Women at the Turn of the Century
A talk given to the National Women’s Register, Young Wives and Senior Wives in 1992 and 1993
by Julia Moss
A hundred years ago Britain was a far more divided society than it is today. It was a country of contrasts - although the changes of the 19th century had brought a great increase in the numbers of the middle classes, there was still a tremendous gulf between the rich and the poor. There were marked regional differences too, life in Lancashire differed substantially from life in the Fens and life in London was different again. Country life was very different from town life and you have only to think of the experiences of war time evacuees to realise how long some of these differences persisted. This evening, however, I'm not going to talk about society as a whole, only the female half of it and here I'm going to concentrate on younger women. This brings me to another great contrast, vast difference between the lives of men and women. We have only to look at photographs of our grandmothers to realise that unisex fashion was far in the future. Little girls in almost all walks of life were conditioned early to accept the difference. As one woman, who was the eldest daughter in a family of six boys and three girls, wrote, “Most of the responsibility in these days was put on the eldest girl. I had three brothers older than myself, but boys weren't expected to do chores about the house”. Perhaps the greatest change in the lives of women of all ages and all classes in the United Kingdom has been the virtual disappearance in the last 100 years of families of six boys and three girls. Here Queen Victoria, whose nine children were born over a period of 17 years, typified the women of the age which bears her name. Another woman remembered that throughout her childhood she been burdened with an overwhelming amount of household chores.
One of the great pleasures of exploring the social history of this period is the great variety of sources available. The census of 1891, available for the first time this year, provides mass of material on the composition of the households, the size of families, the occupations of various members of the household and so on. After 1870, basic literacy which previously had been “patchy”, spread rapidly resulting in a great outpouring of memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, letters, etc. I've made considerable use of sources of this kind and I've also brought with me a selection of these books, many of them available in paperback, for you to look at. Newspapers of the time carry articles, advertisements and other features which shed a good deal of light, even if some may be a little misleading, on the lives of the late 19th century woman. Then as now, relationships with the opposite sex played an important part in the lives of young women, even if the rules were rather different. Girls (generally middle-class girls, I gather, probably because they had plenty of time), wrote to the problem pages of magazines like “Girls Own”.
I thought you might be interested in a few sample pages from the 1891 census for Oundle. This page lists five households in New Street, starting with the Vicarage which had been occupied for the previous 20 years by the Reverend Charles Hopkins. The Vicarage household consisted of the widowed vicar, his middle age sister-in-law, “living on her own means”, and a cook and house maid, both in their 20s and both born outside the County. The next household was headed by Alfred King, bookseller, stationer and printer. who was also a widower. His household consisted of his unmarried sister, age 56, and also “living on her own means”, his three unmarried daughters age 27, 24 and 21, none of whom had any occupation, and a young girl of 18, described as “general servant – domestic”. Then came Mrs Hewitt, the saddler’s widow of 47, who lived with her three children and her widowed mother. James Denton the bank manager, and his wife Ann, had only one child at home, a 10 year old daughter Mary. The Dentons employed two servants, a cook age 24 and a house maid age 21, both of whom, unlike their employers were born locally.
The last household on this page was that of Josiah Beal, an elderly linen draper, whose address was Market Place, and the composition of whose household illustrates another aspect of Victorian life, the presence of unmarried employees in a tradesman or retailer’s household. In addition to Josiah Beal, age 73, his sixty year old wife Mary. His household included his niece, two servants and six other people.
I’ve chosen this page because it gives some indication of the limited options open to unmarried females in their late teens and twenties. For middle class women marriage was still the main career open to them. None of the three daughters of Alfred King worked for a living, neither did Josiah Beal’s niece. What then did they do? Perhaps Alfred King’s daughters helped their father in the shop or waited on their aunt, or did some of the work of the house, which must have been heavy load for 18 year old Caroline Drinkwater, the general servant. Josiah Beal’s niece may have been involved in the drapery business, or she may have helped her aunt with the housekeeping. There were two 17 year old servants, Sarah Tucker and Sarah White. Sarah Tucker was described as a kitchen servant, but it seems unlikely that she was responsible for preparing food for the household of 11. Dress making and millinery were respectable occupations and could be combined with marriage. Shop work, like office work, was becoming increasingly common as an alternative to domestic service, but domestic service servants still remained the most numerous group of female workers. In 1881 one in three of all girls between 15 and 20 were domestic indoor servants. There were of course regional variations, for example in Lancashire many girls worked in the mills, and here in Northants the boot and shoe industry provided employment for women as well as men. Still having said this, an awful lot of girls went into service.
