Women in the Workplace in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

Every undertaker should employ women,” wrote Priscilla Bell Wakefield in Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex (1798), “for the express purpose of supplying the female dead, with those things which are requisite. How shocking is the idea of our persons being exposed, even after death, to the observation of a parcel of undertaker’s men” (47). Wakefield finds employment opportunities in the loopholes and inconsistencies of the gender ideology of the long nineteenth century. In doing so, she demonstrates the mental acrobatics many women performed in order to negotiate places (actual and hypothetical) for themselves within the economic landscape of the period. Two recently published essay collections on women’s economic positions and professional status in nineteenth-century Great Britain provide a rich view of the whole circus.