ABSTRACT
Despite the upbeat tone of the above piece published in the Englishwoman’s Review in 1904, it would be wrong to assume that the history of women’s work in Britain is one of untrammelled progress and success. On the one hand, employment opportunities slowly began to open up for single middle-class women and the better-educated sections of workingclass women. However, on the other hand, the growing influence of domestic ideology on workplace legislation and on working-class aspirations to a stay-at-home wife, meant that working-class women were seeing their range of work possibilities narrowing and that the numbers of married women participating in paid work was gently declining. As mentioned earlier, there are problems with using census returns and other official data relating to women’s employment in this period because underrecording and changing job definitions skew statistical data. Sweeping generalized statements, based on national statistics, can also obscure regional variations and therefore need to be treated with caution.2
