WOMEN in LONDON

by Alex S.

Throughout history western society has believed that women should be the ones to take care of the household, while men are the ones to work and provide for the family. Eighteenth century London was no exception. In novelist Samuel Richardson, "the feminine ideal of his time. . . . is a young woman perfectly chaste, dutiful, obedient, religious, useful, orderly, charitable, thrifty, and kind." The vision was that women were to be passive in relation to men and domestic. However, like most ideals, this one was not met. Due to the uncertain economy and the fact that wages of unskilled laborers were not enough to support a family, women, and sometimes children, were often forced to provide for the family in some way. For the aristocratic women, this simply meant bringing a large dowry and high connections upon marriage, but for middle and lower class this actually meant performing labor in order to receive wages.
The work that women did depended upon their location and economic status of the family. Rural women with land would run the household, make the family clothing, raise and care for cows, pigs, and chickens, tend to the garden, and sell the surplus food. Rural women with no land could become hired hands or work at home as textile workers. Other women hired themselves out as wet nurses to well-off families that could afford to pay. In the city, the wives of skilled craftsman would work alongside their husbands. If her husband was a weaver, she would spin thread; if her husband was a tailor, she would sew on the buttons; if he was a shoemaker, she would wax the shoes. Sometimes the wife would have the same job as the husband, or take over if he was ill or too busy. And sometimes, a woman actually had a trade of her own, usually associated with food or clothing: seamstresses, embroiderers, wig makers, bakers, grocers, innkeepers. One women was even known to be a butcher. If her husband was not a skilled craftsman, women could work in a factory or as domestic servants. Others pedaled cheap items from door to door.
Even though women helped to provide for their families, there still existed a large disparity between men and women. Women earned less money for performing the same jobs. Women’s wages were about one-third to one-half what men’s were. Female craftsworkers were not allowed to join guilds. Sometimes they would be granted membership after the death of their husband and then only if they did not remarry. Oftentimes women would not be allowed to practice a certain trade if there were enough men to provide adequate services. For instance, by 1700 women were excluded from goldsmithing. Despite these differences, however, marriages were based on whether the partner could provide an economic advantage.
Clearly the concept of woman as the domestic caretaker was a fantasy for many. Yet the mythology remained. Even this ideal, however, began to transform as women slowly began to vie for more rights in the late 18th and early 19th century. The idea of the more independent women can be seen in books like Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, written in 1813. The protagonist, Elizabeth Bennett, is a spirited woman full of personality and her own opinions. She refuses to marry in order to obtain financial stability, and chooses, instead, to marry for love (although that man that she ends up marrying happens to be the richest man in the novel). Yet the idea of economic stability as the primary reason for marriage persisted as did the belief that the only way a woman could secure her position was through marriage, since she was unable to provide for herself. Elizabeth’s friend Charlotte, who is past prime marrying age, is forced to marry a man for whom she has no feelings, but who can provide financial stability.
For single women, life was very hard. Single women essentially belonged to a household, whether as a daughter or as a servant. Women had no rights and could not inherit property, thereby making it very difficult to live independently. However, marriage meant giving yourself over to your husband. As Ian Watt points out, ". . .the legal position of women in the eighteenth century was very largely governed by the patriarchal concepts of Roman law. The only person in the household who was sui juris, who was a legal entity, was its head, usually the father. A woman’s property, for instance, became her husband’s absolutely on marriage, although it was customary to arrange a jointure for her when the marriage articles were drawn up; the children were in law the husbands; only the husband could sue for divorce; and he had the right to punish his wife by beating or imprisoning her." As children, girls would do chores for the household, and as they grew older they would specifically learn to do the tasks their mothers did, just as the boys learned the things their father did. When they reached adulthood, if they did not marry, there were very few options open to them. They could become a domestic servant or a governess, enter a convent, become a prostitute, or work in a textile factory and live with other women in the same condition.
Life in eighteenth-century London did not reflect the fantasy of the docile, domestic woman who ran the household and took care of the children while the husband provided economically for the family and was active in the larger society, but, for most, was a laborious life full of struggles and very few options. Class, of course, affected how hard a woman had to work, as it did men; the richer a family was, the less the husband and wife had to work. Yet, despite their legal and social disadvantages, women of all classes were expected to bring some economic stability into the marriage.

Endnotes
1 Rachel M. Brownstein, Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), p. 43.
2 Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 44-45
3 Tilly and Scott, pp. 47-49
4 Tilly and Scott, p. 49
5 Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965), p. 141.

Bibliography
Brownstein, Rachel M. Becoming a Heroine: Reading about Women in Novels. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Tilly, Louise A., and Joan W. Scott. Women, Work, and Family. New York and London: Routledge, 1989.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965.
http://muse.jhu.edu/demo/jowh/
http://www.victorianweb.org/victorian/gender/genderov.html

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