The Women's History of the World

by Rosalind Miles

  Exceptional only in making their way on to official lists, however – not at all in their energy, nor even in their unconventional occupations. For even the most cursory survey of women’s work reveals that its range, quantity and significance has been massively underestimated, not least by women themselves. For in every era, they have simply got on with the job, whatever it was. Women have never questioned, for instance, the fact that, already burdened with an unequal share of the work of re-creating the race, they have had to work in fields and factories as well – nor that their role as wives, mothers and home-makers entails a disproportionate amount and variety of other kinds of work – domestic, social, medical, educational, emotional and sexual. The harder the conditions, the harder women had to work to maintain their families and create the best environment they could for them: the women of the American colonies, for instance, had to manage a far greater range of demands on their skills and flexibility than did their husbands. The men’s work would be tough and unremitting, with land to clear, trees to fell and roots like boulders to be prised out of the reluctant ground; but most men would consider the resulting exhaustion a fair price to pay for being spared the washing, spinning, weaving, sewing and cob-baking, Indian-fashion, on the embers of a dying Are – then having to salt the fish, scour the floor, plant the herb garden with all the old herbs from England to see which of them will take, try some onions and yarrow to flavour the stringy turkeys the men brought back from the woods, warn the children about those poisonous weeds, hear the maid’s catechism, teach the boy to read . . . and write home to England to mother, to tell her ‘how well we do here . . .’, as so many of the colonists’ letters stoutly sign off.

  In the touching attempts of the women pioneers to make English gardens filled with all the familiar herbs and flowers, we see the continuity that also linked the endless work in the New World with that of the old, as far back in time as there are any traces of human activity. Historians and anthropologists have recently discovered something that has hardly been a secret to the women concerned:

  The labours of early women were exacting, incessant, varied and hard. If a catalogue of primitive forms of labour were made, women would be found doing five things where men did one.3

  Overseeing the women, perhaps?

  In the light of this, the persistence of the myth that ‘working women’ are a problem peculiar to the twentieth century is very hard to account for. The very earliest records, grave inscriptions for instance, tell of laundresses, female librarians and doctors, midwives, dressmakers, hairdressers throughout the Roman world. Their Greek sisters were more closely restricted, married women in particular being virtually imprisoned in the gynaeceum (women’s quarters) of their husband’s houses; the dismal bridal ceremony, when the axle of the chariot bearing the new wife from her father’s to her husband’s house was broken and burned, was designed to reinforce this. But even there, women worked as nurses, herb-sellers, garland-makers, and so on. By the first century A.D., the writer Athenaeus recorded that 3000 women were working as hetairai musicians, while by the fourth century in Athens, the shortage of women oboists and singers resulted in their male patrons fighting in the streets to secure their services.4

  Whatever its pressures, this was privileged work. Elsewhere the classic picture showed women worldwide saddled with the most degraded and disgusting occupations of their society. In the Arctic, for instance, women chewed the raw pelts of dead birds to soften them for wearing next to the skin. They also cured larger hides by rotting them till the putrid blubber and hair could be scraped off easily, sousing them in urine to clean them, then massaging them with animal brains as dressing. To observers, this seemed ‘the filthiest work in creation’. It was equally seen to be ‘work which only women did’.5

  Yet this work was vital to the tribe’s survival. Without hides, there would be no boots, parkas, trousers, containers for food and water, kayaks or tents. It also demanded creativity, precision, and a wide range of skills. None of these, however, have necessarily won status and respect for work performed by women. Nor did it ever exempt them from heavy work – the post-romantic fantasy of ‘the weaker sex’ is another myth instantly exploded by the legion of women who were Egyptian pyramid-builders, temple masons of Lydia as noticed by Herodotus, Burmese canal-navvies and earth-movers in China. Portering, even of quite extraordinary weights (an Eskimo woman was observed to carry a boulder on her back weighing 300 pounds), was in fact regarded as women’s work on the Russian edge of Europe and throughout the East. One astonished missionary to the Kurds observed a woman at an impasse with a loaded donkey; she simply shouldered the donkey’s load herself and led the animal through; but she was already carrying a load of 100 pounds at the time, as well as spinning as she went with her spindle in her free (?) hand:

  I often saw the women looking like loaded beasts coming down the precipitous mountain path, one after the other, singing and spinning as they came . . . women with great panniers on their backs and babies on these or in their arms, go four days over that fearful Ishtazin pass, carrying grapes for sale and bringing back grain.6

  This extract highlights another constant and universal feature of women’s work, encapsulated in the old English couplet:

  For man’s work ends at setting sun,

  Yet woman’s work is never done.

