Educated working women: Essays on the economic position of women workers in the middle classes

by Clara E. Collet

December, 1899.

“Rather than remain braced and keen to watch the world accurately and take every appearance on its own merits, the lazy intellect declines upon generalizations, formalized rules and Laws of Nature.”

—“Idlehurst, a Journal kept in the Country.”

Every reader of the educational journals must be familiar with the typical advertisement that “The Council of the —— High School for Girls will shortly appoint a Headmistress. No one over 35 need apply.” The restriction produces an effect on assistant mistresses very prejudicial to the interests of education. Girls after a three or four years’ University course, followed in some cases by a year in a Training College, have hardly settled down to the practical business of their lives in the high schools before they are seized with a nervous fear that if they do not shortly bestir themselves in the competition for headmistress-ships they will before long be stranded on this old-time superstition. Their youth and inexperience are facts constantly brought before them up to the age of thirty or thereabouts, and then with hardly an interval they find themselves confronted by this theory of sudden decay of faculties in women. During the second five years of teaching there is a constant agitation among young mistresses in the endeavour to secure a headship, and then amongst those who fail in the lottery—for it is a lottery—comes the deadening prospect of, perhaps, a quarter of a century’s work to be carried on without hope of promotion.

It may be useful to consider the origin of this “formalised rule” that women are unfit to undertake serious responsibility after the age of thirty-five.

The rule—an advance, no doubt, on the eighteenth-century habit of referring to men and women of forty or fifty as “aged”—became stereotyped at least as early as the middle of this century. Unmarried ladies regarded as on the shelf at twenty-five were forced to let their faculties die for want of exercise. The freshness was drained out of them by the pressure of trivialities unresisted by hope. Those who entered the labour market did so as victims of cruel misfortune, full of pity for themselves and quickly worn out by their struggles to gain a livelihood with few qualifications for the task.

During the last twenty years a very striking change has made itself apparent. In some branches the extension of the working period of a woman’s life has been so great that it has even brought back to useful, hopeful enterprise women who had settled down to the colourless, dreary, monotonous round prescribed for the unattached elderly. The number of educated women who either earn a livelihood or engage in philanthropic work has not increased so much as is usually supposed, but the spirit in which the work is undertaken is wholly different. Not that it is in all respects a praiseworthy one. The disinterestedness of the saint is perhaps lacking. Indeed, what I wish to lay stress on as a fact for which to be thankful is that the period of youthful interestedness has been very greatly extended.

In fiction our women writers have long since abandoned sweet seventeen as a heroine, and even men writers, slowest of all to observe such changes, have, during the last five years or so, recognised that at that favoured age girls are nowadays too much absorbed in preparing for senior locals and college entrance examinations to offer useful material for romantic literature.

Not a few of our veterans shake their heads over what I have called the extension of youthfulness, but what they call the prolongation of childish irresponsibility. The crudeness of the girl-graduate of two or three and twenty is contrasted unfavourably with the finished manners and graceful maturity of the girl of eighteen some forty years ago. And there would be much to be urged in support of their disapproval if, with the raising of the age-limit of a girl’s systematised education, there were no corresponding rise in the age-limit of her usefulness and energy. If the prime of life were necessarily passed at an age fixed for all time, so that the time spent in preparation for work was deducted from the time available for work itself, it might fairly be doubted whether our modern system of education was not positively harmful.

But there is no such fixity in the age at which maturity is attained, and there is reason to believe that as each generation takes longer to arrive at maturity, owing to much more careful attention to mental and physical development, so also each generation retains the possession of its mature powers for a longer period than the preceding one.