The state of women’s emancipation and industrialisation in 1860s United States: A comparative essay

By Patrik Duhaj

Edited by Katie Simpson and Mark Potter

The state of women’s emancipation and industrialisation in 1860s United States: A comparative essay of occupations available to women in the United States and England

The nineteenth century saw the start of industrialisation in the United States. This process led to a change in women’s position within society, with more of them becoming active parts of the labour process than ever before. Virginia Penny’s The Employments of Women, released in 1863, provides us with a list of the occupations available to women in the United States at this time. This essay will take Penny’s list and contrast it with a list of women’s occupations from England, constructed using the 1861 England census. By doing so, we gain a better understanding of how advanced industrialisation and women’s rights were in the pre-Civil War United States. My findings suggest that by 1863, there were more urban occupations available to women than in England, and therefore the United States might have been more industrialised than Europe by this time. The essay will be split into five sections. Section one will provide an overview of the relevant secondary literature on early nineteenth century industrialisation and women’s rights in the United States. Section two will provide a succinct overview of Virginia Penny and The Employments of Women. Section three will outline the justification for this essay, whilst giving an overview of the methodology of my research. Section four will then present the results of said research. Finally, in section five, I will examine the reliability of these results by considering some of the limitations imposed by the primary sources used.

The nineteenth century was a time of great change for the entire western world, including the

United States. In the early decades of the century, especially after 1820, rapid industrialisation took place in the country, concentrated largely in the New England

region [1] The rapid growth of the cotton textile industry in this period led to mass migration from the countryside to urban centres, and increased immigration from countries such as Ireland to the United States.[2] In 1820, only twenty-eight percent of the population worked outside of agriculture and only seven percent lived in cities, and these values increased to forty-one percent and thirty-six percent respectively by 1860.[3] Further changes took place between 1843 and 1893, when industrialisation started affecting the entirety of the United States, not just certain regions of it.[4] As Herbert Gutman highlights, at the election of Lincoln, the value of the US’s manufactured goods was still behind European countries such as England, France and Germany, but by 1893, it was worth more than the products of all of these countries combined.[5] Thus, when Virginia Penny penned The Employments of Women in 1863, she did so in the middle of great economic change that would see the United States becoming the world’s largest and most important manufacturer.

These changes in the United States economy in the early-to-mid nineteenth century had the

greatest effect on women’s lives. Prior to industrialisation, the majority of manufacturing took place in the home by women, who made goods for their households and local communities.[6] This tied them firmly to a patriarchal system, where they remained largely confined to the home and received little to no monetary reward for their labour.[7] With the establishment of the cotton textile industries, the work performed by these women at home were rendered largely obsolete.[8] Young, unmarried women were wooed by industrial cities to leave their rural hometowns behind and move to urban centres, where they were able to find work in said industrial complexes, making a living for themselves, independent of their families.[9] By 1860, more than sixty-thousand women were employed in the cotton textile industry.[10]

In 1863, Virginia Penny compiled a list of occupations available to women in the United States in her book called The Employment of Women. In this book, she gave a list of over 500 jobs available to women at the time.[11] Her book is a mixture of simple job descriptions, historical analyses, and feminist campaigning for the inclusion of women in further professions. She dedicates her book “to worthy and industrious women in the United States, striving to earn a livelihood”[12]. In the introduction of the book, she describes the purpose of her work:

I desire to present to those interested a clear and succinct view of the condition of

business in the Unites States, the openings for entering into business, the vacancies

women may fill and the crowded marts they may avoid, the qualifications needed for a

selected pursuit, and the pursuits to which they are best adapted’ also the probable result pecuniarily of each calling honorably pursued: in short, it is intended as a business

manual for women.[13]

Penny claims to have spent three years completing her study and acquired the information

presented in it by personally visiting the factories, offices, shops etc. where women of the

United States were employed.[14] She claims that her book is intended to be read by women all over the United States, however, I have noticed while reading that she does focus on the region of New England in many of her descriptions and talks relatively little of other regions of the country. In short, Virginia Penny’s book was written during a time when many women sought employment outside of the traditional at-home setting and her book was made to help these women learn about the different occupations available to them.

