Forget the cliché that women suddenly joined the workforce in the middle of the 20th century. They've been active in the economy as long as there's been an economy and not anecdotally. Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power, takes us through women's CV from the Stone Age to the Industrial Revolution.
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Transcript
(Transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors.)
Isabelle Roughol (00:00)
Hello and welcome. I'm Isabelle Roughol and this is Broad History, a brand new independent media about history with women in it this time. I'm so excited to be here behind the mic again. I'm just going to take a minute of your time and get on with the show. My goal here is to host a weekly history podcast that centers female characters and changes our perspective on the history we think we know. And I think if we do that, it might also illuminate our present.
making a show on my own with that amount of research, storytelling, of production, and then making it every single week is a mammoth task. So I'm starting smaller with a bunch of experiments over the next few weeks. What matters right now, and you'll know if you've ever built independent media, is finding out if there's an audience for this, pivoting until there is, and gathering enough momentum and evidence of momentum to secure funding and partners for the next step.
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Okay, episode one.
Isabelle Roughol (02:14)
You may remember this headline from the New York Times a few weeks ago that the internet had thoughts about. "Did women ruin the workplace?" I saw red. Not because of the blatant and quite cheap clickbait, but because the newspaper of record was propagating probably the biggest myth there is when it comes to women's history. That it once was a workplace without women, that they suddenly butted in where they never had been and didn't belong circa World War II. No, women have been engaged in paid labor in the economy
as long as there's been an economy, I promise you, and not anecdotally. So I called on the wonderful economic historian Victoria Bateman to help me bust that myth.
Isabelle Roughol (02:52)
Victoria, hello and thank you.
Victoria Bateman (02:54)
Hello, it's a pleasure to be with you!
Isabelle Roughol (02:57)
Thank you. It's great to have you too. And I should add that you're also the author of one of the most wonderful history books of 2025: Economica, A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.
I want to start us way, back in the Stone Age, which is where you start, because you found that even that far back, we already have misconceptions about the role and the work that early human women took on.
Victoria Bateman (03:22)
Yes, that's so true. Our ideas of the Stone Age economy have cast a great shadow over how we think about gender inequality in the present day. The idea of man the hunter, the idea that men were the active participants in their societies, hunting and providing for women and for children,
whereas women were sheltering in their caves in theory, looking after their infants and cooking a casserole on the fire from the meat that came back from the hunt the previous day, that idea of man the hunter, of man as the provider, it's cast such a shadow. And I think, sometimes in the present
When we're out there fighting for gender equality, there are those that say that to fight for a world in which men and women are equal is to fight against history. That if history tells you that men and women have always taken on these different roles in their economies, men as the active participants, as the providers and women as these
passive creatures that need to be protected and provided for, then perhaps in the modern day to fight for equality is to fight centuries, millennia of evolution. there certainly are those, I think, that say that we shouldn't be aiming for gender equality, that what we should be aiming for is gender complementarity. You know, the idea that
Isabelle Roughol (05:06)
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Bateman (05:09)
men and women are kind of equal but different and that we just need to accept our differences and it's gaining more traction I think in some ways today.
So really what I wanted to do with Economica was to push economic history right back to the beginning of time,
right back to the Stone Age and to crack open that myth of man the hunter to show that from the very beginning of economic history, women were there at the heart of their communities, at the heart of the Stone Age economy, hunting alongside men, providing not just for themselves, but for their
Isabelle Roughol (05:34)
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Bateman (05:54)
families. So I look at the recent archaeological evidence on that and it's fascinating because actually until relatively recently there was a big assumption amongst archaeologists and that was that if you found a Stone Age skeleton and that skeleton was buried with hunting gear, hunting tool kit, then
that skeleton was male. The assumption was that men were the hunters and because we assumed men were the hunters, when hunters were found in archaeological digs, then that backed up the assumption because we just assumed they were men. But interestingly, the most recent archaeological research that has actually started to take the bones and take the teeth of Stone Age hunters and actually sex them
Isabelle Roughol (06:22)
Mmm.
