Gendered Justice: Women Workers, Gender, and Master and Servant Law in England, 1700-1850

As England industrialized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, employment relationships continued to be governed, as they had been since the Middle Ages, by master and servant law. This dissertation is the first scholarly work to conduct an in-depth analysis of the role that gender played in shaping employment law. Through a qualitative and quantitative examination of statutes, high court rulings, and records of the routine administration of the law found in magistrates notebooks, petty sessions registers, and lists of inmates in houses of correction, the dissertation shows that gendered assumptions influenced the law in both theory and practice. A tension existed between the laws roots in an ideology of separate spheres and the reality of its application, which included its targeted use to discipline a female workforce that was part of the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution. A close reading of the legislation and judges decisions demonstrates how an antipathy to the notion of women working was embedded in the law governing their employment relationships. An ideological association of men with productivity and women with domesticity underlay both the statutory language and key high court rulings. Therefore, although the law applied to workers of both sexes, women were excluded semantically, and to some extent substantively, from its provisions. A quantitative analysis of 5590 cases of employment conflicts, drawn from 64 different sources and entered into two databases, reveals that gender shaped the rates of prosecutions brought by and against male and female workers, as well as the types of conflicts in which they were involved, and the outcomes of cases. In general, female workers were treated slightly more leniently as defendants than male workers, although they were slightly less successful as plaintiffs except in cases of assault. However, female textile workers were treated more harshly than female workers overall, and than male textile workers. They were also an exception to the downward trend of female servants involvement in cases over the course of the period. As women were increasingly driven out of employment in arable regions, they made up a decreasing share of workers in master and servant disputes.