Women in the Economy: Middle class women

The employment of women in Victorian England was hindered by two factors. First, women shared with male workers the insecurities of employment brought about by the fluctuating nature of the Victorian economy. Secondly, they battled alone against the voice of propriety that sought to define them within an exclusively domestic environment. For middle class women, unlike their working class sisters, the issue of employment was connected with their claims for independence, for a share of the public domain, and with the demand for an identity defined by self-respect[1].

The following developments occurred in middle class employment in this period:

1841 Governesses’ Benevolent Institution founded

1859 Society for Promoting the Employment of Women founded

1860 Nightingale Fund School of Nursing founded

1862 Female Middle Class Emigration Society established

Female Medical Society [for midwives] founded

1864 Alexandra Magazine begins publication

1865 Ladies’ Medical College [for midwives] founded

1866 Englishwoman’s Review begins publication

1869 First women medical students at Edinburgh University

1873 Bishop Otter Memorial Training College for Schoolmistresses founded

1874 Women and Work begins publication

Jane Nassau Senior appointed to the workhouse Inspectorate

1875 Women clerks introduced, National Savings Bank

1876 Women’s clerical branch of the Post Office introduced

Medical (Qualification) Act allowing for the granting of qualifications to suitable qualified applicants regardless of sex

1881 New Civil Service grade of woman clerk introduced

1887 Royal British Nurses’ Association founded

1891 Women assistant commissioners appointed to Labour Commission

1893 First women factory inspectors appointed

1899 Women Sanitary Officers’ Association founded

The early campaigns of the 1850s and 1860s were concerned with the problem of finding suitable employment for single women. The reason for this lay in the prophesied rise in the ranks of women for whom marriage was to prove unattainable and the increasing failure of middle class families to maintain large retinues of unproductive and unmarried daughters. For such women, the spectre of a double failure loomed large: the inability to attract a husband marked them out in the circles of Victorian gentility, while their upbringing and education did not prepare them in any sense for the world of work. However, they were faced by fierce competition for the meagre openings that were available to them. When the Post Office Savings Bank opened its clerical doors to women applicants in 1875, the response was such that it was obliged to refuse further applications.

The aim of the mid-century feminists through their organisations and journals was to extend women’s capabilities and qualifications through education and training and to combat the prejudice that barred women from many avenues of employment. Their concern was only with ‘ladies’, with women of breeding, whose respectability was threatened by the need for paid employment. Though the early organisations did succeed in placing women in jobs, the number was tiny. They did bring a fresh and positive set of attitudes into prominence based not on the threat of poverty but on the dignity and fulfilment that waged-work could offer. Their concern with work as a worthy and indeed morally beneficial alternative to the domestic role marks their distance from those who campaigned in working class areas; though paid employment was quite clearly an urgent necessity for many middle class women, the feminists were also concerned with aspects of choice. The question of payment was, of course, a central issue. The widespread presence of women in philanthropic endeavour was acceptable only because of their volunteer status, a declaration of respectability and of moral sanctity. When their labours were a source of gain rather than personal sacrifice, the issue became one of respectability.

The tightrope of respectability was only one of a host of structural problems and personal prejudices encountered by feminist campaigners. Middle class women shared with their working class sisters the problem of a heavily circumscribed filed of opportunity. The ‘governess problem’[2] encapsulated the difficulties imposed. Because there was a dearth of employment available for middle class women, governesses rapidly became an overstocked, underpaid and hugely exploited field of labour. Feminists pointed to the absurdity of delivering educational responsibilities into the hands of women unprepared and untrained for the task. Feminist activists saw women’s unpreparedness for the eventuality of earning their own living as one of their principal targets. The campaign around the employment of middle class women centred on the questions of opportunity and of choice for the single women, and of course implicit too in that notion was that of her choice of whether or not to marry. Their demands and efforts were couched in the name of justice, a justice in which the working women and single women were no longer ideological outcasts.

