Women and the business of farming: the role of farmers’ widows in England, 1750-1850

"This paper is based on the early stages of a new comparative project on the changing role of farmers’ wives, daughters and widows in three English counties after the mid-eighteenth century. The research aims to bridge a gap in our understanding of the gendering of the farm labour process in the past. The gendered nature of paid work in the formal rural labour market is now well established as a key area of historical research, with regional diversity, lifecycle change, market conditions and local custom all recognised as significant factors affecting women’s employment opportunities, task allocation and wage rates. But the range of activities undertaken by farmers’ female relatives, and the contribution these made to the family business, remain obscure. This is largely because the kinds of tasks performed by such women – supervising servants, attending to farmyard animals, working in the diary, selling goods at market, managing the farmhouse diet and budget – were not widely documented. As G.E. Mingay commented many years ago, ‘The farmers’ wife and daughters do not emerge very clearly from the contemporary records’. Indeed, the dominant assumption in much contemporary comment and historical literature is the withdrawal of farmer’s female relatives from productive roles on the farm and in the farmhouse in the century before 1850 (especially on farms in southern England), with women abandoning their skills and increasingly perceiving the farm business to be distasteful and inappropriate. This significantly underestimates the wide range of women’s experiences based on farm size, type and region, social status, lifecycle circumstances and household structure. This project therefore aims to identify and catalogue the whole range of activities undertaken by farmers’ wives, daughters and widows, calculate the contribution they made to the family business, and assess the ways their position changed over time and space. This paper however will concentrate on the position of farmers’ widows, drawing upon the accounts kept by two farmers’ widows in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Frances Hamilton owned and managed the 100-acre Lydeard House farm in Somerset after the death of her husband in 1779, directed a labourforce of indoor and outdoor workers and undertook brewing and cidermaking . Mary Simpson took over the running of her husband’s 94-acre rented farm in Norfolk on his death in 1831 until her son assumed responsibility for the business in 1838. These records are important, not least because they are rare surviving records kept by farm women. But they also reveal the remarkable range of activities undertaken by these widows: the level of business acumen attained during their years married to farmers, their skills in account-keeping, the relationship they had with their workforce, and their participation in the wider rural community. The paper will thus demonstrate that the model of women’s removal from the farm business in the century after 1750 is too prescriptive."