In the Home

Domestic service was the most common female occupation in the paid workforce for all of the nineteenth century. About half of all working women still earned their living in this way in 1901, but times were changing rapidly. More and more women preferred other work, and by 1945 the days of the live-in servant had gone for good. The burden of housework then fell squarely on the housewife.

In contrast with other areas of work, technological change was slow to reach the home. In fact, housework changed very little from the 1840s to the 1940s: it was hard, heavy work with endless repetition. Not surprisingly, many who advertised for domestic servants often specified ‘good, strong girls’. But the pace of change increased after the Second World War, as new labour-saving devices became more affordable. This was just in time, as women increasingly looked to find paid work outside the home. In 1954 one in eight married women worked outside the home: by 1970 it was one in three. Now most women are in the paid workforce, but they still perform far more household tasks than men. Some things have been even slower to change!

This section looks at the home as workplace, for both paid and unpaid workers. It is a story of slow transformation over time, with more continuities than we might imagine.

Housework

It is hard to imagine life without modern household appliances - the automatic washing machines, microwave ovens and electric kettles we use every day. Thinking about life without electricity is even more difficult. Almost everything we do now involves reliable access to power, as we discover to our cost during occasional power outages. But women in the past had none of these things. The slow transition to the modern home was just that – slow! For much of the period from 1835 to the present, women supplied the labour that cooked the meals, cleaned the houses, made, washed, ironed and mended the clothes. Most of them were unpaid wives, mothers and daughters.

Wives and mothers

Watching period dramas suggests that households in the past were full of servants, but the reality for most people was very different. For all of this period, most household work was performed by wives, mothers and daughters. Although domestic service was a very common female occupation, there were never enough servants to meet the demand for them, and most women had to do at least some of their own housework. It is also important to understand that even with Victoria’s relatively high wages, most families could not afford even a general servant, let alone the range of maids employed in wealthy households.

Most families in the past also included far more children than the average family today, and there is good evidence to suggest that families were even larger in Australia than in Britain at the same time. This was probably because women tended to marry earlier in Australia. While family size varied a great deal from one household to another, it was not unusual for a woman who married in the 1850s to have seven or more children over her lifetime, while many had more than this. There was no reliable means of contraception available until quite late in the nineteenth century (and arguably much later than this,) and no real understanding of how female reproduction worked until about the same time. That meant that a woman might expect to have her first child quite soon after marriage, with another baby following every two to three years until she reached menopause. The only sure way to avoid conception was to abstain, and not surprisingly this was never a very popular option! All of which meant that before about the 1920s children tended to grow up surrounded by a sizeable group of siblings, all of whom had to be fed, clothed, and housed. Contrary to popular opinion, infant mortality, although much higher than today, was not as high in Australia as in Britain or Europe. While families might well experience the death of one or perhaps two children, it was unusual to lose more than this. Large groups of siblings were the norm until about the 1920s.