Female unemployment in England and Wales 1851–1911: An examination of the census figures for 15–19 year olds

When one thinks of working-class women in England and Wales in the second half of the nineteenth century, the picture that rises to mind is one of unremitting toil, of factory hooters at dawn calling out the mill girls in their clogs and shawls, of dressmakers' apprentices at two o'clock in the morning fainting as they put the finishing touches to a gauzy ball gown, of sooty-faced girls in denim trousers shovelling coal at a pit head in Wigan, or of girls with raw, chilblained fingers pulling turnips in the sleety November rain. One does not usually think of teenage girls and young women, unemployed for months at a time, dragging out empty days on the doorsteps of farm labourers' cottages or in the back streets of mining villages and seaports. Yet a really close look at the published census returns suggests that though the first picture may be true of the majority, for a very sizable minority, in some areas over 40 per cent, of the girls who grew up between i85o and the First World War, the second is equally true. Though it is generally accepted that the Industrial Revolution in England and Wales caused unprecedented change and created many problems, long-term structural unemployment is not seen as one of them.' Historians refer to certain cases of technological unemployment (lasting one generation), like that of the handloom weavers, to the periodic unemployment caused in particular industries by trade cycles and trade depressions, even to under-employment like that which depressed the wages of agricultural labourers in the southern counties, but see the overall unemployment rate as not rising much above 5 per cent from mid-century to the First World War.2 It seems to be generally assumed that the changes in employment structure caused by industrialism did not bring in their wake any major long-term problems of unemployment.