  The outdoor work of men, even begun at dawn, necessarily ended with the dark. For women, though, the invention of the first artificial light in the first prehistoric cave had the effect of indefinitely extending their working day so that leisure, a genuine respite at the end of labour, became what it largely remains today, a masculine prerogative. Spinning in particular, in the days before the spinning jenny, was never done, and became a byword for the endless, repetitive, unremitting and unrewarding labour generally understood as ‘women’s work’. Certainly a man would have recoiled in horror from the idea that he should have any contact with spinning, as the contemporary equivalent of an enforced sex-change, and even the enlightened Erasmus held firmly to the view that ‘the distaff and spindle are in truth the tools of all women, and suitable for avoiding idleness.’7 But some women were not sufficiently grateful for this thoughtful provision for their leisure hours (correction, ‘idleness’). And when the elastic hours put in at home were exacted under the factory conditions of early industrialized Europe, the wretches were even heard to complain, as in this bitter little work-song of the silk-spinners of medieval France:

  Always we reel the silk,

  Although we’ll never be well dressed;

  We’ll always be poor and naked,

  Always hungry and thirsty.

  They give us little bread

  Little in the morning and still less at night.8

  Town girls may have had more learning than the million million women who were born, worked, and died after lives not far above those of their cattle in the depths of the country: or perhaps there was no one to record their feelings. Descriptions like this of the peasant woman’s lot were obviously made at a safe distance from the alarming creature that the life produced:

  In this beautiful region we are obliged to say that the female sex is treated barbarously. Women are obliged to work the land and toil as farm labourers. Their appearance suffers from this, and the majority are unattractive. Sunburn, sweat and work ruin their figures and features. Before they are eighteen the girls have leathery faces, drooping breasts, calloused hands and a stoop.9

  In every society, the lives of the landless peasants were cruelly hard, and men too did not escape being ground down to an animal level of daily existence. When the philosopher La Bruyère travelled through pre-Revolutionary France, he was horrified to see ‘throughout the countryside . . . wild male and female animals, black, livid and all burned by the sun . . . attached to the ground, in which they burrow and dig’. These creatures made ‘a noise like speech’, he went on ironically, but at night they withdrew ‘into lairs, where they live on black bread, water and roots’.10


  These observations of La Bruyère also help to lay to rest another profound misconception of the twentieth century: that there has always been ‘men’s work’ and ‘women’s work’ with a sex-segregated workforce such as we know today. In reality, although there was always work like spinning which men would never undertake, there was very little about which the same could be said of their wives and daughters. As a modern economic analysis stresses:

  Before the agricultural and industrial revolution there was hardly any job that was not also performed by women. No work was too hard, no labour too strenuous, to exclude them. In fields and mines, manufactories and shops, on markets and roads as well as in workshops and in their homes, women were busy assisting their men, replacing them in their absence or after their death, or contributing by their labour to the family income.11

  What this meant in practice was an unquestioned and ingrained habit of co-operation, with men, women and children all working together in ways subsequently lost or mislaid as societies became more ‘advanced’. An early traveller to Finistère has left this dramatic account of a community unselfconsciously absorbed in the work that all needed to do, if all were to survive:

  In storms, in deepest darkness, when the sea is high . . . all the inhabitants of the region, men and women, girls and children, are especially busy . . . naked, unshod on the spikes of slippery rocks, armed with poles and long rakes, stretched over the abysses they hold back the gift which the sea brings them and would take away again if they did not haul it in.12

  In certain ways these earlier societies could have taught the twentieth century something about genuinely egalitarian working practices. But the equality enjoyed here by the women seaweed harvesters extended only to capering naked at the midnight work-party on the dangerous rocks – they may have had the fun, but they failed to get the more substantial reward of money. For wherever records have survived of the pay of working people, women are shown either to receive less than men, or to get nothing at all, so entrenched was the notion of the paterfamilias as provider. So in seventeenth-century England, male labourers were paid 8d, ‘without meat and drink’, and females only three-quarters of that, 6d, while male reapers earned 5d ‘with meat and drink’ to the women’s 3d – exactly the percentage of male to female earnings still obtaining worldwide today.13

  This fundamental inequality was compounded by the fact that when a family lost the struggle to survive on these starvation sums, it was almost always the women who were left with their children, to continue the desperate struggle without the one earner who was most likely to obtain employment. Parish registers throughout Europe, from the Middle Ages onwards, are full of poignant pleas from ‘poor disconsolate female creatures’, ‘harbourless since Candlemas last’, with their ‘impotent’ children; for accommodation was very often tied to the man’s labour, and if he vanished, so too did the roof over their heads. The homeless Eleanor Williams, of Worcester, England, was lucky that she only had one child, ‘her husband having left the soil where they lately dwelled and gone to some place to her unknown’. Eleanor was as she declared willing and able ‘to relieve her child by her painful labour’, if only she could obtain ‘house-room’.14 As a prototype ‘single parent family’, Eleanor was already facing the struggle for accommodation, the sole burden of responsibility, above all the prospect of endless, over-exploited, under-paid work that is still the lot of the average deserted woman today.

