Being a shop assistant in one of the newfangled department stores springing up in towns and cities across the country or waitressing was now an option for working- and lower-middle-class women, who had previously had something of a Hobson’s choice of factory work or service.
At first, shop owners exploited the abundance of cheap, deferential labour with predictable cynicism. When assistants ‘lived in’ a store – a common practice at the time – their lodgings were often squalid. What’s more Thomas Sutherst, president of the Shop Hours Labour League in the 1880s, wrote: ‘the shop assistant in these days is obliged to submit to the intolerable fatigue of standing for periods, varying according to the locality, from thirteen to seventeen hours a day.’ We might bemoan twenty-first-century interning, but it was nothing to what women then experienced. They were often ‘apprenticed’ for several years during which they were paid pocket-money wages.
A young woman called Margaret Bondfield took a leaf out of Ada Nield Chew’s book when she wrote a series of pseudonymous articles for The Shop Assistant exposing shoddy, exploitative practices in department stores in Brighton and London. Living in, she experienced overcrowded, insanitary conditions and awful food as well as what she called ‘an undertone of danger’. Bondfield was expected to work between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks per year. Little wonder she had already become an active trade unionist by 1896, when the Women’s Industrial Council suggested she work as an undercover agent, reporting back to them – and the wider world, through a column in the Daily Chronicle – on the abuses she found.
Despite her limited education, Bondfield went on to enjoy a long, illustrious political career, founding the Women’s Labour League (WLL) in 1906 and becoming both the first woman to chair the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the first female cabinet minister, as Minister of Labour in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929–31.
Decades before Bondfield made history in this role, the choice of work available to women was expanding. As early as the 1860s, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Rye had managed, through their Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, to secure jobs for women in banks and insurance companies. The booming communications sector offered other opportunities. In 1869, the year the Telegraph Act of 1869 handed the Post Office a monopoly on telegraph services, most of the 6.8 million telegrams sent in Britain would have been dictated to women. By 1914, 7,000 women were employed by the Post Office and 3,000 in other government services. But there were massive barriers remaining, not least that women had to give up their jobs once they married. And, of course, they were paid significantly less than men.
Actually, the gender pay gap was an issue in all white-collar clerical jobs. At the Prudential insurance company, male clerks earned up to £350 a year while few women made more than £60. Women had to shoulder the burden of dressing smartly on low wages or risk losing their jobs for being scruffy.
While equal opportunity at work was still a distant dream for late-Victorian feminists, there were plenty of battles to be fought at home. The nature of the middle class was changing. The difference between lower-middle and upper-middle was becoming more defined in terms of manners and outlook, and the number of servants a family could afford to hire: just a cook and a maid-of-all-work? Or an array of different kinds of help? At the top of the scale, what mattered was that the house was beautiful – and by extension the woman beautiful, for she occupied the centre of this world, holding its elements in genteel suspension.
Rooms in late-Victorian upper-middle-class homes grew cluttered as hoarding fine things became a moral prerogative – conveniently for those who wanted to be both genteel and righteous; to reconcile, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, ‘piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass’.27 As the design historian Deborah Cohen notes: ‘Women’s sense of themselves seems from the 1890s onward to have been tied up increasingly in their décor.’28
The continuing popularity of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is revealing. It’s fair to assume most families read it aspirationally. Mrs Beeton, who died in 1865, four years after it came out, directs her advice to the manager of a large household whom she compares to the commander of an army, the assumption being that this woman has a team of servants at her beck and call to engineer show-offy dinner-party coups de théâtre, such as Service à la Russe, in which as many as fourteen courses are presented one after the other.
While husbands went off to work, middle-class ‘womenfolk’ remained at home as pampered dependents. Katharine Chorley grew up in the well-to-do Manchester suburb of Alderley Edge where ‘pheasants whirred out of copses, the crack of guns sounded through the winter, [and] cattle churned to a muddy porridge the good Cheshire soil at the entrance gates of fields.’29 Happily, this bucolic idyll existed a mere fifteen minutes’ train journey from the centre of Manchester. Chorley recalled in her memoir Manchester Made Them that once the 8.25, 8.50 and 9.18 trains had left in the morning the Edge became ‘exclusively female’:
You never saw a man on the hill roads unless it were the doctor or the plumber, and you never saw a man in anyone’s home except the gardener or the coachman. And yet it was a man-made and a man-lorded society.30
Businessmen using the trains travelled First Class. But if a wife or daughter needed to go into Manchester she would always travel Third Class because ‘to share a compartment with the gentlemen (we were taught never to call them just plainly “men”) would have been unthinkable’. In this situation ‘business trains’ were avoided if possible: ‘It was highly embarrassing, a sort of indelicacy, to stand on the platform surrounded by a crowd of males who had to be polite but were obviously not in the mood for feminine society.’31 Chorley’s less-deceived gaze is unsparing: women in such a society, she recognises, ‘existed for their husbands’ and fathers’ sakes and their lives were shaped to please masculine vanity.’32
Life for upper-middle-class women was, if anything, even stranger and more isolated. Privilege infantilised them: Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, wrote in Period Piece, her very funny memoir of her 1890s childhood, that at the end of the century there were thousands of British women like her Aunt Etty who had ‘never made a pot of tea … been out in the dark alone … travelled by train without a maid … or sewn on a button.’33
‘There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: “I am very busy answering my own bell.”’34
How had this situation arisen? Because the behaviour of ‘respectable’ women was governed by strict social rules. By the 1880s public transport was making it easier for women to get around, but there were still places where they needed to be accompanied. Women who walked the streets themselves were seen as ‘either endangered or dangerous’, as one historian puts it,35 and as a rule ‘a lady was simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets or eating alone.’36
Virginia Woolf’s The Pargiters, an early version of the ‘essay-novel’ that would become The Years, her last work to be published in her lifetime, is partly set in the 1880s, at which point the middle-class Pargiter sisters ‘could not possibly go for a walk alone’:
For any of them to walk in the West End by day was out of the question. Bond Street was as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles … To be seen alone in Piccadilly was equivalent to walking up Abercorn Terrace in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge.37
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