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.

Greedy Britain!!

In the past decade the gulf between rich and poor has widened.  Proportionally, the poor pay more in taxes than the rich and the super-rich.  It appears that we increasingly live in a society where 'to him that hath, shall more be given'.  After 'Cool Britannia', we now have 'Greedy Britannia'.  Is this a reflection of what the Tories call 'Broken Britain' and are we becoming an obese society in financially as well as physically?  The past few months suggest that this is the case especially in the ranks of parliamentarians who establish rules to deal with sleaze and then proceed regularly to ignore them...sorry it was an administrative oversight.  The Conway affair is only the tip of the iceberg and I suspect that some MPs are thinking 'there but for the grace of God...'

The issue of MPs' expenses can be easily dealt with by three measures.  First, they should not be allowed to employ any member of their family or extended family in their parliamentary or  political activities.  So no sons, daughters, wives, mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, nieces or nephews.  Employing people should be by open application and interview.  Secondly, their expenses should be audited annually and published and I don't mean a sample of MPs, I mean all.  This should also be extended to include members of the House of Lords.  Thirdly, any MP or peer found to be corrupt in their parliamentary activities, should be expelled from Parliament.  The question of party funding again can be solved relatively easily.  I am not in favour of public funding of political parties, perhaps the easiest solution.  Put simply, donations to political parties should only come from individual party members and should be limited to £10,000 per year.  No donations should be allowed from organisations at all: so nothing from business or the trade unions.  This should be backed up by punitive fines on political parties that ignore the rules: any party found in breach of the rules on party funding should be fined £1 million for each offence.  This may appear draconian but in the world beyond Westminster, individuals found to be corrupt in their employment would be sacked and probably prosecuted.  MPs and peers should be treated precisely the same.

Which brings me to the rich and the super-rich.  Taxing them at 40 per cent is obscenely low.  I'm not suggesting moving back to the punitive 90 per cent tax rates that existed in the 1960s.  However, taxing anyone who earns more than £100,000 a year at 50 per cent and 60 per cent over £250,000 does not seem unreasonable and might do something to reduce the yawning gulf between rich and poor as well as bringing in additional revenue.   Combined with raising inheritance tax, this would be politically popular as well as a move towards a financially fairer society.  You never now, it might lead to a sleaker and less greedy Britain!

Women in the Economy: 3 Working class

Types of work: some examples

The notions of ‘a woman’s job’ and ‘a woman’s rate’ were regarded by employers, trade unions and by women workers themselves as a ‘natural’ phenomenon throughout this period. The consequence this [or was it the cause?] was low pay and a sexual division of labour leading to segregation. Patterns of sexual segregation were by no means fixed throughout the country. Brickmaking was a woman’s trade in the Black Country where men worked in ironworks and coalpits. In Lancashire where women worked in cotton and where openings for men were scarce, it was a male preserve. It was, however, rare not to see a clear dividing line between women and men’s jobs within occupations and between women and men’s processes[1].

Not only was there vertical segregation at work with men’s and women’s processes clearly distinguished but there was a trend to horizontal segregation increasing after 1911 with women working in lower grade occupations, at a lower wage.

Women’s work commanded a woman’s rate, even when they were involved in the same processes as men. In manufacturing occupations women generally earned about half the average weekly earnings of men. Only in textiles did women earn significantly above 50 per cent of male earnings. New methods of wage payment introduced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reinforced the idea of a woman’s rate. Women were more often paid by piece rate than men. They also found their rates lowered or they earned ‘too much’. Non-manual workers generally earned a higher percentage of the average male earnings: women shop assistants earned about 65 per cent as much as men in 1900 and women teachers 75 per cent their male colleagues.

Average earnings for women in 1906

Occupation	Percentage male wages
Textiles	59
Clothing	47
Food	42
Metal	38
Total	43

 

In all-female occupations, women often did worst of all. Nineteenth century nurses were often paid little more than domestic servants. Indeed their pay was actually lowered to encourage middle class applicants who did not need the money. Middle class parents were roundly condemned by feminists for allowing their daughters to work for pocket money because they considered it to be more respectable and genteel. Theirs was voluntary work rather than real work.

In trying to assess the number of working women during this period, we run up against a number of confusing problems. The change of work-base from the home to the factory or workshop led to changing, though never fully clarified definitions of the meaning of ‘work’, ‘employment’ and ‘occupation’. In effect, ‘work’ became shorthand for waged work. Yet formal employment was a minority theme in the social history of working class women in this period. When the census of 1881 excluded unpaid household work as a category of gainful employment, there was a dramatic drop in the female work rate figure from around 98 per cent [and almost the same as the work rate for men] to 42 per cent. In reality, however, working class women worked in large numbers and often for a considerable proportion of their lives in both paid and unpaid position. This occurred despite the howls of middle class protest raised periodically in parliament and in the press against their involvement in the world of work with their consequent neglect of husband, family and home.

What is difficult to explain is the persistence of low paid, sexually segregated and poorly organised work as the norm for women. The historiography of attempts to resolve this issue began with a natural view of a sexual division of labour in which sex discrimination was an accepted part of life. The whole proposition of a sexual division of labour was, however, rejected by feminist writers after the 1960s. Early commentators on the problem, like Sidney Webb, concluded that women’s inferior earnings were mainly due to natural causes: women’s productive power was usually inferior to men’s both in quantity and quality. This was linked to the notion that low pay was a matter of individual female choice because of the prior commitment of women to marriage, childbearing and childcare. Women, it was argued, were not prepared to invest in long training programmes or apprenticeships, sought work close to their home, had interrupted career patterns and were prone to absenteeism. This model treats the possibility of sex discrimination as a residual factor and ignores the systemic processes that trap women as a group rather than as individuals within certain grades and kinds of work. Investigators often conflated the natural and historical explanations of women’s work.

Modern economic and social theorists reject the notion of a sexual division of labour as natural and a matter of choice on the part of women. They argue for the existence of a dual labour market in which primary workers were assured a stable career with rising wages and secondary workers, who were often unskilled or who possessed highly transferable skills, and who come to be seen as unstable workers. Large proportions of the latter were women. More radical versions of the dual labour market theory suggest that it is not so much job specific skills that explain the development of career hierarchies and grading structures, but rather the process of deskilling which leads to a breakdown of grading and skill differentials functional to capitalism. It is the male preservation of their skill differentials at the expense of deskilling women that was the issue.

Both employers and male trade unionists denied women access to the means of acquiring real skills by their exclusion from training and apprenticeship programmes. This pattern of male dominance and control at the workplace must be related to the power dynamics within the family. It has been suggested that male dominance over the pre-industrial family work unit and the practice of sexually segregating tasks was carried over into the factory when the workplace separated from the home. The boundary between men’s and women’s work was defended in the face of technological change [which threatened to blur the distinction between sexual boundaries] by means of union exclusiveness and the control skilled men managed to exert over apprenticeship and via their power to subcontract work. The conclusions reached as to what was suitable work for women differed from area to area and between social classes but male workers, employers, government and women workers themselves largely shared it.

