Work & Money
Women's employment, wages, and the economic realities of Georgian London
Women's employment, wages, and the economic realities of Georgian London
The world of work open to women in eighteenth-century London was limited, low paid, and often insecure. While men had access to a wide range of occupations through the apprenticeship system, women's employment was largely confined to domestic service, needlework, laundry, and petty commerce. Understanding these limited options is critical to understanding Harris's List, which often mentions the occupations of the women discussed in the text and, in so doing, inadvertently reveals the economic pressures on their lives.
Domestic service was the largest female occupation in Georgian London, and it has been estimated that a third of all women in the capital city of England worked as a domestic servant at some time in her life. Young women came to London from the provinces to enter domestic service, and the demand for housemaids, cooks, and lady's maids was considerable in a city in which even modest middle-class homes employed at least one servant.
Service offered some advantages, including the provision of board and lodging, and the fact that a servant in a good household might be able to save some of her wages towards a marriage portion. However, the work was hard, the hours were long, and the servant was completely at the mercy of her master. Being dismissed without a character reference (a written reference from a former employer) was a disaster, effectively blacklisting the woman so that she would be unable to find another position as a servant. Reasons for dismissal might be trivial or unfair, and a woman dismissed from her service without a character reference faced a crisis of survival.
Several entries in Harris's List describe women who had formerly been in domestic service. The narrative follows a familiar pattern for eighteenth-century literature. A young woman arrives in London, takes a position as a servant, loses her job (often because of the unwanted attentions of her master or his sons), and, being without a character, finds herself forced to seek alternative means of supporting herself. These stories, though they may have been fictionalised by the writers of Harris's List, reflect a social reality documented in other sources, including the records of the Magdalen Hospital and the Foundling Hospital.
Needlework was the most common type of women's employment after domestic service. Mantua-making (Dressmaking), Millinery, Stays, and plain sewing engaged thousands of women in London. The needlework trade provided the prospect of independent work and a certain amount of prosperity for the most accomplished women. A successful mantua-maker who catered to the fashionable elite could live a comfortable life.
For the majority of women, needlework meant a lot of hard work for a small amount of pay. Plain Sewing, which included activities such as hemming shirts, mending linen, or stitching seams, was considered to be the lowest-paid work. The pay for a woman engaged in plain sewing was as little as sixpence to a shilling a day, which was barely enough to pay for a room and board. The work was seasonal and intermittent, with a large demand during the fashionable 'Season' (which included January to June) and little work during the summer months as the gentry moved to their country houses.
Harris's List includes several women who are described as former milliners or mantua-makers, a profession that was associated (often unfairly) with sexual availability. The closeness of young women in this type of work to wealthy male patrons, combined with the low wages and variable work, created a situation that moralists of the period saw as particularly liable to lead to seduction.
Other forms of work included street selling, laundress work, char work, nursing, and work in the food and drink industry. Street selling did not require significant capital outlay: a woman might simply purchase a basket of fruit, flowers, or fish and sell them for a small profit. However, margins were slim and the competition fierce, and street selling exposed women to the hazards of the London streets, the weather, violence, and the attention of the police who might arrest them as vagrants.
Laundry work, although physically demanding, paid relatively better than sewing. The wage for a laundry woman might be two shillings a day, although the work involved carrying heavy loads of wet linen, standing for hours over steaming tubs, and working with harsh lye soap that damaged hands and skin. The laundry work, however, was available all year round, making it a more stable occupation than other forms of employment.
Some women also found employment in the growing number of taverns, coffee houses, and chophouses that served the population of London. Waiting at tables, drawing beer, and cleaning were all women's work in these establishments. Once again, the close proximity to men and the late hours that the work entailed raised moralistic fears, and contemporary commentators often equated women's work in the hospitality trade with prostitution.
To understand the economic context of Harris's List, it is necessary to compare the wages that women received with the price of living in London during the Georgian period. The price of a room in a respectable lodging house might be between one and three shillings a week, while the price of food, which included bread, cheese, and small beer, might be another two or three shillings a week. Candles, coal, and clothes would be additional expenses. The woman who earned six or eight shillings a week from needlework or street selling might be able to survive, but with almost nothing left over for emergencies, sickness, or periods of unemployment.
The prices recorded in Harris's List are notable in this context. While the publication's pricing information must be treated with caution (figures may have been exaggerated or invented) even the lower end of the range represented a large sum relative to what women might earn in "legitimate" employment. The economic incentive was clear, even if the social costs were high.
Harris's List is, amongst other things, an economic document of inequality. The women listed in Harris's List lived in a labour market that provided them with few opportunities and paid them poorly for the opportunities that did exist. The previous occupations mentioned within the entries (servant, milliner, needlewoman) are not trivial details but clues to the economic influences at work. Reading Harris's List against the economic history of women's work within Georgian London demonstrates a world where the division between respectable and disreputable work was far less rigid than the moralists of the period cared to admit.