The pressure on widows to seek employment, whatever their home ties, is seen with tragic pathos even in the bald figures of the Census.
| Single. | Married. | Widowed. | Total. | |
| Percentage of women and girls occupied | 54·5 | 10·26 | 30·1 | 32·5 |
Although widows in the very nature of the case are older on an average than married women, although the whole tendency of modern industry is towards the employment of the young, yet the percentage of widows occupied is three times as great as the percentage of married who are occupied.
There are no short and easy paths to the solution of the difficulties of woman, but those who uphold such measures as the prohibition of employment to married women, are bound to consider, firstly, how the prohibition should be applied in cases where the male head of the family is not competent or sufficiently able-bodied to support it; secondly, whether the children of widows can flourish on neglect any better than the children who have a living father, and, if not, why it is more desirable for the widow than for the married woman to go to work outside her home and away from her children.
Conclusion.—The following points summarise the results obtained from a study of the statistics in regard to women, supplemented by facts of common knowledge. Women outnumber men, especially in later life. Not all women can marry. A large majority of girls and a small minority of adult women work for wages. A large majority of women marry some time or other. The majority of young women leave work when they marry. Some women depend upon their own exertions throughout life, and some of them have dependents. Some women, after being maintained for a period by their husbands, are forced again to seek work for wages; and many of these have dependents.
CHAPTER IV.
WOMEN IN TRADE UNIONS.
Early Efforts at Organisation.—It is probably not worth while to spend a great deal of time in the endeavour to decide what part women played in the earlier developments of trade unionism, very little information being so far obtainable. It seems, however, not unlikely that some of the loose organisations of frame-work knitters, woollen weavers, etc., that existed in the eighteenth century and later, may have included women members, as the Manchester Small-Ware Weavers certainly did in 1756, and Professor Chapman tells us that women were among the members of the Manchester Spinners’ Society of 1795. At Leicester there appears to have been an informal organisation of hand-spinners, called “the sisterhood,” who in 1788 stirred up their male friends and acquaintances to riot as a demonstration against the newly introduced machines.[22] We find some women organised in the unions that sprang up after the repeal of the Anti-Combination Act in 1824. The West Riding Fancy Union was open to women as well as men, and although the General Association of Weavers in Scotland expressly excluded female apprentices from membership it added the proviso, “except those belonging to the weaver’s own family.”