The role of women during the industrial revolution

The role of women 1840-1914

Middle-class women

1) The original role of middle-class women

At the time Queen Victoria came to the throne (1837) all women were treated the same as criminals and children before the law.

In the most people’s opinion women should be passive „ladies“; obedient to their husbands and their place was at home. Married women’s property was owned by their husbands.

The young women were taught at home by their mothers and governesses and learned how to „catch a man“ and how to be a good wife.

Many middle-class families employed servants, so the middle-class women/girls in Victorian England had little to do except entertaining and embroidery.

The feminists at that time complained about their lives of ‘genteel uselessness‘.

2) The growth of education

In 1850 about 25 % of the middle-class girls were not going to be able to marry. The reasons were that men died in small colonial wars, emigrated to the colonies or else remained bachelors.

From these ranks of single women emerged the early Victorian feminists.

In 1850 the North London Collegiate School was founded by Frances Mary Buss and in 1858 Dorothea Beale opened up the Cheltenham Ladies College.

In these school women prepared young girls for the Civil Service Examinations, entry into business and commerce, university and one of the professions.

By the 1890s the Girl’s Public Day School Trust had about 40 schools and

7000 pupils. These school were for girls out of well-off families.

In the time from 1868 to 1895 the number of endowed school rose from 12 to 80.

Ann Clough, the first principal of Newham College, believed that the schools should train the girls how to be good wifes and mothers, others lijke Emily Davies said that girls schools should give girls the same opportunities as boys.

Davies persuaded the universities to allow girls to take the same Certificate Examinations as boys and she opened up her own College (Hitchin). It was a College where the girls were taught by Cambridge University lecteurs.

In 1878 London University allowed the women to take part in the same couses on an equal footing with men. 17 years later, in 1895, the Universtities of Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool followed London’s example.

Oxford did not open ist degrees to women until 1919 and Cambridge until 1947.

Limits: These advances do no not hide the fact that most girls by the end of the 19th century were not well-educated. The girls out of richer families were the ones who benefited from these advances.

3) The changing nature of women’s employment

The Nightingale School of Nurses, founded by Florence Nightingale in 1860, trained well-educated ladies as nurses. This made nursing a respectable profession for middle-class women.

Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson founded the Garrett-Anderson Hospital. All the staff were women and they had the chance to become doctors.

Anderson herself was a doctor who was forced to work in Paris after the students in London protested at her presence in school.

In 1876 the Parliament passed a law allowing medical schools to admit women as students and by the 1890s women were being admitted into the medical profession.

In the middle of the 1900 century most jobs required great physical strenght and they were thought unsuitable for women. Laws were introduced to protect women and children from heavy and dangerous work. From the 1860s new forms of work and technology gave the women new opportunities. The most women found work as supervisors, operator and secretaries or worked in school or Educatoin Offices. Department stores gave women the opportunities to work as buyers, managers or assistents.

In spite of these new opportunities, women’s pay was much lower than men’s, because women looked for jobs a temporary phase before getting married.

Before 1914 the women had to give up their jobs when they got married.

4) Changing role of the middle-class wife

In 1870 and 1882 Married Women’s Property Acts were passed by the Parliament which allowed married women to retain ownership of property inherited from their parents.

Smaller families became the norm for Victorian middle-class families.

Feminists tried to change the rights of women to gain a divorce in the same grounds as a man.

This was first achieved in 1923.

The reduction in size of middle-class families also meant higher living standads and better health but almost only the middle-class families benifited from this. Working-class families were still very large until 1914 and the death rate for working-class women was much higher than for middle-class women. Also, led the industrial age to a rapid increase of physical strenght of the mothers because it was not uncommon to have more than 10 children. Womenhad to work right up to and straight after the day of childs birth of financial reasons so they were forced to have the care of the new born child to older relatives. But many families broke up with members going to different places just so they could survive. Many never saw each other again. Mothers had to leave their babies at home while they worked 16 hour days. To keep them quiet they would stuff their mouth with rags soaked either in alcohol or opium.

