In many ways, Swedish industrialisation began in the home. Women spun, wove and sewed clothes for payment in between their daily agricultural tasks, food preparation and childcare. But didn't all industrial production gradually move into the factories? ‟No, it didn't. That is a common misconception," says economic historian Malin Nilsson, who is researching paid home industry work.
‟That is an oversimplified description of history, as there were many parallel processes going on at once, and in fact home industry work still exists today", says Malin Nilsson, researcher in economic history at the Lund University School of Economics and Management.
Nowadays, we may not find quite so much home industry work specifically in Sweden but, altogether, there are at least 60 million home industry workers globally (and just over 200 million more home workers who do not have industrial occupations).
‟This is a cheap and flexible workforce and for many married women, it is still their only opportunity to work and earn money in parts of the world where you cannot leave your children at a municipal pre-school, for example. We must remember that Sweden still stands out internationally with its high proportion of gainfully employed married women."
Invisible in the employment statistics
Malin Nilsson describes the sewing machine as a technical novelty that gave Swedish women the opportunity to earn money from home towards the end of the 1800s, in the same way as it still provides an income, albeit low and uncertain, to many women in other parts of the world today. However, if you research historical material as Malin Nilsson does, there are several complex circumstances to untangle before you can actually find these women who worked from home.
‟I don't like referring to the women working at home as invisible - after all, there were so many of them. When I meet people out in libraries and various genealogical research contexts, there is always someone who says ‛yes, my mother or aunt also worked from home in that way'. Everyone seems to be able to relate to it," she says, continuing:
‟But when it comes to actual employment statistics, they were in fact invisible for a long time. They are often designated as ‛housewives' despite dedicating more than eight hours a day on work as seamstresses, for example. This applies both to Sweden in 1910 and Malaysia in 2010."
During the Covid-19 pandemic, many people settled into working from home, perhaps especially those in office jobs. It was also during the pandemic that Malin Nilsson and her co-editors finished writing their anthology ‟Home-Based Work and Home-Based Workers (1800-2021)". The book can be read online free of charge and covers over two hundred years of work in the home in various forms, from seamstresses in Buenos Aires in the 1850s, via Sweden and Finland among others, and up to present-day India and Turkey.
You finished writing the book in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, a pandemic that made many of us into some sort of home worker. Is it possible to draw any parallels between the workers of the early industrialisation period and those currently sitting at home sewing in India, for example, and an office worker like me working from home on a computer?
‟In a way. In my historical studies, I can see that many women who have worked from home have found it difficult to estimate how many hours they work. They do piecework and it is what they produce that counts, not whether they did the work before or after making the porridge and soothing the baby. During the pandemic, when people were working from home, they didn't have a timekeeper or a manager keeping track of them, but they may have had a child yelling while they were trying to produce something. There are parallels, regarding work environment issues, for example, although in Sweden today our conditions and circumstances are completely different."
Who did what in the agricultural community?
At the moment, Malin Nilsson is mainly working on two projects, one on spinners in Sweden in the late 1700s and one on gender distribution of household tasks in a changing agricultural community.
‟In the early 1800s, there was a major increase in the number of crofters, hill cottage residents and day labourers in agriculture in Sweden. At that time, a change was underway in that it was no longer a given for most families in the countryside to have their own farm. The rural population was undergoing a process of proletarianisation, and much of the work was regulated in lease contracts, for example between crofters and the estate on which they were located. However, when these contracts were drawn up, they were signed by the man in the family, and it was the man's work above all that was defined in the contract. At the same time, it was presumed that a married woman would accompany the signatory as an appendage. She had no contract of her own with the estate or the large farm, as she would have had if she had been unmarried and taken work as a maid."
Malin Nilsson looks at the impact of this on gender distribution of work in agriculture: what type of work were men expected to do and what work fell to the women? When the crofter carried out several hundred hours of work on someone else's land every year, who then took care of the agricultural tasks at home around the croft?
‟There is a lot of exciting investigation to be done. We will have to report back on what we find out in this project and in the spinning project. There, for example, we see that many of the early workers in textile manufacturing were children. That is also something we tend to forget."
