? Journal article Developing measures of multiple forms of sexual violence and their contested treatment in the criminal justice system Walby, S. Chapter Globalization and inequalities: Book The future of feminism Walby, S. Journal article The impact of feminism on sociology Walby, S. Special issue Measuring equalities: Journal article A social science research agenda on the financial crisis Walby, S.

Journal article Developing Gender Statistics: Commissioned report Beyond the politics of location: Chapter Gender in the financial crisis Walby, S. Chapter Globalization and Inequalities: Book The cost of domestic violence: Other report The gendered division of labour: Journal article From statistics to indicators: Chapter New survey methodologies in researching violence against women Walby, S. Chapter Review of equality statistics Walby, S. Commissioned report Complexity theory, systems theory and multiple intersecting social inequalities Walby, S.

Other report Gendering the Knowledge Economy: Book Theorizing the gendering of the knowledge economy: Chapter Gender approaches to nations and nationalism. Chapter In-depth study on all forms of violence against women: Other report Introduction to gender transformations. Chapter Patriarchy Walby, S.

Chapter Towards international standards for data collection and statistics on violence against women. Online publication Chapter Introduction: Journal article Gender Mainstreaming: Journal article Gender and work in Europe: Chapter Gender, nation and state in an era of globalisation Walby, S. Chapter Improving the statistics on violence against women. Journal article Measuring women's progress in a global era. Journal article Nation, gender and state Walby, S. Chapter Political aspects, East and West: Chapter The sociology of gender Walby, S.

Commissioned report Domestic violence, sexual assault and stalking: Book Five times higher - the extent of domestic violence Walby, S.

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Journal article Gender and Globalisation Walby, S. Other report No one polity saturates the political space in a given territory Walby, S. Journal article Policy strategies in a global era for gendered workplace equity Walby, S. Journal article The real cost of domestic violence Walby, S. Journal article The myth of the nation-state: Journal article Gender and the new economy: Journal article Patriarkatet som system och olika strukturer Walby, S. Chapter Policy developments for workplace gender equity in a global era: Journal article 'Gender' and 'Patriarchy' Walby, S.

Journal article From community to coalition: Other report Against epistemological chasms: Journal article Assessing and managing the risk of domestic violence Walby, S. Chapter Comparing the methodology of the new national surveys of violence against women Walby, S. Chapter Feminist theory Walby, S. Chapter From community to coalition: Chapter Gender, class and stratification: Journal article Science is neither a mirror of nature nor a mirror of culture: Journal article Sexuality Walby, S.

Chapter A uniao Europeia e as politicas de igualdade de oportunidades Walby, S. Journal article Analysing social inequality in the 21st century: Journal article Beyond the politics of location: Journal article Contemporary British Society. Book Gender, globalisation and democracy Walby, S. Journal article Gender, globalisation and democracy Walby, S. Journal article Globalisation, women and work: Chapter In search of feminist theory Walby, S.

Journal article The restructuring of the gendered political economy: Book Introduction Walby, S. Chapter Introduction Boje, T. Journal article The new regulatory state: Journal article Transformations of the gendered political economy: Journal article Contributions to an agenda for sociology for the 21st century Walby, S.

Conference contribution Les figures emblematiques de l'emploi flexible Walby, S. Chapter Nursing and new wave management Walby, S. Chapter Gender Transformations Walby, S. Book Gender, class and stratification: Journal article The 'changing form' or the 'declining significance' of patriarchy? Chapter Women and citizenship: Journal article Analyses sociologiques de la division sexuelle du travail Walby, S. Journal article Gender, work and post-Fordism: Journal article Is citizenship gendered?

Chapter Medicine and nursing: Book Methodological and theoretical issues in the comparative analysis of gender relations in Western Europe Walby, S. Chapter "Backlash" in historical context Walby, S. Chapter Gender Walby, S. Chapter Woman and nation Walby, S.

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