The Langham Place Circle in London, established in the late 1850s, was the earliest feminist group to be involved in this area. It offered a central metropolitan conduit through which a variety of radical and feminist experiments flowed. Alongside the journal and reading room set up at Langham Place, came the first of the women’s employment societies. Founded in 1859, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women [SPEW] had two stated aims: to train women and to find employment for them. It established a register of women seeking employment and the London SPEW also established classes in bookkeeping, a skill of increasing value in Victorian society. Under Emily Faithfull it established a printing establishment, the Victoria Press, where all the compositors were women and it rapidly became the feminist printing house of the period. In August 1874 the National Union of Working Women was set up, with the help of the WPPL’s Emma Paterson in Bristol under the trusteeship of Millicent Fawcett and two male sympathisers. In its early years it had defined trade union links but by the late 1890s it had become little more than another philanthropic society.

Another important aspect of feminist involvement in employment campaigns was the establishment of feminist periodicals devoted principally either to this issue or at least offering coverage of new trades for women, as well as carrying job applications. Emily Faithfull, for example, published a weekly journal Women and Work from 1874. There were so few ways in which women could find such jobs as there were and these feminist ventures played an important role. They were cheap -- Women and Work sold for 1d -- encouraging and informative and introduced women to a whole range of related issues.

The most potent way in which activist women could extend the cause of women’s employment was by themselves moving into the new areas of opportunity. Many prominent feminists did just this, taking up employment in government jobs as factory and sanitary inspectors, in the new female professions of nursing and teaching or by fighting for entry to hitherto closed professions such as medicine and the Law. In 1892 May Abraham, Clara Collet, Eliz Orme and Margaret Irwin were appointed to the Royal Commission on Labour as assistant commissioners. The following year, the Home Office appointed Abraham and Mary Paterson to the factory Inspectorate while at the municipal level, the Kensington Vestry appointed two women sanitary officers, Rose Squire and Lucy Deane. By 1896 five women were employed by the Factory Department of the Home Office, whilst Clara Collet had taken up an appointed with the Board of Trade in 1893. Their success was the culmination of twenty years of agitation. These early appointees were women with a strong academic or vocational training. Clara Collet, for example, was not only the first female fellow at University College London, but was the first women to receive an M.A. They also had been involved in feminism prior to their appointment. If the medical profession at least proved malleable in this period, the law remained unassailable. When Elizabeth Blackwell was placed on the British Medical Register in 1859, the profession’s response was prompt: no foreign medical qualifications were acceptable hereafter. Women had no access to training in Britain but against the odds qualified women doctors began practising in England in the 1870s. The numbers were small but rising: in December 1880 there were 21 registered but by 1894 170. The problems became more acute for women entering nursing or teaching, precisely because they were the areas that rapidly became associated with and almost defining, women’s professionalism. The care of the sick and of children was, of course, acceptable areas of activities for women. Nursing was an exclusively female profession in the latter half of the century, unlike teaching, where the tendency was for women employees to be concentrated in the lower ranks of the profession and paid less than their male counterparts.

In professional and white-blouse work employers tended to play a more direct and central role in maintaining sexual segregation than they did in manual work. In the higher professions employers were also the men who controlled entry to the profession. For example, until 1914 very few teaching hospitals admitted women wishing to train as doctors despite the opening of the Medical Register to women in the early 1870s. Women were also directly excluded from top posts in the Civil Service. The few women who were appointed to senior posts, such as Mrs Nassau Senior, who was hired to inspect girls’ education in workhouses in 1874, or Adelaide Anderson, who became the Chief Woman Inspector of Factories were the social equals of the men they worked with.

In contrast to the administrative grades, very little opposition was encountered with respect to the introduction of women into the clerical and typing grade of the Civil Service. Developments in technology, particularly in the form of the typewriter and telegraph, created space for women workers. It was, however, segregated space with clerical work hived off into a separate, watertight compartment with no possibility of promotion. Men, who had previously been clerks, took on new jobs that were also created by the changing scale and organisation of office work: for example, accountant, officer manager and commercial traveller.

