Bruh
. I'd say no fucking way, but I have a feeling that this is what we've been missing in the "Did women work in the past or did they depend on their husbands to provide for them while they took care of the house and the children?" debates. And not just we, I'm pretty sure that over the years I've only ever seen it as a binary choice between women working in factories and whatnot and being housewives when it was discussed, but almost nobody has ever brought up the possibility of women being self-employed and earning money that way.
At least I don't remember anyone mentioning it.
Anyway, the claim in the title seems pretty bold. I wonder whether the author of that article has anything to back it up?
Well, there's no link in the article itself...
Women have always worked – for pay
But... after some googling of that passage, we find this.
Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911
Just damn at some of the things in there.
While women were notably less likely to be employers, especially in the first three studied periods, there's really not that much of a difference between the amount of men and women who worked on their own-account, and basically were self-employed.
Now that would seem to rebuke the claim I put in the title, with women owning "just" 30% of businesses (which is still incomparably more than both traditionalists and feminists often seem to claim). However, further down in the study where they look at percentage rates of entrepreneurial activity, instead of total numbers, there's this table, accompanied by the study's authors saying the quote we were looking for since the beginning:
In total rates there were twice as many male entrepreneurs as there were female ones, but in percentage terms, widows were much more entrepreneurial than widowers while both single and married women were about as entrepreneurial as their male counterparts, and actually were noticeably more so in the latter periods.
I wonder what was happening there to produce those two results. I guess maybe those areas got lots of male economic migrants who would skew the total numbers while not changing the percentage rates much? I mean, the study is only about England and Wales and this was basically during the peak of the British Empire when it was the economic conter of the world, I can imagine a lot of young men from Scotland, Ireland and the rest of the Empire would come there for the economic opportunities and to try their luck.
Now, it is true that women seem to have been less entrepreneurially spread across various professions than men:
However, I'm not sure whether that meant much. Income is income, after all, and we also have this table:
Although all three types of women were most commonly married to working men, as there were just so many of them, each of the three categories were disproportionately likely to be married to similarly economically active men, clearly showing that those female entrepreneurs were aware of their status, though, when they were married to workers, they admittedly were much less likely than female employers to be married to high-status ones:
Sometimes the two entrepreneurs married together were just running their own common business, but in most cases this doesn't seem to have been the case:
And yes, as the table above shows, in very few cases, the percentages increasing along with the woman's status, you had economically active women married to economically inactive men, meaning that even in Victorian Britain, a place often depicted as very prudish, religious, and extremely "traditional" and beholden to the idea of men providing for their wives, Chads could still find females willing to invert gender roles for them and be their female betabuxxers.
I also love this table:
Jfl at the researchers trying to make working indoors or outside the household a gender thing when their own data shows that the biggest factor of whether somebody worked outside of their house was whether they were a worker of either gender or not. "Men worked outside, women were kept at home. Just ignore our own data showing that men working on their own worked from their homes almost half the time, and since not all of them would even have the choice, that strongly implies that over half of those who had the choice chose to stay at home, despite working outside being so manly!"
This sentence had me laughing:
First, it adds to what I meant about income being income. Women were more concentrated in certain professions than men, but that clearly didn't make their status much lower or anything, and second, the fact there are still debates whether women even worked in the past when an entire profession, one of the most common professions for women at that,
is notable by the women doing it often being the main breadwinners of their families over a hundred years ago is just a ridiculous situation to me.
And finally, the study also makes sure to mention that this wasn't the case just in Britain:
Tfw all those conservatives fetishizing the arrangement where a woman just stays and home and chills her entire life while a man supports her by working backbreaking labour missed that often the woman would also have her own income coming from a cushy job she did at her own terms from her home. "Clean your room bucko, you need to be a provider for a tradwife, that's your purpose as a man! Just ignore the part that she could still easily have a higher income than you and be in charge of the household, yet she won't be shamed in the slightest for not providing for you, she's not a man, that's not her job!"
