Women and economic evolution: or, The effects of industrial changes upon the status of women

by Theresa Schmid McMahon

The serf was in no wise a part of the feudal lord’s family nor did the women of his class experience any of the male chivalry which we are accustomed to associate with this period.

The status of the women of the serfs was little better than that of slaves. The difference between the status of men and women of this class was probably no greater than that between the lord and his wife, but the difference was emphasized in that there was a greater range of abuse on the part of the social superior toward the social inferior where women were concerned.

In the house of the lord “the chief, however violent, and brutal his outdoor exercises, must habitually return into the bosom of his family. He there finds his wife and children, and scarcely any but them; they alone are his constant companions; they alone are interested in all that concerns him. It could not but happen in such circumstances, that domestic life must have acquired a vast influence, nor is there any lack of proofs that it did so.”[24]

The predominance which domestic life acquired among the upper classes during feudal times did much toward elevating the women of these classes to social equality with men.

Although during this period there exists among the people a great difference in the kind of work performed by men and the work performed by women in the higher classes, nevertheless the position of the wife was one of respect, and often one of authority. When the lord was away from home on warlike expeditions the wife assumed at times her lord’s duties.[25]

“Women exercised to the full the powers that were attached to the land either by proxy, by bailiffs, or in person. They levied troops, held courts of justice, coined money, and took part in the assembly of peers that met at the court of the lord.”[26]

Parallel with the decline of the feudal system is the rapid growth of towns. Women did not take a conspicuous part in the work carried on in the towns, but that they were not excluded from the industries is apparent when we find them in the trade guilds as early as the fifteenth century. “Labor disputes arose over the questions of wages and piece-work, of holidays, of the employment of women and cheap workers.”[27]

Before the great pestilence of 1348, women were employed as agricultural laborers. Their wages were invariably lower than the wages of men. This difference in wages can be partially accounted for on the ground that there existed a marked difference in the nature of their work. Women as farm hands were employed in “dibbling beans, in weeding corn, in making hay, in assisting the sheep-shearers and washing the sheep, in filling the muck carts with manure, and in spreading it upon the lands, in shearing corn, but especially in reaping stubble after the ears of corn had been cut off by the shearers, in binding and stacking sheaves, in thatching ricks and houses, in watching in the fields to prevent cattle straying into the corn, or armed with a sling, in scaring birds from the seed of ripening corn, and in similar occupations. When these failed, there were the winding and spinning of wool ‘to stop a gap.’ These were the employments not only of the laborers’ wives; the wife and daughters of the farmer took their part in all farm works with other women, and worked side by side with their husbands and fathers. After the ‘black death’, women shared for a time in the general rise of wages, and were seldom paid less than two-pence for a day’s work, a sum not unfrequently paid a woman for her daily work in the fields before the time of the great pestilence. This amount of wages, however, was diminished by one of the statutes of labourers, which required that every woman not having a craft, nor possessing property of her own, should work on a farm equally with a man, and be subjected to the same regulations as to wages as her husband and brothers, and like them should not leave the manor or district in which she usually lived to seek work elsewhere.”[28]

In the early stages of industry “wool and silk were woven and spun in scattered villages by families who eked out their subsistence by agriculture.”[29]

Often in the sixteenth century the wealthy graziers were clothiers and employed the men and women of the neighborhood to make into cloth the wool raised upon their own lands. “In many districts the farmers and labourers used few things which were not the work of their own hands, or which had not been manufactured a few miles from their homes. The poet Wordsworth’s account of the farmers’ families in Westmorland, who grew on their own land the corn with which they were fed, spun in their own home the wool with which they were clothed, and supplied the rest of their wants by the sale of yarn in the neighboring market town was not so far inapplicable to other parts of England as we might at first imagine.”[30]