Throughout Georgian and Victorian times, men and women have worked from home to bring in an income, in a variety of ways. In 18th century England, various regions had their own specialised industries. In Bedfordshire and its neighbouring counties, straw plaiting was a common job up to the beginning of the 20th century, and could be done from home. In other areas – from Lancashire and Yorkshire to Northamptonshire and Somerset – there was a dependence on yarn and wool.

The manufacture of yarn, spinning it by hand, was often subcontracted to people working from home – known as ‘outworking’. It was often women who outworked, spinning from their cottages while they looked after children and ran the household. They could, by working this way, combine their other commitments and stay at home while their husbands were out labouring – yet also contributing to the family income. These women could also give bits of work to any children old enough to spin, and there was also the possibility of earning a bit extra by keeping a bit of yarn back to sell on. This was illegal, and there are many instances of women being charged with short or false reeling – producing a smaller amount of yarn than they had been contracted to do – and facing the punishment of a fine or, if they were repeated offenders, a spell in the local House of Correction. The prevalence of short or false reeling amongst outworkers was such that legislation had to be passed to deal with the problem, bringing in a new role of Inspector of Yarn, overseen by local magistrates, who would go and inspect the material spun by local workers.

With the onset of the Industrial Revolution, and increased mechanisation, outworkers became fewer in number in the woollen industry. Some had enough money to invest in knitting frames, or to lease them, but the returns might not be enough to justify such investment. Other forms of home-working were needed. Urban areas such as Birmingham – the ‘city of a thousand trades’ – had many industries with opportunities for men and women to continue working from home.

The steel pen industry was one such major business in Victorian Birmingham. Outworkers in this industry were men and women, young and old. Although many people worked in the new pen factories, others constructed nibs and pens from home. The job was not a secure one, and there were several pen makers listed as inmates of the Parish of Birmingham Workhouse in 1881.

This was the same situation with another popular outworking job – that of button making.

Another common job that women could do from home was needlework or dressmaking, producing items in a society where mass-produced fashion did not exist. In 1871, 80-year-old Louisa Morrison, originally from Edmonton, was working from her home in Albany Street, St Pancras, at needlework. In nearby, Islington, 68-year-old Honor Green was also using her fingers and her needle to earn a living. In 1911, 85-year-old Ellen Darling proudly listed her occupation as dressmaker at home – but her address was given as the Paddington Workhouse. This suggests that women prized their prior money-making ability and their professional status, even when they had been reduced to pauperism.

Other women combined working at home and at their customers’ houses, perhaps seeing themselves as ‘separate’ to those who were based in dressmaking shops. In 1911, spinster Alice Maud Howard, aged 47, living in Chelsea, was listed as a dressmaker and milliner at ladies’ houses and at home. This occupation – stressing the fact that she worked for ‘ladies’ – together with her former occupation of lady’s maid – is somewhat undermined by her habitation; although Chelsea is well-to-do now, it had some less salubrious areas in the past, and Alice was living in a tiny, one-roomed place, with a lodger to help her keep her head above water.

Some people desperate for work could end up as the victims of fraud. In 1874, Emily Faithfull – a 38-year-old artist, author, publisher and women’s rights activist who had links to the Industrial and Educational Bureau in London, and who had spent nearly 20 years working to promote women’s educational and industrial interests – wrote to The Times to complain about fraudsters placing adverts in the newspapers stating that they had work available for women wishing to earn money from home. Emily noted that one problem was a lack of practical education, with women seeking any kind of work because their lack of training made them unsuitable for any more salubrious employment. She said, Until educated women discover that they must learn a business before they undertake it, women’s work will neither be valuable nor honourable, and they will be preyed upon by those cunningly devised advertisements of ‘home work’ [The Times, 17 March 1874]

Emily had been involved with the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women (SPEW!), established in 1859, which aimed to both open up new areas of work for women, and to improve their standards of education. Emily and her colleagues recognised that the work open to women – both in the workplace and at home – was limited, and that men could both resent them working and seek to restrict it. Her work – and that of women such as Jessie Boucherett, one of SPEW’s founders – sought to increase the ways in which women could earn money, and also recognised the need of some women to be able to work from home because of the many demands on their time.

The stress of working from home could be high – having to complete a certain amount of work within a certain amount of time, or receive no wages; struggling to see in poor light, or on short winter days, when it must have been a race against time, and darkness, to get work finished. Work could be time-consuming and result in health problems. In 1895, the Birmingham Daily Post published a long report on what it termed homework – the employment of women in their own houses in what may be called industrial, as distinguished from domestic, labours. The paper stated that many objected to women home workers, partly because their work could not be monitored – meaning that they might work in an unhealthy environment, or for too long each day – and partly because of it might be cheaper to employ someone working from home, rather than in a factory. However, it was also recognised that home working enabled ‘industrial wives’ – those whose husbands went out to work and left their wives to maintain the house – to combine household activities with wage-earning, thus reducing the risk of such families needing outside financial help. [Birmingham Daily Post, 14 January 1895]

As time has gone on, old trades have died out – but in their place, new ways of home-working have emerged. Thanks to computers, email and mobile phones, working from home is just as popular as it ever was – albeit, perhaps, easier than it was for our Georgian and Victorian ancestors.