Women and Work since the Mid-Nineteenth Century

Understanding women and work requires an awareness of the nature of women's work and how it is measured. Housework, paid and unpaid, has been central to the lives of women, but services provided by women on a voluntary basis at home are not counted as "work" in economic terms. Over the past one hundred and fifty years there has been a steady decline in paid domestic service and a growth, then eventual decline, in the number of full-time "housewives." These trends have been accompanied by an increase in the productivity of housework as a result of mechanization. In contrast with single women and widows, the classification of married women has posed problems that signal the need for vigilance in interpreting trends in labor-force participation.

At the 1841 census the Irish census commissioners devised a classification of occupations comprising nine categories or orders. Every adult was classified according to his or her occupation or "chief business in life." Wives who had a specified occupation (for example, dressmaking) were counted as such and included under the appropriate order (in this case, clothing). Changes in classification methods ordered by the British census commissioners in 1871 led to the disappearance of many wives from recorded occupations, notwithstanding their continued unrecorded involvement. At the 1871 census 47 percent of wives and just over 60 percent of widows had specified occupations. The recorded married women included 55 in civil service occupations, 205 midwives, 1 author, 29 actresses, 1,146 teachers, 5,883 general domestic servants, 31 pawnbrokers, 3,174 unspecified dealers, 5,858 shopkeepers, and more than 13,000 seamstresses. The largest number—more than 250,000—were agriculturists, generally graziers' wives.

By the time of the 1926 census, the first in the Irish Free State, only 8 percent of wives and 40 percent of widows were recorded as "gainfully occupied." In Northern Ireland the proportion of women in factory employment and domestic industry—many of them married—was higher than in the South, reflecting the importance of the textile and clothing industries in the North. At the 1926 census household-based economic activities of a subsistence nature continued to be significant. Two-thirds of all the women recorded at work in 1926 were in three occupations—farm proprietors (chiefly widows), workers on family farms (mainly single women), and domestic servants (also predominantly single women). Women's occupations were not exclusively traditional, however: One female chimney sweep was recorded.

At this remove it is difficult to determine how many women who were classified as in "home duties" were in effect "at work" in a domestic agricultural context. All that can be said is that intertemporal comparisons that indicate an increase in the labor-force participation of married women may be exaggerated to the extent that participation went unrecorded in earlier decades. As the twentieth century progressed, and as the relative importance of agriculture declined, more women who worked "went out to work."

The underestimation of the labor-force participation of married women was continued in the 1920s and in particular the 1930s by a deliberate policy to curtail the participation of all women. The move to exclude women—especially married women—from the workplace had its roots in nineteenth-century Britain, continental Europe, and the United States in the struggle of working-class men for a "family wage" adequate to support a wife and children and to keep them out of the mines and "satanic mills." During the 1930s, the era of the Great Depression and of the Economic War with Britain, jobs for men were given priority. Gradually, restrictions were introduced that limited the sphere of women's work outside the home. These restrictions remained in force for the most part until Ireland joined the European Community in the early 1970s.

For sixty years from 1926 to 1986 there was scarcely any change in the number of women recorded in the workforce as a proportion of all women—the share, standing at 31 percent in 1986, was marginally lower than the 32 percent share recorded in 1926. Accordingly, the share of those not in the labor force (i.e., on "home duties," "at school/students," and "others") was also static. It should be recalled, however, that married women working in agriculture on family farms were counted out of the picture.

By 1981 over 40 percent of married women were in the labor force in Northern Ireland, more than double the percentage in the Republic. The participation rate in the Republic did not rise to 40 percent until the mid-1990s. Between 1995 and 2000 female participation in the Republic's labor market increased from 40 percent of all females aged fifteen and above to 47 percent. In contrast, the broadly corresponding Northern Ireland proportion remained stable at 48 percent.

The marital status of those in the labor force has changed significantly. In 1926, 77 percent of the female labor force were single, 7 percent were married, and 16 percent were widowed. By 1986 the single share had dropped to 62 percent and the widowed share to 4 percent, while the share of married rose to 34 percent. Over the same period the rise in the participation rate of married women increased from under 6 percent to over 21 percent.

These trends continued in the closing years of the twentieth century. In 1991 the share of women engaged in home duties dipped below 50 percent for the first time, falling to 41 percent by 1996. By 1996 over half (51%) of the female workforce was married, while 47 percent were single and just over 2 percent were widowed. Although most married women who are working in Ireland are working full-time, difficulties exist in interpreting the data because of part-time work by women. As the labor-force participation rate of married women has risen, family size has declined. In the decade 1987 to 1997 the number of mothers in the workforce almost doubled, rising to 235,000.

Strikingly, more than three-quarters of women at work are in agriculture and industry. The share of women in industry (19% in 1996) was slightly less than their share in 1926, while their share in agriculture has fallen from 21 percent to 3 percent, reflecting the relative decline in the importance of agriculture in the economy.

Prior to the School Attendance Act of 1926, which required every child to attend school from the age of six to fourteen years, girls and boys frequently entered the workforce as young as twelve years of age. At the 1926 census one-quarter of all young persons fourteen and fifteen years old were in occupations. Many young women worked in domestic service and factories, including confectionery, jam-making, and clothing factories. By the late twentieth century, following the expansion of second-level education from the late 1960s and third-level education a decade later, women and men rarely entered the workforce before the age of eighteen.

The path of women and work over the past 150 years might be described as wending its way from a domestic economy where life and work intertwined in a predominantly agricultural setting, to working life in factories and economic services, including office and clerical work, which absorbed much of the labor of single women. Beginning in the 1950s the path broadened in the direction of clerical work, especially in the public service and large corporations such as the Guinness brewery and commercial banks. The expansion at first accommodated single women and, from the mid-1970s, married women as well. By the end of the century the information-technology revolution saw the work path turning once more, at least to some degree, toward the home, as "home-working" took on a fresh meaning.

SEE ALSO Celtic Tiger; Conditions of Employment Act of 1936; Education: Women's Education; Equal Economic Rights for Women in Independent Ireland; Farming Families; Irish Women Workers' Union; Women and Children in the Industrial Workforce; Women in Irish Society since 1800

Bibliography

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Finola Kennedy