In her book Penny often compares the availability of certain occupations within the US to

Europe. She does this for several different reasons. In some cases, it is only in order to educate the reader as to the history of certain profession.[15] In other cases, she does it in order the campaign for the inclusion of women in certain professions, by highlighting the fact that the European example of them performing said occupation is a testament to the fact that they are in fact capable of doing so.[16] She also occasionally does the opposite, where she highlights the fact that women are able to partake in a certain occupation in the United States, but not in Europe. This essay will expand on the comparisons made by Penny by presenting a systematic comparison of the occupations presented in her book and a list of occupations available to women in England, compiled using the England census of 1861.

The reasons for expanding upon Penny’s comparisons are twofold. First, by comparing the

occupations available to women in the United States to that of England, we can get a scale of

how many occupations were available to women in the New versus the Old Worlds and thus

begin to ask ourselves what these differences, if there are any, signify. While answering these

questions are outside of the scope of this essay, I will entertain a few directions in which further research could continue, in the conclusion. Second, by looking at the different categories in which more or fewer occupations are available in the US compared to England, we can make assumptions to the nature of work in general in the 1860s United States and determine how industrialised the United States had become by this time, at least in comparison to Europe.

In her book, Penny separates these professions into thirty-five categories.[17] In order to make the comparisons more meaningful however, I have split them into further categories. First, occupations which Penny claimed were not performed by women in the US, or where her description did not let me determine whether they were performed by women, were omitted. The remaining occupations were split into two categories: typical and atypical. Splitting them into these two categories was necessary in order to determine which occupations were truly available to the general female population at the time. For example, in her entry on astronomers, Penny notes how women are capable of performing this work, but she is only able to list a single woman in the US who does so.[18] This makes it likely that this line of work was not actually open to the general population, but only to a select few women. Therefore, this occupation, and others like it, were classed as “atypical”. Jobs were classed as “typical” in three cases. One, if Penny mentions that a large number of women are occupied in this position. Two, if she gives at least three examples of at least a dozen women being in this profession, in at least three distinct regions of the US. Three, if Penny ties the occupation to institutions which generally employ a large number of people, such as factories or academies, and if she gives an example of at least three such institutions tied to the specific occupations. Otherwise, if none of these were true of an occupation, it was categorised as atypical. Using this categorisation, of the occupations listed by Penny, 108 were classed as “typical” and 282 as “atypical”. A total of 126 occupations were omitted.

As for the England census, an analysis of the entire census is unfortunately outside of the scope of this essay. The census is split along county lines into 40 sections and each section is further split into several sub-sections based on civil parishes.[19] For this essay I decided to analyse a sample of the census, made up of a single civil parish for each county, selected at random.[20] I decided to look at a parish from each county instead of randomly out of the whole census, so that we may be able to locate occupations which were only found in certain regions of the country. Thus, I was able to get a feel for the occupations which were widely available. While unfortunately not being able to analyse the entire census means that we might have missed out on occupations that were only performed by a handful of women, however, the splitting of the Penny source into “typical” and “atypical” occupations will enable us to conduct meaningful comparisons. For the United Kingdom census, the professions have also been split using the same categorisation as was utilised with The Employments of Women in order for meaningful comparison to be possible. However, unlike in the Penny source, the occupations found in the census were categorised along numerical lines, as opposed to relying on descriptions. As only a small sample of the entire census was analysed, we were only able to record relatively few cases even of the, presumably, most carried occupations. Therefore, every occupation reported by at least a dozen people were classed as “typical”. If an occupation was reported by under a dozen women but was reported in at least three distinct counties of England, they were also classed as “typical”. Any remaining occupations were classed as “atypical”. For example, I found several hundred women occupied as maids, therefore I categorised that profession as “typical”. I only found a single example of a tin miner woman, therefore I categorised it as “atypical”. Whilst I was only able to find five examples of women occupied as toll gate collectors, as all of these examples came from different counties of England, I categorised the profession as “typical”.

