ABSTRACT
Women's work has fascinated historians since Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck, writing in the early twentieth century, examined the effects of industrialisation on women's labour. The search for continuity and change has been central to the historiography of women's work in the period c. 1850-1950. Statistical profiles of women's relationship to work are notoriously problematic given that a great deal of women's work has, historically been hidden or 'free'. In a study of young women's work patterns, Selina Todd also draws attention to the connections between 'clothes, work and courtship'. In promoting a cultural history of women's work we do not see it as replacing methods or approaches associated with social, economic or political history. What officially counts as 'work' has been subject to definition. Historians using census data to interrogate women's working lives must recognise that 'householders and enumerators varied the extent to which they regarded women's employment outside the home and paid work within it as an occupation'.
