19th century (dbe0d6f6)

The 19th century is presented as a period when women’s social position became an economic and political struggle rather than a merely theoretical question. As women entered paid employment, their labor challenged established expectations that they belonged in the home; yet low wages, unequal domestic responsibilities, and dependence on men continued to restrict the freedom that work might otherwise make possible.

Industrial work and unequal wages

The Industrial Revolution brought women into the labor force and gave demands for emancipation a material basis. Employers welcomed women workers in part because they accepted lower wages, but their employment also provoked resistance from male workers, who saw them as cheap competition. The account argues that workers’ interests did not automatically produce solidarity between women and men: women could defend their own interests and cease being treated as a threat to the working class only when they were integrated into unions.

The wage figures make the inequality concrete. In France, an 1889–93 survey found that women received half the pay of men for a day’s equal work. A 1908 survey reported that women working from home earned no more than twenty centimes an hour, and sometimes as little as five—rates on which they could not live without charity or a protector. In the United States in 1918, women earned half men’s salaries; in Germany, women mining the same quantity of coal earned about 25 percent less. French women’s wages rose somewhat faster than men’s between 1911 and 1943, but remained substantially lower.

Women’s employment nevertheless spread across occupations and classes. In France, 900,000 women worked from home in 1900, making clothes, leather goods, funeral wreaths, purses, beadwork, and souvenirs; that number later declined. By 1906, 42 percent of working-age women were employed in fields including farming, industry, business, banking, insurance, offices, and the liberal professions. The movement expanded internationally amid the labor crisis and war of 1914–18, and women from the lower middle and middle classes also entered the professions.

Work, marriage, and economic dependence

Paid work did not by itself free women from the burdens assigned to them at home. Pregnancy, child care, and housekeeping remained chiefly women’s responsibility. In France, an antifeminist domestic tradition could make men regard household chores as beneath them, leaving women to reconcile work and family life under conditions more difficult than those faced by their husbands.

The rural household shows how the working day could encompass nearly every form of labor. A peasant woman might care for the garden, animals, and fields; clean the cowshed, spread manure, sow, plow, weed, and harvest; then prepare meals, wash, mend, and care for children. Her day began at dawn with feeding animals and serving the men their first meal, continued through work in the fields and household tasks, and could end with mending or cleaning after dinner. Pregnancy and child care added to this workload. With little time to tend to her own health, she could become prematurely worn down, while her husband retained opportunities for social life on Sundays and fair days. The exceptional peasant woman with servants or relief from field work could enjoy greater authority and a more balanced life; for most, rural labor remained crushing.

Marriage could appear to offer security or release from work, but that promise was compromised by women’s limited economic options. Girls were often raised for marriage rather than personal development, and the hope of marrying into a higher social position could divide their attention and weaken their commitment to professional training. The resulting cycle reinforced women’s disadvantage at work and made marriage seem still more necessary. Work, meanwhile, did not always bring social dignity, freedom of conduct, or economic autonomy sufficient to offset its demands. Women could therefore experience paid employment as an obligation from which marriage might deliver them, even as work gave them the possibility of emancipating themselves from marriage.

The desired alternative was a reconciliation of family life and a profession that did not require exhausting effort. But economic inequality and the prospect of dependence on a wealthy husband made that choice harder: the chance of a fortunate marriage was held out as an appealing escape, while remaining independent demanded greater effort from women. The period thus presents employment as both a means of self-determination and a field structured by low pay, domestic expectations, and the lure of dependence.

Repetitive labor and gendered time

The account contrasts open-ended projects with work that merely reproduces the present. It describes birth and breast-feeding as natural functions rather than projects through which women could claim a meaning for their existence; when motherhood was treated as women’s defining duty, housework further confined them to repetition. Against this, it sets the maker’s activity: the person who invents an instrument or builds beyond immediate need can project an end, alter the world, and open a future. The contrast is not simply between paid and unpaid work, but between activities that establish new possibilities and labor that must continually be done again.

Housework gives this contrast its most tangible form. A woman in a poor household may work to make a soot-darkened shack more livable, arranging its few furnishings as carefully as she can, only to feel that nothing she does can make it beautiful. Dishes become dirty again; furniture gathers dust; clothes need mending again. The housewife runs in place, struggling against the return of disorder rather than achieving a lasting result. A sixteen-year-old’s account of hearing her mother clean the house anticipates a future in which the same daily tasks stretch across the years: time ceases to feel like a movement toward a horizon and becomes a succession of identical days.

The girl’s development is also organized around a future imagined as waiting. Childhood may still be experienced as a time of present activity and autonomy, but puberty makes the future seem to settle into the body. The adolescent girl’s youth becomes a transition without valid ends of its own, and her anticipated adulthood is shaped by waiting for a man as a possible route to fulfillment and escape. This differs from the young man’s desire, for whom a woman is described as one element of life rather than the destiny around which life is organized.

The discussion of menstruation shows how social attitudes can turn bodily experience into another constraint on time and movement. Anxiety about the body may lead a girl to give up expeditions and pleasures for fear that her condition will become known. The text connects this apprehension with increased distress and bodily symptoms, while arguing that a biological condition becomes a handicap through the perspective imposed on it. Many women, including athletes, travelers, and women doing strenuous work, accommodate themselves to monthly discomfort; the restriction lies not in a simple biological destiny but in the wider situation that limits women’s outlets.

Solidarity, social position, and freedom

The 19th-century struggle for women’s emancipation is set beside conflicts involving class and race, but the account does not treat those histories as interchangeable. Women and workers were not automatically united: women’s low wages could be used against male workers, and coalition depended on recognizing that shared condition rather than treating women as competitors. Likewise, the comparison with Black Americans identifies a common practice of justifying subordination through stereotypes, while the text distinguishes the distinct histories and circumstances of different oppressed groups.

Women’s position, the argument insists, has also been shaped by their dispersion within families and social classes. Women do not necessarily share interests across class or race: bourgeois women may be aligned with bourgeois men, and white women with white men, rather than with working-class or Black women. Unlike groups with a shared political space or tradition, women are often tied by home, work, and economic circumstances to fathers and husbands. This helps explain why women have struggled to constitute themselves collectively as subjects and why gains have often been conceded rather than won through a unified movement.

The analysis finally measures social arrangements not by claims that women are happy within them, but by the concrete possibilities they provide. Its existentialist standard is freedom: a subject realizes freedom through projects and movement toward an open future. When women are forced to assume the position of the inessential Other, their capacity to act as autonomous subjects is obstructed. The 19th century’s significance lies in making that obstruction increasingly visible: women’s entry into work supplied an economic basis for emancipation, but low wages, domestic labor, and marriage as an apparent escape continued to narrow the future they could claim.