The economical position of women is one of those subjects on which there
exists a “conspiracy of silence.” While most people, perhaps, imagine
that nearly all women marry and are supported by their husbands, those
who know better how women live, or die, have rarely anything to say on
the subject. Such social problems as this are certainly painful; they
may or may not be insoluble; they must not be ignored.
The phrase “to become a governess” is sometimes used as if it were a
satisfactory outlet for any unsupported woman above the rank of
housemaid. When we see advertisements in the newspapers, offering “a
comfortable home,” with no salary, as a sufficient reward for
accomplishments of the most varied character, we sometimes wonder at the
audacity of employers; but when we learn that such an advertisement,
offering the situation of nursery governess, _unpaid_, was answered by
_three hundred women_, our surprise has in it something of despair.
The truth is, that the facts of society have changed more rapidly than
its conventions. Formerly muscles did the business of the world, and the
weak were protected by the strong; now brains do the business of the
world, and the weak are protected by law. The industrial disabilities of
women, unavoidable under the earlier _régime_, have become cruel under
the later. There is neither the old necessity of shelter, nor the old
certainty of support.
The census of 1861 gave nearly six millions of adult English women,
distributed as follows:—
Wives 3,488,952
Widows 756,717
Spinsters over 20 1,537,314
—————————
5,782,983
The census also gives the numbers of women who work for their own
subsistence, as follows:—
Wives 838,856
Widows 487,575
Spinsters (above or under 20) 2,110,318
—————————
3,436,749
In the first place, then, it appears that marriage, as a means of
subsistence (to say nothing of the indecorum of looking forward to it in
this light) is exceedingly precarious in two ways. The proportion of
wives to widows and spinsters in 1801 was just about three to two, while
of these wives themselves nearly one in four was occupied in other than
domestic duties, either as her husband’s coadjutor, as in farm-houses
and shops, or, of necessity, as his substitute in cases of his
desertion, or helplessness, or vice. In the second place, the number of
widows and spinsters supporting themselves, which in 1851 was two
millions, had increased in 1861 to more than two millions and a half.
The rapidity of the increase of this class is painfully significant. Two
and a half millions of Englishwomen without husbands, and working for
their own subsistence! This is not an accident, it is a new order of
things. Of the three and a half millions of women—wives, widows, and
spinsters—engaged in other than domestic occupations, it is probable
that scarcely a thousand make, without capital, and by their own
exertions, one hundred pounds a year. The best paid are housekeepers in
large establishments, a few finishing governesses, and professed cooks.
43,964 women are returned as outdoor agricultural labourers—a fact
worthy of remembrance when it is said that women are too weak to serve
in haberdashers’ shops. Women, refused admission to such shops on the
pretext that they are not strong enough to lift bales of goods, have
been afterwards traced to the occupations of dock porters and
coal-heavers. In practice the employments of women are not determined by
their lightness, but by their low pay. One newspaper still scoffs at the
desire of women to be self-supporting: but starvation is a sufficient
answer to sneers. As a favourable symptom of the last few years, I may
add that 1822 women are returned as employed by the Post-office. 213
women are returned as telegraph-clerks. It is instructive to note the
way in which the salary of these women telegraph-clerks has fallen. When
the telegraph companies were first formed, the pay of a female clerk was
eight shillings a week, to be increased by a shilling yearly, until it
reached fourteen shillings a week. So great, however, has been the
competition of women for these situations, that the pay has been reduced
to five shillings a week, a sum on which a woman can scarcely live
unassisted. In France the women telegraph-clerks have met with a worse
fate. The government took the management of the telegraphs, and
dismissed the women, because they had no votes to bestow on the
government candidates. The exclusion of women from the suffrage has been
called a harmless injustice; but there is no injustice which is not
liable to become an injury.
At present the principal employments open to women are teaching,
domestic service, and sewing. I come to consider the remuneration of the
highest profession open to women.
In 1801 there were 80,017 female teachers in England, of whom the
majority were governesses in private families. It is difficult to
ascertain the average salary of governesses, because the Governesses’
Institutions in London and Manchester, which are the chief sources of
information on the subject, refuse to register the applications of
governesses who accept salaries of less than £25 a year. The number of
this lowest class may be guessed from the fact that for a situation as
nursery governess, with a salary of £20 a year, advertised in a
newspaper, there were five hundred applicants; as I have already stated,
three hundred applied for a similar place with no salary at all. To
return to the higher class. The register of the last six months at the
Manchester Governesses’ Institution shows an entry of—
54 governesses who asked for £30 and under, per annum.
20 „ „ „ 40 „ „
19 „ „ „ 50 „ „
17 „ „ „ 60 „ „
10 „ „ „ 70 and upwards.
These sums, it must be remembered, are expressions of what governesses
wish to receive.[1] Taking nursery governesses into the account, and
remembering that the above statistics refer only to the higher ranks of
the profession, it is probably not too much to say, that from 0 to £50 a
year is the salary of nine governesses in ten. Situations offering more
than £50 are the prizes of the profession, but are generally such as to
compel a serious outlay on dress and personal expenditure. It is
difficult to imagine how the majority of governesses manage to scramble
through life, when we remember that their position involves several
journeys in the year, that they must sometimes provide for themselves
during holiday seasons, and that they must always dress as ladies.