Victoria Bateman (06:48)
What that research has shown is if you take say the Stone Age Americas, 40 % of big game hunters were women. So actually it was quite close to 50-50 in terms of who was providing for their communities. And that was purely on the basis of hunting alone. we think about the Stone Age, we've kind of been obsessed with hunting, but actually...
Isabelle Roughol (07:02)
That's... that's
Victoria Bateman (07:13)
the gathering, for example, was in many Stone Age societies just as important and actually in some perhaps even more important. And we know that women were doing a lot of that too.
Isabelle Roughol (07:25)
And that's such a leap, that's such an assumption to make, that weapon in grave equals man in grave. And that's something that we saw
much more recent grave that I found fascinating which was, the Birka warrior, which is a very famous Viking tomb of a an axe and a spear and a sword and bow and arrow. It was found in the 19th century and only I think in 2017 a DNA analysis after a bone that was indeed
Victoria Bateman (07:42)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Isabelle Roughol (07:59)
a female warrior. And the backlash against that notion was so powerful. The researchers who happened to be a mostly female team had to defend their work and were harassed on the internet. They were accused of mislabeling their samples because there had to be some other explanation rather than a woman might wield a weapon.
Victoria Bateman (08:01)
Yeah.
Yes.
That's right, the mental gymnastics that people have performed to try to explain away the idea that women were hunting and that women were using weapons. The mental gymnastics, lots of crazy hypotheses have been put forward, like perhaps there had also been a man in the grave alongside the woman and that the tools and the weapons were his.
And somehow his body has, you know, has been lost in time, whereas hers has survived. And we're now falsely attributing the hunting and the fighting to the woman, when instead it's, you know, it should be this missing man that we're, that we're honoring. Or the idea that perhaps, you know, the women that are buried with these weapons and these hunting toolkits, perhaps that they were honorary hunters or honorary
Isabelle Roughol (08:50)
You
Victoria Bateman (09:14)
fighters, perhaps they weren't really doing the hunting and perhaps they weren't really doing the fighting, they've just been buried with these perhaps in in reverence to their husbands or their fathers. So the mental gymnastics that are performed to avoid the obvious answer which is actually simply that women were hunting alongside men and that women were
also as you say fighting alongside men because we have become so steeped in this idea that men were the providers, that men were the active people in history and so it becomes so difficult to overturn that mythology that we have of the past.
Isabelle Roughol (09:58)
Nonetheless, though, we do see some specialization in the roles and quite early on the tasks that are performed by women and the tasks are performed by men with some outliers, of course, which you will always find in history. What causes that specialization
Victoria Bateman (10:02)
We do. We do. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
So one thing we find happening in the course of probably the first big economic revolution in human history, which was the shift towards settled farming, the shift away from a hunter gatherer existence towards settled farming. One thing that we find is the rollout of the plow. The plow was the big technological revolution of the time. I mean, the plow was like AI today.
in terms of the impact on society and the impact on gender equality, because the thing about the plough is to a degree, it depended on muscle power. And that created an advantage for men
And so what tended to happen was that men increasingly specialised in being in the fields, ploughing the fields, whereas women took on the role of providing cloth.
men were providing food, women providing cloth.
spinning and weaving cloth for their families. And that cloth, I think, has been underrated in terms of its importance in the earliest economies because cloth was essentially the currency of exchange, the currency of trade.
It's all very well trading in food. I mean we can trade, you know meat for cheese for example. But the thing with trading in food is Certainly some food products can go off or if they're stored for example, they can be eaten by vermin So they're pretty perishable but the thing about cloth is it withstands the test of time and it's easy to judge
the quality of the cloth, by the feel of it, by the look of it, it's also lightweight. So to use as a trading medium, that all meant that cloth quite quickly became, in a sense, our first money, the first currency of...
global trade. And when we think about the Silk Road for example, named after the silk that women were producing and along the Silk Road all types of produce was priced in terms of bolts of silk.
So yes, there was this division of labour that started to arise within early societies, but what women were doing for their communities, what they were producing, I think has been sadly, and it's time to, I think, recognise the value that women were producing for their societies.