Working-class women

1) Early Victorian working-class women

The most working-class girls who were born into poor families had to go to work from an early age. After the industrial revolution had started more workers were needed to work in the cotton mills or in the mines. Now the father didn’t just work as usual, the whole family had to work to live because the payment was so low. Sometimes payment was so low it was only cents a day. Children and women had to work, because the incame of the familyfather was not enough for food rent and clothes. Unusual of the factorywork was that the children and women did not work under care of the housefather but under foreign people. Women were preferred because they were cheap and obedient, they’d also do all the work men refused to do. The main reason why women were preferred was because employers paid them one half to one third as less as men. This wouldn’t be such a terrible storyunless you knew what kind of conditions women worked under. They had to work 14 to 16 hour shifts six days a week and on their day off they’d do nothing but sleep. Women’s jobs during the industrial revolution weren’t like that at all. The women’s work in factories was very monotonous, doing the same weaving or whatever all day long. Being monotonous wasn’t the biggest problem though, work was extremely hazardous to their health. Many women in textile mills got lung disease because of all the dusty air they breathed in during work. Exspecially there women and children were preferred because they were more skillfuller in making knots and in cutting off threads. One of the worst atrocities were the condition women worked under in coal mines. They were forced to do the work with no protective laws. It was terribly hot down in the mines so sometimes the women would work in nothing but loose trousers. Women even worked when they were pregnant, sometimes giving birth down the mines. The work was harder for women too, they had to crawl in and out of the earth throught narrow tunnels hauling the coal harnessed to them because they were smaller than men could fit in smaller tunnels which men couldn’t. One result of the strain was that women were often ill became old faster and died earlier.

Suffrage

Between 1750 and 1900 life was dominated by men and women had very few legal rights. To improve their stiuation women tried to get the right to vote(suffrage). In 1860 a number of small organisations were established by women to reach the suffrage. 1897 Millicent Garret Fawcett set up the national union of women’s suffrage societies (NUWSS). They fought for equality of men and women, and of course, co-ordinated the activities of the suffrage societies collecting petitions and tried to win support, unsuccesfull. A reason for the badprogress was that many people were against the equality, as they thought women should stay at home and be good mothers and wives without any interest in politics and the world of work. A young poor unmarried girl had big problems to earn her money so she often became governess for children from well-off middle-class families, teaching them how to catch a husband and being a good wife, thoug it meant that they would be lonely and badly paid. William Thackeray had the opinion that women should be like a good slave, obedient, humble, flattering, doing anything to please the husband. While Thomas Huxley was caught in the illusion that the man is superior than women in everything, physicalbeauty, average, menatl and physical. With these kinds of statements women were supressed and of course of being used to it they accepted their low positions in society, not knowing that their value was much bigger and higher than any man imagined. But still there was a small group of women who were unhappy with the way they were treated and cried out for more rights. One of these women was mary Wollestonecraft who said: “ I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves!” But on the other side, the women who had the power over men and women, Queen Victoria, was not very pleased with the rights the ladies demanded, she wished them to accept the way it was.

Housemaids

In some well-off middle-class family, there was a governess and/or householdmaid. First a housemaid was a sign of money and good familiar position in society. But as time went by many families had maids so wifes hadn’t too much to work and their children didn’t know another way of live WITHOUT being served. An examination in 1900 proved that most domestic servants came from small villages. (40000 girls came to the big cities every year) Having no money they took a job as maid, also if they were only 14 or so, (96% were in that age and of course unmarried), and when they reached the age of 30 their energy was used up so they were dismissed.

Working hours of housemaids

51,5% worked more than 16 hours a day

46,5% 12-16 hours a day

And only 2% less than 12 hours

Day of a housemaid:

Get up at 6 o’clock, make fire, boil water, clean dinner and livingroom. After that she is supposed to prepare breakfast, help the children in getting ready and bring them to school. When that’s done she cleans up the children and sleeping room. The only thing of the day that lets her relax a bit is shopping, because people have a small chat at the budger, backer e.g. Work goes on with preparing and serving lunch, and washing up.

One third of the women in England went into domestic servise during the industrial revolution, serving all the new upper class women who were married to the newly affluent men all of the new companies. As domestics they had to give up pretty much of their freedom. But they were able to see their family and friends.

Life for a maid was hard, she was paid badly, she had to eat old rests, alone and without saying a word, her bed was in the kitchen, just near the oven so it always got damn hot. Some maids were sexually abused by their master, like Anne Mosegaard, a former maid, she remembered:

I was 14 years old when I started my work as maid, my master gave me a warm welcome and told me that if I work hard he would be a father for me, but before I reached the age of 16 he abused me sexually, he who wanted to be a father to me. This wasn’t a seldom case, but maids were bound to their masters and they did what they where told, even if they knew something was wrong they didn’t interfere, knowing they weren’t entitled questioning the masters’ authority.

840-1900