The Women's Movement and Women's Employment in Nineteenth Century Britain

Ellen Jordan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134657476
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

In the first half of the nineteenth century the main employments open to young women in Britain were in teaching, dressmaking, textile manufacture and domestic service. After 1850, however, young women began to enter previously all-male areas like medicine, pharmacy, librarianship, the civil service, clerical work and hairdressing, or areas previously restricted to older women like nursing, retail work and primary school teaching. This book examines the reasons for this change. The author argues that the way femininity was defined in the first half of the century blinded employers in the new industries to the suitability of young female labour. This definition of femininity was, however, contested by certain women who argued that it not only denied women the full use of their talents but placed many of them in situations of economic insecurity. This was a particular concern of the Womens Movement in its early decades and their first response was a redefinition of feminity and the promotion of academic education for girls. The author demonstrates that as a result of these efforts, employers in the areas targeted began to see the advantages of employing young women, and young women were persuaded that working outside the home would not endanger their femininity.

Part I
INTRODUCTION

1
THE QUESTION OF MIDDLE CLASS WOMEN’S WORK

In the Britain of the 1840s the conditions in the two main occupations entered by middle-class women, those of governess and dressmaker, roused considerable public attention. In 1843 the Report to Parliament of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children was published. Among the revelations of this report were the very poor conditions offered to young women apprenticed to dressmakers. The sub-commissioner reported:

The evidence of all parties establishes the fact that there is no class of persons in this country, living by their labour, whose happiness, health, and lives, are so unscrupulously sacrificed as those of the young dress-makers. They are, in a peculiar degree, unprotected and helpless; and I should fail in my duty if I did not distinctly state that, as a body, their employers have hitherto taken no steps to remedy the evils and misery which result from the existing system…. It may without exaggeration be stated that, in proportion to the numbers employed, there are no occupations, with one or two questionable exceptions such as needle-grinding, in which so much disease is produced as in dress-making, or which present so fearful a catalogue of distressing and frequently fatal maladies.

(PP 1843, vol. 13: 122)

This concern was echoed by a number of journalists over the next few decades. An account of apprentice dressmakers’ conditions published in Fraser’s Magazine in 1846 expressed similar concern for their health:

It is lamentable to see the change that sometimes comes over the country girl shortly after her admission as an apprentice. Arriving, perhaps, from her happy village home, where she has been the pride of honest and industrious parents, her cheeks redolent of rosy health, her step elastic, her spirits light and buoyant… by degrees her pallid cheek and attenuated form shew that the loss of fresh air, and the absence of accustomed exercise are eating into the bud of youth.

(Fraser’s 1846: 309)

The same story was still being repeated twenty years later when Punch published its famous picture The Ghost in the Looking-Glass, showing a fashionable woman admiring herself in a new ball gown, with Madame La Modiste, also fashionably dressed, saying, ‘We would not have disappointed your ladyship at any sacrifice, and the robe is finished à merveille’, while the plainly-dressed girl who has made it can be seen faintly in the mirror in a state of collapse (Punch 1863, vol. 45: 5).

Concern for governesses began with the focus on quite a different problem: the fate of the elderly. In 1841 a society called the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution was founded to help those in distress. Brief accounts of the situations of the women who applied to it were published in the Annual Reports and included such cases as:

Miss E. A., aged fifty-eight. 1851. Her father died when she was very young; and her mother’s second husband ruined the family. Greatly assisted her mother and sister. Being long crippled from a fall, and having some years since lost the use of her right arm and foot, is not only incapable of self-support, but entirely helpless.

Miss S. M .A., aged fifty-nine. 1856. Father a colonel in active service until Waterloo. Governess upon his death, and that of only brother. Assisted relations to the utmost of her power. Frequent illnesses have consumed her savings; is now in very delicate health. Earned only £10 in the past year.

