Pamela Sharpe

The Women's Harvest: Straw-Plaiting and the Representation of Labouring Women's Employment, c. 1793–1885

Increasing attention has recently been given by historians to the many informal ways in which women made economic contributions to rural labouring households in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Both Jane Humphries and Peter King have shown how important the exploitation of common rights, by gleaning for example, could be to the family economy. This is not to overlook the fact that certain types of womens and childrens employment, such as lace-making and straw-plaiting were formally established in some rural communities. The research which has been carried out into straw-plaiting the hand twisting of straw for use in hat making – in certain agricultural counties of southern England, has shown that the plait work of wives and children could provide a substantial financial boost to the household income of poorly paid agricultural labourers. Indeed there were times when their combined earnings could far outstrip those of the man. Single plaiters were also reputed to be able to collect something of a dowry to put towards their marriages out of their plait earnings. Industries such as straw-plaiting, which employed mainly women and children are, not before time, beginning to be considered as sources of the gain in productivity potential of Britain in the Industrial Revolution era. It seems likely that the income earned in these industries will, at last, be included in measurements of labouring family budgets and standards of living.

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth century Ireland and England

Abstract The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of womens work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on womens employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.

Introduction: Women Adapting to Capitalism

Thus did Fuller describe Essex, using suggestive female imagery, in 1662. Across the central north of the county of Essex runs a band of heavy clay, rich and fertile when given appropriate management. The north east of the county is the traditional textile producing region. In the south of the county, the Essex ‘hundreds’ are a marshy area which when partially drained produced rich arable farmland and some pasture on the saltings. Essex’s long coastline meant the produce of the county could easily be transported by sea to market. Essex borders on the greatest of all national markets and the centre of operations for overseas trade — the city of London, and this has shaped the economic history of the county.2

Shifts of Housewifery: Service as a Female Migration Experience

There is no indication whether this letter to a gardener and his wife in the port area of Colchester was from a male or female servant or apprentice. The implication is that he or she went to London after some disagreement either with the family or with an ex-suitor. The servant finds him or herself in a lonely position, significantly ‘with nobody to do nothing for Me’. Service was a double-edged status in the eighteenth century. Poor law records make it clear that even those in fairly lowly positions would buy services, like laundry (hence, presumably, the laundry number to be stitched on to the ‘things’). In a country with a rapidly growing population, and an expanding group of the poor, people in work would be able to find people less well-off than themselves to carry out menial tasks for them. This was also a feature of a developing consumer society.

Re-industrialisation and the Fashion Trades

The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the emergence of several new industries in the area where the now diminishing cloth trade had been situated. This chapter considers in chronological order the emergence of the silk industry and commercial lace embroidery, straw-plaiting, shoe-binding and tailoring. All of these trades were characterised by employing predominantly women, catering for fashion trends in the domestic market, and offering low-waged and seasonal employment usually in urban locations. Yet to an extent these trades represent the ‘re-industrialisation’ of north-east Essex. They were impoverished industries, based on textiles or needlework and offering limited employment prospects. By the early nineteenth century, in the type of goods produced, Essex had moved from fabric to finery, from the ‘staple’, supplying an overseas market, to the luxury trade, largely supplying a middle-class domestic market.

Epilogue: Economic Change and Women’s Status in the Past

Labouring women’s attempts to ‘make shift’ lend themselves to ambiguous statements. ‘Women’s work’ in the past was defined as far as contemporaries were concerned, but it is far more difficult for historians to specify because we cannot fully enter into the exigencies of a developing economy where ‘islands’ of opportunity were surrounded by a sea of impoverishment.2 Uneven development meant uneven chances to ‘make shift’. Furthermore, the conventional methods that historians use are compromised by the attempt to explain the anomalies presented by the history of women’s employment.

Prologue: Making Shift

In the extremely high price year of 1801, Amy Hill wrote from Deptford in London to her settlement parish of Rainham in Essex: It grives me as food is Dear we canot get cloths to shift our selves In; my husband has not only one old pachd shirt to put on as well as the rest of the family and shall be humbly thankful for one a peice wich your goodness be pleased to grant I will Take Care with ...... my husband as well as the rest of us livs so hard I sometimes think he die as John Cook who doctor Smith says was starved he was at work with my husband a fortnight befor he died & has left a wif & three Children to the parish … when my childrn grow out of the way or food cheaper I am shur I believe I shall not trouble any Moor.1

The Economics of Body and Soul

In 1789 a young unmarried Colchester woman called Martha Brown, with apparently no occupation, became the first English woman to be transported to the new colony of Australia. She was convicted of petty larceny.1 Her crime was stealing and carrying away a quantity of wheat and a threshing cloth from a butcher. It was September and these were Thomas Bennall’s gleanings. On 5 October she was tried for a second crime. Along with two brothers she was convicted of stealing carpentry equipment from the workshop of Nathaniel Barlow and Sons, Upholsterers. The news that Martha was being made an example of and transported to Botany Bay for seven years appeared on posters all over Colchester. Increasing numbers of lawless, unemployed poor women was one of the problems of late eighteenth-century urban life.

De-industrialisation and the Staple: The Cloth Trade

Essex has a long association with textile manufacture. Broadcloth production was an established business in medieval Essex, concentrated in Colchester and the towns of the north-east of the county.2 This traditional industry formed the edge of the prosperous Suffolk cloth area which has left a legacy in the great medieval churches and corporate buildings of the former wool towns.3 For Essex, a new regime of production started in the second half of the sixteenth century with the ‘new draperies’, a type of light worsted cloth which found favour in the markets of southern Europe.4 This chapter will describe the traditional industry, then the process of de-industrialisation and the effect of women’s employment in the industry in particular.

Agriculture: The Sexual Division of Labour

Commentators on historic Essex portray a prospering county, well endowed with natural resources and ideally placed to benefit from the growing London market. Most of the farm land was long enclosed which enabled farmers to become increasingly commercially orientated towards the burgeoning metropolis.3 Essex farmers were early agricultural improvers who did not lack the capital necessary for the expensive farming on the heavy clays. In the early modern period, they read local agricultural writers like Thomas Tusser,4 and their increasing affluence was evident to observers such as William Harrison in 1577.5 Farms were mixed producers with some dairy, often some woodland and an increasingly important grain growing sector. For some the proximity of the London market gave the impetus to grow specialist crops. Saffron, hops, medicinal herbs and vegetables were produced. Communications with the capital were good. Before 1800, Maldon was the chief port for shipping grain out of the county. In part due to the flat terrain, the roads were also of reasonable standard in comparison with other counties in England. The old Roman road to Chelmsford and Colchester and on to Ipswich was the chief postal route to East Anglia in the eighteenth century.