Isabelle Roughol (12:51)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
And it's always a bit of egg in the right? do women do a particular kind of work because it is not valued very much, or is it not valued very much because it is women performing it?
Victoria Bateman (13:02)
because it is women's
work, that's right.
And certainly with something like cloth making, from the point of view of women's reproductive labors, women throughout history have always had this double burden in a sense, the reproductive labors, but then also what we can do with our hands. And cloth making was something that women could do alongside, for example,
looking after young children. So cloth making, it's not a dangerous activity. The types of tools that you're using aren't dangerous to children. It's something that you can pause if you need to. It tends to be quite repetitive. So if you lose concentration because your eyes wander to your children, that's not going to diminish the task that you're doing.
So for all kinds of reasons really whilst in theory men and women should be equally good at cloth making, I think because of this extra role that women had to take on in terms of the providers of the next generation, then cloth making was something that they could do alongside that relatively easily.
But I mean, it certainly is true to say that
just because as a woman you're producing something of value for your communities doesn't mean that you yourself get to keep the value of what you're producing. And certainly the fact that cloth was valuable in a number of societies in history led to women being enslaved in order to produce
that thing of value, but where the value went to the enslavers or to the elites rather than to the women themselves. So whether that's, for example, in Viking Europe, women were enslaved and put in sunken round huts, producing cloth that the Vikings could trade through Eastern Europe.
or whether that is lots of examples of women producing without themselves experiencing the rewards of their labour.
Isabelle Roughol (15:09)
And you mentioned reproductive labor, which is again something I think we don't count, that doesn't feel part of the economy, And what I found interesting as well is how
tied the fate of women is to the state's need for that reproductive labor and how the balance shifts between how much women are priced for their labor of their hands versus their reproductive labor.
Victoria Bateman (15:25)
Yes.
Yeah,
yeah, that's right. mean, I think Women have always been on a knife edge in a sense. because certainly going back to, some of the earliest periods of history, when the planet was very sparsely populated, when there were very few people, you know, wandering the planet compared with the present day,
An extra birth within the community meant a great deal. That was something to be prized. It provided an extra pair of hands for the future. It provided the next generation. Fertility was something that was revered. The mother goddess was the religious icon that societies praised. And on the one hand, that could give women immense power.
But on the other hand, it meant that women, because they were so valuable for their fertility, they were also liable for capture and control. Because you don't want to capture and control something that is of no value. Because why bother? You only want to capture and control something that is of worth, something that is valuable.
And so, you know, trading in young fertile women, the exchange of young fertile women between communities, elites that build up harems of women, providing not just sexual services for elite men, but also reproductive services, the next generation of...
of elites or the next generation of fighters perhaps for the community. you might think where people have been scarce and where women's fertility has therefore been highly valued, that that's a good thing for women, but that can also lead to capture and control. I mean, I do think that As population pressures
expand and retreat throughout history, that you can see that reflected in state policy and state attempts to control what women do with their bodies, control who they marry, for example, control who can marry within the community, which women are the ones reproducing the next generation and which ones aren't.
Isabelle Roughol (17:51)
And you argue, I think quite powerfully, and I'd love for you to make that case for us, that restrictions on women's autonomy or involvement in paid labor sort of is directly connected to the economic decline and the fall, the collapse of entire civilizations. show a really great variety.
of attitudes to women throughout the ancient world, you know, I'd much rather have lived in ancient Egypt than ancient Athens, for instance. And in terms of collapse, I think the fall of the Roman Empire is a really interesting case study that you
Victoria Bateman (18:30)
Yes. really the key finding of Economica is that whatever civilization you look at in history, The most successful civilizations have always been those where women were at the heart of the economy. Whether that's ancient Egypt, whether it's ancient Rome, whether it's the medieval Middle East, whether it's Song Dynasty China, whether it's the West today, the most successful civilizations in history
have always been those where women are at the heart of the economy. But similarly, their subsequent decline is preceded by a process of sidelining women, of marginalising women, of controlling how they work, where they work, of controlling the rewards of their labour. And I think Rome is a fascinating example because,
Ancient Rome had a much more successful and longer lasting economy than say ancient Athens. And I think actually what was key to that was that Roman women had relatively greater freedoms than women in Athens. They were able to walk freely amongst with uncovered hair, at a time when in
Athens women were expected to be secluded, were expected to cover their hair. In the Roman world, women were out there in public, they were running businesses, they were working alongside men. Roman women were trading their wine and their olive oil the Mediterranean. And I do think that that was...
