Women and Work in Britain since 1840

Gerry Holloway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781134512997
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The first book of its kind to study this period, Gerry Holloway's essential student resource works chronologically from the early 1840s to the end of the twentieth century and examines over 150 years of women's employment history.

With suggestions for research topics, an annotated bibliography to aid further research, and a chronology of important events which places the subject in a broader historical context, Gerry Holloway considers how factors such as class, age, marital status, race and locality, along with wider economic and political issues, have affected women's job opportunities and status.

Key themes and issues that run through the book include:

• continuity and change
• the sexual division of labour
• women as a cheap labour force
• women's perceived primary role of motherhood
• women and trade unions
• equality and difference
• education and training.

Students of women's studies, gender studies and history will find this a fascinating and invaluable addition to their reading material.

Chapter One
Introduction

The study of women’s history has expanded greatly since the rise of the women’s liberation movement in the 1970s. This is not a coincidence as activists were acutely aware of the importance of understanding women’s past for potential women’s activism. For example, Sheila Rowbotham, in her groundbreaking work Hidden from History linked the question of women’s liberation with the way that capitalism had affected women’s independence through the economic opportunities allowed to them.¹ Since then, a vast amount of research has been undertaken into many aspects of women’s lives, not least in the area of women’s work. The sheer number of textbooks, pamphlets and journal articles on the subject can daunt the most enthusiastic student. One purpose of this book is to guide the reader through some of this material and highlight important texts. A second purpose is to chart and reflect on some of the debates, ideas and contests concerning women’s work since 1840, and to evaluate the distance women have travelled towards a yet-to-be-achieved universal economic independence and equal opportunities. This road is not a straight one and women have experienced many setbacks as well as achievements on the way.

Choosing a date from which to begin a book of this type is a problem in itself and, ultimately, the choice tends to be arbitrary. Why pick the 1840s rather than the mid-eighteenth century when industrialization began to transform work in Britain? I chose to begin with the 1840s because to some extent this was another milestone in the history of women’s relationship to work and also because I did not want to become involved in the debates about women and industrialization as these have been written about elsewhere.² My interest lies in the extent to which women have challenged dominant ideas about the work they should do and the conditions in which they should perform it. Further, I am interested in how women have worked together to achieve change. To this end, the 1840s are a good starting point. One can trace a growing awareness of women’s economic position and the conditions in which they worked. For example, the First Report of the Children’s Employment Commission in 1842 investigated the conditions of girls, boys and women working in mines and collieries and exposed not only the horrors of the coal industry, but also revealed in stark terms the contradiction between the way women were represented in Victorian society and the treatment many received by that society.³ This was also the first time that women workers were classified with children and young persons. Questions concerning the morality of allowing women to work in areas deemed masculine were also highlighted in these discussions. Further, there was an increasing realization of what we would call today the feminization of poverty. Along with the growing concern about the treatment of women in industry, there was a corresponding awareness of the large number of working women, both middle- and lower-class, living in relative poverty.

Out of these concerns one can observe the seeds of discontent being sown – these would develop into a way of addressing ‘The Woman Question’ and the network of organizations that formed the first women’s movement.⁴ The foundations for this movement, which would challenge prescriptive limitations, seek to redefine gender roles, contest male dominance, yet make a case for special protection for women, began to emerge in the 1840s. Some of the issues that caused women to organize around employment at that time have continued to be issues of importance to this day. For example, current campaigns of the Fawcett Society in Britain concerning the under-representation of women in better paid and higher status work reflect the concerns of earlier organizations trying to open up new professional careers for women. Similarly, the question of employment rights, although different in the detail, can be traced back to earlier concerns about women’s role as mothers.

The debate around continuity and change in women’s history has been written about extensively.⁵ However, many of these accounts, which often look at the notion of a golden age of women’s work, tend to attempt to privilege one over the other, whereas I would argue that, while interesting, these debates mask the more important issue of how women have dealt with continuity and change. Understanding the issues around which women have organized, the responses they elicited and the limitations of their success, and the extent of their failure, help us to understand enduring attitudes towards women’s employment and point to ways that might offer us solutions to our own problems. The study of history is important if we are to understand why society is organized the way it is and how we can use our understanding of the past to become agents of change in the present. This is not to argue that we can use simplistically examples of, say, how women responded to protective legislation in the lead industry in nineteenth century in the way we might organize around an issue today. Therefore, this book will not examine in detail the various areas of work in which women participated, although of course these will be mentioned and further reading indicated. Rather, it will focus on the interplay of continuity and change. That is, the ways in which dominant ideas concerning femininity, women’s roles, gender, class and, to some extent, race, have dictated the types of work deemed suitable for women; the value placed on women’s work, the status of women as workers and the strategies that women have employed to challenge these dominant ideas.

