Prometheus's Fire - Sample Chapter: Ch19 (2)

Background

On 10 October 1859 the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science met in Bradford for its third annual five-day conference. Like its predecessors this conference tackled many serious problems - but it was the debate that took place in a fringe meeting on Tuesday 11 October - one hurriedly convened under the chairmanship of Lord Shaftesbury in, for the want of more comfortable quarters, a corridor, that caught the imagination and enthusiasm of many of the seemingly tireless delegates. What those who squeezed into the cramped meeting area wanted to discuss was "the industrial employment of women". It was undoubtedly significant that well over 300 women had turned up at the conference.

But the subject was bound to come up. By the mid l850s it was clear to many forward-looking men and women that society's fondly held self-image of a benign patriarchy in which the weaker sex might rely for protection and support was a myth without substance. At the first meeting of the newly formed Association in Birmingham (1857), its General Secretary, George Hastings had questioned the supposed financial security of middle class women. The debate had continued at the second annual meeting in Liverpool presided over by Lord Brougham (October 1858). At that meeting it had been agreed that action was desirable. In the best tradition of such bodies, it was decided that an investigative committee should be formed to examine the economic position of women in the British Isles.

A committee of twelve ladies and twelve gentlemen was eventually established in the November of the following year - in the wake of the momentous meeting in the corridor at the Bradford congress. It included the Right Honourable the Earl of Shaftesbury who served as President, Miss Emily Faithfull who was appointed Secretary as well as such activists as Miss Jessie Boucherett and Miss Bessie R. Parkes. Many other women, already prominent in the ranks of the Association for the Promotion of Social Science, were also to be associated with the new movement. Among these were Fanny Hertz of Bradford who was involved in setting up the Mechanics' Institutes for Working Women in the Yorkshire manufacturing districts, Madame B.L.S. Bodichon who was deeply concerned with the education of women, particularly of the middle classes, Miss Jane Crowe who took over the post of secretary when Emily Faithfull left to begin running the women's printing house, Mrs Overend and Mrs Bayley who contributed papers on the employment of women and Miss Rye who wrote and spoke on women’s issues.

The birth of the new committee and its agenda reached the ears of the media and the subject was given extensive coverage at home and abroad. There were, for example, two long articles in the French Revue des Deux Mondes as well as in other papers and it was noted that the problem was also a major one in European countries. The work of the committee and related bodies became and remained newsworthy items henceforth.

The committee, with the backing of its prestigious parent, the Social Science Association, made itself a force to be reckoned with immediately. Through its efforts another significant body achieved effective form and shape. This was the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, which was the brainchild of the editorial board of The English Woman's Journal. Earlier attempts to get this pressure group off the ground had proved fruitless. Women were still new to lobbying techniques. The nascent committee had managed to hold a first meeting on July 7, 1859 when it had attempted to draw up a plan of campaign. But it was clear to all members that closer links with the already influential National Association for the Promotion of Social Science were desirable and the relationship was formalised in December 1859. Immediately the Society was in a much stronger position to push for changes in the employment patterns of women.

Its headquarters in 19 Langham Place, London became a focal point for women who sympathised with and supported the movement for social reform. Later the Society moved into offices contiguous with the all-female Victoria Press in Coram Street.

The Society for the Employment of Women and the Development of Technical Education

The officers of the Society were nothing if not forceful and energetic. Their first efforts involved establishing a reading room for ladies which must have been a welcome refuge and meeting place for London's large populace of isolated and lonely women. But of more importance for the future of the movement was the decision to draw up an Employment Register that would serve as a contact link between the available posts in hospitals, workhouses and other centres of philanthropic activity and capable and well qualified women candidates. In undertaking this task the initial aims of the Society were modest in the extreme. It aspired to nothing more ambitious than the opening up of some doors to a few dozen suitable women. This was not how the wider public, and particularly women, interpreted this new form of job club. The Register received wide publicity in the Press and, in testimony to the plight of women, it was literally deluged with applicants. Bessie Parkes told the Association

"Indeed, I remember one Friday, in the month of March, when twenty women applied at our counter for work whereby they could gain a livelihood - all of them more or less educated - all of them with some claim to the title of a lady."(2)

All sorts of women applied to the office for help and advice: young seventeen year olds starting out in life; single women who had been governesses; married women with invalid husbands or whose husbands were "not forthcoming"; widows with dependent children; tradesmen's daughters and well born ladies who had fallen on hard times. This flood of needy and expectant women shocked the staff of the Register and the Journal. The queues of waiting hopefuls, many of them clearly undernourished, revealed the true nature of the problem of female unemployment. Here was evidence indeed that women were not integrated in a providential social hierarchy.

