When did it become usual for women not to work?

Factual Questions
1

Premise 1:
For much of human history, women worked aside from domestic duties. In agricultural societies, most women, even coupled ones with children, contributed to the raising of crops and other farm-related activities. Most households could not have afforded for women not to work.

Did they also contribute to the work in workshops and most services?
Premise 2:
After WWI and especially after WWII, a lot of women wanted to be able to work, even after they became coupled and had children. This implies that they largely did not work and that it was desired of them to leave/not enter the workforce and concentrate on domestic duties.
Question:
When did it become usual for women to concentrate on domestic duties and not work? How did that come about?

One could say rising income reached a point that households could afford for women to concentrate on domestic duties so at that point, women did. However, even if households could afford it, women’s labor could still bring in extra income. It’s not like most households in the first part of the 20th century were living in luxury.

2

Question for you: Premise #1 highlights historical subsistence agriculture. Premise #2 mentions no specific tasks for women at all, just “work.” Could the answer to your question come easier, if you try to link more parallelism in the to scenarios? Can you compare government types – lord of the manor for #1, more representational governments for #2? Rural to urban? Spare population to dense population?

3

I’m confused by your use of the term “domestic duties.” I would have thought that the duties of running a household - cooking, child care, cleaning, laundry, shopping, dealing with tradespeople - ARE work. It’s unpaid work, and it may be less physical than soap-making and the other tasks you listed, but it’s work nonetheless.

In any case, it has never been usual for women not to work. I think you’re really trying to ask two related questions:

When did it physical labor cease to be the norm for adult women?

and

When did women’s household labor cease to be considered “work?”

Historians on the 'Dope can answer both of those better than I can, but I’ll start.

Physical labor ceased to be the norm for women as people moved from self-sufficient agricultural homesteads to cities, and as it became more cost-effective to purchase household goods such as soap and fabric than it was to manufacture them in one’s home.

Similarly, women’s household labor ceased to be considered “work” as people moved from those farmsteads to cities. There, men tended to exchange their labor for cash wages, while women continued to perform domestic labor in their own home without compensation.

4

I don’t think there is a clear line between “work” and “domestic duties” in an agricultural society. If a woman darned sox and sewed up holes in sheets was she not “working” in the same way a man was when he fixed a broken door or window shutter on the house?

5

I use the term “work” like most use it everyday. As in “I’m going to work now” or “I’m trying to find work.” or “100 000 people found work in the last month.” or “I am without work.” or “Don’t call me at work.”

Really, if someone told you “I’m leaving for work now” you would think “Perhaps she means she’ll do the laundry.”? If someone said to you “I am without work” would you really tell them “But of course you’re not, you still have cooking to do!”

4: employment, as in some form of industry, especially as a means of earning one’s livelihood: to look for work.

6

I think this thread is getting into the IMHO area. FWIW, I think the question should be when did it become more common for men to be in the paid labor force instead of confined to the farm where men and both worked but not for pay. And that seems to have been the first half of the 20th century.

7

There was no clear line between “workplace” and “home” in those societies, either. Both sexes did some labor outdoors in locations reasonably close to the house (fields, orchards, gardens, barn), and other types of labor within the house. The idea of “going off to work” didn’t really arise until after the Industrial Revolution got going.

Which tells us when the shift the OP mentioned began: during the start of the Industrial Revolution, when men more often than women traveled a long distance away from the family house to do specialized forms of work which were compensated by wages and simply couldn’t be accommodated in a backyard workshop type of setting.

8

People usually use it nowadays (as in each of your examples) to mean employment. Most people in agricultural cultures weren’t really employed though; it could all be considered domestic work. I would guess employment started becoming popular during the Industrial Revolution and was initially dominated by males.

9

I thought of saying “employment” but thought that could lead to misunderstandings (ha!). I wanted to include people who work on their own like, say, a sole practitioner lawyer or a consultant.

It does seem that it happened during the industrial revolution.

So, would this mean that the opposition to letting women work* was really opposition to letting them have their own money and letting them out of the house?

*Pretend a wife has just said: “My husband won’t let me work.” You would never reply: “But of course he lets you work, he wants you to do the laundry and clean!”

10

Women could and did work outside the home, just in a limited number of jobs. I know my great-grandmother worked in a Lancashire cotton mill, starting as a child right through to retirement, despite having four children (all of whom joined her there as soon as they were old enough)- right through both world wars.

She was far from unusual in this- many mill workers were female, it’s just that women’s jobs were lower paid than men’s, and generally less skilled.

It’s a mistake to look only at the relatively well off, and consider their situation the norm.

11

It depends on where you are and who you happen to be. In agricultural societies, women contributed to the farm as well as handicrafts and other income-generating activities.

In industrialized societies, poor women have always had to work.

Women in very rich families haven’t worked much in any societies. There was a brief moment in some industrialized countries where the women of the middle class could do the same.

12

This is referred to as the separate spheres model of the household, and it really arose in the industrial revolution. In many ways, it was actually kind of empowering: under the older, agrarian model Dad had all the power and all the authority. When the idea of the home as refuge arose, women suddenly had a place where they had some authority, even if only over the emotional/spiritual well-being of the family. When Hawthorne wrote '“Young Goodman Brown” in the 1840s, he had a Puritan husband saying of his wife: “Well; she’s a blessed angel on earth; and after this one night, I’ll cling to her skirts and follow her to Heaven.” That’s not how actual Puritans would have looked at it: the husband had the authority and responsibility for the family’s moral rectitude. (I am not slagging on Hawthorne here. He wasn’t aiming to capture Puritan thought).

