Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 234

Nicola Verdon charges that despite the recent ‘impressive ascent’ of both women’s history and agrarian social history, we know ‘surprisingly little’ about how rural women made a living during the nineteenth century. Her book is intended to fill this gap.

The starting point for Verdon, as for most other researchers, is Ivy Pinchbeck’s foundational Women workers in the industrial revolution (first edition, 1930). Pinchbeck’s consummate text is based on an exploration of printed sources using traditional historical methods. It has been embellished by subsequent research in the same vein, and by Ann Kussmaul and Keith Snell’s innovative research. Their work was inferential, based heavily on southern sources, and is now the subject of revision. But both Kussmaul and Snell provided new insight, significantly in my view, embedded in careful statistical analysis. The resulting conventional wisdom focuses disputation on the precise chronology of women’s retreat from waged labour with regional variations in trends readily acknowledged. history review

Chapter 2 provides an overview of familiar printed sources and seeks to extract something fresh. Verdon begins with the widely-quoted budget accounts of Eden and Davies. Verdon claims the only quantitative analysis of this evidence to be by Thomas Sokoll (1991). This is not correct as both sets of accounts were included in the large data set of working-class budgets assembled by Sara Horrell and myself and analyzed in a series of articles published in the 1990s. Moreover we anticipated Verdon in decomposing family incomes into contributions by fathers, mothers and children. We, however, only included households with a male head, subdivided the budgets according to the occupation of that male head and according to their geographical location, combined the budgets with others recorded for the same period, and contrasted their structure with budgets for different periods. Given the overlap in sources it is not surprising that Verdon’s findings mirror our own: the paramount importance of men’s earnings, the greater importance of children’s earnings than women’s earnings and the relative unimportance of women’s earnings, although Verdon does not describe them in these terms. Verdon does not report the number of observations on which her averages are based nor whether she includes the female-headed households that feature in these collections in her computations, nor how she treats the contributions of poor relief.

Another well-known source discussed in this chapter is the 1834 Poor Law Report. Again it is not correct that answers to the questions on female and child employment have not been ‘systematically exploited’ (p.53). George Boyer, for example, included the answer to Question 11, on the presence or absence of cottage industry, in his econometric analysis of the determination of wages and poor relief in southern counties. Moreover it needs to be underlined that the answers to Question 13 (‘What might the labourer’s wife and four children aged 14, 11, 8 and 5 years respectively, expect to earn in the year?’) do not relate to any actual wife and children but simply to the beliefs of the respondents about what was possible. The value of bar charts based on this evidence would be enhanced if we knew how many responses they represent and/or the variances involved. The resulting decompositions of family income generally confirm the findings from the family budgets for the era, in particular that the earnings of children outstripped those of adult women. It is clear that studies of nineteenth-century standards of living that rely solely on male wage data are misleading.

Perhaps the most useful findings from the printed sources (and see here Burnette, EHNet) are the comparative male and female agricultural servants wages extracted from the Board of Agriculture Reports. Verdon is undoubtedly on the right track when she explains the relatively high female to male wage ratio for Hertford and Buckingham by competition for female labour from domestic industry. Perhaps this explanation could be tested further by linking these wage ratios to the evidence on the geographical distribution of domestic industry revealed in the Poor Law Report.

Chapter 3 turns to farm servants and contributes to the revision of Kussmaul’s description of apparently too rapid and universal decline. There is interesting material here on hiring fairs, servants’ wages, and the replacement of women by young men in milking. But the focus on the East Riding of Yorkshire, which Verdon herself notes was unique among arable counties in the extent to which unmarried male and female farm servants remained a fundamental component of the labour force, means that the reported experience was far from typical. Moreover as the historians of the East Riding have shown, farm service persisted there because it adapted, shedding many of its traditional characteristics such as residence in the farmhouse. It is interesting to speculate how this process of adaptation contributed to the greater segregation of the workforce, with women servants increasingly confined to indoor domestic labour and men monopolizing outdoor agricultural work.

The most important contributions of the book are undoubtedly in Chapters 4 and 5, which summarize the author’s study of farm account books, a much less familiar source than those discussed earlier. In Chapter 4 Verdon measures the relative employment of men women and children at four farms in Norfolk and three in east Yorkshire. She finds that female employment declined in Norfolk but not in Yorkshire. She also charts the seasonal patterns of employment by type of labour, although the failure to record work done on piece rate in the account books leaves men’s work seriously underestimated. After 1850 the accounts indicate a decline in women’s employment consistent with the standard historiography, though it does not entirely disappear. Verdon also adds to the now long list of comparisons of wage books or farm records with census enumerators’ books to show that women who figured as workers in the former were often not recorded as workers in the latter. More ammunition to suggest that the mid-Victorian censuses systematically under-record working women. Cross-linking also allows Verdon to demonstrate that most of her female labourers were married and that many had young children, an important finding.

Verdon joins the debate about the role of custom versus the power of the market in the determination of women’s relative wages. While the constancy of female day wages over the nineteenth century leads Verdon to propose some customary element, she does not reject entirely the argument that women’s low pay reflected their shorter hours of work and lesser physical strength.

Chapter 5 turns to women’s employment in domestic industry, which is explored indirectly through farm accounts. Verdon shows that in Bedfordshire, where there were jobs for women in lace making and straw plaiting, they were rarely employed in agriculture. The absence of women from farm labour here contrasts with Norfolk and Yorkshire where women’s share of the workforce was often around one third and did not fall below five per cent until the end of the century. The inference is that farm labour persisted in areas where there were no alternative employment opportunities. Whether this holds beyond the comparison of Bedford with Norfolk and Yorkshire and why it might be the case are questions deserving further attention.

The systematic failure of many sources which saw the rural economy through the blinkered eyes of Victorian middle-class observers to notice and record the productive activities of women is an ongoing challenge to historians of women’s work. Many authors have emphasized that rural women’s contributions did not always or even usually take the form of earnings. They also contributed through gleaning, gathering, gardening and micro-enterprise as Verdon’s survey of rural working-class autobiographies confirms. But however important they were for individual families, women’s earnings and self-provisioning were small beer relative to the contributions of their husbands and children. Verdon balks at this conclusion, even though it is where her evidence leads, as if acknowledging women’s dependence under-mines the value of her topic. In fact the precocious appearance of a male breadwinner family system is probably of central importance in understanding nineteenth-century social and economic history and it is time it was acknowledged.

In conclusion: did we know surprisingly little about the ways in which rural women made a living in the nineteenth century? I read Verdon’s work as confirming key findings from recent research and shading the conventional wisdom rather than stopping major gaps or radically readjusting our focus. This is not to deprecate her contribution. We all stand on the shoulders of others and Verdon has written a fine book that deserves wide readership.