key to the initial dynamism really within the Roman economy because it meant that the Roman economy could fire on all cylinders. wasn't losing the dynamism that comes from of the population that is women.
But what we started to see in particular as the Republic turned into the Empire, into a more
autocratic kind of structure, what we started to see within the Roman world was almost an attack actually on working women and a building rhetoric that saw working women a problem. So you have, for example, the Emperor Augustus, who was part of a moral panic, really fuelled a moral panic about
feeling of declining fertility rates in the Roman world, a feeling that immigration was to risk kind of the purity of Roman culture and tradition. And so, Emperor Augustus, what he wanted women to do was to breed for the good of Rome, to preserve the Roman way of life
and prevent cosmopolitanism from ruining Roman traditions and Roman culture. So yes, there was sadly this growing kind of backlash against working women, a belief that women had better things to do than start businesses and be earning money, that they should be in the home breeding for the good of Rome.
That's something that you see within many civilizations throughout the fact that women were there at the heart of the economy, but then subsequently you get this backlash.
Isabelle Roughol (21:48)
I certainly hear some echoes that sound familiar for We're going to make a giant leap in the going to talk about my favorite nerdy moment in economic history, which is the Great Plague, but it's going to be right after these ads.
Victoria Bateman (21:51)
Yes!
Yes.
Isabelle Roughol (22:05)
We'll be right back.
Isabelle Roughol (22:11)
Did you know that women pretty much invented mass market publishing? Locked out of higher education and therefore out of writing academic books that impressed the elites, women identified a niche in the general audience instead, a hunger for entertainment and education among ordinary men and women. So they wrote for them. It wasn't a rich woman's hobby, it was done to support themselves and their families. And it wasn't just Jane Austen. Between 1780 and 1830, ten of the twelve bestselling novelists in Britain were women.
And at that time across Protestant Europe, about one in five published authors was a woman, a number we wouldn't reach again or get past until the late 20th century.
But researching, writing, editing, publishing, it's full time and it's expensive. I should know, that's exactly what I'm doing here with Broad History. Advances from publishers did not remotely cover the costs of writing unless you were quite famous already. So authors turned to subscriptions. They asked their network, their friends, their readers to pre-buy the book to fund their efforts in advance.
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Isabelle Roughol (24:04)
And we're back with Victoria Bateman
Let's talk about my favorite, favorite bit of economic history, which is towards the end of the Middle Ages, and that's the Black Death. We circa 1345 in Caffa, which is a Genoese trading on the Black Sea in Crimea. What happens in Caffa at that time?
Victoria Bateman (24:26)
So this was a battle really, wasn't it, between East and West and perhaps one of the first times in history that we see biological warfare. The dead bodies of
plague victims thrown over the city walls, infecting the Italian merchants who then once they were able to escape, boarded their ships, traveled through, the usual ports. this was a time when the Italians were really dominant when it came to trade across Europe, traveled through their various European ports, taking the plague.
with them. As you The Black Black Death, one of the most devastating shocks in economic history. I mean It wiped out between a third and a half of the population of Europe. and really shook the foundations of society. because you know this was a time when the system of serfdom that had really grown since the fall of the Roman Empire
was subject to challenge. Because when you have this devastating effect on your population then workers, or serfs, people, we, you know, as people, become more valuable because there are fewer of us. But at the same time, land became much less valuable because
Now land was in abundance relative to the fewer people that existed that needed to be fed from that land. So workers, greater value and want to be respected for that and want to be rewarded for that. Whereas the landowners, the elites within society,
the effect of the Black Death on the value of their land was really quite devastating from their point of view. you've got these two parties within society, your landowners and your peasants, this big shift in power relations between them. And the way that played out really varied depending on where you were in Europe. In Eastern Europe, for example, what tended to happen was
Isabelle Roughol (26:15)
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Bateman (26:35)
the imposition of like a second that restricted, for example, the geographic mobility of peasants.
