One peculiarity of the trade at which so many women earn their
livelihood I have, as yet, hardly touched upon. It is this: that
however arduous and exacting the labour that trade entails—and the
rough manual work of most households is done by women—it is not
paid except by a wage of subsistence. There may be exceptions, of
course, but, as a general rule, the work done by the wife and mother
in the home is paid for merely by supplying her with the necessaries
of existence—food, lodging, and clothing. She is fed and lodged on
the same principle as a horse is fed and lodged—so that she may do
her work, her cooking, her cleaning, her sewing, and the tending and
rearing of her children. She may do it very well or she may do it very
badly; but beyond food, lodging, and a certain amount of clothing,
she can claim no wage for it. In short, her work in the home is not
recognized either by the State or by the individual citizen (except in
occasional instances) as work which has any commercial value.
There must, of course, be some reason why such intrinsically important
work as the rearing of children and ministering to the comfort of the
community should be held in such poor esteem that it is paid for at the
lowest possible rate—subsistence rate. (Which means, of course, that
wages in that particular branch of work have been forced just as low
as they can go, since human beings cannot continue to exist without
the means of supporting life.) And the principal reason for this state
of things I take to be the compulsory nature of the trade. Given a
sufficiently large number of persons destined and educated from birth
for one particular calling, with no choice at all in the matter, and
with every other calling and means of livelihood sternly barred to
them, and you have all the conditions necessary for the forcing down of
wages to the lowest possible point to which they will go—subsistence
point. In that calling labour will be as cheap as the heart of the
employer could desire; and incidentally it will tend to become what
ill-paid labour always tends to become—inefficient. Exactly the
same condition of affairs would prevail in any other trade—mining or
boiler-making, for instance—if immense numbers of boys were brought
up to be miners or boiler-makers, and informed that whatever their
needs or desires, or whatever the state of the labour market in these
particular callings, they could not turn their abilities into any other
direction. Under those circumstances miners and boiler-makers would
probably work for their keep and nothing more, as the ordinary wife has
to do.
I shall be told, of course, that the position of a husband is not that
of an ordinary employer of labour, and that the financial relations
of a man and his wife are complicated by considerations of affection
and mutual interest which make it quite impossible to estimate the
exact wage-earning value of the wife’s services in the household, or
the price which she receives for them in other things than money. Even
if, for the sake of argument, this be admitted as a general rule, it
does not invalidate my point, which is that the compulsory nature of
woman’s principal trade is quite sufficient, in itself, to account
for the fact that the workers in that trade are not deemed worthy of
anything more than a wage of subsistence. Considerations of sentiment
and affection may help to keep her direct monetary remuneration down;
but to bring it down in the first instance nothing more was needed than
compulsory overcrowding of the “domestic service” market.
That the wage of subsistence—the board, lodging, and clothing—dealt
out to a married woman is often board, lodging, and clothing on a
very liberal and comfortable scale, does not alter the fact that it
is essentially a wage of subsistence, regulated by the idea of what
is necessary for subsistence in the particular class to which she may
happen to belong. The plutocrat who wishes his wife to entertain cannot
habitually feed her on fish and chips from round the corner, or renew
her wardrobe in an old-clothes shop. But she does not get twelve-course
dinners and dresses from the Rue de la Paix because she has earned them
by extra attention to her duties as a wife and mother, but because
they are necessary qualifications for the place in his household which
her husband wishes her to take—because, without them, she could not
fulfil the duties that he requires of her. The monetary reward of
wifehood and motherhood depends entirely on the life, the good luck
and the good nature of another person; the strictest attention to duty
on the part of a wife and mother is of no avail without that. The
really hard labour of housework and rearing children is done in those
households where the wage of subsistence is lowest; and the women who
receive most money from their husbands are precisely those who pass on
the typical duties of a wife and mother to other persons—housekeepers,
cooks, nurses, and governesses. Excellence in the trade is no guarantee
of reward, which is purely a matter of luck; work, however hard, will
not bring about that measure of independence, more or less comparative,
which is attained by successful work in other trades. Dependence,
in short, is the essence of wifehood as generally understood by the
masculine mind.
Under normal and favourable conditions, then, a married woman without
private means of her own obtains a wage of subsistence for the
fulfilment of the duties required of her in her husband’s household.
