Women throughout (American and English) history worked. The idea that in the past the sole responsibility of women was domestic labor and childrearing is largely inaccurate for the majority of women in these societies. Women were expected to do domestic labor like cooking and cleaning and raising children AND work to bring income to their family, this was true for the average woman, excluding the upper middle class/wealthy. If a woman’s husband owned a tavern or restaurant, she also cooked and kept bar and did the duties associated with the business. If a woman’s husband was a (small scale/subsistence/tenant) farmer, the woman did farm labor. Often a woman was expected to do labor related to her husband’s job.
Women also had vocations and forms of income unrelated to their husband. The nature of these jobs changed over time but many women did things like weaving, embroidery, crafting, beer brewing, chicken tending and laundress work to bring income. Women with skills were seen as better marriage candidates because they’d make money for their husband.
My great-great-great-great grandmother told fortunes and did farm labor, my great-great-great grandmother was a midwife, my great-great grandmother worked in a textile factory for most of her adult life and my great grandmother was a school lunch lady.
This is why it makes me irate when women on the right say things like “feminism forced me to get a job instead of being allowed to stay home with my children” before feminism you would have had to tend house, raise your children and bring income to your husband. Now, at the very least, the money is hopefully your own. Women were always in the workforce, their work was not recognized.
Just to add that the vast majority of fibre production and manufacture with cloth was done by women for much of history
relevant to that recent "people don't think working class women existed" thing.
What I think needs a little more spelling out as well is the way that historically, what we grammatically speak of as being the man's occupation was often in fact the entire family's occupation, with which parts of the necessary work each person did conventionally divided up along gender lines.
Just some random examples (the gender splits here are pretty typical but I can't say they're true of all cultures; I'm primarily familiar with western European history and especially the British Isles):
men fishing, women preparing the fish for sale and selling them at a market ("fishwives")
wives as salespeople and managers of the financial side of the business was also common for many male-coded artisan crafts; the man who is the 'silversmith' is actually smithing the silver (possibly with the aid of sons, apprentices and/or hired labourers), while his wife is taking care of everything else that is necessary for this to translate into a money-making business
husbands underground mining coal with a focus on speed over purity of product, children transporting it to the surface so he doesn't have to leave, and wives sorting the coal from the worthless rock on the surface. The entire family contributes to the pay check, which is based on the amount of sorted coal delivered.
wives as writers, editors, secretaries and research partners to male academics, scholars and politicians - also frequently doing much of the work associated with the networking that was neccessary for success in these careers. (It was not uncommon in some periods for wives to handle a lot of their husbands' correspondence, and of course a lot more socialising used to involve being hosted at peoples' homes. Wives of the relevant social classes for these careers were unlikely to be handling e.g. the cooking themselves - their job here is more like event manager and line manager of the staff doing the work.)
servants who were married were typically married to servants in the same household (and servant occupations were highly gendered)
"farmer's wife" and "baker's wife" and so on are properly understood as occupations, traditionally taking on parts of the work that a modern baker would need to hire someone for
the same is also true of soldiers' wives! this varies by army but in many pre-and early modern armies the 'camp wives' had duties and took on work that in modern armies is either done by soldiers (cooking, maintaining kit, guarding the camp, certain parts of supply chain management*) or external contractors *by which we sometimes mean 'brutalising local peasants and stealing their stuff'; womens' involvement in these activities is well-attested to in contemporary art
I really really want to emphasize the academia one, because so many people think women weren't doing research historically, when more accurately they weren't doing *credited* research. But they were in the labs, working right alongside their husbands and fathers and brothers, getting the science done.
To add to the coal mining point - women in the South Wales coal belt had lower life expectancies than the men who went underground. There's a whole thing about it in the Big Pit National Coal Museum.
After a time, women were no longer allowed to work underground, but being a miner's wife was backbreaking exhausting labour, and a great many women not only got the same health issues from handling and washing the coal dust-impregnated clothing of their husbands, but also got serious medical emergencies such as burns and scalds from the constant water heating for baths, pregnancy complications, etc.
One of the greatest upgrades to the lives of South Walian women that ever came about was the funding and introduction of the pit head baths.
