The servant-keeping classes, as I have described the groups that Mr. Booth has called Classes G and H, include everyone with an income of £150 a year and upwards, and, were statistics available, it might perhaps be shown that the unmarried women are, to a large extent, the daughters of clerks and professional men. The tradesman class do not find it nearly so difficult to provide for their sons and set them up in business as is the case in the salaried class; and it is an advantage from an industrial point of view for tradesmen to have wives who can help them in various ways. Emigration is probably more frequent in the salaried class; and where the sons are obliged to emigrate, it frequently happens that the daughters have to work for their living. In this class I believe the inequality of the sexes is greatest, and the probability of marriage least. In this class, therefore, the importance of an industrial training which shall enable women to earn a competency through all the active years of their life, which shall enable them to remain efficient workers and to provide for old age, is greater than in any other.
As my object is not to point out how marriageable women may get married, but to show that a considerable number of women must remain unmarried, a table showing the inequality of numbers of the unmarried of both sexes in different districts in London is given. The districts are arranged in the order of poverty as calculated in 1889; the figures are from the Census of 1881.
Unmarried Women 35-45 to every 100 Unmarried Men 35-45.
| Holborn | 73 |
| St. George’s-in-East | 50 |
| Bethnal Green | 83 |
| St. Saviour’s | 81 |
| St. Olave’s | 75 |
| Shoreditch | 100 |
| Whitechapel | 36 |
| Stepney | 50 |
| Greenwich | 137 |
| Poplar | 50 |
| Westminster | 86 |
| City | 116 |
| Islington | 165 |
| St. Pancras | 135 |
| Camberwell | 200 |
| Wandsworth | 191 |
| Marylebone | 212 |
| St Giles’ | 86[4] |
| Mile End Old Town | 115 |
| Lambeth | 159 |
| Woolwich | 57[4] |
| Fulham | 200 |
| Chelsea | 143 |
| Strand | 66[4] |
| Kensington | 378 |
| Hackney | 230 |
| St. George’s, Hanover Square | 175[4] |
| Lewisham | 325 |
| Hampstead | 366 |
[4] The common lodging-houses in St. Giles’, the Woolwich Arsenal, the Inns of Court and hotels in the Strand, and the Knightsbridge Barracks in St. George’s, Hanover Square, may help to explain these exceptions to the rule.
As only one-third of these unmarried women are domestic servants, even if we suppose that all the unmarried men belong to Classes G and H, there are obviously not enough men for all the women to be able to marry. Such being the case, we can afford to dispense with mutual recrimination. The women who find it less dishonouring to enter the labour market than an overstocked marriage market are taking the more womanly course in putting aside all thought of marriage. The men who remain unmarried are perhaps in the position of Captain Macheath, overwhelmed by an embarras de richesses, and should be forgiven if they fear to make a choice of one which may seem to cast disparagement on so many others of equal merit.
These statistics have been called startling and alarming. They may be startling to men, but can hardly be so to women of the upper class, and I fail to see why they should alarm anyone. If all these spinsters had to be shut up in convents the outlook would be gloomy. But as things are, if only we can secure good pay and decent conditions of life, the lot of all women may be immensely improved by this compact band of single women. It would be difficult to overrate the industrial effect of a number of well-instructed, healthy-minded, vigorous permanent spinsters. A man’s work is not interrupted but rather intensified by marriage; but in the case of women, not only is the wages question very much affected by the expectation of marriage, but much organised effort on their part, whether for improvement of wages or for provision against sickness and old age, must be wasted unless there be a considerable number of single women to give continuity to the management of their associations. Mr. Llewellyn Smith has pointed out that, as mobility of labour increases, actual movement may, other things remaining the same, diminish; and so also I should be inclined to say that it is not marriage that is such a disturbing element in the women’s wages question so much as the expectation of or desire for marriage. In the middle classes, where it is impossible to earn a sufficient income without a long training and years of practical apprenticeship, nothing is so injurious to women’s industrial position as this ungrounded expectation of marriage, which prevents them from making themselves efficient when young, and makes them disappointed, weary, and old when their mental and physical powers should be in their prime.
With this profession of faith in the absolute necessity for the existence of single women I pass on to a brief review of the position of working women, considered in three groups, taking first of all those who belong to the classes whom Mr. Booth describes as “poor.” Classes A, B, C, and D, who are 30·7 per cent. of the population of London; then the well-to-do artisans in Classes E and F, who are 51·5 per cent., and lastly the so-called middle and upper classes, who are 17·8 per cent., of London, and should therefore be designated the upper classes.
From the first of these groups are drawn the lower grades of factory girls in East London, who form the majority of match-girls, rope-makers, jam and sweetstuff-makers, and a considerable proportion of the box, brush, and cigar-makers, as well as of the less skilled tailoresses. The children when they leave school do not all go to work at once, but relieve their mothers or elder sisters of the charge of the ubiquitous baby, enabling the former nurse to go to the factory. They stagger about with their charges, or plant them securely on the coldest stone step they can find, and discuss with each other or with nursing mothers in their narrow street the births, deaths, marriages, misfortunes, and peculiarities of their neighbours. Their families live in one or, at most, two rooms, and their knowledge of life is such as to render Bowdlerised versions of our authors quite unnecessary. Sometimes the children take “a little place” as servant-girl, going home at night, but eventually, and generally before they are fifteen, they find their way to the factory. By the time they are one-and-twenty at least a quarter of them have babies of their own to look after; during the next five years the rest, with but few exceptions, get married or enter into some less binding union. To show that I do not exaggerate the proportion of girl marriages in this class, I give a table of the number of girls married under 21 years of age in every 100 marriages that took place in the seven years from 1878 to 1884. The percentage has been calculated for each year, and the mean of the percentage is given.
Girls Married under 21 years of age in every 100 Marriages 1878-1884.