'A lady does not accept payment for her work'

Personal reflections on 19th and early 20th century shifts in the ideology of women's (paid) labour

In 19th century Castlegregory, Co. Kerry, women’s cash income made up 56% of household earnings. In Brandon, on the Dingle Peninsula, it was 68.9%, in Dingle itself it was 57% and in Kenmure it was 70%¹. Most of this came from very specifically female industries such as poultry production (mainly in eggs), dairying (mainly in butter-making), raising pigs and more skilled work such as weaving, spinning and lace-making.

Investigations like these by the Congested District Boards, across the Rural West (from Donegal to Kerry) also found that women were “more industrious than men in times of hardship”² with families often relying on the cash income generated by such ‘female industries’ (indeed, data from this period finds that if male income in a household went down, female income went up i.e. she always worked hard to find a way to plug the deficit).

For this reason and more, many historians comment on the relative ‘economic power’ women held in this period, particularly in poor rural communities were they were often important ‘breadwinners’ and economic players. As historian J.J. Lee notes, “women’s economic contribution to the family was so essential to the family economy that they enjoyed considerable independence”³

Mary Barlow at her Spinning Wheel: Letterbrone, Co. Sligo, 1935. Image from The Photography Collection at Dúchas.ie B063.05.00002

Yet, what the Congested District Boards were recording and catching sight of were the last remnants of what historian Mary Daly has called Ireland’s pre-Famine economy. In the latter half of the 19th century (in the Post-Famine years of the 1860s onwards) a new economy was emerging, and it was one which increasingly devalued and delegitimised women’s waged labour.

In 1861 there were 846,000 women in Ireland who worked for wages. In 1901 this figure had dropped to 550,000, and by 1911 it had decreased to 430,000.⁴

“In 1861 nearly 56 per cent of women doing housework were unwaged…. This percentage increased to over 65 per cent by 1881, then rose to 78 per cent in 1891. In 1901, 81 per cent of women doing housework were [unwaged]. This had increased further to 85 per cent by 1911”⁵.

There is, of course, no coincidence in the fact that as the numbers of women earning a wage are decreasing, the numbers classified as unpaid houseworkers are increasing. There is a plethora of reasons for this, from how many of the traditionally female spheres of earning, particularly dairying, began to be taken over by formal, male-ran institutions such as local creameries and co-ops, to the collapse of cottage industries like weaving and spinning in the face of industrialised factories, the general deterioration of the paid labour market for women in post-Famine Ireland, and legilsation which limited women’s access to paid employment. Yet, the shift which most fascinates me is what happened to people’s psyche — in how the ideology surrounding paid work was shifted to that of it being an exclusively male endeavour.

Historians name it as a move from a family economy, where everyone in the household contributes to the economic survival and well-being of the family, to the breadwinner model, where the male head of the household is the primary earner and the rest of the family his dependents⁶ — it was the ideology of domesticity.

Within such a framework, women engaging in paid labour came to be seen as a signifier of poverty, as something undesirable, something which could reduce a family’s social status and produce derision — it was both shameful and a disgrace for a woman to be earning a wage, evidence of both her deviance and his failings to provide for his family. Consequently, women’s labour was re-framed as an act of service as opposed to an act of ‘work’.

Historians Christina Brophy and Cara Delay write:

“There is no doubt that the Great Famine (1845-1852) radically recast economic, social, and cultural life for Ireland’s people and, as most historians have argued, a significant decline in Irish women’s status was foremost among these changes. Part of the decline was rooted in the shifting attitudes towards women and wages. The idea that ‘a lady did not accept payment for her work’ was an elite and middle-class concept geared toward demonstrating the distinguishing status of wealthy families. However, this concept became highly influential in Victorian-era Ireland and contributed to the idea that any woman who desired or accepted payment for services was somehow suspect. Middle-class reforming Catholic priests and Irish politicians alike projected this idea onto working-class and rural labouring women—ignoring, of course, the economic realities they faced…. Distaste for women’s waged work became so ubiquitous that…. ‘in the Victorian era, female inclination to engage in paid labour was considered a sensitive barometer of poverty’”⁷.

