Femmes en trop, femmes sur le carreau

In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the phenomenon of “surplus women” has to be studied in the dual context of the sex imbalance in the whole population and the underemployment of women on the labour market. This article shows how the structural changes in a regional economy and the common precepts in the patriarchal ideology contributed to make more fragile and precarious the condition of young women in the rural south of England. It is based on qualitative sources (literary and parliamentary) and quantitative data (registry general and published census). The case in point is the corn-producing county of Berkshire and its industrial centre, Reading. Around 1840­1850, new capitalist farming processes led to male emigration and quasi-eradication of female labour in the countryside: unable to marry there, many girls went to the county town and were hired there as domestic servants. From the 1860s, railway building and a big biscuit factory made Reading into an industrial centre, without relying upon available female labour, however. When the sex imbalance became less acute in the 1870s, most women had no other work experience than domestic service as a preparation for marriage, and a whole generation of aging surplus women was still a reminder of Reading’s former reputation as a maiden town. On the whole then, the middle decades of the past century stand out as a particularly crucial period in the history of the sexual division of labour, a most visible phenomenon in the context of a regional economy dominated by structural change in its agricultural activities. Here it was reinforced by structure and ideology combined

Census · Context (archaeology) · Economic growth · Economic history · Economics · Emigration · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Underemployment · Unemployment · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Law