Domestic service was the most common occupation for working class girls and women throughout this period. Between 1851 and 1871 there was an increase in the numbers employed rising from 9.8 to 12.8 per cent of the total female population in England and Wales. After 1871 there was a slight decline down to 11.1 per cent by 1911. It has been frequently stated that domestic servants were usually country girls who has few alternative forms of work and certainly many country girls did follow this route. However, in towns where heavy industry dominated there were often few opportunities for girls other than domestic service. The vast majority of domestic servants had in common a heavy workload but they did not all share the same social status. All servants were affected by the social status of their employers and within a household there were considerable differences in power of influence of, for example, the housekeeper or the kitchen maid and there were also male and female status hierarchies involved.

By 1900 there were increasing complaints about the shortage of servants from members of the middle and upper classes. It was not simply a matter of wages since these increased steadily throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. The wages still appeared to be low: average annual wages for 1907 were £19 10s for general servants and £26 8s for parlour maids. What is more difficult to compute is monetary value of board, lodging and uniform provided by the employer. In households where everything was provided arguably domestic servants had a distinct wage advantage over other female workers since they has a reasonable disposable income out of which it was possible to save. Various reasons have been provided for the ‘servant shortage’. An increasing number of women regarded the wages as insufficient compensation for what were regarded as long hours, the hard physical effort and lack of independence. There was an increase in alternative employment. While town girls preferred to have different employment to domestic service, for country girls it represented an easily available and acceptable occupation. However, the difficulty in finding servants around 1900 needs to be seen in relation to the declining rural population.

Textile workers increased in number throughout the period especially in the cotton industry in England. This expansion was accompanied by the steady decline of the Scottish cotton industry as it became more concentrated in Lancashire. In the Lancashire industry women had more equality with men than on most other industries. The only major process from which they were excluded was mule spinning. Women were also excluded from being tacklers or overlookers, the person in charge of a group of weavers. Women weavers were paid well compared with most other women workers. Oral evidence suggests that they could and did earn more than unskilled men on other areas of employment and a good woman weaver could earn as much as her male counterpart. However, in most mills this was not the case and the aggregated figures show that women weavers earned less than men.

The tendency for women working in urban trades was to see their condition decline after 1830 and the sweated trades expanded. Outwork was the contracting out of tasks to a group of workers employed in a small factory or workshop while homeworkers, as the name implied, worked at home on raw materials supplied by an employer. The drive towards increasing mass production in urban trades forced male skilled craftsmen to defend their position as their livelihood was threatened. The outcome for most women workers in these trades could only be exclusion from skilled work and employment in subdivided or unskilled work at lower, often very low, wages. In the printing industry, women were effectively excluded by 1880. There were important technological advances: the steam press from 1814 and new composing machines in the 1850s. Male unions -- the provincial Typographical Association and the London Society of Compositors -- both attempted to reserve the new compositing machinery for men only. Women were employed but at a lower rate and male dominance was confirmed by the introduction of the linotype machine in the late 1880s. By contrast women bookbinders preserved their skill and status, though also their low wages relative to skilled men, until changes in the 1880s.

By the 1850s, except in large cities like Manchester and Leeds, homework had disappeared from the North of England. In the Midlands and the South, however, the pattern was very different. For example, in Birmingham many women made nails and chains in sheds attached to their homes; Northampton women made boots and shoes. One of the largest concentrations of homeworkers was in London where women worked in the various garment trades, a situation aided by the marketing of the sewing machine after 1851. Outworkers and homeworkers were predominantly women. Women had always been involved in agriculture. The decline in the number of women involved after 1861 reflects growing mechanisation but the census figures neglect the seasonal nature of much of the work.

Clerical and office work offered increasing opportunities for women and in 1914 about twenty per cent of clerical workers were women. Between 1861 and 1911 the number of male clerks increased fivefold while the number of women clerks rose by 400 per cent. The expansion of large commercial firms and the growth of insurance, banking and communications all provided more jobs for women. Typing and shorthand were generally presumed to be particularly suited to women. A similar rise can be found in shop-work. In this ‘white-blouse’ sector automatic dismissal often followed marriage which gave the employers constant access to younger and cheaper labour. It also upheld the notion of the separate spheres whereby the paid labour of a married woman was equated with a husband’s failure in fulfilling his role in the conjugal bargain.

The nature of change: a conclusion

The ideology of the separate spheres made little impact on working class existence where economic necessity intervened, but it found an effective parallel in the sexual division of labour. The consistent and increasing relegation of women workers to poorly paid and low status jobs, both within the manual and non-manual sectors of employment, effectively inhibited women’s economic independence. The growing degree of state regulation of women’s work further emphasised that the gender distinction was to remain an important feature of labour politics throughout this period.

In trying to assess the number of working women during this period, we run up against a number of confusing problems. The change of work-base from the home to the factory or workshop led to changing, though never fully clarified definitions of the meaning of ‘work’, ‘employment’ and ‘occupation’. In effect, ‘work’ became shorthand for waged work. Yet formal employment was a minority theme in the social history of working class women in this period. When the census of 1881 excluded unpaid household work as a category of gainful employment, there was a dramatic drop in the female work rate figure from around 98 per cent [and almost the same as the work rate for men] to 42 per cent. In reality, however, working class women worked in large numbers and often for a considerable proportion of their lives in both paid and unpaid position. This, despite the howls of middle class protest raised periodically in parliament and in the press against their involvement in the world of work with their consequent neglect of husband, family and home.

---

[1] Carl Chinn They Worked all their Lives: Women of the Urban Poor in England 1880-1939, Manchester University Press, 1988 and K.D.M. Snell Annals of the Labouring Poor, CUP, 1985 provide an urban and rural perspective. Harriet Bradley Men’s Work, Women’s Work, Polity, 1989 is an up-to-date survey and critique of the available research material on the sexual division of labour. It contains valuable case studies of a variety of occupations. Margaret Hewitt Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry, Rockliff, 1958 is useful for information. Dyhouse and Lewis have questioned its conclusions. D. Bythell The Sweated Trades: Outwork in Nineteenth Century Britain, Batsford, 1978 is the standard work while Shelley Pennington and Belinda Westover A Hidden Workforce: Homeworkers in England 1850-1985, Macmillan, 1989 examines a specific area. Theresa McBride The Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Service in England and France 1820-1920, Croom Helm, 1976 is a valuable comparative work. Pamela Horn The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, 1975 is still the best work on the subject. Studies of other industries include: A.V. John By the Sweat of their Brow: Woman Workers at Victorian Coalmines, Croom Helm., 1980, Patricia Malcolmson English Laundresses: A Social History, Illinois University Press, 1978

Women in the Economy: 2 Working class

 

How did women’s work developed between the 1830s and 1914? Domestic service, the textile trade and the clothing trades accounted for eighty per cent of all women in recorded occupations in 1851. In contrast the number of women in agriculture halved between 1851 and 1881 and there was a new and expanding category of professional occupations and subordinate offices. Most other occupations employed few women, though at a regional level there were still significant numbers in the metal trades, in food and drink manufacture and also in printing and stationery work.

