Women of England

by Bartlett Burleigh James

In the nineteenth century came a great uplift of the status of the stage and workers upon it, and, in contrast to the opinions which prevailed in the eighteenth century, an actress suffered no disparagement and had the same opportunity for cherishing her reputation as any others of the sex. The stage no longer brought its followers into disrepute, for it rested with the actress herself to preserve or to tarnish her character. She was no longer, by virtue of being an actress, regarded as a Bohemian, and it was not considered a regrettable thing for a girl of character to enter upon a histrionic career. It was her course and conduct after she had entered the profession, and the nature of the plays in which she appeared and the parts which she allowed herself to present, that determined the public verdict with regard to her. As a result of the changed character of the theatre,—although it was by no means cleared of all the odium that had so long attached to it,—a larger number of men and women attended dramatic performances than ever before.

The introduction of women into commercial life was followed by the opening up of civil service appointments and a change of sentiment with regard to women engaging in trade. In 1870, when the government bought the interests of the telegraph company, the officials were brought under the existing civil service rules. Some of them happened to be women, and thus, inadvertently, women were admitted to civil service appointments under the government. In 1871 the postmaster-general bore striking testimony to the efficiency of the women employed in his department. When commenting upon the transfer of the telegraphs from private control to post office direction, he said: "There had been no reason to regret the experiment. On the contrary, it has afforded much ground for believing that, where large numbers of persons are employed with full work and fair supervision, the admixture of the sexes involves no risk, but is highly beneficial." Then, remarking upon the better tone of the male staff by reason of their association with women as fellow employés, he added: "Further, it is a matter of experience that the male clerks are more willing to help the female clerks with their work than to help one another; and on many occasions pressure of business is met and difficulties are overcome through this willingness and cordial coöperation."

The experience of employing women in the post office was duplicated in other departments of the public service, until it has become a recognized fact that women can be employed in connection with men without any of the results which it was apprehended would follow the departure. In the country districts, postmistresses and female carriers are not a novelty. It was the post office which first Opened up to women employment under the government, and its various departments now utilize them extensively. Although other of the public services have received women as clerks, their position is still in a measure tentative, but it can hardly be said that the employment of them by the government is any longer an experiment. In addition to the large numbers of young women who have found employment in the government service, there is no railroad company, insurance company, or any other large semi-public or private business firm or company, which has not found women to be of peculiar serviceability. The great number of women who, during the latter part of the nineteenth century, fitted themselves for business careers indicates not only a change of ideal, with a realization of their self-sufficiency, but the increased adaptability of women to the peculiar conditions of modern society.

It is no longer a curious phenomenon to see the name of a woman upon a business letterhead, or on the sign over some large commercial establishment, for frequently, when their husbands die, women themselves now take in hand the business interests of the deceased and conduct them with marked success, and with no question from their business competitors as to the propriety of their so doing. Nor do such women forfeit the esteem of society. Society as such is no longer concerned chiefly with matters of pedigree, but more largely with the question of prosperity. While it would be asserting too much to say that the nineteenth century witnessed the iconoclastic shattering of the old aristocratic ideals, nevertheless, while the woman of blood maintains her rightful place in the select circles of society, the door stands ajar for women who have no other claim for recognition than that they have amassed fortunes, or inherited them, or are the wives of wealthy men. However, they must not have clinging to them the odor of their humble beginnings, if they rose from lowly walks of life. The real test applied to them is not the test of breeding, which relates to the past, but of gentility, which is the measure of the present life.

Besides the women who managed large business interests in their own names, the nineteenth century witnessed the advent of the business woman in numerous lines of small trade. To name the various kinds of business in which women are found making for themselves a sustenance would be to give a list of the many lines of retail trade; but the shopwoman of the earlier part of the nineteenth century is quite a different person from the tradeswoman of the latter half. Instead of a small, obscure shop, conducted in a hesitating, apologetic manner, to-day women are as aggressive advertisers, make as fine displays in their shops, and sustain the same business relations with the wholesale dealers, as do the retail dealers of the other sex. Beyond any peradventure, women have become a part of the business organism of England, and are competing upon terms of equality with men for the patronage of the public; and they have before them just as hopeful prospects of amassing a competence for an easy and independent old age.

Great as is the army of women who enrolled themselves in the ranks of commerce and clerkship during the nineteenth century, they are in a minority as compared with the greater host of industry,—the women who are found in the factories, working upon the raw materials of human comforts and luxuries, toiling unremittingly and often under hard conditions for a mere pittance as compared with the value of their products. In 1895 there were one hundred thousand women in England holding membership in the various trade unions, and, besides these, a far larger number who were without such enrolment, such as fifty-two thousand shirtmakers and seamstresses and four hundred thousand dressmakers and milliners; and these were but a mere fraction of the immense host of women who, outside of the home, found themselves earning their own bread by their personal labor. With the growth of manufactures, women were drawn from the rural districts. It became an uncommon thing, where formerly it was the usual practice, for women to perform the work of field laborers, or to depend chiefly for support upon butter and cheese making, or service at the inns or in the shops of the neighboring towns. It is now only the women of the lowest rank who devote themselves for a livelihood to berry picking, hop picking, garden weeding, and like menial outdoor services.

