+---------------+--------++-----------+--------+----------+
| |England ||Kensington.|Hackney.|Islington.|
| |& Wales.|| | | |
+---------------+--------++-----------+--------+----------+
|=All ages= |=177·9= || =256·4= |=205·7= | =183·0= |
| 15-20 | 3,844 || 6,499 | 5,431 | 3,704 |
| 20-25 | 201·2 || 540·1 | 270·2 | 219·7 |
| 25-35 | 42·8 || 133·7 | 53·9 | 48·1 |
| =35-45= | =20·0= || =62·0= | =28·3= | =25·5= |
| Unmarried } | || | | |
| women to } | || | | |
| 100 married } | 18·1 || 52·0 | 24·9 | 22·4 |
| women and } | || | | |
| widows } | || | | |
| 35-45 } | || | | |
+---------------+--------++-----------+--------+----------+
+---------------+-------+--------+-----------+-------+------------+
| |LONDON.| St. |Shoreditch.|Bethnal|Whitechapel.|
| | |Pancras.| | Green.| |
+---------------+-------+--------+-----------+-------+------------+
|=All ages= |=182·4=| =168·3=| =151·8= |=157·5=| =172·2= |
| 15-20 | 3,370 | 3,450 | 2,066 | 2,162 | 2,793 |
| 20-25 | 214·9 | 194·8 | 102·2 | 108·5 | 153·5 |
| 25-35 | 51·7 | 48·2 | 25·2 | 21·0 | 31·0 |
| =35-45= | =25·4=| =24·4=| =13·8= | =9·4=| =14·3= |
| Unmarried } | | | | | |
| women to } | | | | | |
| 100 married } | 22·2 | 21·3 | 12·0 | 8·6 | 12·2 |
| women and } | | | | | |
| widows } | | | | | |
| 35-45 } | | | | | |
+---------------+-------+--------+-----------+-------+------------+
In this table, which deals with women only, Whitechapel would take
its right place between St. Pancras and Shoreditch, as in Mr. Booth’s
classification, indicating that the abnormal figures in the other
table are due to a preponderance of male immigrants over female
immigrants of a race which prevents inter-marriage with the English
population. England and Wales takes its place, so far as the ratio at
the age of 35 to 45 is concerned, after St. Pancras, from which the
inference may be drawn that London either possesses a larger percentage
of the servant-keeping classes, or that these classes employ more
servants than is the case in England and Wales. Both the tables show
that we are right in selecting the age-period 35-45, when men and women
have left off marrying, and have not begun dying, for special study in
connection with industry or marriage.
In all England and Wales, then, the proportion of women who may be
expected to remain unmarried is, roughly speaking, one in six; in
London it is one in five. The important question arises, Are these
chances equally distributed? On the face of it, it would seem not;
but people readily point out that the greater ratio of middle-aged
spinsters in Kensington, Hackney, and Islington, as compared with
Shoreditch or Bethnal Green, is easily explained by the number of
servants who naturally, if unmarried at this age, congregate in the
richer districts, but would, if distributed among the working-class
districts, make the ratios fairly equal. The explanation sounds so
plausible, that, were it not that experience has convinced me that in
the educated middle class there is a surplus of women over men above
the average, I should have accepted it without further inquiry. But by
a study of the Census for 1861 (in many respects an ideal one so far as
the tabulation of facts is concerned) and of the unpublished official
returns of 1881 for Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Hackney,
and Kensington, I find that, supposing all the middle-aged indoor
domestic servants to be single, they nevertheless are not more than
one-third of the single women in each district. Of the outdoor domestic
servants, such as charwomen, the percentage under 25 years of age is
so very small that it may fairly be assumed that the great majority
are married women or widows, and that the exceptions to this rule will
be balanced by the exceptions to the rule that the middle-aged indoor
domestic servants are single women. Shoreditch and Bethnal Green (with
almost exactly equal populations) give us together a ratio of 11·6
unmarried women between 35 and 45 to 100 married women at that age
as the normal for a working-class district without any upper middle
class. Kensington (including Paddington), with a population of 270,000,
contains 70 per cent. of working-class inhabitants; the surplus women,
whether servants or otherwise, are to be found in the houses of the
30 per cent. of middle and upper-class inhabitants. Roughly speaking,
then, to every 70 working-class married women in Kensington we may
assign 8 unmarried women, and to the remaining 30 married women between
35 and 45 years of age we must assign 54 unmarried women. To every
76 working-class married women in Hackney we may assign 9 unmarried
women at this age-period, leaving 18 unmarried women to the remaining
24 married women. One-third of these being domestic servants, if we
subtract them, we have left in Kensington in Classes G and H 36
unmarried women to 30 married women, and in Hackney 12 unmarried
women to 24 married women. It follows, therefore, that in Kensington,
excluding domestic servants, more than 50 per cent. of the women
between 35 and 45 in the servant-keeping classes are unmarried, while
in Hackney about 33 per cent. of the same class are unmarried.
