The Full Story
In the late 18th century, working women across England had a problem. If they got sick there was nothing. No government. No employer. No safety net. So they built their own.
Female Friendly Societies spread across English towns and villages; the earliest firmly documented include York in 1788 and Wisbech in 1796. Each society pooled pennies every week into a common fund. Their rules defined illness as the inability to work, and they counted the work of the household: housework is work. Childcare is work. If you are too sick to do it, you get paid. Not because you had lost a wage, most of them never had one, but because the work of keeping a household alive was work.
Long before public policy would say any such thing. The rules were written by women with no university education, no legal training, no political power. Women who looked at their lives and decided they were worth protecting. Nobody told them to. Nobody gave them permission. They just did it. Town by town. Village by village. Across England.
Why This Matters
The feminist economics of the twentieth century, the insistence that unpaid domestic labour is economic labour, was quietly anticipated in English market towns nearly two centuries earlier. By ordinary women with no platform at all. The principle they put in writing in the late 18th century was only formally recognised by the British state in the second half of the twentieth century. The women who first wrote it down were right.
Key Facts
- ⚠Correction: the video dates the societies to 1780 and presents their rules as something nobody else in the world was saying. The earliest firmly documented female friendly societies are York (1788) and Wisbech (1796), so this page says late 18th century; and the scholarship's finding is that their rules valued unpaid domestic labour alongside paid work, a remarkable but not provably unique position.