The female labour market in English agriculture during the Industrial Revolution: expansion or contraction?

This article reviews some of the recent literature on women's farm work and adds evidence from sources such as Marshall's Review and farm accounts to consider patterns of expansion and contraction in the demand for female labour from the capitalist sector of English agriculture over the period a7oo-185o. The amount of work available to women, the sexual division of labour and female wage rates are discussed. It argues that although generalizations regarding the causes of increase or decline in female work and wages are not easily made, the final impression is that both before and during the Industrial Revolution, the demand from agriculture for female labour was limited. Thomas Hardy describes Tess of the d'Urbeville's slavery to the threshing machine thus; For some probably economical reason it was usually a woman who was chosen for this particular duty, and Groby gave as his motive in selecting Tess that she was one of those who best combined strength with quickness in untying and both with staying power ...~ While by some accounts, Tess' labours were anachronistic by the 188os, this article considers the extent to which English women carried out farm work from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. Were female farm workers 'economical' to employ? Did their aptitudes suit agricultural labour? Research and writing in social and economic history has been concerned with patterns of women's work, particularly since the 'new wave' of women's history from the 197os, but we still have little idea of where and when women worked on farms. Widening our knowledge of the female labour market enables us to develop our understanding of the 'release' of labour from the land to mills and factories (for the main Industrial Revolution labour force was female) as well as to local cottage industries. Nevertheless we cannot assume that expanding opportunities for women in agriculture would have been welcome if more attractive work were available in other sectors of the economy. More generally, historians * I gave early versions of this article as a seminar paper in Cambridge, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol. Later versions were presented at the Social History Conference and Local Population Studies Annual Conference in a996 and at the conference on 'Wage Systems and Industrialisation in Europe, eighteenth-twentieth Centuries' in Les Treilles, Provence, in 1999. I am grateful for all the comments received. For remarks on the written text, I thank Pat Hudson, Ad Knotter and the anonymous reviewers for this journal. i Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbevilles 0891, 1985 edn), p. 4o6. AgHR 47, II, pp. 161-181 161 162 T H E A G R I C U L T U R A L H I S T O R Y R E V I E W still disagree on whether or not capitalist agriculture meant more or less work for women. The issue of when and where women worked on farms is considered in Section I. Inextricably connected to this question is the extent to which women's work in farming became more specific in terms of the type of work women undertook. To what degree work was gender segregated and whether this was more rigidly applied over time is explored in Section II. Section III will review wage rate evidence and Section IV will examine the 'female marginalization' thesis in more detail. The current differences of opinion between historians mainly concern areas of developed capitalist farming, so that this discussion will tend to concentrate on the east and the Midlands rather than smaller farms of the west and uplands which, until recent times, employed more family labour. The focus will not be on live-in farm servants (unmarried young women) but on dayor piece-workers (wives or widows). Feminist historians have taken exception to the term 'family labour', with its implicit devaluing of the contribution of members other than the 0~ale) household head, but a close examination of the identity of female workers in farm accounts shows that they are usually related to the farm labourers who worked on the same farm. Their wives and children found periodic employment, as did adult daughters (some of whom seem to have been women who had illegitimate children and perhaps found themselves excluded on the grounds of respectability from domestic service), and widows of former farm workers. 2 Moreover, at this stage it is easier to review some of the debates and difficulties rather than aiming to produce a definitive view. Ultimately, exploration of the regional context of women's work will provide a fuller and more nuanced picture. I