The Jobs That Weren't Jobs

In the 1901 census of England and Wales, a woman listed as having no occupation was, in the terminology of the time, unoccupied. This was the official category. Domestic work, the cooking, washing, childcare, fire-keeping, mending, marketing, nursing, managing, belonged to a part of economic life the census simply did not see. That a woman might be engaged, every day, for ten or twelve or fourteen hours in labour that sustained the entire working household around her was considered, by the machinery of enumeration, approximately equivalent to not working at all.

In east Lancashire cotton towns this gap between the visible and the invisible economy was particularly stark, because Lancashire was unusual. Women here worked the looms in very nearly equal numbers to men. Married women on the mill floor were ordinary, not remarkable; the culture expected it, the economics required it, and the culture had organised itself accordingly around the question of what happened at home while both adults were at the shed. The answer, in most households, was: somebody managed it. That somebody was generally female, and generally not the same somebody who went out to the shed in the mornings, and generally not counted.

The knocker-upper was the most visible figure in this economy of managed mornings. She was, at least, recognised as doing a job. She charged for it. She had customers. She appears, however infrequently, in trade directories and local newspaper notices. She was paid money, which gave her labour a recognisable shape. But she sat at one end of a long continuum of women doing essential work that was structured around the mill's requirements without belonging to the mill's visible world.

Consider what had to be done before a family of two adults and two children could get the wage-earners out the door by five-thirty. The range had to be lit or brought back up. Tea had to be mashed. Bread had to be cut or porridge had to be made. The children's boots, if the children were half-timers, had to be found and put on the right feet. Dinner pieces, bread and dripping, perhaps, a bit of cold potato, had to be wrapped and handed over. In houses where the husband or older children worked different shifts, this process might happen twice in the same morning at different intervals, or the evening before in partial preparation for a morning that came sooner than sleep made reasonable.

None of this is in the census. None of it figures in the wage statistics that historians use to discuss living standards in cotton towns. The household surveys of the period, Charles Booth's work in the nineties, Seebohm Rowntree's in York, the later Board of Trade inquiries, captured wages, rent, food expenditure, often in impressive detail. What they could not capture, and did not try to, was the labour behind the household's operation: the time spent, the knowledge required, the physical effort involved in keeping a back-to-back cottage in sufficient order that the wage-earners could leave it in the morning and return to it in the evening and find it functioning.

Women who were not in mill work were nonetheless within the mill's orbit. Their mornings were shaped by the whistle as surely as their husbands' mornings were. They simply experienced it from the other side: not as the sound that pulled them to the gate, but as the sound that marked the moment when the household could exhale slightly, when the immediate emergency of the morning was over, and the day's other work could begin.

That other work was extensive. Washing was a weekly ordeal requiring a full day's labour: heating water in the copper, scrubbing at the dolly tub, rinsing, mangling, hanging. All in a yard shared with neighbouring houses. All dependent on weather. All generating a sustained physical effort that left the woman doing it exhausted by mid-afternoon. Market day required planning: money counted out at the table, goods priced against each other against the week's budget, the arithmetic of managing eighteen or twenty shillings across rent, coal, food, meter money, and the children's boots worked out in the head rather than on paper because paper was not always available and the calculation had been done so many times it no longer needed writing down.

Childcare during the working day was managed variously: by grandmothers if they were local and able; by older daughters if they were below mill age; by neighbours in informal arrangements that involved obligation without contract; or not managed, which meant children were left, which was common enough to be unremarkable and which the poor law commissioners deplored and could do nothing about. There was no public provision. There was no expectation of public provision. The gap was filled by women organising around each other's needs in the way people do when the alternative is not managing.

The neighbourhood itself was a form of labour. A woman who knew her street well enough to watch for the signs of trouble in other households, the candle where there should be gas, the child at the wrong hour of the morning, the front step not donestoned, and who acted on what she observed, was performing a social function that held the street together. She was not paid for it. She did not think of it as a function. It was simply what you did if you were paying attention, and most women on a terrace street were paying attention, because the neighbourhood was where their working life took place.

All of this is visible in the written record only sideways, in the gaps. In the Petty Sessions column of a local paper: a woman charged with leaving a child unattended. In the Guardians' report: a widow applying for outdoor relief, the visiting officer noting that the house is clean and the children are clothed, as though this required recording because it had required effort. In the letters column: occasional sharp correspondence from women who signed themselves A Weaver's Wife or A Householder, writing about the brook or the school or the state of the street with the authority of people who have looked at these things every day for years and have views about them.

They were not unoccupied. They were simply working in a part of the economy that the age had agreed, for its own convenience, not to see.