Women’s work in orchards and cider making

The documents that survive for farm cider are accounts, tenancy papers, tithe material, trade records and the occasional diary. Every one of those was created for a purpose that made men visible: ownership, tenancy, wage payment, sale. A woman working alongside her husband on piece rates, or as part of a family unit paid as a unit, appears in an account only as part of a sum paid to him.

Census enumeration compounds it. Nineteenth-century census practice recorded occupations in ways that systematically under-recorded women’s agricultural work, and the categories used shifted between censuses, so the apparent decline or rise of women’s employment in agriculture across the period is partly an artefact of the recording. Historians of rural labour treat these series with considerable caution and so should anyone using them for orchards.

The consequence is a familiar historiographical trap. An absence in the record is read as an absence in the past, and a history written from the documents alone produces orchards worked entirely by men, which nobody who has looked at the photographic evidence believes.

Fruit gathering is the clearest case. Picking, and particularly the gathering of windfalls from the ground, was seasonal work performed in numbers over a few weeks by whoever was available, which in practice meant women and children alongside men. It was paid by the sack or the bushel rather than by the day, which suited a family working together and made the woman’s contribution invisible in the accounts.

Nineteenth-century public inquiries into the employment of women and children in agriculture documented gang and seasonal labour across England in some detail, and describe the conditions plainly: long hours, exposure, low piece rates, and children present because their mothers were. Fruit harvest is one of the tasks that appears in this material.

Sorting is the other large category. Fruit arriving at a mill has to be picked over for rot, leaves and stones, and this was routinely women’s work at farm and, later, at factory scale. The commercial works of the twentieth century employed women in numbers in sorting and bottling halls, which is well attested photographically and is the point at which the work becomes visible in industrial employment records.

On a mixed farm the farmhouse was a production unit with its own responsibilities, and the dairy is the best-documented example: butter and cheese making were characteristically the farmer’s wife’s department, with her own equipment, standards and often her own income from sales. Cider sat in an adjacent position, and the evidence for who managed the cellar is much weaker than for the dairy.

What can be said is that the cellar work was of the same kind: seasonal, repetitive, requiring judgement, and carried out in the buildings around the house rather than in the fields. Scalding casks, keeping vessels sweet, drawing the daily allowance and provisioning the harvest workforce with food and drink all belonged to the domestic economy, and that economy was run by women.

Widows are the exception that shows the rule. A widow holding a tenancy appears in the record as the farmer, and such cases are numerous enough to establish that women ran holdings, including orchard holdings, whenever the legal circumstances put them in that position. What the record does not show is the work of the women whose husbands were alive.

Cider paid as part of a farm wage was drunk by the man who earned it. That is an obvious point with a serious consequence: the household received less cash than a fully monetised wage would have provided, and the part paid in drink did not reach the family table in any form.

This argument was made at the time, and it was made most forcefully by temperance campaigners and by organisations of rural women. The case against payment in cider was not principally that drinking was sinful; it was that the truck system in this form transferred household income into the employer’s product and out of the wife’s hands. Reformers arguing for the abolition of the practice used exactly this reasoning.

It is one of the few places where women appear in the cider record as historical actors rather than as unrecorded labour, and it is worth noting that they appear as opponents of the custom. Any account of the cider allowance as a benign piece of rural tradition has to be set against that.

Both world wars made women’s agricultural work official and therefore visible. The Women’s Land Army in the first war and on a much larger scale in the second placed women in orchards among other agricultural work, and it is documented photographically and administratively in a way that ordinary farm labour never was. The visibility ended with the wars; the work had not begun with them.

Factory employment is the other twentieth-century strand. Bottling halls, sorting lines and laboratory work in the commercial cider industry employed women in large numbers, and the gendered division of that labour — men in the yard and the tank room, women on the line — was consistent across the food and drink industries generally.

The modern sector is different in a way that is easy to overstate and wrong to ignore. Women are prominent as producers, orchardists, researchers, judges and writers, and several of the specialist and campaigning organisations in this field have been led by women. That is a genuine change in who does the work, and it is also a change in who writes the record — which is part of why the historical question is now being asked at all.