The following were the changes in the work available to women in London during the 19th and 20th century.
- Factories employed large numbers of women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- With technological developments, women gradually lost their industrial jobs and were forced to work within households.
- The 1861 census recorded a quarter of a million domestic servants in London, of whom the vast majority were women, many of them recent migrants.
- A large number of women used their homes to increase family income by taking in lodgers or through activities like tailoring, washing and matchbox making.
- There was a change once again in the twentieth century. As women got employment in wartime industries and offices, they withdrew from domestic service.