My findings indicate that there were overall more occupations available to women in the United States compared to England. As I noted previously, I found 108 occupations in Penny’s book that were “typically” available to free women in 1863. In comparison, in my sample of the England census, we found thirty-four jobs that were “typically” available to women. That is a difference of seventy-four. When taking “atypical” profession into the equation as well, there were 390 occupations available to women in the United States at the time, whilst I only found sixty-eight different occupations performed by women in our sample of the England census altogether. That is a difference of 322. This suggests that by the 1860s there were a far greater number of occupations which were available to female workers within the United States than in Europe. My findings also indicate that there were more occupations tied to industrialisation, such as factory work, in the United States, compared to England, where more traditional roles seem to dominate. As you can see from Figure 1, in Penny’s book I found that only a small minority of “typical” professions were performed by women in the home, as is typical of pre-industrial work, and that majority of professions were performed by women outside of the home, which could indicate a greater level of industrialisation. In comparison, in my sample of the England census, I found eighteen “typical” occupations which were performed at home in a traditional manner, and only sixteen occupations that were performed in a more industrialised manner. If we take “atypical” work into consideration as well, there were a total of sixty-eight pre-industrial occupations found in the Penny book, and 321 industrial ones. In the sample of the England census, I found twenty-three pre-industrial and forty-five industrial occupations. Looking at the percentages might be even more meaningful: in the United States, only 17.48% of work was done at home, whilst in England this number was 33.82%. This suggests two things. First, in regard to the variety of jobs available, there were more industrial occupations available to American women in the 1860s than pre-industrial ones. Second, it suggests that in comparison to England, there were far more industrial occupations available to women in the United States, suggesting that industrialisation as a whole might have already overtaken Europe by this time, at least in the sectors in which a large number of women were occupied. My findings therefore suggest that industrialisation and women’s emancipation into the workplace was already more advanced in the United States compared to England and, by extension, Europe, by 1860.

However, there are various reasons why these findings might have been inaccurate. First

looking at the England census, there are various inaccuracies in it regarding women’s work

documented in the secondary literature. In particular, as is evident from Higgs and Wilkinson’s article, women’s labour was hardly ever properly documented, unless women were the heads of their families, which, as long as they had a husband, they were legally not.[21] I also myself encountered difficulties while trying to make sense of the census, such as the fact that in numerous occasions only very vague descriptions of work were given, such as women’s occupation being categorised as “assistant”. Unfortunately, the source did not offer any clarification in the question of what these women assisted in. It was also quite difficult to make out the environment in which some professions were practiced. For example, for women categorised as “dressmakers”, there was no way to determine whether this referred to the pre-industrial at home manufacture of clothes, or to an industrial way of manufacturing dresses inside of a factory. Only looking at a sample of the entire census might have also made it so that some occupations were missed, even though the civil parishes looked at were selected at random in the hope that they would return a sample of all different major occupations available to women.

The Employments of Women on the other hand, is based solely on the research of a single

woman and is based mostly on interviews that she conducted with the women working in the

occupations that she lists.[22] It is also aimed at women who want to make a living for

themselves.[23] This means that Penny’s biased in favour of industrial occupations as opposed to more traditional roles, which could have led to industrial roles being so much more highly represented in her work in comparison to non-industrial work. Furthermore, sometimes the census jobs were reported under umbrella terms, whilst Penny might go into more detail. Though I tried to eliminate discrepancies like these in order to make the two sources as comparable as possible, it is sometimes difficult to determine whether a job genuinely does not exist in a given context or whether its workers are just reporting their work under another umbrella term. In Penny’s text, some occupations might be categorised as typical, because many women perform them relative to the overall population of these occupations. In the census, however, if some occupations are atypical when it comes to the population, even if the majority of its performers are women, it might be categorised as atypical, as it is impossible to determine whether it is just a small part of the population practicing it or it is only practiced by a few women, without analysing the entire census including the men's reports, which is firmly outside of the scale of this essay. Illegal occupations, such as prostitution, are also exempt from both of these sources, as one is a published book and the other is a government census, therefore we cannot deduce from them the range of illegal or taboo occupations which were available to women in addition to legal professions.

