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

by Clara E. Collet

But the real value of Mrs. Stetson’s argument is that by its absurdity it brings home to us with striking force a fact of which most middle-class people have only a sub-conscious knowledge—that, unfortunately, in England at any rate, what Mrs. Stetson calls the economic independence of the wife is in too many cases not an ideal, but a reality.

Mrs. Stetson says that economic independence among human beings means that the individual pays for what he gets, works for what he gets, gives to the other an equivalent for what the other gives him. “As long as what I get is obtained by what I give,” says Mrs. Stetson, “I am economically independent.”

I do not accept this as a true definition of independence, but it is sufficient that this represents the ideal of independence that Mrs. Stetson desires.

Well, nearly all unmarried women in England are self-supporting. The servant-keeping class is probably less than 12 per cent. of the population; a considerable number of unmarried women even in these classes support themselves. It is only in this servant-keeping class that it has ever been true that there was no means for a woman to get a living except by marriage. And if in the classes below women have married in order to be relieved from working for their living, they have found that the married woman’s life was harder, so far as work was concerned, than that of the unmarried woman. Domestic servants, accustomed to luxurious living and comparative ease as professional servants, willingly consent to marry artisans on 25s. a week, and to work harder than any maid-of-all-work would be asked to do. In factory districts a considerable percentage of the married women go out to work; and there is no greater slave to her husband than the woman who receives no support from him.

I am far from maintaining that a married woman should not do paid work. In all cases where a wife knows herself to be decidedly below par in housekeeping capacity, it is a natural enough thing that she should wish to make up for her expensiveness in this direction by earning some money by work for which she has more aptitude. But even in this case, unless she has some specially strong aptitude for some kind of highly-paid casual work, she would probably be wiser to spend her energies in trying to make herself better fitted for her position of house mistress.

“The development of any human labour requires specialisation,” says Mrs. Stetson. But the direction of human labour requires generalisation; and the married woman, by giving up her post of general, will go down several grades in the army of workers. As it is, she alone amongst skilled workers can watch the development of human beings of both sexes at every stage; the best fitted psychological laboratory in Germany cannot compete with the one that every married woman has at hand in which to study human nature, if only she has the intelligence to know it. Even the domestic servant system at its worst has at least one merit—that it prevents us from ever being able to shut our eyes to the great deficiencies in the education of the working classes. Dismiss our servants to the restaurant kitchen or the bedroom cleaners’ supply associations, and who knows what sham admiration of the working classes, and real apathy with regard to their welfare, may be developed?

The married woman who knows how to turn her experience to good advantage may eventually become a person of high industrial value. In a world where so many odd jobs which ought to be done are left undone, because all the experienced workers are permanently employed, the married woman with experience and judgment comes in as the right person in the right place. She is perhaps the only skilled casual worker. If there is no need for money, she should prove the best philanthropic worker, her position as mistress of a house making it possible for her to give a personal service in her own home which the official philanthropist must often regret she is unable to offer. And when her children really are old enough to be quite satisfactorily left to themselves and their teachers for the working day, I see no reason why the skilled married woman should not enter the labour market, and undertake the direction of one or other of those big institutions which Mrs. Stetson wishes to be universal, and which most of us regard as in some cases necessary. It is not permissible to serve two masters. The mother who thinks of earning her living must choose whether her children or the earning of an income shall be her first duty. If her children take the second place, she is worth nothing as a mother; if they take the first place, she is worth little as an outside worker. But in later life the two occupations need not clash. But although the elderly married woman may prove a valuable industrial organiser in the hotel, the residential chambers company, the hospital, the orphanage, or the college, it will only be by having served her apprenticeship, and taken honours as a house mistress and mother.

I have not cared to discuss Mrs. Stetson’s views on housekeeping. But I not only see room for improvement in the domestic organisation of working women’s homes, but feel very hopeful of the power of women in the working classes to arrive at, at least, a partial solution of their difficulties by co-operation in removing them. The most important result of the co-operative movement will, I believe, be the improvement of the conditions of home life, and the better organisation of the housework of the overtasked wives of our artisans and clerks.

There is much truth in Mrs. Stetson’s criticisms of women’s failures in every direction, but the remedy is better education and simpler tastes. It is only for the sake of her thesis that Mrs. Stetson finds fault with women or with men. She is generous in her estimate of the actual and possible capacities of both, and is full of high-minded delusions about them. “Woman holds her great position as the selector of the best among competing males; woman’s beautiful work is to improve the race by right marriage.”

And not once does it cross her mind that most women are neither particularly attractive nor particularly good, and that they have therefore neither the power nor the right to assume this lofty office.