Miserable must be their means of providing for old age or sickness, to
say nothing of claims of affection or of charity throughout life, or the
means required for self-culture.[2]
Probably there are few portions of society in which more of silent
suffering and misery is endured than among female teachers, and in the
class which supplies them. Charitable people who have opened little
“Homes” for decayed governesses can tell histories of struggling lives
and crushed hopes which it saddens one to hear. The reports of Bethlehem
Hospital and other lunatic asylums prove that not a few poor governesses
find their way thither. Some are found in Penitentiaries among the
fallen. Inquiry shows that insufficient food while out of situations,
added to the mental trials of an unloved and isolated being, have driven
some of these governesses to opium or to strong drink, until, penniless
and degraded, they have sought a refuge among penitents where there was
nothing to pay. “Her funds are exhausted, and she earnestly seeks a
re-engagement;” words such as these, taken from an advertisement in the
_Times_, headed—“To the benevolent,” are no unfrequent symptom of a deep
and wide distress. Some determined women there are who have devoted to
self-culture as much of their pittance as could be spared from the
barest needs of life, and of whom it is known that, night after night
when they went to bed, they have tied a band round their waist to keep
down the gnawings of hunger. One such I know who has risen by her force
of character to almost as high a place as it is at present possible for
a _woman_ to occupy in the educational world, but who is not yet free
from sufferings entailed by years of mental anxiety and bodily
privations. An insufficiency of the necessaries of life is not the
bitterest complaint of many of these sufferers, who by their lives
protest that man does not live by bread alone. “Worse than bodily
privations or pains” (I quote the words of one of them) “are these
_aches and pangs of ignorance_, this unquenched thirst for knowledge,
these unassisted and disappointed efforts to obtain it, this sight of
bread enough and to spare, but locked away from _us_, this depressing
sense of a miserable waste of powers bestowed on us by God, and which we
know we could have used for the lessening of evil and the increase of
the happiness of our fellow-creatures.”
The desire for education which is widely felt by English women, and
which has begun to find its expression in many practical ways, is a
desire which springs from no conceit of cleverness, from no ambition of
the prizes of intellectual success, as is sometimes falsely imagined,
but from the conviction that for many women to get knowledge is the only
way to get bread, and still more from that instinctive craving for light
which in many is stronger than the craving for bread. “Amongst the
wealthier classes,”—I give the words of one who has much knowledge of
that of which she speaks—“women are better provided for materially,
though even here they are often left to the mercy of the chances of
life, indulged and petted whilst fortune smiles, left helpless to face
the storm of adverse circumstances; but here, more often than elsewhere,
one meets with those sad, dreary lives, that have always seemed to me
amongst the worst permitted evils of earth,—
‘A wall so blank
My shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there’—
is true of many a life. Even sharp misfortune is sometimes a blessing in
a life of this sort; something to do, and leave to do it. I do not say
that any possible education, any freedom of career, any high training of
faculty, would spare _all_ this waste; some part of it is of that sad
mystery of life which we cannot explain, and for the unveiling of which
we can only wait and pray. But I am quite sure that much of it is
altogether needless, and comes from the shutting up in artificial
channels of those good gifts of God which were meant to flow forth
freely and bless the world. If I could only tell, as I have felt it in
my own life, and in the lives of other women whom I have loved, how
wearily one strains the eyes for light, which often comes not at all!
“God knows it all, and if men do not know it, it is because they have
been, I will not say they are, cruelly and criminally thoughtless. I
wish some of those men who talk as if they imagined our life a
delightful one, could but be women for one little year, and could feel
the dreariness I speak of, feel too the intense longing to be up and
doing, helping in the world’s work which is God’s work, and know the
depressing effect of that inaptitude, which is the want, not of capacity
or of faculty, but of training. The serious work of life needs all the
help that women as well as men can bring to it, and for helpfulness
something more than goodwill is needed. Always have my own ignorance and
helplessness been the hindrances to that for which I would have freely
given my life; and I know that other women feel in just the same way: I
have heard and known too much of thoughtful women not to be sure of
this. Confessions of this kind, the simplest and frankest confessions of
ignorance, and of why that ignorance is painful, have been made to me
many a time by women whom the world pleases to think clever, but who are
too true-hearted to believe the world.
“It is not as luxury that we crave knowledge, but as bread of life for
ourselves and others. We want it that we may distribute it to others,
with helpful hands and words of blessing. We want it as the lever by
which we may help to raise the world. If we thought only of gratifying
vanity, there are easier and shorter ways to that end. Whilst men are a
little too apt to depreciate the intelligence of women as a class, they
are apt to over-rate the intelligence of individual women whom they may
happen to know and esteem. Many a woman is credited with power merely
because she has never been brought to the test of performance.”
For the amelioration of the condition of female teachers two things are
necessary: the first is to raise the intellectual status of qualified
teachers, and to accord a juster social recognition to their profession;
the second is, to find other occupations for those who are unfit to
teach, and only take to teaching because they can do nothing else.