The servant-keeping classes, as I have described the groups that Mr.
Booth has called Classes G and H, include everyone with an income of
£150 a year and upwards, and, were statistics available, it might
perhaps be shown that the unmarried women are, to a large extent, the
daughters of clerks and professional men. The tradesman class do not
find it nearly so difficult to provide for their sons and set them
up in business as is the case in the salaried class; and it is an
advantage from an industrial point of view for tradesmen to have wives
who can help them in various ways. Emigration is probably more frequent
in the salaried class; and where the sons are obliged to emigrate, it
frequently happens that the daughters have to work for their living. In
this class I believe the inequality of the sexes is greatest, and the
probability of marriage least. In this class, therefore, the importance
of an industrial training which shall enable women to earn a competency
through all the active years of their life, which shall enable them to
remain efficient workers and to provide for old age, is greater than in
any other.
As my object is not to point out how marriageable women may get
married, but to show that a considerable number of women must remain
unmarried, a table showing the inequality of numbers of the unmarried
of both sexes in different districts in London is given. The districts
are arranged in the order of poverty as calculated in 1889; the figures
are from the Census of 1881.
_Unmarried Women 35-45 to every 100 Unmarried Men 35-45._
Holborn 73
St. George’s-in-East 50
Bethnal Green 83
St. Saviour’s 81
St. Olave’s 75
Shoreditch 100
Whitechapel 36
Stepney 50
Greenwich 137
Poplar 50
Westminster 86
City 116
Islington 165
St. Pancras 135
Camberwell 200
Wandsworth 191
Marylebone 212
St Giles’ 86[4]
Mile End Old Town 115
Lambeth 159
Woolwich 57[4]
Fulham 200
Chelsea 143
Strand 66[4]
Kensington 378
Hackney 230
St. George’s, Hanover Square 175[4]
Lewisham 325
Hampstead 366
[4] The common lodging-houses in St. Giles’, the Woolwich Arsenal, the
Inns of Court and hotels in the Strand, and the Knightsbridge Barracks
in St. George’s, Hanover Square, may help to explain these exceptions
to the rule.
As only one-third of these unmarried women are domestic servants,
even if we suppose that all the unmarried men belong to Classes G and
H, there are obviously not enough men for all the women to be able
to marry. Such being the case, we can afford to dispense with mutual
recrimination. The women who find it less dishonouring to enter the
labour market than an overstocked marriage market are taking the more
womanly course in putting aside all thought of marriage. The men who
remain unmarried are perhaps in the position of Captain Macheath,
overwhelmed by an _embarras de richesses_, and should be forgiven if
they fear to make a choice of one which may seem to cast disparagement
on so many others of equal merit.
These statistics have been called startling and alarming. They may be
startling to men, but can hardly be so to women of the upper class,
and I fail to see why they should alarm anyone. If all these spinsters
had to be shut up in convents the outlook would be gloomy. But as
things are, if only we can secure good pay and decent conditions of
life, the lot of all women may be immensely improved by this compact
band of single women. It would be difficult to overrate the industrial
effect of a number of well-instructed, healthy-minded, vigorous
permanent spinsters. A man’s work is not interrupted but rather
intensified by marriage; but in the case of women, not only is the
wages question very much affected by the expectation of marriage, but
much organised effort on their part, whether for improvement of wages
or for provision against sickness and old age, must be wasted unless
there be a considerable number of single women to give continuity to
the management of their associations. Mr. Llewellyn Smith has pointed
out that, as mobility of labour increases, actual movement may, other
things remaining the same, diminish; and so also I should be inclined
to say that it is not marriage that is such a disturbing element in
the women’s wages question so much as the expectation of or desire
for marriage. In the middle classes, where it is impossible to earn
a sufficient income without a long training and years of practical
apprenticeship, nothing is so injurious to women’s industrial position
as this ungrounded expectation of marriage, which prevents them from
making themselves efficient when young, and makes them disappointed,
weary, and old when their mental and physical powers should be in their
prime.