A problem with sources

From 1851 the census returns provide slightly more reliable indicators of women’s paid employment based on individual occupations taken every ten years. However, there are very considerable difficulties in interpreting the data. There are doubts among historians as to the accuracy and reliability of the evidence especially for the nineteenth century. There is increasing awareness that mistakes were made either by the original enumerator or by the householder or by both[1]. This was compounded by the inconsistent use of key terms like ‘domestic servant’. Research on the returns for Rochdale and Rutland suggest that the number of domestic servants was exaggerated and many people so identified were relatives helping out the family concerned.

There are more serious difficulties with the census returns that historians now recognise. They seriously under record the number of employed women, possibly by as much as a third. There is considerable evidence that part-time seasonal and irregular work of all kinds -- including seasonal agricultural work, outwork, casual domestic work such as washing and working in family businesses -- were all ignored. More surprising than the omission of married women’s part-time work was the failure on occasions to count even their full-time work. Comparison of wage books with workers’ name and addresses, and the census enumerators’ books, for identical days, demonstrate that married women’s full-time work was seriously underestimated. Evidence from the woollen mills of the Border region suggest that up to half of married women with full-time work were recorded with no occupation in the census returns.  The value of census returns lies in their indication of trends but exact figures and precise comparisons between years should be treated with considerable caution.

Did the percentage of women in the workforce increase after 1830?

Historians are divided on this issue. The ‘optimists’ argue that the Industrial Revolution gave women more job opportunities and led eventually to their emancipation. The ‘pessimists’ and observers at the time are less enthusiastic about the results of industrialisation but are divided as to its effects on women’s participation rates in the labour market and on their status as workers.  Contemporaries argued that labour in the pre-industrial world was creative, satisfying and wholesome. Historians take a less romantic view but have suggested that home and work were more integrated and men and women more equal. Other ‘pessimists’ consider that industrialisation, though producing more female employment, had a disastrous effect on the women, their homes and their families. On the other hand, there are historians who suggest that women lost jobs because of industrialisation [as in the case of home spinning] or that industrialisation offered no employment at all for women in the new jobs that were created [for example, in the railway industry]. These writers tend to ignore the new service jobs that were created as a result of the increased prosperity of the middle classes. Female participation rates after 1871 show that the combined processes of urbanisation and industrialisation had little impact.

So what were the levels of female participation in the economy? After 1851 female participation rates can be calculated from the censuses but problems with enumeration means that figures should be regarded as only a very tentative guide.

Female participation rates 1871-1931

 

Census Year	Percentage women of all ages
1871	31
1891	27.4
1911	26.9
1931	27.5

Through the period the combined processes of industrialisation and urbanisation appear to have had little impact of women’s participation rates though these figures hide much unremunerated work. There were, however, significant differences in the percentage of women working at different ages:

Women working in 1901

 

Age	Percentage of age group working
15-34	77
35-44	15
45-59	12

The pattern of the typical women worker in full-time, wage-earning work as young rather than an older person had some effect on the generally lower wages women earned compared to those of men. In many industries [though not all] older women with more experience could demand higher wages. However, there were fewer older women working and they were unable to ‘boost’ the average female wage. Aggregated figures should not be allowed to hide the fact that sometimes women did earn as much or more than men. This can be seen in the Potteries where skilled women decorators were paid more than some of the male potters doing less skilled jobs[2]. There were widespread assumptions about the relative value of men’s work and women’s work. Many men argued that they had greater physical strength than women do and were more skilled and therefore they deserved higher wages than women. In some cases this seems to have been based on gender stereotyping rather than on reality. Women were often skilled though most found themselves confined to the unskilled sectors of the economy

The 1871 census suggests that just over a quarter of the female population -- some 2.8 million out of 10.6 million -- were at work and that women made up about thirty per cent of the country’s labour force. It is not surprising that the proportion of the female labour force remained remarkably constant between the 1870s and the 1910s. However, when these figures are broken down region by region, and occupation by occupation, it is apparent that the participation rate could vary considerably over the country. The proportion rose to over a third in Lancashire, Nottingham, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire but fell to less than one-fifth in Northumberland, Durham, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Monmouth and Kent. Such wide regional disparities are not simply reflections of a particular age-structure, because women’s participation in work varied greatly even for the 15-24 age group, whose members were mostly unmarried and therefore notionally available for work.

There were very few activities where women actually made up three out of every ten workers involved. Viewed nationally four activities accounted between them for almost ninety per cent of women’s work. Domestic and allied forms of personal service headed the list, employing about two out of every five working women; the textiles and clothing industries provided employment for a similar proportion; and lagging a long way behind agriculture found work for about one working women in every twelve. This concentration in a few sectors had an obvious corollary: there were other important areas of economic activity from which women workers were absent completely or in which they participated in small numbers. Women were absent, for example, from the building trade by 1851 and except in a few areas where they did surface work they were not employed in coal or mineral mines. They do not appear among the clerks and secretaries in the commercial offices and counting houses of Dickens’ London. Women may have been excluded from many parts of the primary and secondary sectors of the economy but they certainly dominated others. Taken all round, women were probably under represented in the primary sector and over represented in the tertiary sector, compared with men.

Once the uneven distribution of women workers between different occupations and industries has been appreciated, the marked regional differences in women’s participation in the labour force starts to make sense. Some activities were carried out all over the country like domestic service and dressmaking while others were confined to particular specialist localities. Regional and local specialisation created marked divergence from the national norm, not only in the level but also in the variety of women’s employment. What women did depended largely on the particular economic structure of the place where they were born, and generalisations based on crude national totals ignore the essential element of regional and local variety.

Between 1871 and 1914 women were concentrated in certain ‘women’s jobs’. In 1881 four main occupations accounted for 76 per cent of employed women and this changed only slightly before 1914. Agriculture, which accounted for 12 per cent of women workers in the 1840s, had already ceased to be a major employer of women by 1881. Increasing numbers of young rural women went into domestic service, where they were better paid, receiving £12-£15 per year rather than £10 as a fieldworker, and were in addition given board and lodgings. The decline in the numbers of women employed in textiles, clothing and domestic service was, by 1911, substantial but these women were reabsorbed primarily in the clerical and distributive trades and to a lesser extent by the metals, paper, chemical and food, drink and tobacco trades. The growth in these occupations was sufficient to absorb a particular large increase in the numbers of women working between 1901 and 1911.

Women’s occupations 1881-1911 [percentage of women employed]

 

	Domestic service	Professional	Dressmaking	Textiles
1881	37	4	17	16
1891	35	5	16	14.7
1901	33	6	14.5	13
1911	27	7	13	12.5

There was an important shift to white-blouse work in the period after 1871. While the numbers engaged in such work [mainly teaching, retailing, office work and nursing] increased by 161 per cent between 1881 and 1911, the numbers working in manufacturing industries and domestic service increased by only 24 per cent. Moreover the expansion of the non-manual sector was much more rapid for women than it was for men and, to some extent, this opened up routes of social mobility for working class girls. This did not by any means involve a leap into middle class status but it did provide an increased element of respectability to employment. It is the division between manual and non-manual occupations that becomes increasingly the fundamental division in women’s work rather than the, always tenuous, division between working and middle classes.

