Holborn19·4
St. George’s-in-East22·9
Bethnal Green34·7
St. Saviour’s22·9
St. Olave’s19·5
Shoreditch20·9
Whitechapel25·2
Stepney21·8
Greenwich19·6
Poplar18·9
Westminster15·1
City17·5
Islington14·6
St. Pancras14·7
Camberwell17·2
Wandsworth17·5
Marylebone13·9
St. Giles’16·6
Mile End Old Town26·5
Lambeth17·3
Woolwich17·1
Fulham19·3
Chelsea14·5
Strand14·0
Kensington12·9
Hackney13·9
St. George’s, Hanover Square10·6
Lewisham12·1
Hampstead9·4

As girl marriages are more common among the poorer half of East London, and as, unfortunately, in a large number of cases, the legal ceremony only takes place, if it takes place at all, in time to legitimise the offspring of the union, it is obvious that girl marriage is extremely common in the class of which I am speaking. When the husband earns regular wages, even though they may be small, the wife does not as a rule go to the factory, nor even take work out to do at home, for the first few years of her married life. But many factory girls return to work the day after they are married, and those who leave it for several years often return as soon as one of the children is old enough to leave school. Married labour is, of course, irregular labour, and many employers discourage it as much as possible. But it is most to be deprecated on account of the effect on the children. It is unfortunate that the Census returns, as at present tabulated, give us no means of estimating the extent of the evil. We do not need to know whether men engaged in different occupations are married or single; but there is no fact of more importance with regard to female labour, and the value of such a return would more than balance the expense. The factories where the work cannot be given out (as is the case in match, jam, and cigar factories) contain the largest percentage of married women; and if called upon to choose the less of two evils, married labour in the factory and home work, I should unhesitatingly decide in favour of home work, which, if well organised, need not even be an evil.

The great need of this class is training for domestic life—by which I do not mean domestic service. Herein lies the only effective cure for the industrial and social miseries of the poor. The children are overworked, or else allowed to spend their time in a most dangerous idleness. That men should ask for an Eight Hours Bill when little girls of thirteen or fourteen may be found in our factories working ten hours seems unwise, if not selfish. Ten hours in a factory is not so wearing to a child as eight hours in school would be, but it is far too long. It makes education impossible, and leaves no room for surprise that married women in the poorest classes sink into a condition hardly above animalism. The two things which struck me most in East London were the amount of wasted intelligence and talent among the girls and the wretchedness of the married women. A secondary education in cooking, cleaning, baby management, laws of health, and English literature, should follow that of the Board School, and the minimum age at which full time may be worked should be gradually raised. By 1905 no one under sixteen should be working for an employer more than five hours a day, and all half-timers should be attending morning or afternoon school. The dock labourers’ wives, having learnt to be useful at home, would appreciate how much is lost by going out to work. Their withdrawal from the labour market and the increased efficiency of their children, brought about by better home management and education, would both tend to raise wages, provided that a trade union existed to secure that the workers should keep the result of their increased efficiency. Bad cooking, dirty habits, overcrowding, and empty-headedness are the sources of the drunkenness, inefficiency, immorality, and brutality which obstruct progress among so many of the poor, and philanthropic efforts can be better employed in this direction than in any other.

During the last four years the trade union movement, for which Mrs. Paterson worked so unwearyingly and with such dishearteningly small success, has made considerable progress in East London amongst this group. The principal results to be expected from trade unionism amongst these workers are not sufficiently obvious for large numbers to be attracted by them. But even a small union can be most useful in guarding against reductions and in bringing public opinion to bear upon employers who allow their foremen to exercise tyranny and make unfair exactions from their workpeople. The usefulness of a trade union must be estimated in many cases by what it prevents from happening rather than by any positive advantage that it can be proved to have secured.