Despite the over 150 years between me and the origin point of this statement, there is something that feels disconcertingly personal about it. The notion that ‘a lady did not accept payment for her work’ feels uncomfortably close to the innumerable moments in my life when I’ve said something like, “Oh no, I wouldn’t dream of it”, or “Don’t worry, it’s not a bother”, or “No no no, I couldn’t possibly” when someone has offered me money in return for some time or effort I may have provided. However, the willingness to provide my time ‘for free’ and, more specifically, the lack of acceptance of receiving monetary payment is not something I have ever associated with gender. It’s a trait of upbringing.

I have watched both of my parents devote thousands of hours of their life ‘for free’ to a variety of community organisations, helping out neighbours, extended family members and pretty much anyone who asks for their assistance. And not in an ad-hoc kind of way either — such activities, at various points of their lives, have been very central parts of their ‘working days’. For many years they were prioritising their ‘voluntary work’ over their ‘waged labour work’, altering the latter to fit around the former. So extremely skewed was that balance my Mum has openly concluded that it wasn’t really worth it; ‘How much better their personal situation may have been if they had put that much time and effort into their livelihoods’.

But my Mum (and my Dad too) was only following the model of living given to her by her parents, and most especially her mother (my maternal grandmother).

When someone has passed, you only really remember them in shadowy vignettes but in every single one I have of Granny she is ‘giving’ something of herself for the assistance of another. Her entire home acted as a processing unit for some act of service. She lived by a mantra that ‘You should never leave the house unless one arm is shorter than the other’ (meaning you should always be carrying something that you’re giving to another), and she was out of the house often, her car always laden with something for someone. My Mum once said of her, ‘She made the little bit of money she had really work for her’, and by that she meant she made it stretch so she could share it across her entire community. She gave hundreds of thousands of hours of her life doing work that few would dream of doing unpaid. But she did it because she had a huge heart and that was ‘just what you do’.

I live in a very different world to that of my parents and grandparents. I am not rooted in a community-way of living like they are and were, and yet, I have, unconsciously absorbed the model of life they have lived by — one which very clearly separated money from meaning; paid work and meaningful work are distinct things.

Several years ago (circa 2016), while I was completing my PhD and living in London, I was invited to give a talk to the “Behavioural Science” team at a very large, very well-known Investment firm. My PhD examined the impact of emotions on risk-taking behaviours, and this interested them from the perspective of how their fund managers made decisions (with millions and millions of pounds). Unless you are used to that world, nothing really prepares you for the whole other level of wealth that greets you the moment you walk through the doors of such financial monoliths. It is hard to describe, except to say that it is like going into a really expensive, 5*+ hotel. There is the triple-height sun-bathed foyer. The friendly but professional reception team. A concierge service that takes your coat and leads you through panelled corridors to your assigned meeting room. No half-stale chocolate digestives or dry Jammie Dodgers on the table, there are petit fours in crimped paper packages and perfectly arranged Macarons (from Ladurée no less). No luke warm coff-tea from a beleaguered flask in the corner, there is an entire hospitality team ready to take your order for whatever hot beverage you desire. Everyone is immaculate. Everyone is beautifully dressed. Everyone looks like they were hired directly from a modelling agency not whatever university produces analysts and hedge fund managers and ‘quants’. I feigned confidence and comfort, got through the presentation and gladly left the building to the ‘real-world’ that lay beyond.

A few days after, the head of the team who had invited me sent me an email. It wasn’t so much a job offer was one of those kind of ‘look us up when you’re finished the PhD, there are opportunities here’ type of emails. I replied with thanks and gratitude and never contacted her again. I finished my PhD and took a badly paid (if normal going-rate for UK academia) part-time position researching how human behaviour impacts the welfare of farm animals and gave hours and hours of my own free-time assisting colleagues and students with extra bits of work because ‘that is what you do’, you help people and say “No worries” (I wouldn’t dream of making this a monetary thing).

I, of course, would never have sought a career in the mahogany-clad halls of Big Finance. That wouldn’t have been my kind of place at all. Even if I had taken her up on her very kind offer and pursued such ‘opportunities’ I know I’d have quit within a year or so — it wouldn’t have suited my constitution. But aside from that, there was a very clear reason why I pursued a (poorly paid) job researching the impact of humans on farm animal welfare over a (I can only imagine how well-paid) job researching the behaviour of finance professionals — meaning vs. money.