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[1] The census return was initially filled in by the householder and then checked by the enumerator. The instructions given to householders and enumerators were unclear, particularly in dealing with the work of women within the household or family economy.

[2] Richard Whipp Patterns of Labour: work and social change in the pottery industry, Routledge, 1990 provides a detailed discussion of this issue.

Where's History going?

Maria Grever and Siep Stuurman (eds.)

Beyond the Canon: History for the Twenty-First Century

(Palgrave, 2007)

222pp., £45 hard, ISBN 978-0-230-51650-2

Why is government throughout the Western World increasingly concerned about national identity and the transmission of historical knowledge? The answer perhaps lies in the increasingly fluid world in which we live where substantial population migration appears to be the norm and where ‘our’ history is no longer accepted with the same quietism that was the case a generation ago. Defining who were are and what our history is used to be relatively straightforward; in many respects the early attempts to produce a National Curriculum reflected, though not without disagreement, what the ‘great and the good’ saw as important in our history. That certainly no longer exists as we now try to come to terms with our past, a process that had parallels in Germany, the United States, the Netherlands, France, South Africa and Canada. Take, for example, the debate over the slave trade and whether the government should apologise for this. Is it possible to apologise to people long dead and should one apologise to their descendents? Are we applying today’s moral imperatives to the past and is that, in fact desirable? The slave trade, for all its barbarity, existed and apologising now for events two hundred years ago and more seems to me a token but then perhaps it is a necessary token.

I remember a discussion with year nine students on the slave trade where we looked at its morality. Those who did not really think about the issue quickly concluded that we should apologise because slavery was wrong, a moral judgement without doubt but perhaps not a historical one. However, those who thought more deeply about the issue began to ask the sorts of questions that politicians ought to be asking before reaching heavily-spun and simplistic conclusions. Why did some people in 1780 believe that slavery was morally right? Would we have supported the slave trade in the eighteenth century? The students split on the issue with some arguing that if they were merchants and wanted to make a good profit they probably would have traded in slaves. Would we support slavery today? No contest, of course not. As one student, not the brightest in the ground, said, it all depends on the context.

Our historical identity demands a clear historical context and narrative. The problem is that in a world of flux neither the context nor the narrative are as clear as they once were. I had thought that Butterfield buried Whig approach to history but it seems not; it has undergone a dramatic revival enhanced by the historical application of political correctness. So has history come down to relativism? Has it become yet another too of government?

These issues form an important theme in an excellent collection of fourteen papers that consider old canons and new histories. Part 1 considers the framing of historical knowledge and contains an excellent paper by Peter Lee on the issue of historical literacy. Part 2 looks at the foundations and revisions of the Western Canon considering issues such as the Enlightenment as a possible canon for modernity, citizenship and the crisis in the Humanities, rethinking the nation in historical museums and gender. The final part considers the transmission of historical knowledge in multicultural settings including a powerful chapter on slavery. This is an important book for history teachers since it places some of the issues that are raised in the classroom and by revisions to the history curriculum in a global context. If it is true that every generation rewrites the history of the previous generation, then the message for history teachers in Britain is that you are not alone in your concerns.

Women in the Economy: 1 Working class

Working class women and work

There are difficulties defining the ‘working classes’ but generally the term is used to cover women who worked with their hands, who were paid wages, not salaries, and who did not employ other people; also, and most importantly, the wives and daughters of men who fitted this description. Women worked full-time or part-time either outside the home in a factory, shop or factory or on the land or worked in their own homes or in other people’s. However, a very large numbers of women worked full-time in the home for no wages at all. A contrast was made between ‘real’ work and work in the home which since it has never been paid was somehow assumed not to be ‘real’ work at all and consequently has become devalued in the eyes of many men and women. Many aspects of women’s work were controversial throughout this period. Women, married and unmarried had always worked. They had been, for example, spinners, dressmakers, straw-plaiters and lacemakers; they had combined this with housekeeping and child rearing. These activities did not appear to arouse the controversy that accompanied the public appearance of wage-earning working women, as a result of industrialisation, in certain areas like Lancashire, West Yorkshire and the Potteries. Working wives and mothers were often regarded as unnatural, unfeminine, immoral and inadequate homemakers and parents. They were attacked by male workers who feared the loss of work but who wrote petitions full of apparent concern for women and their children. Unmarried women were also attacked[1].

These criticisms arose out of contemporary assumptions about women’s work and about the inherent nature and functions of women themselves. It is clear that the upper and middle class critics of working class women did not disapprove of work as such; what concerned them was the location of that work when women were seen working away from their proper sphere, that is, their own or someone else’s home. This ‘domestic ideology’ dominated thinking about women’s work throughout the period. Expressed simply, it saw the world as divided into two spheres, one for men and one for women. Men were to go out to work, make money and support their families while women were to stay at home, creating a haven for themselves and their children and for their husbands to return to. These created certain tensions as most working class women, especially if unmarried, were financially forced to work. Most women worked because they had to and were not ashamed of this believing they were supporting and helping their families by working outside the home. Paid work was not seen as an alternative to housework but as a way of enabling them better to fulfil their duty as wives, mothers and homemakers.

In general, working class women did not regard full-time work as something they would undertake for the whole of their adult lives. It is very clear that married women continued to believe firmly that their primary commitment was to home and family. Poverty drove many women to wage-earning work and it was widespread poverty that to some degree helps to explain why men held defensive attitudes against women working. Men believed that a limited amount of work was available and suspected that allowing women to share work would cause some families to be without pay as a result of other families taking more than their fair share.

Women’s work in 1851

The 1851 census suggests that just over a quarter of the female population -- some 2.8 million out of 10.6 million -- were at work and that women made up about thirty per cent of the country’s labour force. However, when these figures are broken down region by region, and occupation by occupation, it is apparent that the participation rate could vary considerably over the country. The proportion rose to over a third in Lancashire, Nottingham, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire but fell to less than one-fifth in Northumberland, Durham, Lincolnshire, Cambridgeshire, Monmouth and Kent. Such wide regional disparities are not simply reflections of a particular age-structure, because women’s participation in work varied greatly even for the 15-24 age group, whose members were mostly unmarried and therefore notionally available for work.

There were very few activities where women actually made up three out of every ten workers involved. Viewed nationally four activities accounted between them for almost ninety per cent of women’s work. Domestic and allied forms of personal service headed the list, employing about two out of every five working women; the textiles and clothing industries provided employment for a similar proportion; and lagging a long way behind agriculture found work for about one working women in every twelve. This concentration in a few sectors had an obvious corollary: there were other important areas of economic activity from which women workers were absent completely or in which they participated in small numbers. Women were absent, for example, from the building trade by 1851 and except in a few areas where they did surface work they were not employed in coal or mineral mines. They do not appear among the clerks and secretaries in the commercial offices and counting houses of Dickens’ London. Women may have been excluded from many parts of the primary and secondary sectors of the economy but they certainly dominated others. Taken all round, women were probably under represented in the primary sector and over represented in the tertiary sector, compared with men.