Miss S. A., aged sixty-eight. 1857. Father a large calico printer; her mother having impoverished herself to assist her son’s speculations, she gave up the whole of her property to her and became a governess; and to the same purpose devoted all her earnings. Is now entirely dependent upon the kindness of friends.

Mrs. O. S. G. B., aged fifty-seven. 1858. Father a captain in the army. Her husband, a surgeon, died suddenly, having made no provision for her and two children. Assisted her mother for some years. She suffering from chronic bronchitis and sciatica, and a daughter, also in very ill health, are without certain income, being dependent on the letting of her apartments.

(Parkes 1859a: 148, quoted)

Contemporaries argued that both these occupations were ‘overstocked’. Too many women were pursuing too few positions and employers could exploit this oversupply by driving down wages and conditions (Crosswaithe 1863: 688; Jameson 1846: 235). As a writer in Fraser’s Magazine put it: ‘The market is glutted. If the supply were lessened, the demand would be greater’ (Fraser’s 1844: 580).

Yet by the beginning of the next century the situation had changed beyond recognition (Mitchell 1995: 23–32). Instead of being faced with the most obviously restricted and crowded labour market in the country, young middle-class women had a range of occupations they might enter, and a far higher percentage than in the past entered employment before marriage. The census of 1851 had recorded occupations for 56.5 per cent of young women aged from fifteen to twenty-four, and only 8.9 per cent of this age group were in occupations which could be called middle class: 7 per cent were milliners (which included dressmakers), 1 per cent were teachers, with the rest in various retail areas or engaged in literature and the arts.

By the end of the century a quite dramatic change had taken place. Middle-class women were now working as doctors, nurses, pharmacists and hospital dispensers, as teachers in publicly funded primary and secondary schools, as librarians, civil servants, clerks and shorthand typists, and as hairdressers and shop assistants (Bird 1911: 63–79, 90–1, 126–197, 233–4). The 1911 census showed that the number of young women listing an occupation had risen to 65.3 per cent of the age group (a rise of 8.8 per cent), and that most of this increase (7.85 per cent) was accounted for by the rise in the number of young women in middle-class occupations to 16.75 per cent of those in the age group (See Tables 4.3 and 4.5 in Chapter 4). Although the number of occupations available to women had been declining since the beginning of the eighteenth century (Hill 1989: 47–68), the period 1851 to 1911 saw a reversal of the trend, but a reversal that applied primarily to occupations for young middle-class women.

This change raises three sets of questions which this book attempts to answer.

First, why were dressmaking and teaching the only middle-class occupations employing young women in the 1840s, and why were conditions in them so bad?

Second, why, in the period after 1850, did young middle-class women begin to enter previously all-male areas like clerical work, hairdressing, dispensing, and librarianship, and others like nursing, retail work, and elementary school teaching previously restricted to older women, and why was almost all the recorded increase in the proportion of young working women the result of an increase in numbers in such middle-class occupations?

Third, why by the end of the century had it become customary for middle-class women to work before marriage when fifty years earlier this would have led them to ‘lose caste’?

The answer suggested is that the understanding of the nature of masculinity and femininity, and of the work appropriate to each sex, had a determining effect on the kind of labour force that evolved during the industrial changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and this resulted in a contraction of the work opportunities available to women of all classes. More and more work was being done outside the households where women had previously worked with their fathers and husbands, and yet in only a very few industrial sectors did employers consider women an appropriate workforce. Thus female unemployment was high and some areas were grossly oversupplied.

As the century progressed the employment open to married women and young working-class women increased and decreased at the discretion of employers. It was their needs and, even more, their blindness to the cheapness and flexibility of female labour, which kept working-class women’s industrial position stagnant.

