New research has revealed that women played a fundamental role in the development of England's national economy before 1700.
Far from being the unpaid homemakers and housewives of traditional historical record, women contributed to all the most important areas of the economy, such as agriculture, commerce, and care.
More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households.
This picture has emerged following an extensive search of thousands of court reports and witness statements that describe the activities being undertaken by everyday folk.
The research, led by historians at the University of Exeter, has been collated in a new book, The Experience of Work in Early Modern England, which is published this week and publicly available on an open-access basis.
"The idea of a 'woman's place being in the home' was common even in Tudor England and has led many historians to conclude that women contributed much less to the economy than men," said Professor Jane Whittle, lead author and an expert in the rural economy. "But from the extensive research we have conducted, it is clear that women of the early modern history period of England engaged in a much greater variety and quantity of work in the economy than we previously thought,"
The book brings together the major findings of the five-year European Research Council project, Forms of Labour: Gender, Freedom and Experience of Work in the Preindustrial Economy. The team visited archives in county record offices and heritage centres where they sifted through reams of early modern church court depositions and quarter sessions court papers.
The figures compiled from this evidence enabled the researchers to compare for the first time how different work tasks were apportioned between men and women, and between people with different occupations. For example, 42% of male servants' work consisted of agricultural tasks, but surprisingly, it also figured prominently for female servants (21.5%) and married women (15%). One tithe dispute from 1634 uncovered by the research team contained witness statements from two married women in their 50s, who said they had sheared 50-60 sheep per year for a Devon farmer.
Professor Whittle said: "Out of the most common types of farmwork, our evidence shows that women dominated milking, undertook more than 40% of other cattle farming tasks, did a third or more of harvest work, and were active in sheep farming and caring for horses. Only in ploughing and wood cutting do we find activities that they rarely undertook - but overall, the many hours of agricultural labour they provided each year, reveals the fallacy of describing this as "man's work"."
Across the field of commerce, the research showed that the work was split equally between women and men in buying and selling, running shops and going to market. Women also dominated the activity of pawning goods and were prevalent in tasks related to money lending. And women were also readily involved in areas like transport, management, food processing, and crafts.
The high proportion of female servants undertaking housework reveals just how valuable married women were to a family's commercial activities, said Professor Whittle. And the figures also show that much of the care work performed at the time was done on a paid basis, including midwifery, nursing and medicine.
"The goal of this research was to get beyond the vague assumptions that have shaped accounts of women in early modern history," concludes Professor Whittle. "Now we have evidence that they undertook a much greater variety and quantity of work in the economy than we imagined. Our research approach is also a reminder that the economy is the sum of ordinary people's activities, something we forget in the modern world."
