Work and Victorian Women*

1. There were 3 aspects to the problem of women and work:  1. inability to fulfill one’s sense of vocation (Aurora Leigh, Dorothea Brooke, &c.) 2. Inability to find genteel work  3. Insupportable conditions of poor working women (and also 4. prostitution; but we will cover this elsewhere)
2. The first arose from middle and upper-class prejudice – women were not allowed (often by law; other times by organizational rules) to pursue occupations outside of the home.  There were few serious schools for women, and few to no institutes for specialized training or higher education.  Women were not licensed to practice medicine (after the first, Elizabeth Blackwell, became licensed by means of a loophole)
3. The second was a combination of the former with social taboos about losing caste.  A gentlewoman, abruptly impoverished by the death of her husband or father, could have probably found work as a servant or factory worker; but once she did so, she would lose all of her friends and her place in society (she would have to curtsey to people who she once treated as equals, for example).  Moreover, there is no reason to suppose that the laboring classes would have welcomed such intruders with open arms.
4. The third problem had to do with a complete absence of regulations, with England’s potent class system, which assisted the powerful in ignoring the humanity of their workers, and with the ready availability of labor.

Women's work appears to have been on the rise in the first half of the nineteenth century.  It plateaued between the 1850s and 1870s at around 42% of women over 20 being employed, at least part time.  During the second half of the century, the percentage declined to ~35%, only picking back up again after WWII. 

Women have, of course, always been economically active, whether in the marketplace or through their unpaid but highly valuable labors in the home, or in some combination of the two.  For laboring women, the Industrial Revolution changed the social and geographical settings of their work.  Agriculturalists migrated to the cities as public lands were enclosed for sheep-grazing, and whereas clothweavers and other artisans had once worked in the home, often on a freelance or semi-independent basis, factory workers obviously worked out of the home, complicating childcare issues and placing them more at the mercy of their employers; but by taking them out of the home it also gave them more independence and challenged the "separation of spheres," the dogma that asserted that woman's place was in the home, while men moved between the home and the public world. 

For women in the bourgeois and upper classes, the quality and quantity of labor changed.  Whereas they had had extensive domestic and manorial responsibilities in the Renaissance, by the 19th century women were supposed to aspire to idleness. It was no longer appropriate for ladies to take over the family business or estate while the husband was out of town.  This "idleness" was of a highly dubious nature, however, especially in the middle classes, where the women's contributions to making, trimming, and maintaining the family's wardrobes were often crucial.  In addition to needlecraft, women also had to oversee the servants; as these were not always highly trained or highly motivated, this could be a considerable task.  Moreover, as women had few fixed responsibilities, their time was considered open for administering to the needs of the members of her household, whether that meant tending an invalid, mending clothes, fetching slippers or newspapers, playing cards, reading aloud, or just generally being sociable.  Women with any pretensions to seriousness ought to have undertaken charity work.  This could entail making clothing for the poor, visiting the ill, teaching local schools, or the more intense labors of people like Josephine Butler and Florence Nightingale. As Bodichon observed, "Women who act as housekeepers, nurses, and instructors of their children often do as much for the support of the household as their husbands; and it is very unfair for men to speak of supporting a wife and children when such is the case" (Herstein 128).