Showing papers by "Jane Humphries published in 2008"
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28 Jan 2008
TL;DR: A miner's wife reported that she made flannel shirts at 7d apiece and 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 as mentioned in this paper.
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
9 citations