With middle-class women, however, other factors intervened. The plight of governesses and dressmakers was written up in the serious press of the day and created a public awareness of their problems which ultimately reversed the trend where young middle-class women were concerned. Furthermore, some upper middle-class women were dissatisfied with the restricted field of activity allowed them, and began to demand the right to an occupation outside the home. In consequence, groups of philanthropists and intellectuals emerged who made it their business to alter the existing employment structure of their society to make a place for both the dissatisfied and the unemployed. They lighted on certain areas of work which they considered suitable for women, and then in campaigns with twofold purposes persuaded employers that young middle-class women were an ideal labour source and persuaded such women that the work they were suggesting was of a kind which would not compromise either their gentility or their femininity.

Alternative explanations

This argument is at odds with the explanation currently accepted for the expansion of middle-class women’s work, and reverts in part to a theory which that explanation was propounded to supersede. In the earlier decades of this century, particularly in accounting for the change in the middle-class attitude to young women working before marriage, it was assumed that the Women’s Movement of the 1860s played a crucial role. Ray Strachey wrote in 1928:

This large extension of wage-earners was, to some extent, accounted for by the rapid increase in the population, and in part by the general rise in the prosperity and business of the country; it was, however, also closely connected with the new stirrings of ambition and independence which education and the Women’s Movement between them were stimulating among the younger women, and opportunity thus coincided with desire.

(Strachey 1928: 226)

Some years later Élie Halévy gave the Movement credit for expanding the range of acceptable work, arguing strongly against what he called the Marxist theory that employers, by taking girls and women into the factories, had created a structure upon which a superstructure of demands for sexual equality was bound to be built (Halévy 1934: 479). Instead he argued for intellectual origins for the movement.

The historian of feminism must not depict women driven against their will into the factories by the greed of manufacturers and then emancipated in their employers’ despite as a result of the common conditions which the factory system enforced on both sexes… Advanced ideas of the eighteenth century enlightenment, the philosophy of the French revolution, the revival of these ideas and this philosophy in the great individualist and liberal movement which after years of stagnation marked out the years around 1860–these are the sources from which was derived the impulse which drove women to claim equality with men in the factory and the office, in the liberal professions and in public life. The origin of the movement was intellectual not economic, bourgeois not proletarian.

(Halévy 1934: 482)

It was because of the ideas of the Women’s Movement, he claimed, that women outstripped men in numbers in the teaching profession, were admitted as doctors, gained entry to the universities, and became clerks in the civil service and in private business. They were not driven, like the factory workers, by economic necessity, but entered those occupations ‘of their free will and to find freedom’ (Halévy 1934: 497).

Halévy’s stress on the intellectual element produced a reaction, an assertion of the primacy of economic and structural causes, which has gone largely unchallenged ever since. In 1955 O. R. McGregor wrote in a bibliographical article:

Halévy’s view neglects the demographic and occupational changes which, rather than the revival of old ideas, were the effective determinates of the origin in the ‘fifties of the organized women’s movement and became recurring themes of critical writing and discussion about the position of women from mid-century onwards.

(McGregor 1955: 50)

He refused to accept Halévy’s contention that the impulse for movement into new areas came from the women themselves rather than the needs of employers:

The great expansion of non-manual occupations had centred on schools, offices, shops and hospitals–an expansion which, deriving from the technological and social diversification of industrialism and satisfying its cheap labour requirements, owed little to pioneering feminists.

(McGregor 1955: 54–5)

Since the 1950s the part played by the Women’s Movement has been continually discounted. In 1973, for example, Lee Holcombe wrote that ‘foreseeing a development is not the same as causing it, and the women’s movement cannot be justly credited with bringing about the wider employment of middle-class women’ (Holcombe 1973: 18) and in 1984, Peter Gay that ‘it was not feminism that brought girls flocking to the lower echelons of sales forces or bureau employees, to posts where both pay and prestige were low; it was the rational, complex modern capitalist economy’ (Gay 1984: 179). Even Philippa Levine, in her Feminist Lives, sees the Women’s Movement’s apparent successes in the area of work as due ‘largely to the fact that they targeted expanding areas’ (Levine 1990: 130).