Several themes run throughout this book, so it is useful to draw these out from the beginning of this study. The first is the sexual division of labour. The question of what sort of work women should be undertaking is central to the whole debate around women’s role in society and has affected all women. The sexual division of labour is not a recent occurrence forced onto the population by increasing industrialization. It has a much longer history than the period focused on in this book; it can be argued that there is a long history of women’s work being accorded a lower social status and value than men’s because of women’s primary association with unpaid childcare and housework.⁶ In Britain, Catherine Hall has led the way in arguing that an ideology of domesticity, reinforced by evangelical Christianity and the effects of industrialization, led to the sharply defined gendered roles of this period.⁷ This ideology sought to elevate women’s domestic responsibilities and condemn paid work that took women out of their so-called ‘natural’ sphere, that is, the home. Industrialization certainly made women’s paid employment more visible as some forms of women’s work moved from the home into the factory. Vickery, however, cautions against being too committed to the notion that the ideology of separate spheres developed in the late eighteenth century. She argues that there are problems with definitions of public and private and how the meaning of these concepts has changed over time. She calls for a careful reading of the contemporary meanings of these concepts and how people use the terms. Further, she argues that a close examination of particular individuals’ and groups’ activities rather than a focus on prescriptive literature undermines the notion that men and women of this period occupied different, self-contained spheres. She calls for a more nuanced approach to the exploration of the ways that gender, and indeed class, operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and argues that, if anything, women’s sphere of influence increased in the nineteenth century especially in the field of philanthropy. Furthermore, she disputes that there was ever a golden age when men and women were held in equal worth in the world of work. She calls for more local case studies of how society operated at a micro level in order to test the separate spheres theory.⁸

Notwithstanding the concerns of Vickery and others who are calling for a more sustained critique of the separate spheres question, there is evidence in the nineteenth century of a changing attitude to women’s paid employment. Women had, of course, always worked in a range of occupations. Sometimes, this was paid work and sometimes it was not. Some types of work took women away from the home while other employment could be undertaken at home. In this book, I shall focus on paid employment whether undertaken at home or in a public workplace. This does not mean that women’s unpaid work was unimportant, whether it was the domestic labour that reproduced the workforce, philanthropic work or work that supported a family enterprise.⁹ However, this work is outside of what is conventionally thought of as employment and it is the debates around paid work that are the focus of this book. Women’s unpaid work will, therefore, only be discussed where it is suggested as being women’s ideal work or where it impinges on their actual or perceived ability to do paid work.

Returning to paid employment, there was a significant and growing debate around women’s work by the middle of the nineteenth century. For working-class women there was a growing public worry about the sort of paid work they were undertaking. It was not just women working in factories who were criticized, although they were probably the majority, as we shall see. Women working in agriculture and mining, for example, were also criticized for undertaking unwomanly work. The government intervened at several points to introduce legislation designed to protect women but which, in reality, excluded them from certain types of work. Consequently, during the nineteenth century, the types of work that were deemed suitable for working-class women were growing narrower over time and women’s own attitudes towards work were increasingly shaped by their responsibilities and relationship to domesticity. Arguments centring on the exclusion of women from certain types of paid work drew on discourse that constructed women as wives and mothers and the guardians of Christian moral values. Women working outside of the home, especially in areas of work divorced from feminine pursuits, were increasingly seen as neglecting their primary role as homemakers and in danger of losing their virtue. This meant that women’s employment opportunities, apart from domestic service, were funnelled into overcrowded sectors where they were ripe for exploitation. Against this background, campaigns to open up new areas of work to women exacerbated tensions by posing a threat to men and fuelling fears that the world was being turned upside down. For middle-class women, there was little concern about them undertaking unpaid work within their families and they were not discouraged from philanthropic work if it did not interfere with their domestic duties. Public anxiety about the type of work that women performed was a continuous thread throughout this period and will be examined in its various contexts.

Even without the campaign to remove women from certain employment sectors, there was widespread sexual discrimination within industries where segregation took place both vertically and horizontally. Segregation can mean the almost total separation between the types of work that men and women do. It is an ongoing phenomenon and is evident in many occupations and industries, although the form it takes differs over time and in differing work contexts. Women were, and still are to some extent, segregated into the unskilled, worst paid, most menial jobs and their pay was lower than men’s even when they did the same work. Furthermore, women were usually denied any chance of extended training that might enhance their chances of promotion as they were regarded primarily through their ideological domestic roles whether these existed in reality or not. Either way, women’s role in the workplace was not considered as a career nor were they considered the primary wage earner, although the reality often challenged these assumptions. Throughout the book, I shall examine various debates concerning segregation in the workforce.

