Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 43.1 (2000) 167-169

Book Review

Women's Work: The English Experience 1650-1914

The nature of women's work, its value, remuneration, and ability to command authority both within the household and beyond, and the character and contribution of women workers themselves--not to mention the cultural conceptualizations of that work and those women--are all subjects which occasion controversy in even the contemporary context. The data are hard to aggregate and strongly held conclusions easily arise from isolated anecdotes.

When these questions are raised in reference to their historical dimension, the problems of evidence and interpretation grow yet more intractable. Source material about the past working lives of women, especially of those women most constrained by the necessities of work, is scarce. To this day, women are globally less literate and less numerate than men, and thus less likely to leave a record of the activities which sustain them. Moreover, a large component of women's work historically has been naturalized and labeled as something else, namely reproduction, thereby distancing it from the purview of those whose attention was focused on the parameters of work in the past. The resulting [End Page 167] paucity of evidence makes it all the more difficult to identify the impact (if any) of social class, urban/rural dichotomies, and geographical location on the nature of women's work over time. In fact, some have argued that our very inability to clearly differentiate along these various dimensions is itself the best evidence that the working experience of women has actually been characterized more by consistency than by change. Where then should the historian of women's work begin?

These questions did not start to receive serious scholarly attention until the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, all of the earliest writers on the history of women's work broadly conceived were themselves women who had been educated by the late-Victorian women's suffrage movement which sought greater female access to the arenas of public discourse and decision-making. When Alice Clark published her pioneering study Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) and Ivy Pinchbeck followed with Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850 (1930), they chose to examine the economic condition of their sex in the period which had (immediately, in the case of Pinchbeck) preceded their own. They did this in large part with an eye toward explaining the process by which women of their own day had come to such a sorry economic state, as evidenced in both the widely shared conviction that women were exceptional to the world of paid work, and in the belief that they had always been thus. These early academic efforts, then, were as much correctives to contemporary prejudice as they were historical inquiries in their own right.

In the decades which have followed, the focus of the historical study of women's work has rightly shifted more toward an understanding of the past in its own terms. However, the field remains fraught with the overtones of current ideological debates. In particular, the identification of the varying intensities of what might be called the "relative victimization" of women, as well as the possibilities for female agency across time and space, have lent themselves especially well to arguments based on strong prior beliefs about the "natural" status of women vis-à-vis men.

This volume of collected essays edited by Pamela Sharpe tackles all of these issues head on. The essays, mostly written within the last decade, have been selected to represent a variety of scholarly viewpoints, as well as to cover the broad thematic scope of the larger debate over the possibilities for, and the value and meaning of, women's work in England between the seventeenth and early-twentieth centuries. The collection is commendable both for its substantial coverage and for the very useful...