Minding my own business

is what I was doing. Quietly reading through a pile of journals to see if there were any articles relevant to careers guidance practitioners when – for no reason that I can discern – I came across the following and ceased to be a careers information researcher and became a woman interested in how women lived over a hundred years ago!

‘The wife's administration of the earnings’? Working-class women and savings in the mid-nineteenth century

an article by Josephine Maltby (York Management School, University of York) published in Continuity and Change Volume 26 Issue 2 (August 2011)

Abstract

A survey of working-class womens activity as savers offers a new insight into their economic activity, opening questions about the sources inside and outside the family of the money saved by single and married women. It is relevant to a number of issues: the economic activity of married women and its relationship to the legal context in which they were operating – in particular before the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882; the extent to which women's employment in the nineteenth century may have been mis-stated and/or under-reported; and the distribution of income within the working-class family. A study of investment patterns within two savings banks, one in Huddersfield and one in Sheffield in the mid-nineteenth century, suggests that working-class women may have been more active as savers than has been reported by earlier studies.

Hazel’s comment:
I realise that the fascination of the article does not come through well in the abstract but it was, for me anyway, there. The idea of women being the managers of the household’s money is not new but this study shows how prevalent it was.

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