Male teachers were also incensed by the growth in the number of women teachers. Between 1875 and 1914 the number of women elementary teachers increased by 862 per cent compared to a 292 per cent increase in men. This led to the proportion of female teachers rising from 54 per cent in 1875 to 75 per cent by 1914. Unlike doctors and top civil servants, male teachers were not in a position to control recruitment that was in the hands of school boards and then local authorities after 1902. The nineteenth century pupil-teacher system had encouraged the entry of working class girls into teaching. Like nurses, they learned on the job. Pupil teaching did not enjoy a high status and it was not unusual for such girls to be considered in the same bracket as shop assistants or clerks. Many female teachers remained uncertificated: in 1913 the ratio for women was 1 in 9 compared to 1 in 3 for men. After 1907, the bursary system of teacher training replaced the pupil-teacher scheme. Boys or girls intending to become teachers had to stay on longer at school and become student teachers at seventeen. As a result, more middle class women entered the profession and its status rose.

Women in non-manual occupations, particularly those in the professions, experienced rather more direct discrimination by employers in respect to recruitment and promotion than did manual workers. As the number of qualified women increased, and it became usual for middle class girls to work on leaving school, the lines of sexual segregation were increasingly closely defended. Ideas regarding the proper role of married women in particular lay behind the introduction of the marriage bar, particularly after 1918, which assumed that all married women could be treated as a reserve army of labour because of their primary responsibility to home, family and husband[3].

Some conclusions

Gender distinctions were woven into the fabric the nineteenth century industrial capitalism and the development of industrial capitalism had an impact on what it meant to be a man and what it meant to be a woman. They created different experiences for men and women and led to men and women doing different jobs in manufacture within the working class and to demands for access to the same jobs as men by middle class women.

The language of gender represented women as childbearers and dependants and men as breadwinners. It constituted the labour market as a domain in which men designed jobs. Women often were accused of undermining male workers and their economic pursuits stigmatised their husbands. Men’s unemployment became symbolic of a character failing, a symptom of male dishonour. Women and men were thrown into competition; workers fought with each other as well as with their employers in their struggle for a livelihood.

At the heart of the nineteenth century debate about working women was the concept of respectability, initially developed by the middle classes it developed as a supreme value among the working classes during the course of the century. To be respectable required that a man earn enough to support his wife and that he conduct himself at work and in the community in ways that were considered ‘manly’ or honourable. Family respectability, and the respectability of family members, was premised on a male breadwinner whose wife could devote herself to the arts of domesticity. There was an inherent contradiction between waged work and domesticity. For the working classes women worked out of necessity; for middle class women they worked out of choice or, in same cases, need. Yet the desirability of the women as full-time homemaker and mother remained.

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[1] Working class women and some poorer middle class women could not afford the luxury of employment as an expression of their identity. For them it was a matter of subsistence.

[2] On the issue of governesses see Kathryn Hughes The Victorian Governess, Hambledon, 1993.

[3] Lee Holcombe Victorian Ladies at Work: Middle class working women in England and Wales 1850-1914, David & Charles, 1973 and Martha Vicinus Independent Women: Work and community for single women 1850-1920, Virago, 1985 provide a much needed focus on the problems facing middle class women who either did not wish to enter into marriage or for whom work was necessary within marriage. Catriona Blake The Charge of the Parasols, Women’s Press, 1990 examines how women fought for and obtained entry into the medical profession. Kathryn Hughes The Victorian Governess, Hambledon Press, 1993 and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, Weidenfeld, 1993 provide valuable insights into two areas where middle class women found a niche [albeit an insecure one]. F.K. Prochaska Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England, OUP, 1980 is a subtle study of the lives and motivations of middle class women as well as about their ‘causes’.

Women in the Economy: Unionism and Protection

By the end of the nineteenth century it is possible to see the sexual division of labour clearly in operation. Women were concentrated into a few low paid industries -- where the great majority of employees were female -- and in domestic service. Outworkers and domestic servants were isolated and divided workers and were to remain outside any co-operative protection or trade unionism. For the most part, feminist[1] activity concentrated on the reality of the working woman’s situation and on the necessity that brought it about rather than on theoretical arguments in favour or against women’s work of this kind. It was largely a pragmatic and practical concern with the organisation of benefit societies and unions, with working conditions or wages, with the evils and miseries of outwork that motivated organisation within the working classes. Interested middle class women ran many of these organisations, though there was significant working class input as well. This section will consider two big issues that confronted feminists after 1850: the organisation of women into trade unions and the question of protective legislation revived by government in the 1880s.

