Women, Work, and Family by Joan W. Scott

First published: 1978

Type of work: History>

Time of work: 1700-1950

Locale: Great Britain and France

Principal Personages:

• Michael Anderson, a social historian
• Annie Besant, a late nineteenth century British birth control advocate
• Frederick LePlay, a French sociologist
• Ivy Pinchbeck, a women’s historian

Form and Content

As the authors acknowledge, the effect which paid employment has on women and on the family is an old problem, but one which was still unresolved at the time they decided to write Women, Work, and Family. Some historians, such as Alice Clark, believed that industrial capitalism was responsible for the exclusion of women from paid employment, and thus played a crucial role in modern women’s oppression. Others, including Ivy Pinchbeck, insisted that the Industrial Revolution increased women’s employment opportunities and therefore was a liberating factor. Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott seek to resolve this dispute by examining the impact of industrialization on female employment and on the family in Great Britain and France between 1700 and 1950.

Women, Work, and Family is divided into three parts. Part 1 examines the family economy in early modern France and Great Britain. Part 2 considers the family economy during the Industrial Revolution in those two countries. The third part traces the development of what Tilly and Scott call the family consumer economy in the period after the Industrial Revolution. Each part examines the nature of women’s work, the demographic forces shaping women’s lives, and the relationship between women’s paid labor and women’s position in the family. Twenty-four pages of notes and a nine-page bibliography enable the reader to evaluate the sources used by the authors and provide a useful guide for those who wish to do further reading on the subject.

Drawing upon the work of demographers, economists, and anthropologists, Tilly and Scott use a social-science approach to their subject rather than a traditional chronological narrative. As a result, the authors rely on aggregate statistical data to demonstrate changes in such areas as fertility rates, age at first marriage, wage rates, and the growth of women’s employment in specific industries. The primary focus of the book is thus on the material structures that shaped women’s lives; there is little about women’s attitudes toward these developments or the cultural forces that affected their lives. By concentrating on ordinary women of the lower middle class and working class, the authors avoid the pitfall of making broad generalizations based upon the experiences of a small number of exceptional middle-class women.

Women, Work, and Family is a scholarly study which breaks new ground in directing attention to the social and economic environment within which women lived during this period. It makes use of new approaches used by social scientists, such as the concept of the life cycle, in explaining women’s distinctive reaction to economic and social modernizing forces. Its strength lies in identifying the long-term economic and social trends that transformed women’s lives. Indeed, one of the goals of the authors is to create a model of how work and family interact at different stages of industrialization which will apply to any society going through that process.

Context

Women, Work, and Family is considered a classic in the field of women’s history because it effectively undermined the modernization model that portrayed industrialization as leading to women’s emancipation. It presents convincing evidence of the strong continuity in working-class women’s participation in the labor force during the two centuries prior to 1950. Throughout this period, most married women worked to provide financial assistance to other family members, rather than for their own individual interests. The authors also show that the typical female wage earner of the nineteenth century was not the relatively highly paid factory worker but someone who worked in areas, such as domestic service, that had been considered women’s work for centuries.

Bibliography

Bradley, Harriet. Men’s Work, Women’s Work. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1989. A sociological account which examines the theories about why work is gendered, followed by case studies of the sex segregation of jobs in several industries. Bradley suggests that the most important feature of women’s paid employment is that women are invariably relegated to “women’s jobs” and thus limited in what they are permitted to do.

John, Angela V., ed. Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England, 1800-1918. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1986. A collection of essays on different aspects of women’s employment between 1800 and 1918 written from the perspective of the women who worked. The authors reinforce Tilly and Scott’s thesis about the continuity of women’s employment roles by demonstrating in detail how this was accomplished in specific industries.

Lewis, Jane. Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984. An overview of the changes in women’s lives from 1870 to 1950 which pays special attention to the impact of economic and demographic forces. Although sensitive to class and other differences that separated women, Lewis views women as a gender group living in a man-made world.

Roberts, Elizabeth. A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940. Oxford, England: Basil Blackwell, 1984. An important study of working-class women in Lancashire which makes good use of interviews. Roberts stresses the power that women wielded within their families, and she finds that they define emancipation as being able to leave paid employment, rather than in terms of employment opportunities outside the home.

Roberts, Elizabeth. Women’s Work: 1840-1940. London: Macmillan, 1988. Perhaps the best brief summary of the contemporary state of knowledge on women’s work from the mid-nineteenth century to World War II. While acknowledging the gains in women’s employment opportunities, Roberts stresses the sex segregation of jobs that restricted women to lower-paid positions.

Rose, Sonya O. Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Makes extensive use of theory in constructing a sociological account of working-class women’s work during the period of industrialization. Noted for its use of gender analysis in demonstrating how cultural forces shaped women’s perceptions of class and gender relations.

Walby, Sylvia. Patriarchy at Work. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. A sociological study of the way in which patriarchy shapes capitalism through a historical account of women employed in three industries: cotton textiles, engineering, and clerical work. Whereas other authors have claimed that patriarchal relations in the workplace reflected patriarchal family structures, Walby argues instead that patriarchy and capitalism are in conflict with each other.