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Homework increased rapidly since 1860’s in Britain. The increase of homework highlighted conflicts between various sectors of the society, and exploitation of children and women as social problem. The Factory and Workshop Act of 1878, legalized home workshops as ‘women’s workshops’. Thereafter homework became the symbol of women’s labour. This means that women labourers became homeworkers since 1880’s in Britain.

This article tries to explain why British women labourers became homeworkers in that circumstances, to reveal the essence of the homework issue, to analyse the strategy of women’s labour movement on that issue. And this study explored how the gender/class politics worked through the antagonism between capital and labour, the difference of the organized labourers and the unorganized, and the inner conflict of women’s movement.

The need to earn wage for family breeding necessitated the homework of married women labourers. The homework was a pattern of women’s labour that revealed the substantial role of gender in the complex relationships between poverty, reproduction and women’s labour.

British women’s labour movement began to organize women home workers and to legalize protection for them from 1890’s. At that time, women’s labour movement was sharply divided into two groups, on the ways to resolve the homework issue. The Women’s Industrial Council suggested the ‘Licensing of Home Workers’, but the Women’s Trade Union League supported the ‘Minimum Wage Bill’. The final result was the latter. This Act aimed at reduction and final eradication of homework system through the application of the minimum wage for homework. Through the enforcement of the Act, the wage level of homeworkers was somewhat raised and organization of women homeworkers improved. Therefore we can conclude that the Minimum Wage Act contributed for the alleviation of the problem of women labourers’ homework.