The main types of work that were open to women at the beginning of the nineteenth century were agriculture, domestic service, textiles, needlework and governessing. Out of these, women’s work in agriculture and textile factories was increasingly frowned upon, especially where married women were concerned. Various commissions investigated these occupations and sought to implement legislation that would regulate and consequently limit women’s access to these areas of work. Working-class women and work became an increasingly problematic question and, apart from government investigations, was the focus of a range of literary and moral discourses. The danger of women’s loss of moral character if they engaged in certain types of work was ever present in these texts. This will be discussed in Chapter One in respect of needlework, agricultural work, factory work and coal mining, and reviewed where appropriate in subsequent chapters. Up until the Second World War domestic service was seen as the ideal employment for working-class women and a great deal of effort was made by reformers, writers, clergymen and politicians to entice, or hector, women into this sector. For example, in the 1850s, J. D. Milne wrote of the ‘charms’ of domestic service:

The situation of a domestic servant … is attended with considerable comfort. With abundant work it combines a wonderful degree of liberty, discipline, health, physical comfort, good example, regularity, room for advancement, encouragement to acquire savings habits. The most numerous class of depositors in the Savings Bank is that of domestic servants. The situation frequently involves much responsibility, and calls forth the best features of character. Kind attachment in return for honest service is not uncommon with the master or mistress: and honest pride in the relations springs up on both sides and lasts throughout life.¹⁰

This rose-coloured version of domestic service would probably have been unrecognizable to many domestic servants at the time who, in 1850, worked long hours, at the constant beck and call of their employers, for around £10 per annum; they were at the mercy of their employer if they fell ill and had meagre free time or holidays.¹¹ Further, it was not usual for domestic servants to stay with the same employer over a lifetime. Most domestic servants were young girls who left to marry or moved from position to position via the annual hiring fairs or employment bureaux.¹² However, cold facts were not allowed to dim the virtuous glow that surrounded the topic of domestic service for middle-class advocates of the work. Furthermore, despite these exhortations, the difficulties of finding suitable domestic servants and keeping them was a constant topic of conversation amongst the middle classes up until the First World War.¹³ After the war, despite the best efforts of the government to coerce women back into domestic service, participation continued to decline. The notion of domestic work changed as more servants lived out and domestic appliances helped lessen some of the more tiresome aspects of domestic labour. After the Second World War, immigrant female labour from Europe and the Caribbean was channelled into cleaning work both in public institutions, such as hospitals, and in private homes. Race was an issue that shaped these women’s employment opportunities, as we shall see in Chapter Thirteen.

Domestic service serves as an important example of a gender-segregated, idealized area of work but also as an area where class relations were sharply defined and class-based practices carried out.¹⁴ For example, in 1899, the social investigator Seebohm Rowntree took the keeping of servants as the dividing line between the working classes and those higher up the social scale, thus setting out a clear demarcation between those who carried out the dirty, monotonous, low-status work and those who aspired to something better.¹⁵ Class played an important part in the type of work women undertook, as did gender segregated employment. Loss of status through performing the ‘wrong’ sort of work was extremely serious. Conversely, like men, middle-class women wanted to ring-fence certain areas of work as their own and set up institutions that created indiscernible barriers that excluded working-class women from certain work. Consequently, the way that class operated in the employment arena and the implications of this will also be considered at various stages. Definitions of class are always problematic, however; Roberts has developed a rough rule of thumb: working-class women undertook manual work, were paid wages rather than salaries, and did not employ others. Middle-class women tended not to work but when they did were often not paid, or if they were, drew a salary; they did non-manual, often skilled, supervisory or professional work and employed people to do certain manual tasks. However, some areas of work fell between two stalls and their class status is less clear. Shop work, nursing and clerical work, for example, are not easy to define as, depending on the type of work undertaken, the work can be considered either working or middle class. For example, working as an assistant in a high-class dress shop would be acceptable to a middle-class woman, whereas being a general assistant in a general shop in a working-class area would not. Moreover, all women tended to be identified with the class status of their husband or father.¹⁶ Therefore, although Robert’s definition is a useful starting point, a more complex definition of class develops over time. Class status was particularly significant for middle-class women. Whereas working-class women were expected to work for money, middle-class women were regarded as losing respectability, and through this, status, if they worked for pay. This was a particular obstacle for the many middle-class women in the nineteenth century who needed paid work. It was a problem also for those women who did not need the money but wanted to be treated fairly in comparison with men. Consequently, the issue of middle-class women working for money was a continual problem for campaigners throughout the nineteenth century.¹⁷ Class, the way it is defined...

Table of contents

• Women’s and Gender History
• Contents
• Tables
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One Introduction
• Part One 1840–70
• Part Two 1870–1914
• Part Three 1914–45
• Part Four 1945 to the end of the century
• Appendix 1 Chronology of important dates
• Appendix 2 Brief biographies of some key women
• Notes
• Further reading
• Index