‘Working Mothers’ in Eighteenth-Century London

Abstract

The phrase ‘working mother’ was a mid-nineteenth-century addition to the English lexicon that would have been incomprehensible to the inhabitants of early modern Britain. There were very few circumstances in which a mother did not work, whether in return for income, as a producer for home consumption, and/or as a provider of ‘subsistence services’ (involving unpaid laundry, housework, meal preparation, and the personal care of dependents). The majority of mothers who managed households – either jointly as wives or singly as widows – also undertook responsibility for delegating work to others, especially (but not exclusively) to servants. Illness was as likely a diversion for mothers from income-generating work as either unpaid childcare or leisure. The common perception that women combining motherhood with other employment is a relatively recent phenomenon overlooks a much longer history of maternal duty, understood as much in terms of provision as in terms of a unique and irreplaceable affective commitment to the personal care and socialization of children. The term ‘working mother’ is, of course, highly problematic both because of its suggestion that mothering is not work and because it implies that mothering should preclude paid work – notions originating in nineteenth-century AngloAmerican discourse with the concept of the male breadwinner wage, separate spheres ideology, and the re-categorization of housewives as ‘dependents’. Cross-culturally and over the longue durée, mothering has been (and continues to be) experienced as work, although its characterization within capitalist systems consistently overlooks this dimension, emphasizing instead mothering’s moral or affective characteristics. In response, twentieth-century social reproduction feminism has emphasized both the costs and value of unpaid care work, in terms of its discriminatory consequences for women (within the waged workforce as well as beyond it), and in terms of the accrual of its value within broader capitalist systems which could not function without unpaid care – which, if properly valued, can represent staggering proportions of GDP. Feminist economists have long urged for the inclusion of unpaid care work in Systems of National Accounting alongside subsistence production, to date unsuccessfully (although a broader range of subsistence services, including unpaid care, features in the Satellite Accounts that assess sectors not represented in National Accounts). Questions surrounding the definition of ‘production boundaries’ – the parameters determining what work counts as ‘productive’ to an economy – remain fraught with