Women in trade unions

Trade unions in this period were male-dominated and most had the interests of male trade unionists at heart[2]. Unions were threatened by the way in which female labour was being used to undercut male wages and to ‘dilute’ male craft skills. Their reaction did not help women workers but does not explain the lowly place of women in the labour market. Women’s trade unions tended to have their most marked successes in recruiting in periods when male union activity was riding high. In 1832 1500 women card-setters at Peep Green Yorkshire came out on strike for equal pay. The Lancashire cotton mill women were active in trade unions. In 1859 the North East Lancashire Amalgamated Society was formed for both men and women and in 1884 the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association of Weavers was established for male and female workers. But the most significant development was the emergence of separate women’s unions. Thus the Women’s Protective and Provident League [WPPL] was established in 1874 at a time when men’s unions were enjoying some success, both in membership terms and in establishing their legality. Similarly it was in the brief period of ‘new unionism’ in the late 1880s and early 1890s when unskilled labour became politicised that the Women’s Industrial Council [WIC] and a score of women’s unions were established. The late nineteenth century saw considerable industrial action by women: the famous Bryant and May’s matchgirl strike of 1888 but also the Dewsbury textile workers in 1875, the Aberdeen jute workers in 1884, Dundee jute workers in 1885 and Bristol confectionery workers. Women’s unions, under the inspiration of the League, campaigned for better wages and working conditions. It is a reflection of this era of separate female unions that in 1906 there were 167,000 members of all unions and that by 1914 this had risen to nearly 358,000.

A host of disincentives stood in the way of the successful unionisation of women. Male unions at this stage were barely acceptable and themselves faced the problems of recruitment and of sustaining membership. The economic competition that women posed as a cheaper labour supply further determined men not in unionising women but in deterring their existence in the workplace. The sporadic nature of women’s work, interrupted by pregnancies and domestic duties, might mean that in many cases work for women was simply a strategy for survival. Constant interruption added to poor pay and monotonous work would certainly not encourage women to invest energy in their identity as workers; their concentration in the less skilled sectors of employment not only further discouraged any such identity but made them vulnerable too. Unskilled unions were late in taking off because such workers were, by virtue of their lack of skill, expendable. Agitation could this be easily nipped in the bud. In addition, the high number of women whose source of income derived from occupations such as outwork or domestic service, where congregation with their peers was precluded, were without any means of organisation. Many working women were isolated through their work and essentially untouched in this organisational context.

The Women’s Protective and Provident League [WPPL] was established in 1874. Throughout its principal function was to offer help to working women in their own setting up of unions. It was never a trade union itself but a mechanism for pooling funds, expertise and experience. It offered sickness benefits and a host of related activities. It has been criticised for offering welfare instead of militancy and it was certainly far more of a propaganda and educational body. This should not, however, obscure our understanding of its political significance. Its initial gains were no more than modest. Its overall membership fluctuated wildly, though in 1884 there were less than a thousand women in its unions. Nonetheless in that time the League had succeeded, albeit temporarily, in organising a number of London trades from boot and umbrella makers, tailoresses and laundresses to feather and flower workers and box makers. Its activities extended beyond London to other industrial centres like Dewsbury and Leicester. Emma Paterson, who had founded the League, died in 1886 and control passed to Lady Emilie Dilke. Under her leadership many of the former policies of the WPPL were abandoned and a more militant approach adopted. The name was changed to the Women’s Trade Union and Provident League in 1889 and to the Women’s Trade Union League two years later. It sought more secure funding with the introduction of a scheme of affiliation for unions with a female membership and also sought to broaden its appeal outside London and by 1891 had seventeen London unions and six provincial affiliates.

