This is a study of women's employment in Great Britain from 1891 to 1921, years prior to, during and immediately after the First World War. As originally written, it was an Oxford University doctoral thesis, a scanned copy of which as well as a more reader friendly PDF version, can be accessed by title at Oxford Research Archives' website ora.ox.ac.uk. This study begins by showing, using the Censuses of 1891, 1901 and 1911 as its base, the occupational distribution of the sexes. It then takes a closer look industry by industry of women's work and finds as its most pervasive feature its division from men's. Moreover, further inquiry shows the division to be not only in content but also in pay, with women receiving less for their work than men did for theirs. Furthermore, this pattern persisted as much during the First World War, with working women's unprecedented entry into formerly all male preserves, as it did in the war's immediate aftermath, shifting but never eliminating the dividing line between the sexes. How to explain this? Why were women in certain jobs and not others? Why were men absent from the work women did? Why did women receive less for their work than men did for theirs?While the obvious economic factors controlling the demand for and supply of women's labour come immediately to mind, they by themselves fail to explain why sex as such was a differentiating factor, So this study digs deeper and finds its answer in the conventional upbringings of the sexes: women as wives, mothers and homemakers; men as heads of households, husbands, fathers, and breadwinners. In consequence, women's "hands and brains" were of a very different sort than those of men's and showed in what kind of work women were offered and willing to do compared to their brothers, husbands and sons.Though most women of the time accepted without question the division of their work from men's and the lower pay that went with it, not so a small but growing minority. For the 1891-1921 period coincided with the advance of the so-called women's rights movement whereby women, as active agents in furthering their interests as citizens, wives, mothers, and persons, also undertook to improve their position as workers. Why was there dissatisfaction with it? What were the measures taken to better it? How effective were they? What did they signify for the division of labour? This study embraces these questions as well.Though these "new women", as they were called, ended up having little to show for their efforts, this was not the case with their influence upon the upcoming generation of girls, signs of which were already appearing. But to pursue that further goes beyond the scope of this study. Even so, this study, limited as it is to women's employment in one country, for thirty of its years, and these of a century ago, is far from outdated. For the questions it asks and the answers it gives are as relevant today as they were then, perhaps even more so given how a movement just in its infancy back then has, in the intervening years, gained not only in numbers and influence but also in extent, no longer confined to its countries of origin but now circling the globe. Thus in showing how far women have advanced in the workplace since a century ago, this study brings not only perspective to an issue still very much with us but at the same time inspiration to those determined to eliminate it, namely, the very feature of women's work this study found as its most pervasive in earlier times, its division from men's. For as fewer and fewer people are willing to tolerate the exclusion of women from men's more expansive and lucrative side of the dividing line, the movement to eliminate it grows. This study, beyond its mere academic interest, does does much to point the way.