With this profession of faith in the absolute necessity for the
existence of single women I pass on to a brief review of the position
of working women, considered in three groups, taking first of all those
who belong to the classes whom Mr. Booth describes as “poor.” Classes
A, B, C, and D, who are 30·7 per cent. of the population of London;
then the well-to-do artisans in Classes E and F, who are 51·5 per
cent., and lastly the so-called middle and upper classes, who are 17·8
per cent., of London, and should therefore be designated the upper
classes.
From the first of these groups are drawn the lower grades of
factory girls in East London, who form the majority of match-girls,
rope-makers, jam and sweetstuff-makers, and a considerable proportion
of the box, brush, and cigar-makers, as well as of the less skilled
tailoresses. The children when they leave school do not all go to work
at once, but relieve their mothers or elder sisters of the charge of
the ubiquitous baby, enabling the former nurse to go to the factory.
They stagger about with their charges, or plant them securely on the
coldest stone step they can find, and discuss with each other or with
nursing mothers in their narrow street the births, deaths, marriages,
misfortunes, and peculiarities of their neighbours. Their families live
in one or, at most, two rooms, and their knowledge of life is such
as to render Bowdlerised versions of our authors quite unnecessary.
Sometimes the children take “a little place” as servant-girl, going
home at night, but eventually, and generally before they are fifteen,
they find their way to the factory. By the time they are one-and-twenty
at least a quarter of them have babies of their own to look after;
during the next five years the rest, with but few exceptions, get
married or enter into some less binding union. To show that I do not
exaggerate the proportion of girl marriages in this class, I give a
table of the number of girls married under 21 years of age in every
100 marriages that took place in the seven years from 1878 to 1884.
The percentage has been calculated for each year, and the mean of the
percentage is given.
_Girls Married under 21 years of age in every 100 Marriages 1878-1884._
Holborn 19·4
St. George’s-in-East 22·9
Bethnal Green 34·7
St. Saviour’s 22·9
St. Olave’s 19·5
Shoreditch 20·9
Whitechapel 25·2
Stepney 21·8
Greenwich 19·6
Poplar 18·9
Westminster 15·1
City 17·5
Islington 14·6
St. Pancras 14·7
Camberwell 17·2
Wandsworth 17·5
Marylebone 13·9
St. Giles’ 16·6
Mile End Old Town 26·5
Lambeth 17·3
Woolwich 17·1
Fulham 19·3
Chelsea 14·5
Strand 14·0
Kensington 12·9
Hackney 13·9
St. George’s, Hanover Square 10·6
Lewisham 12·1
Hampstead 9·4
As girl marriages are more common among the poorer half of East London,
and as, unfortunately, in a large number of cases, the legal ceremony
only takes place, if it takes place at all, in time to legitimise the
offspring of the union, it is obvious that girl marriage is extremely
common in the class of which I am speaking. When the husband earns
regular wages, even though they may be small, the wife does not as a
rule go to the factory, nor even take work out to do at home, for the
first few years of her married life. But many factory girls return
to work the day after they are married, and those who leave it for
several years often return as soon as one of the children is old enough
to leave school. Married labour is, of course, irregular labour, and
many employers discourage it as much as possible. But it is most to be
deprecated on account of the effect on the children. It is unfortunate
that the Census returns, as at present tabulated, give us no means of
estimating the extent of the evil. We do not need to know whether men
engaged in different occupations are married or single; but there is
no fact of more importance with regard to female labour, and the value
of such a return would more than balance the expense. The factories
where the work cannot be given out (as is the case in match, jam, and
cigar factories) contain the largest percentage of married women; and
if called upon to choose the less of two evils, married labour in the
factory and home work, I should unhesitatingly decide in favour of home
work, which, if well organised, need not even be an evil.