The astute women of the Journal quickly realised that the stream of enquiries to their office was providing them with the information that was vital to changing the situation of women. They began to interview and categorise. The applicants were asked what kind of work they sought and, a more important question, "for what kind of work they were fitted". In this, the first survey to be mounted in the British Isles to analyse the position of working middle class women, the answers from these desperate candidates provided the data that was needed. Certainly this was how the staff in Langham Place saw their efforts. As Bessie Parkes said,

". . . we may certainly lay claim to have heard more of women's wants during the last year than any other people in the kingdom."

What they discovered from their poll was the astonishing fact that the only profession open to women - governessing - was the one job they definitely did not want. Teaching was the traditional refuge for the single woman trying to keep body and soul together in Victorian England. It paid badly - or in some cases not at all, and the conditions of employment were often intolerable. Why then did so many women consent to tolerate an unrewarding profession? The answer was simple. Teaching had one single great advantage over all other possible careers for women. It was genteel. Being a teacher or a governess meant no loss of caste for the women, or "ladies" involved. What these women now sought, and hoped that the sanctuary in Langham Place might offer them was some equally noble, but better paid and more enjoyable way of earning a living - one in which they could continue to regard themselves and be regarded by others as ladies.

Of course it was not only ladies who had to eke out a living still clinging to the trappings of gentility. Men had suffered similarly, but while some loosening of the social thraldom of caste had occurred for them by the mid-nineteenth century, no such good fortune had befallen women. At the Bradford meeting Bessie Parkes called for a social re-evaluation of the sort of work that women of the middle ranks of society might do. She noted the diminution of social stigma in men's professions, pointing out that it had once been thought that a gentleman, deprived of independent means, could only earn his bread as a soldier but that it was now more acceptable for him to turn to business or one of the professions. It was time that the same freedoms were extended to women, and that the list of possible employments, although still small, should admit the female sex. No woman, she argued, should be reproached for earning her living by going into business.

The data from the Langham Place poll greatly reinforced this daring argument that ladies should forego the acquisition of the "accomplishments" in favour of a more useful technical education. It was agreed in these reforming strongholds that, while ladies from the very highest ranks of the great and the privileged might continue with their embroidery and music with some degree of security, an effort should be made to persuade the orders just a little way below them to aspire to greater comfort in their lives by acquiring some useful technical skills. The committee ladies were aware that they would meet with strong opposition from the very ladies they were trying to help. Although few of these job-hunting women could claim any training worthy of the name of education, they were proud of their ladylike accomplishments and they would have to be coaxed and cajoled into "semi-mechanical occupations".

But the problems did not end there. Since few employers were likely to take on workers who were, in effect, unskilled, the ladies of Langham Place recognised that they must themselves offer some basic technical education followed by suitable employment. Somewhat nonplussed by the task before them and the expectations they had aroused the Society's steering committee began to do its best to establish training places for women.

The Progress of Women's Employment (1860)

In its first formal report to the National Association, tendered at the 1860 meeting in Glasgow, the Society detailed the steps that had been taking in the fostering of women's work since its inception. It is a fascinating document of ambition and achievement. What the society had managed to establish in the few months of its existence was a women's printing house, which had been a top priority. Next a law stationer's office had been opened in Portugal Street, Lincoln's Inn in which women were employed as law copiers. On the strength of £200 advanced by one of the prominent women in the movement the woman manager who ran the office was able to do so on a profit-making basis to the benefit of herself and the ten female clerks employed therein.

The next avenue to be explored by the Society was the employment of women as bookkeepers and cashiers in shops. The most fundamental requisite for this type of work was basic arithmetic. The ladies might have well as been asked if they knew classical Greek. With the exception of the charity schools where it was often well taught, arithmetic was accorded little honour in any school, male or female, with social aspirations. To remedy this failing, classes in basic mathematics were opened, some for the daughters of tradesmen to qualify them as clerks and cashiers, and others specifically for middle-class women including one to which the Society made a grant of £40 on condition that the manager would include morning and evening classes in bookkeeping.

Nor did the Society seek to carry its work on stealth. It aimed to raise the consciousness of others. To publicise its activities and the opportunities on offer, the ladies printed flyers for distribution that detailed the work available for women - an early job centre - but devised by women for women. This flyer included the addresses of the Victoria Press and the Lawcopying Class, the addresses of the two chief officers of the Electric Telegraph in London (both large employers of women) and the addresses of the two chief institutions for training and employing nurses and also Mr Lushington's cooking school. At the bottom of the list they noted that they kept a limited register for competent matrons, clerks and secretaries. In addition they suggested that it would be appropriate to employ women in such occupations as "hair-dressing and hair-working" and other similar services designed for female clients.