In conclusion, by comparing these two sources, I have found the following results: there were

more occupations available to women in the United States in the 1860s than in Europe. This

could indicate that the United States was industrially already more advanced than Europe by

this time and hence presented more employment opportunities to women outside of their

traditional household roles. However, as I noted in the last part of the essay, there are several

limitations imposed on us by the nature of these sources and the scope of the essay. Further

research could focus compiling an even more accurate list of occupations for our two countries through using the above presented sources and combining them with other primary sources from the period that would either highlight further occupations or some mistakes in our sources. They could also focus on expanding the scope of the essay by including other Industrialising nations in the comparison, such as France and Germany, or by looking at the present two countries in more intricate details, for example by splitting the United States into Northern and Southern parts, as the different economies of these different regions might have led to important differences in women's employment.

Notes

[1] Thomas Dublin, Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860, Second Edition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.3.

[2] Dublin, Women at Work, p. 5.

[3] Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 3-5.

[4] Herbert G. Gutman 'Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919' The American Historical Review, 78(3) (June 1973), p. 555

[5] Gutman, ‘Work, Culture, and Society’, p. 5.

[6] Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 3-4.

[7] Dublin, Women at Work, p. 4.

[8] Dublin, Women at Work, p. 5.

[9] Dublin, Women at Work, p. 5.

[10] Dublin, Women at Work, pp. 5-6.

[11] Virginia Penny, The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work (Boston: Walker,Wise, & Company, 1863), pp. xvii-xiii.

[12] Penny, The Employments of Women, p. iii.

[13] Penny, The Employments of Women, p. viii.

[14] Penny, The Employments of Women, p. viii.

[15] Penny, The Employments of Women, see, for example, pp. 18-19.

[16] Penny, The Employments of Women, see, for example, pp. 278-280.

[17] Penny, The Employments of Women, pp. xvii-xxiii.

[18] Penny, The Employments of Women, pp. 1-2.

[19] Ancestry.co.uk, 1861 England Census. Online database, available at:

<https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/8767/> [Accessed: 13/12/2020].

[20] The civil parishes picked at random were the following: Old Warden in Bedfordshire, Ashampstead in Berkshire, Hawridge in Buckinghamshire, Dullingham in Cambridgeshire, Crowley in Cheshire, Morvah in Cornwall, Whitehaven in Cumberland, Newton Grange in Derbyshire, North Huish in Devon, Winterbourne Whitchurch in Dorset, Middlestone in Durham, Great Clacton in Essex, Pentrobin in Flintshire, Norton in Gloucestershire, Newham in Hampshire, Kington in Herefordshire, Great Berkhamptead in Hertfordshire, Connington in Huntingdonshire, Eastchurch in Kent, Fulwood in Lancashire, Foxton in Leicestershire, Burton on Stather in Lincolnshire, Northolt in Middlesex, Bircham Newton in Norfolk, Church Brampton in Northamptonshire, Britley and Chollerton in Northumberland, Halam in Nottinghamshire, Clanfield in Oxfordshire, Seaton in Rutland, Bennetts End in Shropshire, Brompton Ralph in Somerset, Bradley in Staffordshire, Little Saxham in Suffolk,

Great Bookham in Surrey, West Firle in Sussex, Stoke in Warwickshire, Milburn in Westmorland, Castle Eaton in Wiltshire, Doddenham in Worcestershire and Elloughton in Yorkshire.

[21] Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson, 'Women Occupations and Work in the Victorian Census Revisited', History Workshop Journal, 81(1) (2016) pp. 17-18.

[22] Penny, The Employments of Women, p. viii.

[23] Penny, The Employments of Women, p. iii.

Bibliography

Ancestry.co.uk. 1861 England Census. Online database.

<https://www.ancestry.co.uk/search/collections/8767/> [Accessed: 13/12/2020]

Dublin, Thomas. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell,

Massachusetts, 1826-1860. Second Edition. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993

Gutman, Herbert G. 'Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America, 1815-1919.' The

American Historical Review. 78/3. June 1973

Higgs, Edward and Wilkinson, Amanda. 'Women Occupations and Work in the Victorian

Census Revisited.' History Workshop Journal. 81/1. 2016

Penny, Virginia. The Employments of Women: A Cyclopaedia of Woman's Work. Boston:

Walker, Wise, & Company, 1863