The great need of this class is training for domestic life--by which
I do not mean domestic service. Herein lies the only effective cure
for the industrial and social miseries of the poor. The children are
overworked, or else allowed to spend their time in a most dangerous
idleness. That men should ask for an Eight Hours Bill when little
girls of thirteen or fourteen may be found in our factories working
ten hours seems unwise, if not selfish. Ten hours in a factory is
not so wearing to a child as eight hours in school would be, but it
is far too long. It makes education impossible, and leaves no room
for surprise that married women in the poorest classes sink into a
condition hardly above animalism. The two things which struck me most
in East London were the amount of wasted intelligence and talent among
the girls and the wretchedness of the married women. A secondary
education in cooking, cleaning, baby management, laws of health, and
English literature, should follow that of the Board School, and the
minimum age at which full time may be worked should be gradually
raised. By 1905 no one under sixteen should be working for an employer
more than five hours a day, and all half-timers should be attending
morning or afternoon school. The dock labourers’ wives, having learnt
to be useful at home, would appreciate how much is lost by going out
to work. Their withdrawal from the labour market and the increased
efficiency of their children, brought about by better home management
and education, would both tend to raise wages, provided that a trade
union existed to secure that the workers should keep the result of
their increased efficiency. Bad cooking, dirty habits, overcrowding,
and empty-headedness are the sources of the drunkenness, inefficiency,
immorality, and brutality which obstruct progress among so many of
the poor, and philanthropic efforts can be better employed in this
direction than in any other.
During the last four years the trade union movement, for which Mrs.
Paterson worked so unwearyingly and with such dishearteningly small
success, has made considerable progress in East London amongst this
group. The principal results to be expected from trade unionism
amongst these workers are not sufficiently obvious for large numbers
to be attracted by them. But even a small union can be most useful in
guarding against reductions and in bringing public opinion to bear upon
employers who allow their foremen to exercise tyranny and make unfair
exactions from their workpeople. The usefulness of a trade union must
be estimated in many cases by what it prevents from happening rather
than by any positive advantage that it can be proved to have secured.
From the second group of working women are drawn our better-paid
factory girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large number
of our dressmakers and milliners, shop-assistants, barmaids, clerks,
and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dressmakers,
shop-assistants, and clerks are, however, drawn from the lower middle
class, and a few from the professional class. Although this second
group is the largest group in London, and probably in England, it is
the one about which we have least general information. They have hardly
been made the subject of industrial inquiry, do not regard themselves
as persons to be pitied, and work in comparatively small detachments.
They are nevertheless of more industrial importance than the working
women of the first group. Their work is skilled and requires an
apprenticeship. They are in the majority of cases brought into direct
contact with the consumer, and education, good manners, personal
appearance and tact all raise their market value. In this second group
would be included the majority of the Lancashire and Yorkshire weavers
by anyone competent to deal with England as a whole; and what applies
to the group in London would not apply to this section of it, who
occupy a unique position. The extent to which women compete with men is
very much exaggerated. Of the three million and a half women and girls
who were returned as occupied in industry in 1881 in England and Wales,
over one-third were domestic indoor servants, 358,000 were dressmakers,
milliners, or stay-makers; midwifery and subordinate medical service,
charing, washing and bathing service, hospitals and institutions,
shirt-making and sewing employed another 400,000. The textile trades
employed altogether only 590,624 women and girls, and of these over
300,000 were in the cotton trade. Their aggregation in large factories
and in special localities has attracted to them an undue amount of
attention, and the history of industry in Lancashire is often given
as the history of industry in England, whereas no other county is less
typical.
In London in 1881 the number of women and girls occupied in industry
was 593,226. Of these, more than 40 per cent. were indoor domestic
servants, more than 12 per cent. were engaged in charing, washing and
bathing service and hospital and institution service, 16 per cent. in
dressmaking, millinery, stay-making, shirt-making and needlework; and
of the remaining miscellaneous trades a large proportion are purely
women’s trades; even in those where men are employed women and girls
are rarely to be found doing the same work as men. Of domestic servants
and charwomen there is no need to speak here. Of the laundresses a
considerable proportion belong to the first group already discussed,
but the ironers generally belong to the second group. An inquiry into
their position with regard to wages, hours and sanitary conditions of
work is about to be made, and the proposal to bring them under the
Factory Acts cannot be considered until the results have been given
us. Of the wages and hours of work of dressmakers and shop-assistants
surprisingly little information is at present available. But one fact
is too common to be denied: these girls accept wages which would not
be enough to support them if they had not friends to help them; and
they endure hard work, long hours, and close rooms because they believe
that they are only filling up a brief interval before marriage. The
better off their parents may be, the less heed do they give to securing
anything but pocket-money wages. These girls are constantly coming in
contact with the rich, and have ever before their eyes the luxury and
comfort of those who have money without working for it. They are taught
to think much about dress and personal appearance, and are exposed
to temptations never offered to the less attractive factory girls.