Under unfavourable (but not very abnormal) conditions she does not
even obtain that. In the case of the large army of married women who
support idle or invalid husbands by paid labour outside the home, the
additional work inside the home is carried on gratis, and without a
suggestion of payment of any kind.
I am inclined to believe that the principle that payment should be
made for domestic service rendered does not really enter into the
question of a wife’s wages; that those wages (of subsistence) are paid
simply for the possession of her person, and that the other arts and
accomplishments she may possess are not supposed to have any exchange
value. At any rate, a mistress, from whom the domestic arts are not
expected, is often just as expensively kept as a wife—which seems to
point to my conclusion. What Mr. John Burns has called a woman’s “duty
and livelihood” is, in the strict sense of the term, not her livelihood
at all. Her livelihood, as an ordinary wife, is a precarious dependence
upon another person’s life; should that other person die, she could
not support herself and her children by remaining in “woman’s
sphere”—cooking, tending the house, and looking after her young
family. That sort of work having no commercial value, she and her young
family would very shortly starve. The profession of the prostitute is a
livelihood; the profession of the wife and mother is not. A woman can
support her children by prostitution; she cannot do so by performing
the duties ordinarily associated with motherhood.
That marriage has another side than the economic I should be the last
to deny, as I should be the last to deny that there are many households
in which subjection and dependence in the wife are not desired by her
husband—households in which there is a sharing of material, as well
as of intellectual, interests. But that does not alter the fact that
the position of a great many other married women is simply that of an
unpaid domestic servant on the premises of a husband. The services
that, rendered by another, would command payment, or at least thanks,
from her are expected as a matter of course. They are supposed to be
natural to her; she is no more to be paid for them than she is to be
paid for breathing or feeling hungry. (One wonders why it should be
“natural” in woman to do so many disagreeable things. Does the average
man really believe that she has an instinctive and unquenchable craving
for all the unpleasant and unremunerative jobs? Or is that only a
polite way of expressing his deeply-rooted conviction that when once
she has got a husband she ought to be so thoroughly happy that a little
dirty work more or less really cannot matter to her?)
It may be argued that in the greater number of cases marriage, for
the husband, means the additional labour and expense of supporting a
wife and children; and that this added labour and expense is expected
from him as a matter of course, and that neither does he receive any
thanks for it. Quite so; but, as I pointed out at the beginning of
this book, marriage is a voluntary matter on the part of a man. He
does not earn his living by it; he is under no necessity to undertake
its duties and responsibilities should he prefer not to do so. He has
other interests in life and no social stigma attaches to him if he does
not take to himself a wife and beget children. He enters the marriage
state because he wishes to enter it, and is prepared to make certain
necessary sacrifices in order to maintain a wife and family; whereas
the position of the woman is very different. She very often enters the
married state because she has to—because more lucrative trades are
barred to her, because to remain unmarried will be to confess failure.
This state of things in itself gives the man an advantage, and enables
him to ensure (not necessarily consciously) that his share of the
bargain shall be advantageous to himself—to ensure, in short, that he
gets his money’s worth. With his wife, on the other hand, it has often
been a case of take it or leave it; since she knows that, if she does
leave it, she will not be able to strike any more advantageous bargain
elsewhere.
These being the conditions under which, consciously or unconsciously,
the average wife strikes her bargain, it follows that in the ensuing
division of labour she generally gets the worst of the transaction, the
duties assigned to her being those which her husband would prefer not
to perform. They are handed over to her as a matter of course, and
on the assumption that they enter into what is commonly known as her
“sphere.” And it is this principle—that woman’s work is the kind of
work which man prefers not to do—which regulates and defines not only
the labour of a woman in her own household, but the labour of women
generally.
I am quite aware that this principle is not openly admitted in
assigning to woman her share of the world’s work—that, on the
contrary, the results of its application are explained away on the
theory that there is a “natural” division of labour between the two
sexes. But when one comes to examine that theory, dispassionately
and without prejudice, one finds that it does not hold water—or
very little—since the estimate of woman’s “natural” work is such
an exceedingly variable quantity. One nation, people, or class,
will esteem it “natural” in woman to perform certain duties which,
in another nation, people, or class, are entirely left to men—so
much so, that woman’s sphere, like morality, seems to be defined by
considerations “purely geographical.” Unless we grasp the underlying
principle that woman’s “natural” labour in any given community is
the form of labour which the men of that community do not care to
undertake, her share in the world’s work must appear to be regulated by
sheer and arbitrary chance.