And if you can't move, then you can't run off, find a better job and build a better life for yourself. So that was one result. But what was happening over in Britain or in Western Europe is that Peasants were able to wrestle greater rights from the landowners and achieve higher wages.
I mean, it wasn't an easy process. What it culminated in in Britain was the Peasants' Revolt in the 1380s, when peasants got tired of being ignored, tired of being unrewarded, and so marched on London to demand greater rights and higher wages and lower taxes and so on. And actually women were there
on the front line of that. ultimately, what we find in Britain is a higher wage economy, peasants with more rights. And this wasn't just about, a
change in the landscape in class terms, between the landed elite and peasants, but this also had an impact in terms of gender equality as well. Because one of the things that you're seeing at this time is that In response to the fact that you have fewer peasants within your economy, fewer men, Then farms, businesses,
increasingly need to turn to women to perhaps do tasks that were previously done by men. And so you have lots of opportunities for women in this economy in which ordinary people are able to achieve greater rights and freedoms. This is a time when women have the opportunity to increasingly so go out to work, get a job,
build a life for themselves. And I think we see that in particular in two sectors of the economy. So one is in meat production and the other is in brewing. and ale. you imagine that, you know, these peasants, they now have more rights and they're earning more. And one of the things they do therefore is to buy more meat and to buy more beer.
they can afford.
Isabelle Roughol (28:51)
That's a good life.
Victoria Bateman (28:52)
those things.
is living your best life. perhaps making up for what you'd lived through in the years beforehand.
And one of the things that happens as people eat more meat is that really boosts the meat production sector. And so we get the emergence of the stereotypical dairymaid, of women whose job it is to look after the cattle. look after the cows that are both producing the milk, but also producing the beef. And so it's at this time that beef started to become the national dish
of the English. Beef pies, roasted beef and so on start to become the national dish. And what do you need to wash down your beef pies or your roast beef? It's good ale, know, beer. And women were also there, you know, at the heart of what was happening in the brewing system. So You see the transition away from home brewing towards more commercial brewing.
You see the birth of the British pub and tavern. And it's fascinating when you look at the records, say, of the Brewers Guild in London in the early 1400s, so not long after the Black Death, And by that point, London Brewers, there were enough of them to get together to form this guild.
And around 40 % of them were women. So, this transformation that happens not just to class relations, but actually to gender relations, I think, is so important at the time.
Isabelle Roughol (30:16)
a huge
And that's where you have a bit of a roll of the dice of history as well, because this continued in Britain and in Northwestern Europe, whereas perhaps Southern Europe went back to more...
traditional gender relations. And so the powerhouses that Spain and Portugal and Italy not continue on to be the great powerhouses of later centuries. And you draw a direct connection between these transformation after and why the industrial revolution happened in the unlikeliest of places, you know, this tiny cold island a
Victoria Bateman (30:38)
right.
Isabelle Roughol (31:02)
smallish population and not that many resources you know if you compare to to a lot of the previous empires of the world.
Victoria Bateman (31:08)
that's right. I mean, I think To understand why it was that Britain had the Industrial Revolution, why it was that with that, Europe and the West moved to the top of the economic league tables, you know, after millennia of being behind and why it was that alongside you see this shift from Southern Europe, Southern and Eastern parts of the Mediterranean up to the northwest of Europe,
first to Holland and then to Britain, to understand that I think we really have to look at the lives of ordinary women. so often when we think about how did Britain do it, we think about men. we think about famous male scientists, engineers, industrialists, bankers but actually I argue in Economica that It was the freedoms of ordinary women and those freedoms that you know go back to that story
of the Black Death, of ordinary women being able to go out onto farms, get jobs, milking cows or brewing and working at their local ale houses, that the ability for young women to leave their homes, earn their own money, that that sowed the seeds of economic change that over the centuries led to the rise of Britain. And I think that worked through a number of four or five different
channels.
So the first one was that When young women were out there earning their own money in Britain, they were able to avoid child marriage. because they could stand up, they could run off, get a job and decide for themselves whether, when and who to marry. And actually, if you look at the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, the average age that a British woman was getting married at was 25 or 26,
It wasn't in her teens. at a time when, for example, in Southern Europe, in China, in the Middle East, in India, women typically did get married in their teens. In Britain, and I should say also in the Netherlands, so in Northwestern Europe more generally, women were getting married not until their mid-20s. And that meant that they weren't producing children until their mid-20s, until they were married.
and the result was much less population pressure on the economy. And That meant that the economy was better able to support higher standard of living, Whereas what was happening, say, in southern Europe at that time was population was really expanding to a point that it was pulling down those high wages that existed after the Black Death. And so you ended up with this
kind of divergence in wages between Northwestern Europe and Southern Europe. And those high wages, I think, were really important because that provided businesses with an incentive to develop and use machines. Because if instead you can just exploit cheap labor, why do you want to build machines? And actually when we think about the Industrial Revolution, it's very much about machines.
Isabelle Roughol (34:16)
Mm-hmm.
Victoria Bateman (34:17)
It's
the capital in capitalism, you just the rollout of machines, clunking, clunking, know, machines in the cotton industry and the steel foundries and so on. And why do businesses increasingly want to adopt these machines? It's to save on labour costs. And why are labour costs? To get more productivity.
Isabelle Roughol (34:34)
Yes, to get more productivity out of that labor.
Victoria Bateman (34:38)
And I think the other thing is that because women were marrying in their mid-twenties rather than in their teens and having smaller families as a result, Families could better afford to educate or apprentice, train their children because they had fewer of them. And they could also better afford to save because with fewer mouths to feed, you've got more disposable income. So you think actually that
the ability for young women to go out into the economy, get a job, and take charge of the marriage decision, which in turn feeds through to later marriage, smaller families, and with it, a higher wage economy that provides the incentive for technological innovation, the incentive for businesses to use machines. Also, families that are better able to afford to save, and that's therefore providing the funds to invest in machines.
and Families that are better able to afford to educate their children so that you've got the skill base that can help develop those machines and that can use those machines in the production process. So I think actually in terms of sowing the seeds of the industrial revolution and the rise of the West, it is those freedoms that ordinary women had going all the way back to the
black death, you know, that's so critical. Possibly going back even further than the black death, but I think To understand what was so special about Western Europe, what was so special about the West that allowed it to overtake parts of the world that had been ahead, not just for centuries, but for millennia, it's women.
It's the freedoms of ordinary women. I think when you look at the lives of men, actually they were relatively similar. Whether you were looking at China, India, the Middle East or Europe, relatively similar. But the lives of women were markedly, markedly different. And I think that is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that we've been missing when we've tried to explain the Industrial Revolution and tried to explain the rise of Europe. And I think...
Isabelle Roughol (36:49)
Hmm.
Victoria Bateman (36:49)
Appreciating that, appreciating how important the freedoms, the economic freedoms of ordinary women is for building a successful economy. think it's really key
where we are today.
Isabelle Roughol (37:04)
It is and it's fascinating and I think it's a very important point that you make and we've heard everything about the industrial revolution from Protestant work ethic to the weather, but that has been talked about less, which is really surprising when you think about how much women's empowerment and women's autonomy is at the heart of development policies today when you're talking about developing
Victoria Bateman (37:13)
Mm. Yes.
Isabelle Roughol (37:29)
poorer economies. I was reporting in Cambodia 15 years ago and it was all about young women in garment factories that were transforming the economy and transforming their own destiny, earning more than young men. And yeah, that's something that was also true our own history.
Victoria Bateman (37:32)
Yes.
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.
Yeah.
Isabelle Roughol (37:49)
Is this the point at which work becomes something that happens in the workplace? Because we've, I think, devalued
Victoria Bateman (37:49)
Yeah.
Isabelle Roughol (37:57)
women's work a lot in history because it happened in the home. Even paid labor happened in a home, piece work Is this the Industrial Revolution that changes that?
Victoria Bateman (38:01)
Yes.
Yes,
To a large extent, yes. historically, Before the Industrial Revolution, the home was the workplace and the workplace was the home. And I think similarly For men and for women. you would, you know, you would be sleeping, living, eating, whilst also, you know, weaving your cloth or making your pots.
Isabelle Roughol (38:14)
For men and women, for both, right?
Victoria Bateman (38:28)
or hooving horses or... your workshop and your home were on the same patch of land. And What happened with the Industrial Revolution, with the arrival of mills and factories, is this greater division between the workplace and the home. And The workplace becomes seen as
the economy and the home instead becomes seen as a place of nurture. And What you see in the course of the 19th century is so as the industrial revolution wears on and as you approach towards the latter part of the 19th century is much as you'd seen actually in the Roman world a kind of backlash against working women
a push really for women to to remain within within the domestic sphere. and for men to be the people out there in the workplace. And so you see not only this division between home and workplace, but This division is gendered: So The workplace becomes seen as masculine and the home as feminine.
various things push in this direction in the 19th century. I mean, in terms of working class jobs, Unions, for example, that push for family wages for men, unions that put pressure on employers literally to not employ women so as to free up more jobs for men. by
By locking women out of the labour market of course, Men feel that they can push up their pay packets by locking out half of the competition, so hat makers, printers, forming these unions or these guilds that are pushing women out of the workplace and into the home and under the pretext that this is good for women, that you know let men
protect and provide for women, and that the workplace might be an exploitative place for women. So It's better off if they're in the home. So that's what was happening in terms of working class jobs, but then also in terms of professional jobs, more middle class jobs. And the 19th century and, beginning with the industrial revolution was really a time when the professions were really starting to Things like law,
and accountancy, civil service, administrative sectors, were really pushing forward because businesses were becoming more complex, the economy was becoming more complex, so we needed more accountants, more lawyers and other things. And what started to happen was that those professions started to form their own societies and those societies pushed to get royal charters that allowed them to
establish entry requirements or you know, training requirements. So to become a professional accountant or professional lawyer or a professional medic, you needed to be a part of one of these societies and meet their requirements, meet their standards. And sadly, what happened as these societies formed was that they locked women out. Again, it was a great way if you were you know, a middle class man to
to wipe out half the competition you might face in the job market. So Women were being increasingly pushed out of the most lucrative jobs, and left with the crumbs really. Expected to assume the role of a housewife, but of course the reality was that many women couldn't afford to be housewives.
you know, Reality bites. But at the same time, they were locked out of better paid jobs. so women were left in a situation where Yes, they had a family to look after, they had children to bring up, but they also had to work to make money. So whether it was taking in...
Making gloves at their kitchen table, in cloth make small garments, sew stockings or sew gloves at their kitchen table. Whether it was going on the high street with a basket full of hot buns to sell, the bankers outside the stock market in the centre of the city of London. Women were having to really kind of root around and find a means to support their subsistence.
Of course, if you were an unmarried woman, then really your key options included domestic service a notoriously poorly paid, poor working conditions, part of the economy that was very much ignored, neglected by the unionisation, by trade unions that were forming at the time.