Once the uneven distribution of women workers between different occupations and industries has been appreciated, the marked regional differences in women’s participation in the labour force starts to make sense. Some activities were carried out all over the country like domestic service and dressmaking while others were confined to particular specialist localities. Regional and local specialisation created marked divergence from the national norm, not only in the level but also in the variety of women’s employment. What women did depended largely on the particular economic structure of the place where they were born, and generalisations based on crude national totals ignore the essential element of regional and local variety.

---

[1] Useful studies of working women writing and speaking for themselves include: John Burnett (ed.) Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Work People from the 1820s to the 1920s, Routledge, new edition, 1994, Doris Nield Chew Ada Nield Chew: The Life and Writings of a Working Woman, Virago, 1982, Clementina Black Married Women’s Work Being the Report of an Enquiry undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council, 1915 especially for rural work and charwomen and Maud Pember Reeves Round About a Pound a Week, 1913, Virago, 1979, a survey carried out by Fabian Society’s Women’s Group of families living on an income of 18-26 shillings a week in Lambeth, south London.

Aspects of Chartism: Chartism and Slavery 'distinction without difference' 3

‘Moral radicalism’

Contemporary reformers in and around Birmingham were convinced that the Birmingham Political Union had led the popular movement that brought about parliamentary reform in 1832. For Thomas Attwood and his supporters what made this possible was the union of middle and working classes in the town. This union of all classes was, the BPU argued, based on the unity of interest of all the ‘productive classes’, a shorthand term for both manufacturers and workers. Whether valid or not, the myth of class collaboration as a means of achieving reform was a powerful one in Birmingham and it is not surprising that later attempts to draw together middle class radical and the more respectable elements of Chartism drew its inspiration from the BPU[1].

The precise relationship between political, ideological and social factors was, however, more complex than this suggests. The BPU may have proclaimed the success of the alliance of the working and middle classes, but there was considerable dissatisfaction among working people with the 1832 settlement. This contributed to the re-emergence of the BPU between 1837 and 1839 and Attwood’s somewhat pragmatic conversion to the programme of universal suffrage he had previously opposed. In many respects, Attwood was responding to changes in the local economy towards the increasing factory production of various trades, downward pressure on wages and fear of unemployment and under-employment[2]. This had led to developing economic conflict with employers and resentment at the exclusion of working class representatives from a share in the leadership of the BPU. The notion of a ‘unity of interest’ looked increasingly precarious by the middle years of the 1830s and collapsed completely in 1838-39 with the incorporation of Birmingham in late 1838 and the decision by BPU leaders to call in detachments of the metropolitan police in mid-1839 to control rioting crowds in the Bull Ring.

One of the strengths of middle class radicalism in Birmingham up to the late 1830s was that although it was bankers, manufacturers and businessmen who took the lead, they were able to draw on the support of those exponents of ‘moral radicalism’ among the town’s middle class. The attitude of ‘moral radicals’ was explicitly shaped by non-Anglican religious loyalties and their conviction of the possibilities of class harmony through class collaboration. This perspective was not grounded in any socio-economic analysis and they had no evident attraction to Attwood’s currency theories, but their presence in the BPU does seem to have made a difference. Attwood and his supporters were abolitionists and maintained this position after 1833 and they found common ground with the religious reformers over factory regulation and opposition to the financial claims of the Established Church.

The ‘moral radicals’ shared a number of the specific objectives of the Attwood group and the more general aspiration to class collaboration. However, by 1835, their views on class collaboration began to diverge from the emphasis of the BPU. A more distinctive moral radicalism was given voice in a new weekly paper, the Reformer and in its successor, the Philanthropist. In addition to their opposition to West Indian apprenticeship, support for freer trade, the ballot and further franchise reform, the moral radicals directed their views at the aspiration to respectability among the working class by advocating temperance and what was later called ‘rational leisure’. There was also a strong element of patriotism in their thinking. The duty of Christian reformers was to end corruption and they believed in ‘reform of every abuse from the throne to the poor house’[3]. This led to increasing tension with the BPU and the Philanthropist concluded before the end of 1837 that the BPU not longer commanded the support it had in 1832 and lacked the influence to turn the Whig government out and was simply hoping for something better from the Tories[4]. With the collapse of the Attwood-working class alliance by 1839, the moral radicals were best placed to establish a new union of the classes. Sturge certainly saw himself as leading any such alliance. The result was the eventual creation of the Complete Suffrage Union in early 1842.

The Complete Suffrage Union: the high point of co-operation

Was Sturge being politically naïve in believing that a Parliament elected by the people could be trusted to legislate for the people? Francis Place certainly had worries on this score. Sturge had, however, taken the moral high-ground of the right to the vote just as he had accepted the right of slaves to freedom irrespective of how that right might be exercised. This was apparent in the ‘Declaration’ he drew up to be circulated for signature. It articulated the principle that taxation without representation was tyranny and that the right to a ‘full, free and fair’ franchise was based on both constitutional and Christian principles[5]. By 1842, a provisional committee based in Birmingham had begun preparations for a conference in April.

The Birmingham conference in April 1842 launched the Complete Suffrage Union[6] amid high hopes for a successful coalition. It recognised the natural right to the suffrage and demanded the vote for every male aged twenty-one regardless of property qualifications, called for a secret ballot, annual parliaments and the payment of MPs. This was all condensed into a resolution for Sharman Crawford to introduce in the House of Commons. Lord Brougham agreed to launch it to the House of Lords and to present the memorial to the Queen. This showed that there was awareness among middle class radicals of the need for conciliation on their part. They announced that it was wrong to assume that a memorial embodying principles agreed on the preliminary discussions was intended to defeat the Charter. Nonetheless, the imprint of the outlook of moral radicalism and anti-slavery was clear in the minutes and records of the conference. The language of ‘political slavery’ was used widely and a proposed pattern of operation through correspondents, lecturers and missionaries, tracts and pamphlets as well as propaganda in religious periodicals such as the Nonconformist and the Eclectic Review was reminiscent of anti-slavery campaigns.

Many abolitionists rallied to support Sturge. Nonconformist clergymen were among the most active as many were already sympathetic to the ‘Chartist churches’ established among the working people. In this groups were: Edward Miall, J.H. Hinton of London[7], J.P. Mursell of Leicester[8], J.W. Massie of Manchester[9], Doctor John Ritchie of Edinburgh[10], Thomas Swam of Birmingham[11] and Henry Solly of Yeovil[12]. The most noted organiser of Chartist churches, Arthur O’Neill, worked with Sturge in Birmingham. Influential abolitionist ministers of the established church included Patrick Brewster and Thomas Spencer of Bath[13]. Spencer and Solly had the most direct contact with the working class. Scottish abolitionist supporters of Sturge included James Moir, John Ure, James Turner and Andrew Paton from the Glasgow area, Baillie Turner and John Dunlop of Edinburgh. Support also came from the League especially from Archibald Prentice, P.A. Taylor and Dr John Bowring as well as from Lord Brougham and Daniel O’Connell, prominent anti-slavery politicians. The moral radicals were also encouraged by the emergence of ‘new move’ Chartism; this was just the kind of respectable radicalism that was most likely to appeal to Sturge and his religious friends. Leading Chartists, including William Lovett, Henry Vincent (as the leading exponent of teetotal Chartism his attendance was immediately encouraging to temperance reformers among the moral radicals), John Collins and Bronterre O’Brien[14] who were already committed to the anti-slavery cause also supported Sturge.

