The same cause, acting within and without the home in different ways, is resulting in a steady transference of these domestic avocations from the household. Moralists often lament this tendency, and attribute it entirely to increased love of ease and leisure among women. But it is no more possible to draw an indictment against a whole sex than against a whole people, and an alteration in custom so widespread as this which we are discussing must have deeper roots than a personal defect of laziness in particular individuals.
This removal of production for domestic use from the home operates, however, in very different ways in different cases. Sometimes the article is produced much more cheaply outside the home than within, owing to the lower cost and greater efficiency of large-scale methods of manufacture. But this is not invariably the case. Laundry-work, for instance, is probably done more cheaply in the private household. The few attempts hitherto made to provide hot cooked food from a central kitchen at a reasonable price have not been successful. On the other hand, no individual household could hope to rival Messrs. Huntley & Palmer as producers of biscuits. The factors which prevent the full economies of the large-scale method of production from being realised in the making of certain commodities are twofold. (1) Some goods are of such a kind that they must be consumed where they are produced. Jam or even plum-puddings can be made in a factory in the North of England and afterwards transferred to London. But roast beef, omelettes, and rice-puddings must be eaten within at least a hundred yards of the place where they are cooked. This obvious fact effectually retains the supremacy of the home in the provision of hot cooked food, and disposes once and for all of the cruder arguments for co-operative housekeeping. (2) Certain commodities must be made for or returned to individual owners. If, for instance, we did not trouble to receive our own sheets and towels from the laundry, but simply made a contract 170 that each week we should be supplied with a certain number, then the washing and sorting could be done wholesale at a much cheaper rate. If we sent our own fruit to the factories to be made into jam, jam would be much more expensive.
Thus the household will compete successfully with outside agencies, in the case of all commodities which must be consumed on the spot, and the outside agencies will have only a small advantage—will do the washing or dressmaking more conveniently, but not much cheaper—when wholesale methods are forbidden by the personal interest of each consumer in one special portion of the commodities dealt with.[67]
Still, regarding the matter from the general economic standpoint, it cannot be denied that the result of the industrial revolution has been to transfer many branches of production both for profit and for use from the home to the factory.
(4) The Position of Women as Affected by the Industrial Revolution
This in its turn affected the position of women, and is probably, if not the sole, at least the most important reason for the discontent and unrest to be traced among women of many different classes in the nineteenth century. But the women belonging 171 to the manual labouring class and the women belonging to the upper classes were influenced in different ways.
The former had always been accustomed to work for their living, indirectly if not directly. On the little farms they looked after the cow, the hens, and the garden. They did the carding and the spinning of flax and of wool. True, these industries were carried on at home, and probably the decent “manufacturer,” then literally a hand-worker, would have regarded himself as disgraced had his wife or daughters needed to go outside his home to find work.[68] But when the factory system came, with the horrible sufferings caused by the transition from one system of industry to another, the women and children always accustomed to toil at home followed their work to the factory, and there, owing to the new methods of competition and to the absence of any regulation of industry, they suffered hardships of overwork and underpayment which seem to the present generation nearly incredible.
Home life for a time almost disappeared, and the suffering and degeneration was only checked by the series of Factory Acts, imposing ever fresh and fresh restrictions on the treatment of women 172 and children.[69] The policy underlying these acts was much criticised at the time, and was indeed not fully comprehended until recently. But it is now all but universally admitted that the Factory Acts have in the main achieved their object, and have greatly improved the position of women in the districts most affected by them; and reformers are constantly urging their extension to fresh trades.
This movement was not understood, and was in consequence opposed by the women of the middle-classes, whose position was affected quite differently by the industrial revolution. They too found their occupations within the home to a large extent destroyed. And in other ways their situation was altered. For some reason not yet explained, there appeared in the middle-classes a surplus of women. This is no doubt partly due to the colonial expansion of the period, which sent young men out to Australia, Canada, and South Africa, while their natural mates remained behind in England. It is not easy to give precise statistics, as our statistical tables make no distinction of classes, but common observation and the description of social life in the novels of the nineteenth century afford evidence of this fact. Some statistics bearing on the subject can be found in Miss Clara Collet’s[70] article, “Prospects of Marriage for Women,” and also in “Die Frauenfrage,” by 173 Lilie Braun, pp. 157 ff. Frau Braun, whose book is marked throughout by characteristic German thoroughness, sums up:[71] “Es hat sich gezeigt, dass die Zunahme der allein stehenden Frauen, die Abnahme der Heiratsfrequenz und die wirtschaftliche Not als Ursache der Frauenbewegung in aller Lände anzusehen sind.”