  Small wonder, then, that in countries where unmarried girls were allowed to have jobs outside the home, they used them to set themselves up for the marriage security that had eluded Eleanor. In a notary’s agreement of a rural betrothal, a French contemporary of Eleanor’s recorded her pride in the fruits of her working life, which, given the meagre wages of a maid, were considerable: ‘Jeanne Valence, a farm labourer’s daughter, provides for her own dowry the sum of £30 earned during the years she spent in service in the town of Brioude, plus a new woollen dress and a peasant-style wool tunic, a straw mattress, a white woollen blanket and a pinewood chest with a lock and key.’15 Domestic service was no feather-bed for a girl, hardly even a straw mattress, as the shameful saga of the Pepys maidservants makes clear. In addition to the greasy mouth and groping hands so self-lovingly immortalized in the famous Diary, the master also had a brutal streak which found frequent play. Noticing that the maid Jane had left ‘some things laid up not as they should be’, for instance, the Saviour of the Navy ‘took a broom and basted her till she cried out extremely, which made me vext’. On another occasion, when Pepys’ brother had delayed the washing by distracting the maid, Pepys had his wife beat her till all the neighbourhood was disturbed by her cries – ‘and then shut her in the cellar, where she lay all night’.16

  By his own account Pepys was a harsh and overbearing house-husband. The Diary records his merciless nagging as he perpetually found fault with his wife’s ‘sluttish and dirty’ housekeeping. He is angry with her when she burns her hand while dressing a turkey, buys a fowl too large for the oven, or sends the Sunday joint raw to the table when they have guests. Another row was raised when the sauce was too sweet for his leg of mutton, and Pepys candidly reports that he ‘takes occasion’ to shout at his wife on any grounds that arise. But how would the hapless Elizabeth have learned housekeeping? A motherless child, she spent the short years of her childhood wandering around France with her father. Married at fifteen, she found the housekeeping money kept short while Pepys spent freely on his own pleasures; for supper, she and her maid would share a glass of ale and a slice of brawn while Pepys and his cronies revelled at eight-course dinners, stuffing themselves to the point of nausea. When Elizabeth complained of being bored, confined as she was to the house and excluded from her husband’s jaunts about fashionable London, Pepys deliberately set about making work for her: ‘keeping the house in dirt, and doing of this and everything else in the house but to find her employment’. He was then angry to discover that Elizabeth was unhappy with his solution to her problem.

  Still suffocating under the dead weight of the Judaeo-Christian compulsion to shut women up in their homes and carefully control their access to the public world, societies of the West created a very great deal of indoor or domestic work for women to do. Further afield from the urban centres women enjoyed a wider range of activities, many of which, if not fun already, became work-parties when their friends and their children joined in. On the islands around Hawaii, for instance, it was the task of Polynesian women to build the offshore dams that trapped the fish within the coral reef, thus ensuring a constant food supply. In the description of one observer, it perfectly conforms to D. H. Lawrence’s pronouncement that ‘there is no point in work unless it absorbs you / Like an absorbing game’:

  [The] women would set out in their canoes through the heavy surf, before the sun was up. They shot the narrow entrances, beached their canoes, deposited their babies under the shade of palms on the soft sand and in the calm waters of these small lagoons, set to work. They cut lumps of coral rock and lifted them into the narrow entrances, trying not to scratch themselves, for some coral is poisonous. To cool themselves off they dived and swam, regaling themselves with fish and coconuts . . .17

  Polynesian women were not the only ones whose climate favoured outdoor living, in itself a greater basic freedom than many Western women have ever had. In Australia, Aboriginal women and girls would spend all day in the water at the height of summer, catching fish and gathering underwater roots, but relaxing and playing too. Similarly in Burma, although women had to work hard in their paddy fields, with or without their husbands, whose labour was not to be counted on, still there was some room to enjoy the warm and fertile world in which they lived, to spend time with other women, to feel that their work was valuable, to see its end product, and to dispose of the fruits of their efforts as they saw fit.

  There could be no doubt, though, in the minds of women and men, that the real work of a woman’s life was her husband and family. From earliest times this
involved a wide range of different skills, plus the never-done labour and elastic working day already noticed, as this portrait of a good Jewish wife makes clear:

  She seeketh wool and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands . . . She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household . . . She considereth a field and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard . . . her candle goeth not out by night . . . Her husband is known in the gates, where he sitteth among the elders of the land. She maketh fine linen and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant . . . She looketh well to the ways of the household, and eateth not the bread of idleness.18

  Spinning, weaving, agriculture, a little business on the side, running a household, supporting her husband in the demanding work of sitting among the elders, successfully avoiding the bread of idleness and too much sleep – this Canaanite housewife displays an astonishing continuity with her English counterpart of 3000 years later, whose duties were set out by Sir Anthony Fitzherbert in a manual of 1555 detailing ‘what works a wife should do’, called, with the grave assurance of unintentional irony, A Boke of Husbandrye:

  First set all things in good order within thy house, milk the kine, suckle thy calves, strain up the milk . . . get corn and malt ready for the mill to bake and brew . . . make butter and cheese when thou may, serve thy swine both morning and evening . . . take heed how thy hens, ducks and geese do lay . . . and when they have brought forth their birds, see that they be well kept from crows and other vermin . . .19