The 1890s saw both a growth of women’s trade union membership and the creation of several new women’s organisations. The Women’s Trade Union Association [WTUA] was founded in 1889 by women dissatisfied with the stance of the WTUL, amongst them Clementina Black, Amie Hicks, Clara James and Florence Balgarnie. Its aims differed little from the parent body and it was to be a short-lived venture merging in 1897 with the Women’s Industrial Council then three years old. In 1870 some 58,000 women were members of trade unions but by 1896 that has risen to 118,000, a figure representing some 7.8 per cent of all union members. Unionism was strong in the textile and especially cotton industry where women often outnumbered male operatives. Women had since the 1850s been incorporated in mixed unions. The common characteristic of all these organisations was their concern with the singularity of women’s position and women’s requirements in the worlds of work and leisure and even within the working class home. These spheres could not be divorced given the disrupted employment patterns of most women workers. Even when the WTUL opted for a policy of encouraging women into unions of mixed rather than single-sex membership in the 1890s, other specifically female issues remained central planks of their overall philosophy. Given the extensive nature of women’s exploitation, feminist activity was necessarily split into a series of autonomous but linked campaigns.

The question of protective legislation

Legislation restricting or prohibiting women’s work in certain area like the mines or limited their duties or hours of work featured prominently in the factory reforms of the 1830s and 1840s. In these decades legislation was a consequence of a preoccupation with the effects of work on children. When the issue was revived in the 1880s with women’s employment as its primary target the political context was of a very different complexion. Despite the ability of women’s organisations to lobby parliament, state intervention in areas of social and economic concern was a growing reality despite voices raised in support of the values of individualism. The extension of the factory Inspectorate after 1878 and the appointment of women inspectors signalled a more serious intention of enforcement by the authorities than had the earlier, more permissive, acts[3].

The issue was a difficult one for feminists dividing them less along class lines than along lines of political belief. Three positions emerged in the debate. First, there was outright laissez-faire opposition to any proposals that restricted women’s freedom. Secondly, some women saw restriction as a progressive and humane response of the state. Finally there were those who applauded the principle of protective legislation but only where its application was not on the basis of gender. The reaction of working women varied but there is little doubt that the impact of government reform was an unwelcome reality for many late Victorian and Edwardian working people. The significant point is that women were legislated for without consultation. There was a total neglect of their views. It was a case of men legislating for women.

Women, from markedly different ideological camps, agreed that there was clearly a need to curb the excesses of employers whose interpretation of the free market was detrimental to the health and safety of their workers. They also broadly agreed where government legislated for mixed employment as in the 1878 Factory Act. But the 1878 Act specifically exempted workplaces exclusively employing women and the sweated trades were left untouched. The problem that the anti-legislation lobby had was that in championing women’s rights to all available employment, they came close to sanctioning work that clearly endangered health and safety. Working class women were at the bottom of the economic pile, forced into distasteful jobs by economic necessity and forced out of them by the ethics of another class and another gender. It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the sweated trades and shop assistants were brought under legislative control. This took place in 1909 and 1912 respectively. Feminism in this period was a wholly urban movement, predominantly middle class, clustered for the most part round the larger towns and London where industrial conditions could be easily observed. Domestic service, the largest employer of female labour, and agricultural work, despite the governmental investigation of this area in the 1840s, were largely untouched.

The interest shown by so many better-off middle class women in tackling the problems of industrial conditions and practices rather than the home lives of women is significant. Their choice of organisations offered help in establishing autonomous unions rather than merely philanthropic aid and often pious moralising. There were certainly class tensions between the middle class activists and working class women. However, despite the mistakes the failures and lapses into the philanthropic mode, feminist organisations in this central area of working class women’s work represented a serious attempt at broadening the notion of sisterhood beyond the parameters of class.

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[1] By ‘feminist’ I mean those women who argued for changes in the role of women in society and an extension of the opportunities open to them.

[2] B. Drake Women in Trade Unions, London, 1921 reprinted by Virago, 1984 is the classic starting-point on this subject. See also: Norbert C. Soldon Women in British Trade Unions 1874-1976, Gill & Macmillan, 1978, Eleanor Gordon Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850-1914, OUP, 1991 which focuses on the jute industry in Dundee and Judy Lown With Free and Graceful Step? Women and industrialisation in nineteenth century England, Polity, 1987. Anne Taylor Annie Besant: A biography, OUP, 1992 is now the standard work on a critical figure in the development of women’s trade union rights, birth control and women’s rights generally.

[3] Mary Drake McFeely Lady Inspectors: The Campaign for a Better Workplace 1893-1921, Blackwell, 1988 is a useful study of how women fared as factory inspectors.