There were, however, notable absentees. Colonel T.P. Thompson was sceptical of Sturge’s approach believing that Chartism would drag the CSU down. Edward Baines did not accept that it was possible to unite such a disparate collection of reformers effectively. In addition, Baines believed that, after 1832, the middle class electorate had to be preserved from being overwhelmed by the uneducated masses and for many years was opposed to the complete suffrage proposals or even household suffrage. Joseph John Gurney, probably the leading figure of the evangelical Quakers, was hostile to Chartist politics. This was largely the consequence of his views on American democracy that he experienced first-hand in the late 1830s. He believed that democracy was no good unless it was also a theocracy and he especially disliked the habit of oppressive popular violence in the democratic system.

What made the Complete Suffrage Union different from earlier attempts at class reconciliation was its acceptance of universal suffrage as necessary to forge a cross-class alliance. This posed a real problem for O’Connor and throughout 1842, while expressing personal respect for Sturge he consistently resisted any Chartist alliance with the CSU. The Northern Star opposed the formation of the CSU in April 1842 on the grounds that two national associations committed to universal suffrage could not co-exist. It was never likely that the O’Connorite wing of Chartism would embrace the moral radicalism that informed the middle class leadership of the CSU. O’Connor’s attitude remained ambivalent. The CSU was too closely associated with free trade and the Anti-Corn Law League to be acceptable. O’Connor initially conducted a fierce campaign against the CSU, which was obliged to adopt the Charter in all but name, but recognised the tactical advantage of an accommodation with middle class radicals and came out in favour of class collaboration in July 1842. This strategy of infiltration led to widespread Chartist support for Sturge when he stood for the open and radical constituency of Nottingham at a by-election in the summer. Although the contest was close, Sturge lost. O’Connor did not seek an alliance with the CSU but rather the incorporation of a section of the middle class into the Chartist movement. He told a Chartist meeting at St Pancras in September 1842[15] “We will stand firm and united – We will listen to no coalition, no half measures. Mahomet must come to the mountain…We are the mountain – we are the people.”

The points of the Charter were accepted but they were tied to a repudiation of physical force and an exclusive reliance on ‘a moral agency’. Although the Chartist members of the conference did not dissent from this, signs of future difficulties did emerge. Lovett and his allies would not budge on the Charter itself. No alternative definition of complete suffrage was acceptable. He argued that acceptance of the principles of the Charter without its name made the unity of classes less likely since the Charter had become a symbolic statement for working people. Miall and Spencer voiced the unease of some of the middle class radicals that the Chartists were trying to dictate the terms of the alliance and, as a result, the decision on the status of the Charter was postponed until the autumn.

There was nothing inevitable about the failure of collaboration, at least between the kinds of working class radicals in Birmingham and those present at the April conference. By late April 1842, there were fifty local associations and the CSU presented a rival parliamentary petition to that of the National Charter Association: it too was heavily defeated. The April conference had adjourned with the intention of meeting again in the autumn. However, the summer of 1842 saw widespread unemployment followed by demonstrations and arrests and it was this, more than anything else that destroyed the substantial common ground between middle and working class radicals. Consequently, the meeting was postponed until December. By the autumn, under pressure from Chartist hard-liners and by his failure to attract substantial middle class converts, O’Connor reversed his position and again attacked the CSU as ‘a League job’. A conference to try to determine a common programme was called to take place in the saloon of the Mechanics Institution, New Hall Street, Birmingham from 27^th to 30^th December 1842. Weeks of jockeying for position followed, with each faction trying to send the most delegates. O’Connor and other representatives of the NCA stood in the election to nominate delegates. This proved successful and O’Connor was elected as one of the six delegates for Sturge’s home town of Birmingham. The result was a conference packed with Chartist delegates despite prior agreement.

The irony was that everyone who attended the December conference agreed on goals but it foundered on naming the document through which those aims should be publicised. The middle class radicals insisted on the adoption of a 96-clause ‘New Bill of Rights’ for universal suffrage instead of the emotive ‘Charter’. This was an attempt to disassociate middle class radicalism from the anarchic confusion associated with O’Connor and his supporters. Things did not start well. Thomas Beggs, a Nottingham delegate, presented a series of resolutions, supporting the six points of the Charter, asking that the conference support “such means only for obtaining the legislative recognition of them as are of a strictly just, peaceful, legal and constitutional character” and take as the basis for discussion a Bill of Rights prepared by the council of the Complete Suffrage Union. The two measures were largely identical as both parties to the conference admitted, but there was an absolute deadlock over the term ‘Chartist’. Lovett, as leader of the Chartist faction at the conference, proposed in the interests of harmony that both bills be withdrawn or that both be considered clause by clause. But all attempts at conciliation failed, Lovett was not prepared to accept this and tactically (and temporarily) joined with O’Connor in substituting ‘Charter’ for ‘Bill’ and this was carried by the decisive majority of 193 to 94. When it became clear that the Charter had the support of the majority of delegates, Joseph Sturge resigned from the chair and withdrew from the conference with many of his supporters. Further splits followed as the conference went on, and by its end, the 300 to 400 delegates present at its opening had fallen to just 37. Neither side would accept the other’s conditions for joint action. Class collaboration was ended, the CSU was allowed to wither and O’Connor’s grip of the movement was tightened. The Birmingham Journal provided an apt summary of events: it was the old story of marriage on Monday, quarrels on Tuesday and divorce on Wednesday. The two partners had agreed on their affections but could not agree on the name of their child and so strangled it[16].

A falling-off of support?