From the second group of working women are drawn our better-paid factory girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large number of our dressmakers and milliners, shop-assistants, barmaids, clerks, and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dressmakers, shop-assistants, and clerks are, however, drawn from the lower middle class, and a few from the professional class. Although this second group is the largest group in London, and probably in England, it is the one about which we have least general information. They have hardly been made the subject of industrial inquiry, do not regard themselves as persons to be pitied, and work in comparatively small detachments. They are nevertheless of more industrial importance than the working women of the first group. Their work is skilled and requires an apprenticeship. They are in the majority of cases brought into direct contact with the consumer, and education, good manners, personal appearance and tact all raise their market value. In this second group would be included the majority of the Lancashire and Yorkshire weavers by anyone competent to deal with England as a whole; and what applies to the group in London would not apply to this section of it, who occupy a unique position. The extent to which women compete with men is very much exaggerated. Of the three million and a half women and girls who were returned as occupied in industry in 1881 in England and Wales, over one-third were domestic indoor servants, 358,000 were dressmakers, milliners, or stay-makers; midwifery and subordinate medical service, charing, washing and bathing service, hospitals and institutions, shirt-making and sewing employed another 400,000. The textile trades employed altogether only 590,624 women and girls, and of these over 300,000 were in the cotton trade. Their aggregation in large factories and in special localities has attracted to them an undue amount of attention, and the history of industry in Lancashire is often given as the history of industry in England, whereas no other county is less typical.

In London in 1881 the number of women and girls occupied in industry was 593,226. Of these, more than 40 per cent. were indoor domestic servants, more than 12 per cent. were engaged in charing, washing and bathing service and hospital and institution service, 16 per cent. in dressmaking, millinery, stay-making, shirt-making and needlework; and of the remaining miscellaneous trades a large proportion are purely women’s trades; even in those where men are employed women and girls are rarely to be found doing the same work as men. Of domestic servants and charwomen there is no need to speak here. Of the laundresses a considerable proportion belong to the first group already discussed, but the ironers generally belong to the second group. An inquiry into their position with regard to wages, hours and sanitary conditions of work is about to be made, and the proposal to bring them under the Factory Acts cannot be considered until the results have been given us. Of the wages and hours of work of dressmakers and shop-assistants surprisingly little information is at present available. But one fact is too common to be denied: these girls accept wages which would not be enough to support them if they had not friends to help them; and they endure hard work, long hours, and close rooms because they believe that they are only filling up a brief interval before marriage. The better off their parents may be, the less heed do they give to securing anything but pocket-money wages. These girls are constantly coming in contact with the rich, and have ever before their eyes the luxury and comfort of those who have money without working for it. They are taught to think much about dress and personal appearance, and are exposed to temptations never offered to the less attractive factory girls. They have naturally a higher standard of living, their parents cannot be relied upon to help them after the first few years, and, failing marriage, the future looks intensely dreary to them. There would be little harm in the high standard of comfort of single men in the middle and upper classes which makes them regard marriage as involving self-denial, if working women all along the line were also earning enough to make them regard it in the same light. In a class more than any other liable to receive proposals of a dishonouring union, which may free them from badly paid drudgery, the greatest effort should be made to secure good wages. Combination is nowhere so much needed, and perhaps is nowhere so unpopular. And yet the difficulties of foreign competition which make attempts to raise wages among factory girls so unsafe, and which make it most undesirable for outsiders, ignorant of trade circumstances, to spread the “doctrine of divine discontent,” are entirely absent here; skilled hands are not so plentiful that they could easily be replaced, and the girls, if assisted by their friends, could well afford to bide their time quietly at home until they had secured good terms.

There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers from another. If social distinctions divide population into horizontal sections, industry cuts through these sections vertically. Class G., or the lower middle class, enter the upper branches of the industries to which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They form the majority of the shop-assistants in the West End and the richer suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary schools with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service clerks, that they join the upper middle class, including under that term the professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treating of this third group of working women I shall confine myself entirely to the position of women in class H., partly because my experience as a high-school teacher has brought me into special relations with girls and women of that class who have to earn their living, and partly because their unconscious even more than conscious influence on the habits and ideals of the girls in the lower middle class is very great.

