ABSTRACT
Women have always worked. What has changed historically has been the form that their work has taken. In 1842, when times were hard, a miner’s wife reported that she “[got] a little to make up the rent by making colliers’ flannel shirts at 7d apiece”, paid for black lead and mustard “by any little job” she could get, obtained salt in exchange for the bones left from their meat, and took in a lodger!1 This woman’s efforts illustrate the problems involved in writing a history of women’s “paid work”. Historically, women made money and obtained things of value in many ways other than working for wages. They often did more than one thing at a time, they did different things at different times of year and at different phases of the business cycle, and they adapted their efforts to the structure and circumstances of their families.2 For example, at times and in places when work was organized on the basis of putting-out using family labour, women worked not for individual wages but for a collective wage determined by how much the whole family could produce and the prevailing piece rate. Their efforts and their pay were buried in the family economy. Such energetic and flexible exploitation of local opportunities to get a living is difficult to trace historically let alone measure, and so resists capture in modern terms of activity rates and occupational designations.3