Perhaps because of the model of living I have inherited down my generational line, I have carried an implicit belief that money somehow muddies meaning. That the truly meaningful things in life are the things you do because you decide to give yourself to them, or because you do them with heart. If I think about ‘doing something for money’ I can almost feel my Granny’s distaste or disapproval (not that she didn’t want us to do well in life, but overtly seeking money was a bit ‘ick’). And that seems to breed in me this sense that monetary gain is something dirty; something to be avoided, being of service has much greater meaning.

I remember reading that email from the team lead at that Investment firm and feeling frightened by the idea of a job that would pay so well. “I wouldn’t be worth that”. It was much more comfortable to choose a career where the motivation was not monetary but meaning-driven. And that is a theme which, really and truly, has carried across my entire adult-life so far. I give my time freely and willingly to ‘heart-driven’ things and I assume that they can never be monetarily fruitful because, “Oh, I wouldn’t dream of such a thing” (there is a deep-rooted ‘sense of wrongness’ to it).

Even here on Substack, I have resisted turning on the “Paid subscription” component (despite several lovely people ‘Pledging’ subscriptions, which make me feel buoyed, tearful with appreciation, and uncomfortable all at the same time) because I fear the ‘muddying’ of money with meaning and heart (plus all the other confidence stuff about ‘why would anyone pay for what I write here’ etc.).

To discover then, that there was a point in history, when women’s engagement with waged labour were very directly muddied with notions of ‘impropriety’ feels all too close to the bone. As I mentioned previously, that the relationship I have with money might have a gendered component is not something I have ever considered. Mainly because my male role models have demonstrated a similar service and community-driven mode of living as my female ones. But also because reducing something as complex as one’s relationship with money down to one singular factor (i.e. gender) would be grossly reductive.

Yet, there is something in it. The fact that both my Mum and my Granny (most especially my Granny) so voluntarily gave so much of themselves ‘for free’ (which, although appreciated by many, has been taken advantage of) in such an involuntary way (i.e. they just did it because ‘that’s what you do’) speaks to them being driven by an underlying current that is ideological.

Ideology is rarely overt, it is not something seen with the naked eye, rather it is something which is initially planted in people with suggestion and then made to stick through disciplining (e.g. shaming). Over time it becomes so embedded as to be unnoticeable and unquestioned (unquestionable) — it becomes ‘the way things are’. Ideology becomes orthodoxy and this creates a script which people live by. My Granny definitely lived by that script, her role in life (whether unconsciously or consciously subscribed to) was to give and do for others (and to receive any payment would have been abhorrent, unheard of, perhaps even an insult to her reputation).

Whatever the roots of my own fraught relationship with money and meaning, I cannot quite shake the uncomfortable and foreboding feeling which came over me this week when I read all the above. The unexplainable sense of recognition I felt as a I read of the relationship between the decline of women’s engagement with waged labour and the emergence of an ideology which made any overt acceptance of or seeking of ‘payment’ in return for time and effort by women a shameful, distasteful and improper thing. I can’t help but feel that in there, buried deep beneath a few hundred years of its ontogeny in society, is the origin point of my unquestioned willingness to ‘accept less’ in exchange for meaning. For, after all, this is what that ideological shift did; it achieved a reconstruction of women’s labour from paid to unpaid by condoning the former and exalting the latter (as something of greater merit and meaning).

1. O’Dowd, A. (1994). Women in Rural Ireland in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Centuries – How the Daughters, Wives and Sisters of Small Farmers and Landless Labourers Fared. Rural History, 5(2), 171–183. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793300000662

2. Breathnach, C. (2004). The Role of Women in the Economy of the West of Ireland, 1891-1923. New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua, 8(1), 80–92.

3. Lee, J. J. (2001). Women and the Church since the Famine. In A. Hayes & D. Urquhart (Eds.), The Irish Women’s History Reader. Routledge.

4. Bourke, J. (1991). ‘The Best of All Home Rulers’: The Economic Power of Women in Ireland, 1880-1914. Irish Economic and Social History, 18, 34–47.

5. ibid.

6. Barclay, K. (2013). Farmwives, Domesticity and Work in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Rural History, 24(2), 143–160. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956793313000058

7. Brophy, C. S., & Delay, C. (Eds.). (2015). Women, Reform, and Resistance in Ireland, 1850–1950. Palgrave Macmillan UK. https://link.springer.com/book/9781137513137