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.
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These women worked at the surface of the coal mines, cleaning coal, loading tubs, etc. They wore short trousers, clogs and aprons as these clothes were safer near machinary.
Credit:
Working Class Movement Library; TUC Collections, London Metropolitan University
Women’s occupations during the second half of the 19th and early 20th century included work in textiles and clothing factories and workshops as well as in coal and tin mines, working in commerce, and on farms. According to the 1911 census, domestic service was the largest employer of women and girls, with 28% of all employed women (1.35 million women) in England and Wales engaged in domestic service. Many women were employed in small industries like shirt making, nail making, chain making and shoe stitching. These were known as 'sweated industries' because the working hours were long and pay was very low . Factories organised work along the lines of gender – with men performing the supervisory roles and work which was categorized as ‘skilled’.
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