You can see the same thing in Rousseau’s Emile, when he speaks directly to mothers: “Tender, anxious mother, I appeal to you. You can remove this young tree from the highway and shield it from the crushing force of social conventions. Tend and water it ere it dies. One day its fruit will reward your care. From the outset raise a wall round your child’s soul; another may sketch the plan, you alone should carry it into execution.” The idea of separate spheres removed them from the world, and denied them the opportunity to participate in the world, but it also created a sense that within this much smaller space they bore real authority, by virtue of their relative purity/emotional wisdom.

I have any number of problems with that view of the nature of women, but as a social construct I think it was really important.

13

Well, it’s possible that that was a component, but (see Married Women’s Property Act ) can’t have been the full story - women who worked didn’t have control over their money until the very late nineteenth century anyway.

I suspect there were a number of things going on - practical things, and status things.

Until, say, the fifties and the advent of labour saving devices, there really was at least a whole grown-up’s-worth of work involved in running the average size household - cooking, cleaning, washing, childrearing, it was all really labour-intensive. So if your household finance was in such a state that you needed to have every “work-ready” body (meaning everyone over about 8) leave these tasks to go do paid work, it meant that you were in a bad way. You’d be wearing badly-washed clothes and eating porridge or plain boiled veggies for your supper. It really only made sense if your household was desperate. If you didn’t need the income from everybody, it made the most sense that the mother of the house should be the one at home, doing all the dozens of jobs that really really needed doing (under some circumstances a mid-size or older daughter would do, but by the time a daughter grew to mid-size, the pattern would probably be set). Part of that was, of course, that it was enshrined in law that women could be paid less than men.

Then, there’s status issues. In the industrial revolution there were a whole lot of women working (mostly young girls) but it was nearly all low-paid low-status work in very hard conditions. Certainly not a career, not something that would give you freedom (and those working girls would be expected to give up all or most of their money to their mothers for the running of the household, there wasn’t the sense of the freedom of earning your own money and being in control of your own life that we have today). When they married, they would be generally expected to stop working, and I bet the general thought was thank God for that. I know that’s what my Nan thought when she gave up nursing to get married, and nursing in the '30s was practically lap of luxury territory compared to being a mill girl in the 1850’s

Going further up the ladder, women had never been let into the higher status skilled occupations - crafts and trades or, even further up, the military, government or business. In earlier eras, again there was a fairly practical reason for that - if you were the daughter of a medium status man (craftsman or businessman, say) then you’d similarly marry someone of similar status, have a budget for the servants which would be required to keep a mid-status or higher household in operation and - bingo - there’s your job for you. Someone’s got to supervise the servants rather than earn the money and again, in all but exceptional circumstances, it’s a lot easier for the man of the family to do it. Some women would never marry, but they would generally live in a household that included married family members - their parents or siblings. Not to do so would have been highly irregular, socially, and cause a lot of unfavourable comment on their morals.

By WWII, a lot of those social pressures were starting to change. There had already been some opening of mid-status jobs for women (teachers and nurses) so there was no longer quite the automatic feeling that if you were a woman working it was probably because you were in a desperate situation. The status was starting to improve. Household work was becoming less labour-intensive, freeing up women’s time a little, and sexual mores were relaxing meaning more possibility of single young women setting up on their own, or with other single young women. Even then, a vestige of the whole “high-status women don’t work” attitude well into the 50’s (and, don’t forget, really high status men didn’t work either. These days we despise people who have no job and no qualifications - not so in earlier days where the ultimate status lay in having an independent income and not having to work - for men as well as women)

14

But that’s a very modern invention. You’re asking when did “x” happen, when “x” didn’t exist during “much of human history” which you reference in your OP.

15

Unless they are wealthy enough to afford nannies and cooks, I don’t know of any conventional (i.e. non-homeless, non-institutionalized) women who “don’t work.” They may do so at home for no pay, but work they do. And it’s almost always been that way.

Seems to me to be an question crafted through a male optic that disrespects women homemakers.

16

Surely someone being a farmer who raises crops and livestock isn’t a modern invention. Would you say that farmers 300 years ago who raised crops and livestock did not work according to the definition I provided and which is commonly used?

You say: “If a woman darned sox and sewed up holes in sheets was she not “working” in the same way a man was when he fixed a broken door or window shutter on the house?”

Is there anything I said which portrayed the two examples you provide as unequal? By the way the term is commonly used, neither would constitute working. Have you ever once in your life woken up and said to yourself: “Time to get up for work” and meant fixing a broken door or window shutter in your home?
Seriously, is there any reason you refuse to interpret the word “work” in the same way that you would if a homemaker said: “My husband won’t allow me to work”? Would you really tell her: “Of course you can work, you can do the laundry and such. Plus, the concept of “work” as we conceive it today didn’t always exist like that.”

17

You’re not going nearly far enough back.

Agriculture is less than 10,000 years old. Before that time, most anthropologists believe humans were hunter-gatherers.

The question then is: How often did women in these hunter-gatherer societies contribute to the “hunter” part? Most folk think, “not much.”

18

In agricutural society, to this day, women do plenty of the work involved in providing for a family, and not just the household duties. Some heavier duties like plowing fields may tend to be performed by men, but women will participate in sowing and harvesting, care of livestock, and when needed, any task that men would otherwise perform. Until families depended solely on the income of a man, women weren’t simply responsible for the cooking and cleaning. And plenty of women were always in the workplace as well, but for a long time they didn’t have the same opportunites as men for employment.

19

Right, for a long time every family was a family with kids. Few people lived by themselves.

And as she said, before labor saving devices, “homemaker” was a FT job.

Now, unless you have a lot of kids, a “stay at home” has little to do.

20

They were not going away from the home to perform labor for wages, so hey we’re not “working” by the modern definition of the word any more than a housewife (who also engages in unpaid labor) is.