ABSTRACT
Women’s work is not an easy topic for historical research. The low status of female labour, coupled with the generally humble origins of women workers, mean that they are poorly recorded in historical sources. This was true even at the end of our period, when the census promised to record the occupation of every member of the population. In reality, women’s labour often went unnoticed, as census returns were completed by male heads of household who tended to describe their womenfolk as dependants rather than workers.1 The situation is further complicated as women’s work was more likely to be seasonal than men’s and often involved more than one occupation.2 In rural Aberdeenshire during the eighteenth century, for example, women would work as weavers and knitters at the same time that they earned money from dulse-gathering, kelp-making, fish-selling, peat-digging, and the annual harvest.3
