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myth and materiality in a woman’s world 4 Work Q: Do you do anything else in the way of working for your living than by knitting these articles? Andrina Simpson: Yes, I am married. (Commission to Inquire into the Truck System, Second Report (Shetland), 1872, Evidence, line 326) Producing he deceptively simple reply given by the Lerwick knitter Andrina Simpson upon being asked whether she did anything else in addition to knitting to make a living speaks volumes. For Shetland women marriage meant induction into a fishing-crofting household wherein their role was
This book provides the first history of how we have imagined and used time since 1700. It traces the history of the relationship between work and leisure, from the 'leisure preference' of male workers in the eighteenth century, through the increase in working hours in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to their progressive decline from 1830 to 1970. It examines how trade union action was critical in achieving the decline; how class structured the experience of leisure; how male identity was shaped by both work and leisure; how, in a society that placed high value on work, a 'leisured class' was nevertheless at the apex of political and social power – until it became thought of as 'the idle rich'. Coinciding with the decline in working hours, two further tranches of time were marked out as properly without work: childhood and retirement.
By the mid-twentieth century married men had achieved a work- leisure balance. In the 1960s and 1970s it was argued that leisure time would increase at a rapid rate. This false prediction coincided with the entry of married women into the labour market and a halt to the decline in working hours and in sectors of the economy a reversal of it. These two developments radically changed the experience of time and thinking about it. Time became equated with achieving a 'work-life balance' where 'life' was often unpaid childcare and domestic work.
4883 Social Change PT bjl.qxd 13/6/07 11:07 Page 24 2 Non-agricultural work Introduction There was some development of non-agricultural employment in Ireland between 1851 and 1922, but this does not mean that there was work for everyone. Emigration masked the true extent of unemployment, millions of people moving from the country and sending home money to those who could not survive on the wages paid for the work they described themselves as doing to the census. Any discussion of ‘gains’ must bear this firmly in mind. There was, however, an increase in the
8 Towards ‘work–life balance’ F rom the mid-nineteenth century it became common to think of time as being divided between work and leisure. To do this, however, was to see the world through the eyes of men. Women, whether or not they were in paid employment, had very little sense of time being so neatly divided into work and leisure. Work provided the dominant motif of their lives, and there was no time on the clock when it began or ended. Life was task-oriented, and there were always tasks to be done. In the twentieth century there were fundamental changes in
Conclusion – Understanding work camps Memory and context For some sixty years, work camp movements flourished in Britain. But Britain’s work camps were far from unique. We have already seen the international nature of the labour colony movement, but there were similar debates and exchanges, on an even larger scale, between the wards. In 1935 the International Labour Organisation’s officers detailed camp systems in Austria, Canada, Czechoslovakia, Finland, Germany, Poland and South Africa; in the following year, they added Estonia, France, Japan and Switzerland to
Grene that the aforesaid Joan and her family unjustly mowed grass on the bound between them and took more than she ought to do. Accordingly it is judged that the aforesaid Joan is in mercy and Roger should receive damages from her. [c] [1300] Day in autumn. The daughter of William de Wylinghurst, two daughters of Nicholas le Yonge, two daughters of Thomas Colling, and the daughter of Dygan to work two
tapestry wrought upon the loom after the manner of Arras work and made of false work by Katherine Duchewoman in her house at Finch Lane, being four yards in length and seven quarters in breadth, seeing that she had made it of linen thread beneath, but covered with wool above, in deceit of the people and against the ordinance of the aforesaid craft, and they asked that the ‘coster’ might be declared to be
Fundamental to the image of the ‘new woman’ in the 1920s was her economic emancipation. David Schoenbaum writes of ‘the economic liberation of thousands of women sales clerks … an ever increasing contingent of women doctors, lawyers, judges and social workers … social forces that had brought thousands of women into shops, offices, and professions in competition with men’. 1 However, work is of itself not emancipatory for women; only when it provides them with the means to live independently of any other financial support can it be deemed emancipatory
4 Ambiguities at work: refugees and the French war economy, 1939–40 Throughout the 1930s officials and employers in south-western France had associated Spanish migrants primarily with their role in the economy. Whether in rural or urban areas, Spaniards were perceived as hardworking and exploitable but also effective workers. In Bordeaux, employers preferred to hire Spanish dockers rather than their French counterparts.1 A similar picture emerged from a study conducted in the late 1930s involving interviews with French farmers in the south-west.2 By 1939, a
16 Work is therapy? The function of employment in British psychiatric care after 1959 Vicky Long As the contributions to this volume demonstrate, work and occupation have long formed part of mental healthcare. Yet in the post-war era, the adoption of the policy of psychiatric deinstitutionalisation transformed the nature and intended functions of employment for people with mental health problems within British psychiatric hospitals, and beyond. This chapter focuses on industrial therapy (IT), which hospitals increasingly embraced as part of rehabilitation