In every class but class H. the girls can, if they choose, enter industries conducted by employers with a view to profit. In the section of the factory class where the girls are obliged to be self-supporting there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any considerable period; there is a point above which it would not pay the employers to employ them. The standard of living is, unfortunately, a very low one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed by combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will be employed, however high the wages demanded may be. But the minimum wage is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather determined by the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and part of the cost of food. In class H. women are not employed to produce commodities which have a definite market value, and have therefore no means of measuring their utility by market price. They nearly all perform services for persons who pay them out of fixed income, and make no pecuniary profit by employing them. And there is no rate at which we can say that the supply of these services will cease; for the desire to be usefully employed is so strong in educated women, and their opportunities of being profitably employed (in the economic sense of the word “profitable”) are so few, that they will give their services for a year to people as well off as themselves in return for a sum of money barely sufficient to take them abroad for a month or to keep them supplied with gloves, lace, hats, and other necessary trifles. Chaos reigns supreme. And while in this class it seems to be considered ignoble to stipulate for good pay, strangely enough it is not considered disgraceful to withhold it. Teachers are constantly exhorted to teach for love of their work, but no appeal is made to parents to pay remunerative fees because they love their children to be taught.

The children of the upper and middle classes have their education partly given them by the parents of the assistant mistresses and governesses whom they employ. As a proof of this, I give a few particulars about the salaries and cost of living of the only section of educated working women in which some kind of order reigns—assistant mistresses in public and proprietary schools giving a secondary education. In these schools, of which a considerable number are under the management of the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company and the Church Schools Company, while others are endowed schools or local proprietary schools, some University certificate of intellectual attainment is almost invariably demanded, and a University degree is more frequently required than in private schools or from private governesses. These assistant mistresses have nearly all clearly recognised, even when mere school-girls, that they must eventually earn their own living if they do not wish to spend their youth in maintaining a shabby appearance of gentility. They regard marriage as a possible, but not very probable, termination of their working career; but for all practical purposes relegate the thought to the unfrequented corners of their minds, along with apprehensions of sickness or old age and expectations of a legacy. They are women whose standard is high enough for them to be able to spend £200 a year usefully without any sinful waste. In the majority of cases they are devoted to their profession, for the first few years at least; and they only weary of it when they feel that they are beginning to lose some of their youthful vitality, and have no means of refreshing mind and body by social intercourse and invigorating travel, while at the same time the fear of sickness and poverty is beginning to press on them. There are not 1,500 of them in all England, and their position is better than that of any considerable section of the 120,000 women teachers entered in the Census of 1881. The particulars that I give are from the report of a committee formed in 1889 to collect statistics as to the salaries paid to assistant mistresses in high schools. The critics of the report believe that the poorest paid teachers did not give in returns, and that the report gave too favourable an impression of the state of affairs. The number who gave information was 278. The return for the hours of work did not include the time spent in preparation of lessons and study, both of course absolutely necessary for a good teacher.

Summing up the results, we may say that, of the teachers who joined their present school more than two years ago, one-fourth are at present receiving an average salary of £82 for an average week’s work (the average including very large variations) of thirty-two hours; half (25 per cent. of whom possess University degrees) are receiving an average salary of £118 for a week’s work of about thirty-five hours; and one-fourth (50 per cent. of whom are University graduates) are receiving an average salary of £160 in exchange for a week’s work of thirty-six to thirty-seven hours. These results do not appear unsatisfactory, but it must be remembered that under the phrase more than two years is covered a length of service extending in one case to as many as seventeen years, and of which the average must be taken as very nearly six. Many also of these teachers have had considerable experience in other schools before entering the ones in which they are at present engaged. The condition of the teaching profession as a career for educated women may be summed up according to these averages, by saying that a teacher of average qualifications, who a few years ago obtained a footing in a high-class school, and has continued working in the same school for six years, at the end of this time is hypothetically earning a salary of £118 a year by thirty-five hours’ work a week for thirty-nine weeks in the year, or slightly over 1s. 8d. an hour. A result obtained from so many averages is, of course, entirely valueless as a guidance to any individual teacher, but affords a certain index to the pecuniary position of the profession as a whole.