They have naturally a higher standard of living, their parents cannot
be relied upon to help them after the first few years, and, failing
marriage, the future looks intensely dreary to them. There would be
little harm in the high standard of comfort of single men in the
middle and upper classes which makes them regard marriage as involving
self-denial, if working women all along the line were also earning
enough to make them regard it in the same light. In a class more than
any other liable to receive proposals of a dishonouring union, which
may free them from badly paid drudgery, the greatest effort should be
made to secure good wages. Combination is nowhere so much needed, and
perhaps is nowhere so unpopular. And yet the difficulties of foreign
competition which make attempts to raise wages among factory girls so
unsafe, and which make it most undesirable for outsiders, ignorant of
trade circumstances, to spread the “doctrine of divine discontent,”
are entirely absent here; skilled hands are not so plentiful that they
could easily be replaced, and the girls, if assisted by their friends,
could well afford to bide their time quietly at home until they had
secured good terms.
There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers from
another. If social distinctions divide population into horizontal
sections, industry cuts through these sections vertically. Class _G._,
or the lower middle class, enter the upper branches of the industries
to which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or
become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They form
the majority of the shop-assistants in the West End and the richer
suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary schools
with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service clerks,
that they join the upper middle class, including under that term the
professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treating of this
third group of working women I shall confine myself entirely to the
position of women in class _H._, partly because my experience as a
high-school teacher has brought me into special relations with girls
and women of that class who have to earn their living, and partly
because their unconscious even more than conscious influence on the
habits and ideals of the girls in the lower middle class is very great.
In every class but class _H._ the girls can, if they choose, enter
industries conducted by employers with a view to profit. In the
section of the factory class where the girls are obliged to be
self-supporting there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any
considerable period; there is a point above which it would not pay the
employers to employ them. The standard of living is, unfortunately, a
very low one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can
support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group
there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed by
combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will be
employed, however high the wages demanded may be. But the minimum wage
is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather determined by
the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and part of the cost
of food. In class _H._ women are not employed to produce commodities
which have a definite market value, and have therefore no means of
measuring their utility by market price. They nearly all perform
services for persons who pay them out of fixed income, and make no
pecuniary profit by employing them. And there is no rate at which we
can say that the supply of these services will cease; for the desire
to be usefully employed is so strong in educated women, and their
opportunities of being profitably employed (in the economic sense of
the word “profitable”) are so few, that they will give their services
for a year to people as well off as themselves in return for a sum of
money barely sufficient to take them abroad for a month or to keep
them supplied with gloves, lace, hats, and other necessary trifles.
Chaos reigns supreme. And while in this class it seems to be considered
ignoble to stipulate for good pay, strangely enough it is not
considered disgraceful to withhold it. Teachers are constantly exhorted
to teach for love of their work, but no appeal is made to parents to
pay remunerative fees because they love their children to be taught.
The children of the upper and middle classes have their education
partly given them by the parents of the assistant mistresses and
governesses whom they employ. As a proof of this, I give a few
particulars about the salaries and cost of living of the only section
of educated working women in which some kind of order reigns--assistant
mistresses in public and proprietary schools giving a secondary
education. In these schools, of which a considerable number are under
the management of the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company and the Church
Schools Company, while others are endowed schools or local proprietary
schools, some University certificate of intellectual attainment is
almost invariably demanded, and a University degree is more frequently
required than in private schools or from private governesses. These
assistant mistresses have nearly all clearly recognised, even when mere
school-girls, that they must eventually earn their own living if they
do not wish to spend their youth in maintaining a shabby appearance of
gentility. They regard marriage as a possible, but not very probable,
termination of their working career; but for all practical purposes
relegate the thought to the unfrequented corners of their minds,
along with apprehensions of sickness or old age and expectations of
a legacy. They are women whose standard is high enough for them to
be able to spend £200 a year usefully without any sinful waste. In
the majority of cases they are devoted to their profession, for the
first few years at least; and they only weary of it when they feel
that they are beginning to lose some of their youthful vitality, and
have no means of refreshing mind and body by social intercourse and
invigorating travel, while at the same time the fear of sickness and
poverty is beginning to press on them. There are not 1,500 of them in
all England, and their position is better than that of any considerable
section of the 120,000 women teachers entered in the Census of 1881.
