Before she said ‘I do’ The impact of industrialization on unmarried women’s labour force participation 1812-1932
Recent research based on Dutch marriage records shows a steady decrease of female labour force participation from the 1840s until the 1930s. However, this research relies on combined data from several municipalities. Analysing the sources in this way aggregates the development to such an extent that local variation is completely overlooked. This article contributes to our understanding of regional variation in unmarried women’s labour from 1812 to 1932. The purpose of this research is to isolate the developments in industry from those in agriculture and the service sector. I use marriage records from four regions that list the occupation of the bride to determine the amount of working unmarried women throughout the research period. My data show a different development from the previously mentioned research. Unlike earlier results, I found that unmarried women’s labour force participation in the industrial centres did not decrease gradually throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Moreover, labour force participation was remarkably high compared to the other sectors, especially during the first decades of the twentieth century. I argue that industry developed in a specific way because it required a cheap labour force which was mostly found among young women. This statement is supported by showing the percentages of brides with a recorded occupation in two industrial centres. Furthermore, I show that in these centres, the younger a woman was, the higher the chance that she stated an occupation in her marriage record. This was not the case in the agricultural and serviceoriented regions I have investigated. I therefore argue that research on the history of female labour should be approached from a comparative perspective for a proper understanding of its developments.