These statements are not, however, based on a specific examination of the first entry of women into any of these new occupations. Throughout the period when these assessments were being made, economic determinism was the dominant explanatory paradigm in social history, and all that seemed necessary was to point to certain broad structural changes roughly coincident with the particular changes in women’s employment and suggest the relationship was causal. Even Lee Holcombe’s pathbreaking Victorian Ladies at Work (1973), to which all later researchers in the field owe an inestimable debt, focuses on developments once women were established in an occupation, rather than examining the sites of their first entry. Yet as more detailed research is done in the area, the correlation between expansion and reorganization in some of these areas and their feminization is found to be a tenuous one, and this long-standing explanation is losing its surface plausibility.

Demographic determinates

It was assumed by contemporaries, and indeed is still thought by some historians writing today (Helsinger, Sheets, and Veeder 1983: 136; Jeffreys 1985: 86-7; Maggs 1983: 46–9; Poovey 1988: 4–5), that the answer to the first question raised, why the conditions of governesses and dressmakers were so bad, could be found in the demography of the period, specifically the disproportion of men and women in the population, and that the overcrowding in dressmaking and teaching was created by the ‘surplus’ or ‘redundant women’ who failed to find husbands to support them. A far higher proportion of women, it was believed, remained unmarried than in the past, and it was assumed that these elderly spinsters were not only the ones most obviously in poverty, but also swelled the numbers in these occupations so greatly that wages were driven down (Craik 1858: 2; HW 1852: 84; Smith 1857: 10). Various figures were bandied about, but the ones which had the widest currency were those which claimed that something like 30 per cent of women were unlikely to marry.

This was the figure proposed by W.R. Greg in 1862 in an article called ‘Why are women redundant?’ (Greg 1868: 346–8), based on the fact that in the 1851 census 43 per cent of women aged between twenty and forty were unmarried, and his estimate of the number likely to marry in the future. A closer look at the figures reveals that this was an over-gloomy projection even on the data available. The percentage of those still unmarried in the over-forty-five age groups was much lower, roughly 13 per cent (Anderson 1984: 379), while the 1871 census was to reveal that only 12 per cent of the women in Greg’s 1851 cohort were still single twenty years later. Although the percentage of women remaining unmarried had risen from the low point reached in the late eighteenth centurey, it had not returned to the 15 per cent average of the late seventeeth century, and did not represent a drastic change from previous decades (Wrigley 1989: 112).

Moreover, the elderly composed only a small part of the numbers in dressmaking and teaching. Figure 1.1 is a graph showing the age distribution in 1851 of governesses, dressmakers, and domestic servants (excluding housekeepers).

Although the proportion of older women remaining in the occupation was greater among governesses and milliners than among domestic servants, the general pattern was the same: most of the women in these occupations were concentrated in the under-thirty-five age group, a concentration presumably produced because most of them married before the age of thirty-five and left their occupation on marriage. It would seem, therefore, that the problem of overstocking in teaching and dressmaking was not caused by a large number of older women remaining in these occupations: almost 80 per cent of dressmakers and 70 per cent of governesses were under thirty-five years of age. The disproportion of men and women in the population was at most a minor factor; the real problem was the oversupply of young women looking for work before marriage.

Far closer to the truth were those who argued, as did a few scattered writers before 1857 (Adams 1849: 1370; Fraser’s 1844: 580; HW 1853: 576) and the Women’s Movement most vociferously after that date, that the cause of the overstocking was the very limited range of occupations open to women, and that the number of women seeking work was larger than the amount of work available in the occupations open to them.

Figure 1.1 Percentage of governesses, female milliners and domestic servants in various age groups as shown in the census of 1851

I have argued elsewhere that unemployment was a problem which faced working-class women as well as the middle class, and that the regional variation in unemployment indicates that the cause lay in the limited range of occupations available.

In 1851, although the ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FIGURES
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• PART I: INTRODUCTION
• PART II: THE CONSTRAINTS ON WOMEN’S WORK
• PART III: STRONG-MINDED WOMEN
• PART IV: THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY