Transcript Week 2 Women in the 17c household economy for

WEEK 2
WOMEN IN THE SEVENTEENTHCENTURY HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY
[email protected]
http://open.conted.ox.ac.uk/series/womans-work-never-donewomens-work-england-and-wales-1600-1914
Week 1 takeaways
Source: Humphries & Weisdorf, 2014
http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/materials/papers/13260/j
hreplacement.pdf
Men (annual)
Men (casual)
GDP per capita
Source: Humphries & Weisdorf, 2015
http://www.economics.ox.ac.uk/Oxford-Economic-and-Social-History-WorkingPapers/unreal-wages-a-new-empirical-foundation-for-the-study-of-living-standardsand-economic-growth-1260-1860
Influences
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Women’s domestic responsibilities
•
Ideology and legal rights 17c - Work as social
obligation of wives and daughters
- Statute of Artificers and Elizabethan Poor Laws
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Division of labour and specialization
•
Trade and economic growth
DISCUSSION
What role did housewives and/or
unmarried female servants play in the
seventeenth century?
17c household economy
 92% of English population lived in country or
small towns
 Households of ‘middling sort’ more self-sufficient:
- Growing food
- Preserving food, brewing
- Yarn preparation and making clothes
- Nursing and doctoring
 Most work undertaken in the household
 Household included servants, farm servants and
apprentices as part of the family
 By-employment for the market
 Shortage of employment for married and older
women
Caspar Netscher (1665) A Lady at a Spinning Wheel,
The National Gallery
Role of a 17c
housewife
Caspar Netscher, A lady teaching a child to read, (1670s),
The National Gallery
‘The English housewife is the mother and mistress of
the family, and hath her most general imployments
within the house’ (Gervaise Markham, 1615):
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Physic
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Preserving food, malting, brewing, baking bread,
cooking
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Educating girls and young boys
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Preparing yarn, making clothes
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Assisting in the family business
•
Running her own business
Much of women’s work in the home and unpaid, but
vital to the family economy
Van Brekenkam, Domestic Dutch interior, University of Aberdeen
Fitzherbet’s Boke of Husbandrie
‘It may fortune sometime that thou shalt have so many things
to do that thou shalt not well know where is best to begin.
Then take heed which thing should be the greatest loss and
there begin.’
Cloth preparation
Michael Sweerts, An old woman spinning
(1646-8), Fitzwilliam Museum
Wool:
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•
•
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Sorting fleece
Making dyes and dyeing or sending to dyer
carding spinning
Weaving mainly a specialist male occupation
Linen and hemp:
•
Sowing, pulling, soaking, stripping, drying,
collecting seeds, braking, scutching twice,
scraping, heckling, threshing hemp residue,
spinning, bleaching
Making shirts, shifts, clothes, coverlets, towels,
sacks
The common method of beetling, scutching and hackling the flax (1791),
The British Museum Collection Online
17th century farming
Married women involved as part of
household economy
Lady Alice Le Strange:
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16 live-in servants plus day labourers
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Dairy with 23 cows, producing 195
stones of cheese, 800 pints butter pa
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Brewed 378 gallons beer per fortnight
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Kept household and farm accounts
Yeoman and husbandman families
Patrick Allan-Frase, Cottage interior (mid-19c)
Hospitalfield Arts
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Men responsible for arable farming, rearing beef
cattle and sheep, care of horses
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Women responsible for the dairy - feeding calves,
milking twice daily, straining milk, skimming cream,
making butter twice a week, making cheese, curds
from the buttermilk, feeding whey to pigs
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Also involved in growing vegetables, poultry, taking
corn to mill
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Both men and women marketed farm produce
Harvest time
Turner, Harvest Home (1809),Tate
By-employment
Jane Whittle’s evidence from probate inventories
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•
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% men
% their widows
Rentier
7
8
Yeoman farmer
33
8
Husbandman
24
19
Smallholder
3
15
Households not always self-sufficient
- some produced, others consumed
Craft/specialism
9
-
Weaver/shearman
8
5
Farming frequently combined with
other income-earning activities
Food processing
5
12
Inns/taverns/victualling
4
4
Widows often continued farming, but
undertook fewer activities than
couple-headed households
Retail
3
-
Money-lending
4
13
Retired
-
16
British School, The hiring fair, King John’s Hunting Lodge
Service
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The great majority of rural women’s work performed by housewives,
daughters and servants in mid-17c
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30% of households included servants
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Male and female farm servants lived as part of family
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Mainly aged 15-24, single, hired by the year
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Women servants performed similar tasks as housewives on farms
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Families with small children more likely to employ female servant
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One or two female servants most common
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Equal number of male and female servants in pastoral areas, 2:1 men
to women in arable areas
Day labouring
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Marriage late, often postponed till an economic
niche available, high proportion never married
•
Wives often accessed day waged work through
their husbands, mainly on large farms
Some women’s farm work:
Pulling pease, reaping
Men’s daily wage
Women’s wage
8d
6d
Assisting thatcher
4d
Spreading muck
3d
Weeding corn
2d
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Only available 2-5 months of year
Johann Baptiste Bouttats, North east view of
Kirkstall Abbey (1738), Leeds Museums
Case study – Nantconwy, Caernarfonshire
Thomas Creswick, Bettws-y-coed, National Library
of Wales (commons.wikimedia)
Poverty and work opportunities
Sir John Wynn of Gwydir’s orders for relieving
poverty, 1616-18:
• 5% of Nantconwy adult population poor
• 77% were female-headed households
• Men reliant on day labouring could not support a family
• Girls and boys of 11 and over ordered into service – or
threatened with unpaid apprenticeship
• Fathers ordered to support illegitimate children
• Single mothers could support themselves and one child
• Mothers and children allowed to beg
View of Gwydir Castle and Afon Conwy, National
Library of Wales, (commons.wikimedia)
Merioneth Quarter Session wage
rates 1601
54 maximum wage rates
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Bailiff, chief hind or common male servant in husbandry by the year 26s 8d
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A common labourer by the day from Michaelmas to May with meat and drink 1d,
May to Michaelmas 2d, or 4d without meat and drink.
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A mower by the day with meat and drink 4d
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Masons, carpenters etc. by the day with meat and drink 4d
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A best woman servant by the year 10s
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A mean woman servant by the year 6s 8d
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An infant servant from 16-20 years 10s
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For spinning and carding a pound of wool, 5d
Changing fortunes after 1660
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Improvement in living standards after Restoration
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Falling population and rising GDP
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Agricultural improvement created demand for more
wage labour
•
Growth of cottage industry also created more work
for women
John Wright, King
John
Charles
Wright,IICharles
(1660-65),
II
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AWright%2C_John_Michael_
National Portrait Gallery
-_Charles_II_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
DISCUSSION
What key features of the 17th century household
economy affected women’s work?
Summary
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Gentry, yeoman, husbandmen and craftsmen’s wives played a vital in the
17c household economy
•
Work was unpaid, no clear distinction between work for the household or
market
•
Women produced goods and services that would otherwise have to be
bought from market
•
Junior partner in ‘family enterprise(s)’ as wives, or might run separate
business. Often able to continue as widows.
•
Service in better-off households a major institution for young workers
between childhood and marriage
•
Difficult time for wage workers in early 17c – especially lack of waged work
for women in agricultural sector
Prep for Week 3, Women in agriculture
1.
What do we learn about the work of early 18c agricultural labourers’ wives from Mary Collier’s
poem The Woman’s Labour?
*Mary Collier, The Woman’s Labour (1739) , http://www.usask.ca/english/barbauld/related_texts/collier.html
AND/OR
2.
What changes in women’s work in agriculture in the 18th and 19th centuries can we see from
paintings – including the use of the sickle or scythe?
*Search websites such as www.artuk.org using keywords like harvest, reaping, milkmaid.
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On attitudes to women in agriculture in the later 19c, see History Today website, http://www.historytoday.com/johnpatrick/agricultural-gangs.
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Eve Hostettler, ‘Gourlay Steell and the sexual division of labour’, History Workshop, No. 4 (Autumn, 1977). (Online in
Resources room or Continuing Education Library - http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/, OU e-Journals, History Workshop, 2 loan
copies)
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Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750 -1850, Chapters III-V, (Online in Resources room or
Continuing Education Library - http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/), 2 copies in Library.
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Nicola Verdon, ‘A diminishing force? Reassessing the employment of female day labourers in English agriculture, c.1790-1850’,
in P. Lane, N. Raven and K. D. M. Snell (eds.), Women, Work and Wages in England, 1600-1850 (Woodbridge, 2004). (One
copy in Continuing Education Library, one class loan copy.)
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Nicola Verdon, Rural Women Workers in 19th Century England (2002), especially Chapters 2 and 3. (Reference-only in Bodleian
or History Faculty Library, Radcliffe Camera).
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P. Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism, Chapter 4. (One copy in Continuing Education Library.)