Charwomen and Dublin’s secondary labour force in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACTCharring (cleaning) and charwomen constituted important elements of Dublin city’s informal economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Char work was the most common form of paid work for working-class married women and widows, who formed a sizeable, ubiquitous cohort within the urban workforce. Their ubiquity was represented in the frequent presence of charwomen in the contemporary slum literature. However, charwomen were largely neglected by social surveyors and officialdom, and omission from the historical record has been compounded by their absence from historians’ work on social conditions in Dublin’s slums. This is surprising given that charring and charwomen were indispensable parts of life in Dublin’s tenements, wherein charwomen were the largest occupational group, after (male) labourers, to act as heads of their household. Charring, was also emblematic of the precariousness of tenement life, which was shaped by men and women’s casual, unskilled labour in low-paid jobs, and short-term leases. This article focuses on this particular group of women as a means to expand understanding of working-class women’s experiences of paid work of life in Dublin’s tenements and of the city’s informal economy.