The particulars that I give are from the report of a committee formed
in 1889 to collect statistics as to the salaries paid to assistant
mistresses in high schools. The critics of the report believe that the
poorest paid teachers did not give in returns, and that the report gave
too favourable an impression of the state of affairs. The number who
gave information was 278. The return for the hours of work did not
include the time spent in preparation of lessons and study, both of
course absolutely necessary for a good teacher.
Summing up the results, we may say that, of the teachers who joined
their present school more than two years ago, one-fourth are at
present receiving an average salary of £82 for an average week’s work
(the average including very large variations) of thirty-two hours;
half (25 per cent. of whom possess University degrees) are receiving
an average salary of £118 for a week’s work of about thirty-five
hours; and one-fourth (50 per cent. of whom are University graduates)
are receiving an average salary of £160 in exchange for a week’s work
of thirty-six to thirty-seven hours. These results do not appear
unsatisfactory, but it must be remembered that under the phrase _more
than two years_ is covered a length of service extending in one case
to as many as seventeen years, and of which the average must be taken
as very nearly six. Many also of these teachers have had considerable
experience in other schools before entering the ones in which they
are at present engaged. The condition of the teaching profession
as a career for educated women may be summed up according to these
averages, by saying that a teacher of average qualifications, who
a few years ago obtained a footing in a high-class school, and has
continued working _in the same school_ for six years, at the end
of this time is hypothetically earning a salary of £118 a year by
thirty-five hours’ work a week for thirty-nine weeks in the year, or
slightly over 1_s._ 8_d._ an hour. A result obtained from so many
averages is, of course, entirely valueless as a guidance to any
individual teacher, but affords a certain index to the pecuniary
position of the profession as a whole.
The prospects of the assistant mistress as she approaches middle age
may be judged from the particulars of twenty-four instances in which a
change of work had been attended by a fall of income.
Three of these changes may be at once struck out as changes from the
post of private governess, and three others do not lend themselves to
easy comparison, because of great differences in the hours of work.
Of the remaining eighteen teachers, five have now attained a higher
salary than that formerly paid them, four have exactly regained
their old income, while nine are still in receipt of a lower salary
than that paid them at their last school. These figures point to a
precariousness in the position of teachers which has to be seriously
taken into account in estimating the prospects of the profession.
But there are many people who, like a certain clergyman’s wife, think
that girls are getting “uppish nowadays” when they hear that after
three years at Girton and two years’ experience in teaching, an
assistant mistress refuses less than £120 a year. There are thousands
of mothers like one who wanted a lady graduate as daily governess for
her boys “quite regardless of expense,” and who was even willing to
pay £30 a year! Wealthy residents of Notting Hill and Kensington send
their children to high schools whose managers dare not ask more than a
maximum fee of £15 a year. For their enlightenment I give the tables of
cost of living compiled by Mr. Alfred Pollard with the aid of experts.
Arithmeticians may amuse themselves with calculating in how many
years a teacher, twenty-six years of age, with a salary of £120, may,
by saving £16 a year, secure an annuity of £70 a year; and may then
attack the more interesting problem of the probabilities of any school
retaining her in its employment for that length of time.
