CiNii Books - Women, work, and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England

It is some sixty years since Ivy Pinchbeck published her classic work, "Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution". Bridget Hill now offers a reassessment of how women's experience of work in 18th-century England was affected by industrialization and other elements of economic, social and technological change. This study focuses on the household, the most important unit of production in the 18th century. She examines the work done by women of the household, not only in "housework" but also in agriculture and manufacturing, and explains that women lost, as the household's independence as a unit of economic production was undermined. Considering the whole range of activities in which women were involved - including many occupations that went unrecorded in consensus and have therefore been largely ignored by historians - Dr Hill charts the increasing sexual division of labour and highlights its implications. She also discusses the role of service in husbandry and apprenticeship as sources of training for women and the consequences of their decline. The final part of the book considers how the changing nature of women's work influenced courtship, marriage, and relations between the sexes. Among the topics discussed are the importance of the woman's contribution to setting up and maintaining a household, labouring women's attitudes to marriage and divorce and the customary alternatives to them, and the role of spinsters and widows. The author concludes by asking to what extent the Industrial Revolution improved the overall position of women and the opportunities open to them.

Table of Contents

Introduction - Pinchbeck and After
The Social Context
Women's Work in the Family Economy
The Undermining of the Family Economy
Female Servants in Husbandry
Female Apprenticeship
Housework
Domestic Service
Ignored, Unrecorded, and Invisible - Some Occupations of Women
The Economics of Courtship and Marriage
Clarity and Obscurity in the Law Relating to Wives, Property, and Marriage
Spinsters and Spinsterhood
Widows.

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Women, work, and sexual politics in eighteenth-century England

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