So sadly you do see this backlash really against women's work that happened. And So the idea of the housewife is a Victorian invention. an invention of Victorian Britain, an invention of that time. Before Victorian times, women were there alongside men in the workplace. And it was hat makers,
printers, stationers, In my book I talk about this collection of business cards that's held at the British Museum and the British Museum has tens of them, hundreds of them, these are from the 18th century business cards you can see that women were doing all kinds of things. This is the business card, it's from 1735, it's of a female shoemaker who had a shop.
you know, at the heart of the city of London in 1735. You can see her name, Anna Skew, shoemaker on her business card. But there were business cards of female fan makers, hat makers, printers, jewellers, tea dealers... Women had been there, doing all kinds of things in the economy. But what happened in the course of the Victorian period is that
they were sidelined, they were marginalised, they were pushed into the home and expected to take on the role of the
Isabelle Roughol (44:38)
So I should say for audio listeners that you showed us this beautiful original, I'm thrilled to see the business card of a woman shoemaker with a beautiful illustration of a boot. It's reproduced in the book so people can see it as well or check the YouTube channel. I think you make a really, really important point which is that this idea that...
seems a lot of people have now of women's workforce participation as something that's novel, that is something that our generation or maybe our mom's generation introduced from the 60s and forward not novel, it's perhaps a reintroduction of something.
Victoria Bateman (45:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
Isabelle Roughol (45:18)
that has existed and that's why I think the headline did women ruin the workplace just rankled me so much is that it establishes as some kind of eternal and universal truth something that is really
Victoria Bateman (45:19)
It is.
He
Isabelle Roughol (45:30)
a blip in human history. and something that I think as you show was not natural, it's something that was engineered, the exclusion of women from work by unions, by people seeking their own self-interest, which ended up locking women out. So, yeah, next time you see a trad wife, you know, not that trad take the long view of history.
Victoria Bateman (45:45)
Yeah.
Isabelle Roughol (45:56)
We're going to conclude on something I know I should never ask of a historian, but I'm going to risk it anyway, which is to predict the future. Because with everything you talk to us I would this doesn't feel like a time of expansion women's rights and women's autonomy. What does this say about our economic future?
backlash that we're seeing now against women's rights, that nativist impulse also that's being pushed.
Victoria Bateman (46:21)
well, I think History can be our greatest ammunition to stand up to this. If you honestly believe, if you have a view of the past in which successful civilizations were built on men alone, then perhaps you have little to lose from sidelining one half of the population. If you honestly believe that ancient Egypt, that ancient Rome, that the Industrial Revolution was a result
of male-only efforts, then perhaps what do you have to lose? Whereas if instead we can show that throughout history the most successful civilizations have depended on female as well as male labor, then you have a lot to lose from sidelining women. You risk repeating what has been the biggest mistake of human
history. know, what we've talked about in the Roman Empire, how the Roman Empire went from rise to decline and how that followed the fact that women were there in the economy but then this backlash against them. And that has been repeated throughout all successful civilizations in history. Rise and decline is the repeated story of economic history.
If we in terms of our civilization, if we don't want to end up in the waste paper basket of history, then we need to stand up to this backlash. We need to recognize what history tells us. We need to stay on course. We need to continue to regain the ground that was lost in the Victorian period.
continue in the direction of an economy in which men and women are contributing equally with the same economic freedoms and I think ultimately The recipe of economic success, the thing that all economists are desperately looking for, it's actually, it's not complicated. it's actually relatively simple.
Economic success comes from people being free to make their own decisions about how they work, being free to keep the rewards of their work, being free to save and invest those rewards and decide how they spend their rewards. But women need those freedoms as well as men. We can't be
sidelined. We can't be pushed to the margin. We can't be dictated to in terms of how we work, such as pushed into the home to perform reproductive labour if we might prefer to be out there starting a business, driving the economy forward in that particular way. building a successful economy, it isn't rocket science when you think about it. It is about ordinary people
having the freedom to make the most of their lives, to make the most of their talents. and time after time civilizations have shown the power of that but they have also shown what happens when you move in a very different direction. So let's not repeat the greatest mistake of human history.
Isabelle Roughol (49:52)
was Victoria Bateman. Thank you so much for such a fascinating conversation. The book is called Economica: a Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. There will be a link in the show notes. You can buy it straight from the Broad History bookstore. That's another way to support this program.
Remember to sign up for the newsletter at broadhistory.com and consider becoming a founding member. But for now, it's goodbye from me, Isabelle Roughol. This was Broad History. We'll be back soon.