The experiment with the Complete Suffrage Union was the high point of abolitionist co-operation with Chartism from the viewpoint both of the level of support and the degree of public commitment. Though there was a falling-off of support was caused by a sense of disillusion among some abolitionists and anti-slavery organisations, a significant number of individual abolitionists carried on the agitation for suffrage reform. Sturge continued to tour the country speaking for reform and his newspaper, The Pilot, advocated the franchise as basic to other reforms and necessary even to obtain the repeal of the Corn Law. Abolitionist MPs sympathetic to Complete Suffrage or Chartism in the 1840s included John Bowring, C.P. Villiers, Edward Miall, William Johnson Fox[17], George Thompson and Sharman Crawford. Other abolitionists continued to work through local politics, lectures and publications. Of particular importance were James Silk Buckingham, W.H. Ashurst[18], Albert Albright and his nephew Charles Gilpin, William and Mary Howitt[19], W.J. Linton, F.R. Lees[20], W.E. Forster, Thomas Spencer, Henry Solly, Samuel Roberts of Wales[21], James Haughton of Dublin[22] and several Scots including Patrick Brewster, John Ritchie, James Moir and Alexander Duncannon[23]. The Complete Suffrage Union survived in Scotland after it had died out in other areas,

The increasing sensitivity of British abolitionists to the justice of Chartist demands is reflected in the degree to which visiting Americans were drawn into discussions on the similarities between slavery and working class exploitation and thus into arguments about where priorities should lie. James and Lucretia Mott, John A. Collins, Charles Redmond and William Lloyd Garrison were all influenced by what they saw of working class conditions in Britain. Collins, for example was persuaded that the anti-slavery movement had helped open eyes to other oppressive systems and saw British society was resting on a dangerous structure just as American society rested dangerously on slavery. The late 1840s and 1850s brought an increased flood of American abolitionists to Britain, among them many blacks who were often appalled by the conditions of the British poor. Frederick Douglass, most prominent of all black abolitionists, specifically called himself a Chartist and lectured to large crowds that included working class people. In 1846, Douglass, Garrison and Henry C. Wright, all committed to Chartist principle, worked closely with British abolitionists. They preached in Chartist churches and Complete Suffrage gatherings.

At the same time, several Chartist leaders, notably Lovett and Vincent, strengthened their links with organised anti-slavery groups. Both took part in the formation of George Thompson’s Anti-Slavery League in 1846 and were active in that group’s efforts to pressure the Evangelical Alliance to refuse fellowship to visiting pro-slavery American clergymen. This interest in black slavery continued within the Chartist movement into the 1850s and this is a clear indication of the degree to which the two causes influenced each other. The success of the abolitionists in winning their fight for emancipation and against the apprenticeship system persuaded some Chartists to use their strategy to gain support. More importantly, the Chartists adapted the arguments against slavery for use in their own cause capitalising on abolitionist success in heightening the British public’s awareness of oppression. By equating working class exploitation with slavery, the Chartists forced many abolitionists to extend their vision.

Conclusion

It is easy to exaggerate the significance of Chartist links with the abolitionists. The range of responses to Chartism exhibited by anti-slavery reformers underlines the conclusion that there was no single set of abolitionist answers to working class grievances. Mass support for abolitionism in the 1830s, though it died away after 1838, co-existed with sympathy, ambivalence and much hostility among abolitionists towards claims for greater autonomy and greater influence by the leaders of Chartism. Above all, efforts by abolitionists to work with Chartists achieved very little. However, the abolitionists in general and Sturge’s supporters in particular anticipated the development of the more harmonious society that developed in urban and industrial centres in the late 1840s and 1850s. They also accepted that, if collaboration was to work, it required acknowledgement by the middle class of an equality of esteem as well as rights of working people and meant acknowledging that collaboration did not simply mean middle class leadership. This does not alter the reality of co-operation, which worked best where there was some convergence in attitudes and values between middle and working class radicals. When Oastler said that the causes of anti-slavery and Chartism were ‘one and the same’, he recognised the mutual influence that they had over each other. This was the achievement of class collaboration.

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[1] Carlos Flick The Birmingham Political Union and the Movements for Reform in Britain 1830-1839, Folkestone, 1978 and Clive Behagg ‘An Alliance with the Middle Class: the Birmingham Political Union and Early Chartism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture 1830-60, Macmillan, 1982, pages 60-61, 67.

[2] Clive Behagg Politics & Production in the Early Nineteenth Century, Routledge, 1990, especially pages 158-222 is an invaluable revisionist study that challenges the standard interpretation of the social relations of production in the workshop sector especially in Birmingham.

[3] Philanthropist, 4^th February 1836.

[4] Philanthropist, 21^st December 1837.

[5] The Northern Star, 19^th May 1842 facetiously objected to Sturge’s principle that all who were not a burden on the state should have the vote. This, said the editor, would exclude all the clergy, the upper class and most of the middle class.

[6] On the Complete Suffrage Union, James Epstein The Lion of Freedom, Croom Helm, 1982, pages 286-302 is the best examination of Chartist responses. Alexander Wilson ‘The Suffrage Movement’ in P. Hollis (ed.) Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, London, 1974, pages 80-104 considers the 1840s and the 1850s with a useful section on the CSU. Alex Tyrrell Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain, London, 1987 is the standard biography

[7] Hinton worked with Sturge in organising the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society and was editor of the British Emancipator.

[8] Mursell was pastor of the Bond Street Independent Chapel in Leicester and was active in the Reform agitation and the Anti-Corn Law League.

[9] Massie was an Anti-Corn Law activist and helped organise the Anti-Slavery League.

[10] James Ritchie of the Secessionist church in Edinburgh had taken part in the Scottish abolition movement since the organisation of the Glasgow and Edinburgh societies in 1833.

[11] Thomas Swan was a Baptist minister. He was an active member of the Birmingham Anti-Slavery Society and a delegate to the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1843.

[12] On Solly, see his autobiography These Eighty Years, Or The Story of an Unfortunate Life, 1893. He was a relative newcomer to the anti-slavery cause largely because of the publicity surrounding the World Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840. He went to Yeovil on his first Unitarian pastorate and was challenged by John Bainbridge, the local Chartist leader to explain how he could preach Sunday after Sunday about Christ and yet did nothing to relieve the crushing oppression of the poor and was persuaded by the Chartist arguments. He spoke for the Charter at the ministers’ conference in 1841 and was an enthusiastic support of Sturge and the CSU but was one of the few abolitionists who voted with Lovett to retain the name of the Charter against Sturge who wanted to discard it.

[13] Spencer, like Brewster was outspoken against the established church’s failure to meet the needs of working people and insisted that it was a Christian’s duty to be political in the cause of the oppressed. He spoke in favour of the Ten Hours’ Bill, the unjust tax system, the standing army and other unjust state institutions.

[14] O’Brien had attacked the limited sympathies of abolitionists in the 1830s but seemed to have revised his attitude by 1842 to the worth of working with those of the middle class who were more acceptable because they were not Anglican but nonconformist in religion.

[15] Northern Star, 17^th September 1842.

[16] Birmingham Journal, 31^st December 1842. Bronterre O’Brien put the primary blame for failure to agree on Thomas Spencer, J. Ritchie, Patrick Brewster and Lawrence Heyworth in British Statesman, 31^st December 1842.

[17] Fox was interested in extending educational opportunities, women’s rights and Chartism though he disliked O’Connor’s approach. After the Chartist failure of 1848, he wrote Counsels to the Working Class, in which he argued for the need for co-operation between middle and working classes.

[18] William Ashurst was a radical London solicitor who championed the cause of the poor, the Charter and equal rights for women.

[19] The Howitts took over The People’s Journal and continued it as People’s and Howitt’s Journal. They were active in the Co-operative League and on behalf of Mechanics’ Institutes.

[20] F.R. Lees, who joined the Chartists, published The Truthmaker in which he frequently reprinted anti-slavery as well as Chartist materials.

