_December, 1898._
In making an appeal to middle class working women to keep and utilise
their accounts of expenditure, some little explanation is necessary of
the ends to be furthered by such tedious labour. For the keeping of
such accounts is to most people a weariness and a vexation. One friend
of mine declines to make the attempt because it makes her miserable
to have the smallness of her income and the gloominess of the future
brought before her mind with such regularity. Another after six months’
trial has suffered a relapse because keeping the account spoilt all
the pleasure of spending. Many are afraid that moralists will denounce
their expenditure as misdirected and extravagant, and, although living
within their income, prefer to remain uncertain as to the amount they
spend on what others may regard as mere vanities.
There are two questions which every woman who may have to be
self-supporting should ask herself:--
(1) Is the salary which I am efficient enough to earn sufficient to
maintain that efficiency for a considerable number of years?
(2) In middle age, when I may be entirely dependent on my own
exertions, shall I be more, or shall I be less, competent to earn a
salary sufficient to maintain the standard of living to which I have
been accustomed?
The cost of efficiency is higher than the cost of living, a fact which
is not sufficiently recognised by the middle class working woman or by
her employers. The habits of domestic life which make it incumbent on
women to make the best of a fixed income cling to them as wage-earners.
They do not sufficiently realise that the drain on their vitality,
effected by their daily routine of continuous and often monotonous
exertion, must be met by fresh streams of energy which can only be
produced under present conditions by deliberate search for recreation
and by a greater expenditure of money than a purely domestic life
demands.
Some curious results of the movement in favour of securing economic
independence for women may be observed at the present time. The theory
has of course in many cases been reduced in its application to an
absurdity. Parents who thirty years ago would have expected all their
daughters to stay at home until they were married, now with equal
unwisdom wish them to pass from the school to the office, regardless
of their natural bent, and as careless of their future prospects as
before. Girls fitted by Nature for a home life, and for nothing else,
lose their brightness and vitality in sedentary drudgery, losing at the
same time all prospect of an escape from it.
So also from a system under which the womenkind were expected to
devote their evenings entirely to smoothing away the wrinkles and
dispelling the bad tempers of their fathers and brothers after their
harassing day’s work, we have suddenly passed to one under which all
the daughters may come home equally cross and equally tired, with no
hope that others will do their repairs for them, whether of temper or
of clothes.
But there are well-to-do families where the competent mother has no
desire to hand over her duties to her daughters, and where their
happiness is still the chief consideration. Here girls are allowed to
earn--not their living--but an income by which they may relieve their
parents of some of their cost of living and at the same time live at a
greater cost. From both a social and an economic point of view there
is much to be said for this plan, provided both parents and daughters
realise that the latter have not, under this system, achieved economic
independence, or the power to be economically independent. The girl
who earns £100 a year by her work and receives another £100 a year in
one form or another from her father is in all probability underselling
no one; and indeed, in the consciousness that she is only being paid
half her cost of living, may even, by her liberal views of what is a
good salary, be inciting her less luxurious colleagues to raise their
standard of living and remuneration. But if her work is not of a kind
that gives training and power to pass on to higher paid posts, the
woman worker in middle life will be in almost as unhappy a position if
obliged to be self-supporting as the helpless women who thirty years
ago used to advertise for posts as companions or governesses, stating
as their only recommendation that they had never expected to have to
perform the duties of either situation.
Women never will and never can become highly efficient and continue so
for any long period on the salaries which they at present receive, or
even on the salaries with which, as a rule, they would be contented
if they could get them. Vitality and freshness of mind, when youth is
gone, cannot be maintained within the four walls of the class room or
office, on incomes too small to admit of varied social intercourse,
or of practical beneficence. Without the latter power the middle-aged
unmarried woman can feel that she has small claim to live, and, in such
a case, if her daily work does not in itself call for its exercise, she
has little desire to.
What is our standard of living, then? and how much more will it cost
us to maintain that standard when the whole effort to maintain it
falls upon ourselves? To answer these questions we must have definite
accounts of expenditure.
The samples that I have to give are all more or less imperfect as
regards their form of presentation. The teaching profession is the one
from which naturally it will be easiest to obtain returns. Recruited as
it is from every rank of life except the aristocracy, and charged with
the training for every rank of life--except, again, the aristocracy,
who owe little of their education to their governesses--it should
present to us through its accounts a corresponding variety of standard
of living. It should do so; but I venture to predict that it will not.
My first three budgets were given to me several years ago. They give
the expenditure of three assistant mistresses teaching in high schools
and boarding during term time in private houses. No. 1 gives the
expenditure for one year; No. 2 the expenditure for two successive
years; No. 3 the average expenditure for six years. Side by side with
them I place the budget for one year of another high school mistress
(No. 4) living in lodgings--which I give afterwards in greater detail.