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Local Labour Markets and Family Budgets in Victorian England
| While some sweeping generalisations have been made about the impact of (male) ideologies on the representation of women's work in the Victorian censuses, the reality was far more complex than that. Opportunities for women to work varied enormously, both locally and regionally, and this paper will argue that where work was plentiful an expectation that women would work overrode any ideological preferences for women to vacate the public sphere and confine themselves to their domestic duties. Local and regional variations emerge very clearly from the census, and female employment opportunities could vary greatly even within the confines of a single, small county – such as Hertfordshire. For this county hypothetical family budgets have been reconstructed from family employment structures as revealed in the census, to examine the contributions that could be made by female and child labour, and to determine the degree to which female labour facilitated female independence.
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