_Cost of Living._
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
| | Salary | Salary |
| | £80. | £100. |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
|Board and lodging during | £ _s._ _d._| £ _s._ _d._|
| term, say 40 weeks | 42 0 0 | 50 0 0 |
|Half-rent during holiday | 3 0 0 | 4 0 0 |
|Railway and other expenses | | |
| for six weeks of holiday | | |
| with friends | 3 0 0 | 4 0 0 |
|Six weeks of holidays at own| | |
| expense | 7 10 0 | 9 0 0 |
|Educational books | 0 10 0 | 1 0 0 |
|Dress | 14 0 0 | 15 0 0 |
|Petty cash for omnibuses, | | |
| amusements, presents, | | |
| charities, etc. etc. | 3 0 0 | 4 10 0 |
|Laundry | 3 10 0 | 3 10 0 |
|Medical attendance and | | |
| provision against sickness| 3 10 0 | 5 0 0 |
|Sum available towards | | |
| provision or old age | 0 0 0 | 4 0 0 |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
| |£80 0 0 |100 0 0 |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
| | Salary | Salary |
| | £120. | £150. |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
|Board and lodging during | £ _s._ _d._| £ _s._ _d._|
| term, say 40 weeks | 50 0 0 | 60 0 0 |
|Half-rent during holiday | 4 0 0 | 5 0 0 |
|Railway and other expenses | | |
| for six weeks of holiday | | |
| with friends | 4 0 0 | 4 0 0 |
|Six weeks of holidays at own| | |
| expense | 12 0 0 | 15 0 0 |
|Educational books | 2 0 0 | 3 0 0 |
|Dress | 15 0 0 | 20 0 0 |
|Petty cash for omnibuses, | | |
| amusements, presents, | | |
| charities, etc. etc. | 6 0 0 | 9 0 0 |
|Laundry | 3 10 0 | 3 10 0 |
|Medical attendance and | | |
| provision against sickness| 7 10 0 | 7 10 0 |
|Sum available towards | | |
| provision or old age | 16 0 0 | 23 0 0 |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
| |120 0 0 |150 0 0 |
+----------------------------+-------------+-------------+
It will be observed that these teachers are even here supposed to have
friends who will put up with them for six weeks. And attention may be
especially called to the magnificent sum that can be set apart for
educational books and lectures. Frivolous books, such as the works of
Walter Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, Browning, R. L.
Stevenson, must be presented by friends or borrowed in all their grime
and dirt from a free library.
If this is the position of a favoured thousand, the position of the
rest may be inferred. Of the whole number, however, a considerable
proportion are teachers in elementary schools, and do not come from
Class _H._ I have no means of separating the two. Imagination may be
stimulated by perusing the employment columns of such a paper as _The
Lady_, where advertisements appear for governesses at unconscionably
low salaries, reaching occasionally to almost a minus quantity when
some more than ordinarily audacious matron offers a comfortable home
to a governess in return for the education of her children and twelve
shillings a week.
Are girls worth educating? Apparently not, as their parents do not
think them worth paying for. The expectation that marriage will in a
few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and provide
for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know they can
make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to train them
for really lucrative employment, because they think the money will be
thrown away if their daughters marry; they let them work full time for
half or less than half the cost of living, out of a mistaken kindness,
of which employers get all the benefit. The girls in many cases accept
low salaries under the same impression, in others because they are
not strong enough to hold out where so many are willing to undersell
them. Those who only take up employment as a stopgap until marriage
never become really efficient, and when later on they find that there
is no prospect of release, they become positively inefficient. Those
who have faced facts from the first can throw their whole heart into
their work, but they are heavily handicapped in their efforts towards
progress by the bad pay which is the result of the thoughtlessness
and folly of those around them. If only the relatives of these girls
could realise that at least one-half of them will never be married, and
that of the others many will not marry for several years after leaving
school, that there is no means of predicting which of them will be
married, and that any of them may have to support, not only themselves
all their lives, but a nurse as well in old age, the tangle would
soon be unravelled. Two things only I would venture to suggest: one,
that instead of supplementing salaries and so lowering them, parents
should help their daughters to hold out for salaries sufficient to
support them, should assist them in making themselves more efficient,
and should help them to make provision for themselves in later
life, instead of making self-support impossible; the other, that
manufacturers and business men should train their daughters as they
train their sons. The better organisation of labour should open a wide
field for women, if they will only consent to go through the routine
drudgery and hardship that men have to undergo. An educated girl who
goes from the high school to the technological college will find full
scope for any talents she may possess. As designer, chemist, or foreign
correspondent in her father’s factory she could be more helpful and
trustworthy than anyone not so closely interested in his success. As
forewoman in any factory, if she understood her work, she would be far
superior to the uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses
in our factory system would be swept away.
If anyone objects that women who are intensely interested in work which
also enables them to be self-supporting are less attractive than they
would otherwise be, I can make no reply except that to expect a hundred
women to devote their energies to attracting fifty men seems slightly
ridiculous. If the counter-argument be put forward that women, able to
support themselves in comfort, and happy in their work, will disdain
marriage, then those who take this view are maintaining, not only that
it is not true that
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
’Tis woman’s whole existence.
but also that marriage has naturally very much less attraction for
women than for men.