Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Table 8.8 shows that proportionally more women and adolescents than adult males
may have been involved in the needle trade. The role of women and adolescents in
domestic service also contrasts with that of adult males.
The role of women and children
Although the sources used for this study concentrated on male occupations, some
observations on the role of women and children are appropriate here. In Chapters 4 to 7 I
have noted sporadic references to women in various occupations. The Victorian censuses
show local women heavily involved in domestic service and the needle and glove trades,
with a fair scattering of other occupations such as milliner, strawbonnet-maker, dressmaker
and seamstress. Earlier references show females mantua-making, spinning and carding.
Censuses and also earlier sources such as overseers of the poor accounts show women in
the role of nurses or midwives, while they also played an important part as innkeepers and
shopkeepers or assistants.
If it were not for Rev. Heath’s comments on Inkberrow’s women weavers in the
1790s, we might be unaware of that side of their involvement in the textile trade. Other
women, usually widows, could be found running all manner of businesses, such as
needlemakers, ironmongers and tanners.
Much women’s work would have been part-time or irregular, and therefore underrecorded
even in the 1851 census. 6
Agriculture afforded some such opportunities, but
women’s involvement in agriculture probably lessened during the study period, so that by
the mid-nineteenth century ‘work for women in agriculture does seem limited’. 7
Work in
6 L. Shaw-Taylor in N. Goose, Women’s Work in Industrial England, (Hatfield, Local Population Studies,
2007), p. 40.
7 P. Sharpe in Goose, ibid., p. 75.
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