Several other women speakers read papers at this meeting on topics relevant to the issue of technical education for women. There was one on "Middle-class Schools for Girls", that demanded that girls' education must be treated more seriously and scientifically; another on "The Education of Girls with reference to their Future Position" which insisted that the reality of women having to be self-supporting in later life ought to make both parents more aware of how essential a good practical education is for every girl.

Two reports were particularly interesting. One, delivered by Emily Faithfull, detailed the establishment of the Victoria Press as a going concern. She told her audience that it had been evident to the pioneers of the Society that self help was essential in their movement and that they could, initially at least, expect little from society at large. They were obliged to forward their own goals in whatever way they could. They determined to themselves to create working places that would suit women. It seems that they gave top priority to the notion of introducing women in the printing trade. For unexplained reasons they decided that this was the trade that they would opt to patronise. It is very likely, that in view of the types of publication they subsequently printed, that they had realised how "useful" a feminist printing house could be to the movement.

The Press was in the hands of Emily Faithfull from the beginning, her post as Secretary having been allocated to Jane Crowe. She and a male partner took a house in Great Coram Street, Russell Square, London and fitted it up for the purpose and it opened for business on March 25 1860. The name had been chosen in gratitude for the Queen's approbation of this useful and practical step on behalf of women.

The Society helped get the operation underway by apprenticing five girls at premiums of £10 each; others were apprenticed by friends and relatives making nineteen in all. Immediately the printing house was thrust into operation and in April began setting the first book. Things were not easy with such an inexperienced staff, but fortunately for Emily Faithfull a "skilled hand from Limerick" arrived in Coram Street. She had been trained as a printer by her father and had worked under him for twelve years. After his death she had experienced some difficulties in continuing in her work. It was then that she saw an advertisement in a country newspaper for vacancies for female compositors in London and she determined to make the journey. Pausing only to acquire an enthusiastic letter of recommendation from the editor she travelled from Limerick to London and proved an invaluable asset in the offices of the Victoria Press.

At least three of the other apprentices had also had some training from their fathers, and Faithfull was definitely of the opinion that the "introduction of women into the trade has been contemplated by many printers".She was very concerned about the girls' health and made every effort to ensure their well-being. Working conditions were extremely humane, due time being allowed to eat and rest during set intervals in the eight hour working day. The success of the press was assured and it was soon printing the Journal of the Women’s Education Union as well as the Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and other sympathetic journals. They also issued a series of pamphlets dealing with aspects of the woman question.

In the successful pursuance of her aim of setting up a viable printing press run by women and printing matters of importance to women, Faithfull had noticed a further employment opportunity for women in the field. This was as editor and proof reader. Here was a well paid post for a rare woman who knew the classics and some modern languages. There was no reason she could not earn a sum similar to the 2 guineas a week being paid to male proof readers.

It was undoubtedly this sort of hope that lay behind the Society's buoyant assessment of its work. Its Report to the Conference bubbled with hope for the future. It read,

"the Committee are able to say, that, however far their efforts may have fallen short of any expectations which may have been formed, however little they may have been able to accomplish of the great task which lay before them, they have succeeded far beyond their anticipations in securing the adherence of public opinion in favour of the cause, and this appears to them as no small matter . . . ".(3)

But however favourable public opinion might be, more concrete measures were needed to solve the conundrum of how to find employment for unemployables. Bessie Parkes had spent the previous year researching some solutions and she placed her results before the conference. They were realistic if not encouraging. In the first place she recommended what she called the "semi-mechanical" arts for the uneducated woman of the lower ranks of the middle classes. For the women from higher castes she reckoned that they required a wider field of moral and intellectual exertion but their congenital delicacy both of brain and body ill equipped them for long hours of sedentary toil and made it almost impossible to introduce them "in great numbers into the field of competitive employment". To them she made the recommendation that was increasingly to be offered to the "immense surplus of the sex in England" - that they should embark on "judicious, well-conducted and morally guarded emigration to our colonies, where the disproportion is equally enormous, and where they are wanted in every social capacity". To those that would remain, she recommended that they should be well and carefully trained in "all those functions of administrative benevolence" - by which she meant various aspects of what would now be called social work.

But if women would not consent to be exported to the colonies as necessary elements in the business of propagation of the species or if they were unfit for philanthropic work, what was to be done with them? The answer, ironically, emerged in Ireland where the next annual meeting of the National Association was due to convene. By the time the delegates arrived in Dublin the following summer there were many Irish women who were determined, not merely to emulate the example of women over the Irish Sea, but to do better.