. I'd say no fucking way, but I have a feeling that this is what we've been missing in the "Did women work in the past or did they depend on their husbands to provide for them while they took care of the house and the children?" debates. And not just we, I'm pretty sure that over the years I've only ever seen it as a binary choice between women working in factories and whatnot and being housewives when it was discussed, but almost nobody has ever brought up the possibility of women being self-employed and earning money that way.At least I don't remember anyone mentioning it
.Anyway, the claim in the title seems pretty bold. I wonder whether the author of that article has anything to back it up?
Well, there's no link in the article itself...
Women have always worked – for pay
But... after some googling of that passage, we find this.
Female entrepreneurship: business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911
Just damn at some of the things in there
.
While women were notably less likely to be employers, especially in the first three studied periods, there's really not that much of a difference between the amount of men and women who worked on their own-account, and basically were self-employed.
Now that would seem to rebuke the claim I put in the title, with women owning "just" 30% of businesses (which is still incomparably more than both traditionalists and feminists often seem to claim). However, further down in the study where they look at percentage rates of entrepreneurial activity, instead of total numbers, there's this table, accompanied by the study's authors saying the quote we were looking for since the beginning:
In total rates there were twice as many male entrepreneurs as there were female ones, but in percentage terms, widows were much more entrepreneurial than widowers while both single and married women were about as entrepreneurial as their male counterparts, and actually were noticeably more so in the latter periods.
I wonder what was happening there to produce those two results. I guess maybe those areas got lots of male economic migrants who would skew the total numbers while not changing the percentage rates much
? I mean, the study is only about England and Wales and this was basically during the peak of the British Empire when it was the economic conter of the world, I can imagine a lot of young men from Scotland, Ireland and the rest of the Empire would come there for the economic opportunities and to try their luck.Now, it is true that women seem to have been less entrepreneurially spread across various professions than men:
However, I'm not sure whether that meant much. Income is income, after all, and we also have this table:
Although all three types of women were most commonly married to working men, as there were just so many of them, each of the three categories were disproportionately likely to be married to similarly economically active men, clearly showing that those female entrepreneurs were aware of their status, though, when they were married to workers, they admittedly were much less likely than female employers to be married to high-status ones:
Sometimes the two entrepreneurs married together were just running their own common business, but in most cases this doesn't seem to have been the case:
And yes, as the table above shows, in very few cases, the percentages increasing along with the woman's status, you had economically active women married to economically inactive men, meaning that even in Victorian Britain, a place often depicted as very prudish, religious, and extremely "traditional" and beholden to the idea of men providing for their wives, Chads could still find females willing to invert gender roles for them and be their female betabuxxers
.I also love this table:
Jfl at the researchers trying to make working indoors or outside the household a gender thing when their own data shows that the biggest factor of whether somebody worked outside of their house was whether they were a worker of either gender or not. "Men worked outside, women were kept at home. Just ignore our own data showing that men working on their own worked from their homes almost half the time, and since not all of them would even have the choice, that strongly implies that over half of those who had the choice chose to stay at home, despite working outside being so manly
!"This sentence had me laughing:
First, it adds to what I meant about income being income. Women were more concentrated in certain professions than men, but that clearly didn't make their status much lower or anything, and second, the fact there are still debates whether women even worked in the past when an entire profession, one of the most common professions for women at that,
is notable by the women doing it often being the main breadwinners of their families over a hundred years ago is just a ridiculous situation to me
.And finally, the study also makes sure to mention that this wasn't the case just in Britain:
Tfw all those conservatives fetishizing the arrangement where a woman just stays and home and chills her entire life while a man supports her by working backbreaking labour missed that often the woman would also have her own income coming from a cushy job she did at her own terms from her home
. "Clean your room bucko, you need to be a provider for a tradwife, that's your purpose as a man! Just ignore the part that she could still easily have a higher income than you and be in charge of the household, yet she won't be shamed in the slightest for not providing for you, she's not a man, that's not her job!"@based_meme @DarkStar @Regenerator @Mecoja @Stupid Clown @Sewer Sloth @Sergeant Kelly @Flagellum_Dei @reveries @NIGGER BOJANGLES @veryrare @LeFrenchCel @PersonalityChad @OutcompetedByRoomba @GeckoBus @Lazyandtalentless @weaselbomber @ItsovERfucks @Grodd @anandkoala @Epedaphic @Wumbus @The Judge @Biowaste Removal @KING VON @decafincel @SmhChan
