At present the principal employments open to women are teaching, domestic service, and sewing. I come to consider the remuneration of the highest profession open to women.
In 1801 there were 80,017 female teachers in England, of whom the majority were governesses in private families. It is difficult to ascertain the average salary of governesses, because the Governesses’ Institutions in London and Manchester, which are the chief sources of information on the subject, refuse to register the applications of governesses who accept salaries of less than £25 a year. The number of this lowest class may be guessed from the fact that for a situation as nursery governess, with a salary of £20 a year, advertised in a newspaper, there were five hundred applicants; as I have already stated, three hundred applied for a similar place with no salary at all. To return to the higher class. The register of the last six months at the Manchester Governesses’ Institution shows an entry of—
| 54 | governesses | who | asked for | £30 | and under, | per annum. |
| 20 | „ | „ | „ | 40 | „ | „ |
| 19 | „ | „ | „ | 50 | „ | „ |
| 17 | „ | „ | „ | 60 | „ | „ |
| 10 | „ | „ | „ | 70 | and upwards. | |
These sums, it must be remembered, are expressions of what governesses wish to receive.[[1]] Taking nursery governesses into the account, and remembering that the above statistics refer only to the higher ranks of the profession, it is probably not too much to say, that from 0 to £50 a year is the salary of nine governesses in ten. Situations offering more than £50 are the prizes of the profession, but are generally such as to compel a serious outlay on dress and personal expenditure. It is difficult to imagine how the majority of governesses manage to scramble through life, when we remember that their position involves several journeys in the year, that they must sometimes provide for themselves during holiday seasons, and that they must always dress as ladies. Miserable must be their means of providing for old age or sickness, to say nothing of claims of affection or of charity throughout life, or the means required for self-culture.[[2]]
Probably there are few portions of society in which more of silent suffering and misery is endured than among female teachers, and in the class which supplies them. Charitable people who have opened little “Homes” for decayed governesses can tell histories of struggling lives and crushed hopes which it saddens one to hear. The reports of Bethlehem Hospital and other lunatic asylums prove that not a few poor governesses find their way thither. Some are found in Penitentiaries among the fallen. Inquiry shows that insufficient food while out of situations, added to the mental trials of an unloved and isolated being, have driven some of these governesses to opium or to strong drink, until, penniless and degraded, they have sought a refuge among penitents where there was nothing to pay. “Her funds are exhausted, and she earnestly seeks a re-engagement;” words such as these, taken from an advertisement in the Times, headed—“To the benevolent,” are no unfrequent symptom of a deep and wide distress. Some determined women there are who have devoted to self-culture as much of their pittance as could be spared from the barest needs of life, and of whom it is known that, night after night when they went to bed, they have tied a band round their waist to keep down the gnawings of hunger. One such I know who has risen by her force of character to almost as high a place as it is at present possible for a woman to occupy in the educational world, but who is not yet free from sufferings entailed by years of mental anxiety and bodily privations. An insufficiency of the necessaries of life is not the bitterest complaint of many of these sufferers, who by their lives protest that man does not live by bread alone. “Worse than bodily privations or pains” (I quote the words of one of them) “are these aches and pangs of ignorance, this unquenched thirst for knowledge, these unassisted and disappointed efforts to obtain it, this sight of bread enough and to spare, but locked away from us, this depressing sense of a miserable waste of powers bestowed on us by God, and which we know we could have used for the lessening of evil and the increase of the happiness of our fellow-creatures.”
The desire for education which is widely felt by English women, and which has begun to find its expression in many practical ways, is a desire which springs from no conceit of cleverness, from no ambition of the prizes of intellectual success, as is sometimes falsely imagined, but from the conviction that for many women to get knowledge is the only way to get bread, and still more from that instinctive craving for light which in many is stronger than the craving for bread. “Amongst the wealthier classes,”—I give the words of one who has much knowledge of that of which she speaks—“women are better provided for materially, though even here they are often left to the mercy of the chances of life, indulged and petted whilst fortune smiles, left helpless to face the storm of adverse circumstances; but here, more often than elsewhere, one meets with those sad, dreary lives, that have always seemed to me amongst the worst permitted evils of earth,—
‘A wall so blank
My shadow I thank
For sometimes falling there’—
is true of many a life. Even sharp misfortune is sometimes a blessing in a life of this sort; something to do, and leave to do it. I do not say that any possible education, any freedom of career, any high training of faculty, would spare all this waste; some part of it is of that sad mystery of life which we cannot explain, and for the unveiling of which we can only wait and pray. But I am quite sure that much of it is altogether needless, and comes from the shutting up in artificial channels of those good gifts of God which were meant to flow forth freely and bless the world. If I could only tell, as I have felt it in my own life, and in the lives of other women whom I have loved, how wearily one strains the eyes for light, which often comes not at all!