Rural women workers in 19th-century England: Gender, work and wages
book
posted on 2023-06-07, 22:28authored byNicola Verdon
Despite the growth of women's history and rural social history in the past thirty years, the work performed by women who lived in the ninteenth-century English countryside is still an under-researched issue. Verdon directly addresses this gap in the historiography, placing the rural female labourer centre stage for the first time. The involvement of women in the rural labour market as farm servants, as day labourers in agriculture, and as domestic workers, is examined using a wide range of printed and unpublished sources from across England. The roles village women performed in the informal rural economy (household labour, gathering resources and exploiting systems of barter and exchange) are also assessed. Changes in women's economic opportunities are explored, alongside the implications of region, age, marital status, number of children in the family and local custom; women's economic contribution to the rural labouring household is established as an important part of family subsistence, despite criticism of such work and the rise in male wages after 1850.