[21] Samuel Roberts of Llanbrynmair supported numerous reforms including anti-slavery, manhood suffrage and education, abolition of the death penalty and disestablishment of the church. In 1843, he founded a monthly magazine Y Cronicl.

[22] James Haughton was one of the main leaders of the Irish anti-slavery movement. He favoured the suffrage for men and women as long as they were literate and not on parish relief.

[23] Alexander Duncannon was pastor of a Congregational church in Falkirk and was active in the Scottish abolitionist movement. He wanted a fusion of all reform groups including Chartism, anti-slavery, temperance and anti-capital punishment.

Did women have an Enlightenment?

Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds.)

Women, Gender and Enlightenment

(Palgrave, 2007)

768pp., £22.99 paper, ISBN 978-0-230-51781-3

Did women have an Enlightenment? Historians have long excluded women from the Enlightenment orbit. But images of ‘Woman’ loomed large in Enlightenment thought, and women themselves - as scientists and salonnières, bluestockings and governesses, polemicists and novelists - contributed much to enlightened intellectual culture. From Edinburgh to Naples, from Paris to Philadelphia, innovative minds of both sexes challenged conventional assumptions about female nature and entitlements, and imagined new modes of relating between the sexes. Viewpoints competed, with feminists utilising enlightened principles to argue for women’s rights while defenders of masculine privilege developed new rationales for male dominance grounded in Enlightenment science. This very important collection of interdisciplinary papers by forty leading scholars is a product of a research project on ‘Feminism and the Enlightenment 1650-1850: a Comparative history’ that ran for three years across the millennium. It combines searching historiographical essays with scholarly discussions of specific authors and covers questions of sex, gender and politics as they emerged in Enlightenment France, England, Spain, Italy, Scotland and the American Colonies. Each section had an authoritative introduction and the two concluding essays weigh up the entire volume. The cumulative effect is dazzling, in part because the repetitions and contradictions highlight the different ways in which events, ideas and personalities can be interpreted, depending on the particular focus. The scale of Women, Gender and Enlightenment, with its thirty-five essays, section introductions and biographies clearly demonstrates both the variety of the subject matter, but also the variety of approaches to this material.

Women in the Economy: Introduction

Between 1830 and 1914 there were significant and radical changes in many areas of British economic and social life. The critical question is whether there were parallel changes in the world of women’s work. This section explores this issue from a variety of perspectives[1].

Some general questions about women’s work

There are three major issues that can be raised from the outset about women’s work, especially that of the working class. First, the idea and practice of the sexual division of labour was seminal. For the most part women did ‘women’s work’ defined in terms of low wages. For example, in the Glasgow tailoring industry in the 1890s men were paid 3/6d and women 9d for making the same garment. Women had a reproductive rather than a productive role and as this reproductive work was unpaid society regarded it as having no economic value. This perception was translated into the labour market and a gender hierarchy of labour developed whereby women’s work was given a lower social and economic value than that of men. The sexual division of labour therefore split the working class along lines of sex. It split the unity of that class and often the enmity between the two groups was seen in trade union activity.

Secondly, women were regarded as a cheap reserve pool of labour that could be brought in and out of the workforce to suit the requirements of capital and/or the state. Finally, the Industrial Revolution brought about a decisive separation between home and work. In pre-industrial society women were engaged in production at home. Industrialisation sifted production into the factories or workshops and many women became factory workers or ‘sweated labour’. Cheap labour is a fundamental element of the capitalist mode of production and female labour was and is cheap labour. By introducing machinery and low-paid women into factories, manufacturers sought to break down many specialist tasks into a series of mechanical operations and so keep wages low. Many women were tied to the home yet in need of money to support themselves and their family. Some form of outwork or homework was often their only option. This was, and still is, a particularly exploitative form of employment. Much of this work was brought to the public attention by The Sweated Industries Exhibition of 1906 and by the widely publicised action of the Cradley Heath chain makers’ strike of 1910.

Many aspects of women’s work were controversial. Women, married or unmarried had always worked. However, by the mid-nineteenth century working wives and mothers were regarded as unnatural, immoral and inadequate homemakers and parents. These criticisms arose from contemporary assumptions about women’s work and indeed about the inherent nature and functions of women themselves. The problem historians face is that these assumptions were not always clearly expressed, were not universally shared and which were ambivalent and contradictory.

It is clear that the upper and middle class critics of working class women did not object to work as such. Most objections arose from the matter of the location of work and when women were seen working away from their proper sphere; that is, their own, or someone else’s home. This domestic ideology affected attitudes to women’s work throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially observable among the middle classes, it spread to sections of all classes, and to members of both sexes. These ideas not only affected those from upper and middle classes who criticised working class women for working outside their homes; they also had an impact on the attitudes of many working class men and women.

Many women saw paid work, not as an alternative to housework, but as a way of enabling them better to fulfil their duty as wives, mothers and homemakers. In general, however, working class women did not regard full time paid work as something they would undertake for all of their adult lives. Married women who, for financial reasons, were compelled to work rarely continued to work when the financial crisis had ended. It was poverty that drove many working class women into wage-earning work and it was widespread poverty that to some extent helps to explain men’s defensive attitude against women working. E.H. Hunt wrote of the period 1850-1914[2] ‘Men believed that a limited amount of work was available and suspected that allowing women to share work would cause some families to be without pay as a consequence of other families taking more than their fair share.’

For working class women there could be no clear distinction between the public and private spheres, however much ideally they would have liked there to be one. This confusion between private and public spheres can be seen in a variety of ways: women taking in lodgers or selling food from their back kitchens or acting as a domestic servant.

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[1] The classic works are I. Pinchbeck Women Workers in the Industrial Revolution, first published in 1930, but reprinted in 1985 by Virago with an introduction by Kerry Hamilton and B. Drake Women in Trade Unions, London, 1921 reprinted by Virago, 1984. D. Thompson Women in the Nineteenth Century, The Historical Association, 1990, J. Perkin Victorian Women, John Murray, 1993, J. Rendall Women in an Industrialising Society: England 1750-1880, Blackwell, 1990, Judy Lown With Free and Graceful Step? Women and industrialisation in nineteenth century England, Polity, 1987 and Paula Bartley The Changing Role of Women 1815-1914, Hodder & Stoughton, 1996 are good, short introductions to the background of the subject. Jane Purvis (ed.) Women’s History Britain 1850-1945: an introduction, UCL, 1995 is an outstanding collection of essays. They should be supplemented by E. Roberts Women’s Work 1840-1940, Macmillan, 1987 and E. Richards ‘Women in the British Economy since 1700’, History, volume 59, 1974. For the post-1850 period see Jane Lewis Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change, Harvester, 1984 is a good introduction. S. Rose Limited Livelihoods: Class and Gender in Nineteenth Century England, Routledge, 1992 is a major study of the relationship between capitalism and women. A.V. John (ed.) Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800-1950, Blackwell, 1986 is a useful collection of papers.

[2] E.H. Hunt British Labour History 1815-1914, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981, page 24.