As the Second World War beckoned in 1939, the director of London’s National Gallery, Sir Kenneth Clark, came up with a plan: to commission a handful of carefully chosen artists to document life on the home front. With propaganda potential in mind, the Ministry of Information appointed 37 full-time war artists. Only one, Evelyn Dunbar, was a woman—but, alongside Laura Knight (who worked on commission), her depictions of women in fields and factories have stood as testament to the way in which women were being called upon to fill the boots of men in wartime. Women were, it seemed, at long last doing “men’s work”.
Our perception of women’s lives before the 20th century—before the two world wars supposedly “pulled” them into the workforce—consists of them cradling infants or cooking casseroles, not wearing helmets or tilling the fields. We are led to believe that men were the ones expected to sustain their wives and children with the money earned by working as the proverbial butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. But this is a narrative that has been fed to us through popular culture—including television and cinema—and also by academic economists. Open any economics textbook and you will find a whole section on women entering the labour force during the 20th century, creating the distinct impression that women have spent most of history as nothing more than economic dependents. Now, this “male breadwinner” model of family life is either viewed as offering a utopia to which we should aim to return—hence the rise of the “tradwife”—or as a stain on human history. But this impression of the past as a place in which men produced and women reproduced is nothing more than historical fiction.
As I show in my new book, Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, women have always been at the heart of the economy, doing everything from building pyramids to mining coal and brewing beer. In Stone Age America, 40 per cent of big game hunters were women, and in the subsequent Bronze Age the cloth that women produced paid for the tin that was smelted with copper to produce a new, stronger substance: bronze. In ancient Rome, the proportion of plumbers that were women was four times that in the UK today. Roman women owned ships and shops and traded their wine and olive oil across the Mediterranean, while women in China wove the silk that acted as the currency of trade on the Silk Roads. In 18th century Britain, pamphlets warned that: “None but a fool will take a wife whose bread must be earned solely by his labour and who will contribute nothing toward it herself”. Indeed, the British Museum is home to a whole collection of historic business cards from the era that include those of lady shoemakers, toy makers, fan makers, cabinet makers, tea sellers and silver smiths. Not only was it normal for women to run their own businesses, they did so with pride.
Rather than being a historical relic, the “housewife” was in fact a Victorian invention. After the Industrial Revolution, women who worked were increasingly seen as neglecting their families and contributing to the erosion of society’s “moral fabric” (one of the obsessions of the supposedly virtuous Victorians). Such rhetoric became a veil to hide behind for men who wanted to reserve the best-paid jobs for themselves, rather than compete with the female half of the population. The state and male-dominated unions conspired to push women out of the workplace, with a common union demand in negotiations with company bosses being that the employment of women should cease, and that men should be compensated for the loss of female earnings through being paid higher “family wages”. In 1865, the managers of a Scottish paper mill announced proudly that they had a policy of not employing married women, “to prevent the neglect of children”. Thus, the modern “housewife” was born, not out of tradition, nor good economics, but false righteousness and male opportunism.
Across history, periods of expansion in women’s economic opportunities have typically been followed, much as in Victorian Britain, with periods of backlash. This was true of the Roman Empire, the Islamic Abbasid Empire and of Mongol-Dynasty China. Every leading civilisation of its day had women at the heart of economic activity—until they were pushed out. And, when they were, it neither helped women nor the economy. Understanding this fact, and correcting our own understanding of history, can help us to avoid a mistake that has repeatedly culminated in the rise and decline of civilisations.
