But it was not merely the decreased chance of marriage which made the lives of middle-class women difficult in the last century. There was also a change in the position of the fathers, which decreased their opportunity for providing for their unmarried daughters. The middle-class man is now less and less frequently at the head of a business of his own, and is more and more frequently a salaried clerk, manager, or engineer.
Formerly the shop or farm when it passed to the eldest son was burdened with the charge of the spinster sisters, who often would help in the dairy or behind the counter. Now, when a middle-class man dies, his hold on the industrial world, so to speak, passes away with him, unless he has been at once able and willing to lay by savings out of his salary, a duty too often neglected. Briefly, therefore, the unmarried woman of the middle-classes is less likely to marry, has less to occupy her at home, and 174 cannot so easily be provided for by her father if she remains a spinster.
Is it then to be wondered at if women insist, in increasing numbers, upon a thorough education as well as the right to enter a profession in which they can be self-supporting?[72] But the first women who decided that a way must be opened by which they could earn for themselves honourable maintenance not unnaturally fell into what we cannot but regard now as regrettable mistakes, however unavoidable these errors may have been at the time. Their great difficulties were to win admission to the universities and permission to practise what had hitherto been regarded as men’s professions. Therefore they dreaded all restrictions liable to be laid upon the entrance of women to occupations, and were led in consequence to oppose the Factory Acts, designed for the protection of women of the working-classes. It is only to-day and only partially that the woman teacher, doctor, or journalist has come to understand 175 that the position and problems of the factory-hand are very different from her own, and that confusion is created if she insists on judging them from her own standpoint.
In the next place, they were almost forced to become masculine and aggressive in their manners and outlook upon life. In particular, the need of conformity to a system of education framed for men and not for women led to an undervaluation of domestic pursuits. It was not realised that in managing a household and in bringing up children there was scope for the most developed character and the finest education.
But with the twentieth century,[73] college-trained women themselves are coming to see that their previous neglect of those principles of science and economics which underlie household administration was unwise and unwarranted. Of that change of attitude, the new courses in home science at King’s College are the firstfruits, and this book is a small contribution to a movement which is destined, perhaps, to revolutionise housekeeping, as a band of devoted women succeeded some few years since in revolutionising the profession of nursing.
The main lines on which the influence of the industrial revolution on women’s position has operated can be but briefly indicated in this very 176 summary sketch. Want of space prevents me from doing more than allude to other aspects of the question, such as the employment of married women, the status of women in government offices, women’s trade unions, homework and sweating, the prevention of infant mortality, the work of women in the administration of charity and in local government, together with many other developments of the one cause—the alteration between the relations of the home and of society due to the changes in our commercial and manufacturing system.
I must turn now to a study of the economics of the household as it actually exists to-day.
III. THE PRESENT ORGANISATION OF THE HOUSEHOLD
To begin with, it is perhaps worth while to notice certain broad distinctions which differentiate the household, considered merely as an economic institution, from other agencies engaged in the production of commodities and services.
One main difference is, as was noticed earlier, that the household produces use-values, and all other organisations (save some public bodies) exchange-values. Or to put the same thing in another way, the industrial world is run to make a profit; the household, on the contrary, is kept up by the contributions of its members, and exists to provide for them the necessaries and comforts of life. None the less is the work of cooking, cleaning, and serving of real economic value 177 when carried on within the household, as people discover when they have to pay for the organisation of the same services in hotels or boarding-houses.