The competition of women with men in manufactures was greeted at first with the sullen resentment and open opposition with which machinery was viewed when first introduced; but as women have been drawn into manufactures, men have absorbed many of the outdoor duties which formerly fell to woman's lot in the country districts. The "bakeresses," "brewsters," and the "regrateresses"—retailers of bread—are now known simply in the history of industry; their names have become archaic and their offices obsolete. As machinery took the place of the individual intelligence of the handworker of other days, leaving only a monotonous series of mechanical manipulations for the men, aside from the superior skill called into play by the complexity of the machinery, which demanded expert and intelligent direction, women found relegated to them the simplest parts of factory work and those which did not require any large degree of mentality. As a result, the women of the factories have not developed coördinately in intelligence with their sisters in other lines of active work. This has unfortunately led them to be looked down upon as inferior to girls who work in stores or in offices. As the factory laws came to be framed with regard to greater investigation and regulation of the conditions of women's work in factories, many of the abuses were to a degree corrected. It is not now commonly the case that a self-respecting operative is without redress if subjected to the coarse insults of brutalized foremen, nor are women now permitted to work as formerly under conditions so harmful to their peculiar constitutions. Better sanitation, fewer hours of employment, and greater regard for their comfort, have done much to brighten what was in the early part of the nineteenth century the dreariest life to which any woman could be chained.

Along with the improvements in the condition of women's labor have gone improvements in the housing of factory people. The industrial evils that brought out such chivalrous champions of the poor as the younger Lord Shaftesbury and his associates no longer generally prevail in factory life. There yet remains much to be done for the congregated women and girls of the factories. It was inevitable that by the bringing of them together in great numbers, many from homes of abject poverty where they had none of the benefits of careful training, and by the herding of them together in factories where the nature of their work did not furnish employment for their minds, the moral tone of the young women of daily toil should have been lower than that of their sister workers in other lines. But the dictum of Lord Shaftesbury has been sinking into the social consciousness, and has borne splendid fruit in the improvement of the conditions of factory work for women. "In the male," says he, "the moral effects of the system are very bad; but in the female they are infinitely worse, not alone upon themselves, but upon their families, upon society, and, I may add, upon the country itself. It is bad enough if you corrupt the man; but if you corrupt the woman, you poison the waters of life at the very fountain." In the first half of the nineteenth century, the actual number of women employed in factories appears to have been larger than that of men.

The existence of the factory, drawing out from the homes so many women and making their home life only a secondary consideration and an additional burden, presents one of the gravest problems of modern times—a problem that must be approached harmoniously by the philanthropists and the legislators if it is to be satisfactorily solved. Habit begets contentment, so that it is not the employés of the factory who feel most keenly the unfortunate circumstances of their existence. It is the social reformer, whose one aim is not the uplifting of the individual as such, but the betterment of the individual as the unit of the social fabric, who is most concerned for the betterment of the town life of England. As to the women themselves, when they are compensated by extra wage they have no complaint to make about the long hours; indeed, they sometimes even prefer the factory and the excitement of their surroundings to the dreary and forbidding prospect of their desolate tenements. One unnatural result of women's work in factories is the reversal of the positions respectively of husband and wife in the home. It is not an extraordinary occurrence for women to go out to the factories and earn the bread of the family, while the men remain at home to mind the babies and care for the house. This begetting of shiftlessness in men, who are buoyed up to the point of self-supporting labor only by the dependence of their families upon them, is an incidental but a significant result of factory life upon women. It is seriously to be doubted that, in the aggregate earnings of the family, there is any real compensation for the binding of wives and children to the wheel of toil. It has been observed by careful students of industrial conditions that, for one reason or another, the maximum wage of a family and the degree of comfort in their living are not, ordinarily, greater than that of the family whose sole wage earner is the husband.

There is not a concurrence of views as to the wisdom of special legislation with regard to the industrial place of women. Some see in the various acts passed to regulate the circumstances of their employment a distinct gain, while others view all such enactments as a regrettable interference of the state in a matter where it is not capable of taking cognizance of all the circumstances involved and of displaying the broadest wisdom in dealing with the subject. Then, too, it is objected on the part of some that sex legislation is unwise of itself. The women themselves have not always looked with favor upon the passage of acts for the regulation of their labor, and often complain of such as an infringement of their personal privileges as adults. They complain that the competition of labor is already severe, and that by imposing upon them the limitations of certain acts the difficulty of making a subsistence is increased. They complain against the association of female with child labor, and assert that the conditions are dissimilar and the abuses to be corrected cannot be classed under the same legislative conditions. Industrial legislation was first directed to the correction of offences against women on account of their sex, but the later enactments, and those most complained of, were resented because of their making the securing of a livelihood more precarious. The Times in 1895 pointed out that there were eight hundred and eighty thousand women affected by the Factories and Workshops Bill, introduced into Parliament in that year. The lack of flexibility of the measure, failing to take account of the different natures and conditions of the various employments affected, made it obviously unjust to the women employed in certain trades. Some industries have their seasons of activity and of dulness, while others fluctuate without regard to periods; and to class all such under legislation regulating the hours of labor at the same number for them all could but work injury to the women employed in such trades and disproportionate advantage to other women employed in industries pursued evenly throughout the year.