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Women and industrialisation

1. Did the pre-industrial period witness a ‘golden age’ in gender relations?

2. What were the causes of women’s changing role in agriculture?

3. To what extent does a discussion of women’s work change our interpretation of the industrial revolution?

Core reading

Berg, Maxine. ‘What Difference did Women’s Work make to the Industrial Revolution?’ History Workshop Journal (1993) (reproduced in Sharpe, Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650-1914)#

Gleadle, Kathryn. British Women in the Nineteenth Century, ch.1

Hill, Bridget. Women, Work and Sexual Politics, ch. 5

Honeyman, Katrina. Women, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870, chs. 1, 2,3

Horrell Sara and Humphries, Jane. ‘Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790-1865’, Economic History Review 48, (1995)

Hudson, Pat. ‘Women and Industrialisation’ in Purvis, June (ed) Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945#

Sharpe, Pamela. Adapting to Capitalism. Working Women in the English Economy 1700-1850, ch.1

Agriculture

Humphries, Jane. ‘Enclosures, Common Rights and Women: The Proletarianization of Families in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Journal of Economic History, 40 (1990)

Pinchbeck, Ivy. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, chs. 1-4

Samuel, Raphael (ed), Village Life and Labour, especially articles by Kitteringham, Morgan and Samuel

Sharpe, Pamela. Adapting to Capitalism. Working Women in the English Economy 1700-1850, ch.4

Snell, Keith. Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660-1900, chap 1 (reproduced in Sharpe, Women’s Work: The English Experience 1650-1914)

Valenze, Deborah. The First Industrial Woman, chs. 2 and 3

Valenze, Deborah. ‘The Art of Women and the Business of Men: Women’s Work and the Dairy Industry, c. 1740-1840’, Past and Present, 130 (1991)

Proto-industrialisation

Gullickson, Gay. ‘Love and Power in the Proto-industrial Family’ in Berg, Maxine (ed), Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe

Hill, Bridget. Eighteenth-Century Women, pp. 197-228

Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution

Pinchbeck, Ivy. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, chs. 6, 7, 8, 10

Sharpe, Pamela. ‘Literally Spinsters: A New Interpretation of Local Economy and Demography in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, Economic History Review, 44 (1991)

Vickery, Amanda. ‘The Neglected Century’, Gender and History, (1991)

The ‘industrious revolution’

de Vries, Jan. ‘Between Purchasing Power and the World of Goods’in Brewer, John and Porter, Roy (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (reprinted in Sharpe, Women’s Work)

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, pp. 133-35

Women and the Industrial Revolution

Berg, Maxine. The Age of Manufactures, ch.7

Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine. Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, pp. 51-59

Hudson, Pat. The Industrial Revolution

Humphries, Jane. ‘Lurking in the Wings...Women in the Historiography of the Industrial Revolution’, Business and Economic History, 20 (1991)

Middle-Class Women’s Work

Barker, Hannah. ‘Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution: Female Involvement in the English Printing Trades, c. 1700-1840’ in Barker, Hannah and Chalus, Elaine, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England

Gleadle, Kathryn. British Women in the Nineteenth Century, ch. 4

Pinchbeck, Ivy. Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750-1850, ch. 12

Sweet, Rosemary and Lane, Penelope (eds), Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England, essays by Wiskin and Barker and Harvey

Debates

Bennett, Judith. ‘History that Stands Still: Women’s Work in the European Past’, Feminist Studies, 14 (1988)

Bennett, Judith.‘Women’s History: A Study in Continuity and Change’, Women’s History Review 2 (1993) (reprinted in Sharpe, Women’s Work)

Clark, Alice. Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919)

Hill, Bridget. ‘Women’s History: A Study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still?’, Women’s History Review 2 (1993) (reprinted in Sharpe, Women’s Work)

Tilly, L.A. and Scott, J. W. Women, Work and Family (1978)