ABSTRACT Charring (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.

中文翻译：

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Charwomen 和都柏林在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初的第二劳动力

摘要 在 19 世纪末和 20 世纪初，炭化（清洁）和炭化妇女构成了都柏林市非正规经济的重要组成部分。炭工是工薪阶层已婚妇女和寡妇最常见的有偿工作形式，她们在城市劳动力中形成了相当大的、无处不在的群体。当代贫民窟文学中经常出现的女巫师代表了她们的普遍性。然而，社会调查员和官方在很大程度上忽视了女骑警，历史记录中的遗漏由于他们没有出现在历史学家关于都柏林贫民窟社会状况的工作中而变得更加复杂。这是令人惊讶的，因为在都柏林的住宅区，炭化和炭化女工是生活中不可或缺的一部分，其中炭化工是仅次于（男性）劳工的最大的职业群体，担任他们的一家之主。Charring 也象征着公寓生活的不稳定，这是由男性和女性从事低薪工作的非熟练劳动力和短期租赁所塑造的。本文重点关注这一特定女性群体，以此作为一种手段，以扩大对都柏林住宅区工人阶级女性和城市非正规经济中的有偿生活工作经历的理解。