There Was No “Work-Life Balance” For Most of History
By: Historical Insights
Tags: Work, Covid 19, History, Self Improvement, Life

“The Farm” by Johann Morgenstern (public domain)

A lot of us who are still lucky enough to have both our health and a job during the pandemic have seen what was left of our work-life balance ebb away. Of course, the separation of work and home has been under threat for many people over the last few decades.

The advent of email, laptops, and smartphones has created an expectation — for many white-collar workers at least — that they were never really not “at work.” Emails or texts from the boss and evenings working on a spreadsheet in front of the TV were become quite common in pre-pandemic times.

But there was still some order to our lives. Before the pandemic, most of us still woke up in the morning, got dressed, went somewhere, stayed there until late afternoon, and came home.

Now, those barriers have completely broken down, at least temporarily. We “leave for work” ten seconds before we arrive — at the dining room table.

Our kids are home with us, wandering through our Zoom meetings. Our dogs have to go out 57 times a day while we are trying to get things done. We have to budget time to clean up the mess after our children make themselves lunches six feet from our work space.

There are obviously enjoyable aspects of this — no commutes! family time! — but many of us are struggling to be present with our families, do well in our jobs, and find time for leisure in this new reality. This situation is unusual for us, but we should keep in mind that the very idea of a separation between “work” and “life” is a relatively new phenomenon. For most of history, most people have been living this mixture of work and personal life.

Egyptians perform a number of agricultural tasks, ca. 1700 BCE (public domain)

Most of the human beings on earth for almost all of history did just one job — farming.

For almost all of human history more than 90% of people were farmers, producing a surplus bare enough to support a small population in urban areas. In the United States, 83% of American workers were farmers in 1800.

Even by the beginning of the Civil War, when railroads were spreading across the country and industrial urban areas were growing, over half of Americans were still working in agriculture. In less industrialized countries, those numbers remained high long after the mid-1800s; many countries still have a very high percentage of farmers today.

Many people still list agriculture as their primary occupation (Our World In Data)

On family farms, there was no real separation between family life and work. Childcare and work blended together; in fact, the children often did a lot of the work.

The men and women in the family would generally have different spheres of responsibility, but these were often quite fluid and determined by what was needed at the time. People who owned a family farm didn’t have a boss or supervisor.

They worked when and where they wanted, and had a lot of autonomy. This, of course, meant that there was also no safety net when things did not go well, and no one to blame for the family’s problems if things went south.

What constituted work at different times of the year was quite different. There would be intense periods of work around planting and harvesting, and more relaxed periods during which a farmer could catch up on other projects around the property.

Pay, like work, was irregular. It was based partially on the farmer’s own decisions (Did they plant the right things? Did they do the right kind of work? Did they work hard enough?) and was partially contingent on circumstances out of the farmer’s control (Did it rain enough? What are the prevailing prices for goods?). Rather than being a direct exchange of one person’s personal time and effort for a set amount of another person’s money, work in agriculture was inextricably interwoven with people’s personal lives.

Even for many people who did not farm, there was much less of a separation between home and work than we are used to. The “putting-out” system, for example, which was prevalent in Europe between the middle ages and the industrial era, relied on people — often women — to perform parts of the textile-making process in their own homes.

A merchant might buy raw wool and then take it to one household to be carded, another to be spun into thread, and another to be woven into cloth. Each of these people would work on these projects in their “spare” time. A farmer’s wife might do some textile work while her husband and sons were in the fields.

The husband might join in during slow times on the farm; no work would get done on the textiles when all members of the family were needed in the fields. In this system, workers weren’t supervised directly, and they weren’t paid for their time. Like farmers, they would work as much as they were able or willing, and would be paid accordingly.

This system intermingled their life and their work — one can imagine children running around the loom, making a mess, just as they do in the background of your videoconference.

Vincent Van Gogh, “A Weaver’s Cottage,” 1884 (public domain)

In pre-industrial cities, work was also not quite separate from home life. Even the largest cities were quite small. It was less than an hour’s walk from the center of London to the countryside in 1815.

Before the advent of trains and automobiles, no one lived very far from work. In a “walking city” like London in the early nineteenth century, only 2% of people lived more than a mile from their place of work. It was common to go back and forth between work and home, perhaps several times a day.

Many people, of course, lived “at work,” conducting their personal life in a few rooms above or behind a small shop. Apprentices frequently lived with the shop-owners who employed them. Again, the concepts of “work life” and “personal life” were not that separated.

The relationship between “home” and “work” that we are used to began less than 200 years ago with the advent of the industrial revolution. For the first time in human history, most people’s daily routines were ruled by the clock. Work started and ended at a precise time; if workers weren’t there by the time the whistle blew, their pay would be docked.

Their daily schedule became routinized — every day, they went to the same place to do the same thing for the same amount of time, receiving the same pay. People began to work in facilities far away from home, and entirely separate from home life.

Workers’ children were not permitted in the workplace (unless those children were themselves being employed as child laborers). “Personal business” — childcare, medical care, recreation, household maintenance — was supposed to be taken care of one one’s own time. Work and home were separate, for better or worse.

The idea of a “domestic sphere” — generally constructed as feminine, family-oriented, and consumption-oriented — gained strength. It was seen as the opposite of the male-dominated, productive sphere of work. Writers like Alexis de Toqueville argued that this separation helped both men and women to occupy a “lofty” place in American society. The separation between work and home began to seem healthy and normal, and would remain that way throughout the twentieth century.

Maybe you’re feeling like you’re lost in this new work-from-home world. Maybe you feel this way because there are no boundaries anymore between your childcare duties, your home-improvement projects, your household cleaning duties, your personal recreation time, and your job.

Perhaps these boundaries made it easier to compartmentalize our lives and focus on the tasks at hand. Now, at any given moment from wake-up to bedtime, you could work on that sales report, play with the kids, or do the dishes, and you find yourself doing all and none of those things at once.

You can take a little bit of solace in the fact that the predicament in which you find yourself is one that was very common throughout history. The only difference is that the expectations in many periods of the past were quite different.

It was understood that people weren’t perfectly focused work automatons between 9 am and 5 pm every day. Hopefully, as we (temporarily) sink back into old ways of merging home and work, we can adopt some of the old attitudes toward them as well.