I don't know whether any of you saw TV programme “Out of the Dolls House”. As usual I missed it, but it did catch up with Angela Holdsworth’s book of the title and I saw a brief interview with one of the star turns, Rose Ashton, then in her nineties. Rose, aged 13, had gone to the local hiring fair at Ulverston where she had been hired by a farmer to work seven days a week, including Christmas Day, for six pounds ten shillings for six months! I mentioned Rose Ashton for two reasons. First of all among domestic servants there were far more young girls like her working in single servant households than were in service in establishments, like Apethorpe Hall, where in 1911, 20 women, including 4 laundresses, and seven men were employed in the house itself! But Rose and her family are important from another reason - the types of work undertaken by herself, her daughter, her granddaughter and her great granddaughter. Rose was a domestic servant, her daughter Gladys a shop assistant, her granddaughter Maureen a secretary, and her great granddaughter Catherine an apprentice engineer at Vickers Shipyard, in Barrow-in-Furnace, where all four generations have lived.
But all this was far in the future. What did all these domestic servants who were employed at the turn of the century actually do? Well, every household was different, and employers varied from slave drivers to substitute parents. with most of them somewhere in between.
Extracts from the diary of Mrs Williams (a middle-class London housewife in the 1860s) shows that in some households the turnover in servants was rapid.
That is one side of the coin, now I want to give you some idea what life was like for a girl from an upper middle-class family, who realised very fully how dependent she was for the comforts of life on the family servants. Winifred Whitehead was the daughter of Sir Arthur Fell MP. She describes her life as a child and young girl, first at Ridgeway Place and later at Morriston House, both in Wimbledon. She describes the private dances which were such a pleasure to her. Winifred's account of the baths and nightly arrangements of her youth show some of the changes which have taken place - she then reflects on the part played by the servants.
Leonore Davidoff’s study of “high society”: ‘The Best Circles’, sheds a good deal of light on the way of life which survived to some extent until 1939. All this sounds as if nothing was changing for women in the years before 1914, but of course this was not really true. There were pockets of change in women's lives in the years before the First World War. Some girls, often those from the better off working-class homes, were becoming elementary school teachers. They served an apprenticeship as pupil teachers. Other girls, generally from middle class homes, were getting a good education, similar to their brothers, and a very few even managed to get to University, though often, like Vera Brittain, only after a struggle with their families. When her mother finally agreed to her going to Oxford, she had to face conversations like “How can you send your daughter to college, Mrs Brittain, don't you ever want her to get married?”. In the big cities young women had begun to work in offices and in their spare time some of them seized all the available opportunities to extend their horizons. The fascinating book called “Dear Girl” records through their diaries and letters the friendships of young women, such as Ruth Slate, a clerk in a grocery firm in the city, and Eva Slawson, a legal secretary from Walthamstow. One entry in Ruth’s diary for 1909 shows her attending a meeting with her fiancé, which was organised by the Women's Labour League on behalf of unemployed women. In another entry around the same time, Ruth describes how she missed her train at Charing Cross because she stood for a moment listening to a suffragette meeting in Trafalgar Square. Saturday was half day for the office workers, and, in another extract, Ruth writes how she and Eva spent a free afternoon and evening in January 1909.
One last point, I have only spoken of women in England, but I was looking at this book on life in Vienna and it reminded me that similar changes in women's lives were taking place in other European countries.
Julia Moss 1992
References
Davidoff, Leonore (1986). The Best Circles, Ebury Press, London.
Thompson, Tierl (1987). Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Class Women 1897-1917, Women’s Press, London.
A talk given to the National Women’s Register, Young Wives and Senior Wives in 1992 and 1993
by Julia Moss
A hundred years ago Britain was a far more divided society than it is today. It was a country of contrasts - although the changes of the 19th century had brought a great increase in the numbers of the middle classes, there was still a tremendous gulf between the rich and the poor. There were marked regional differences too, life in Lancashire differed substantially from life in the Fens and life in London was different again. Country life was very different from town life and you have only to think of the experiences of war time evacuees to realise how long some of these differences persisted. This evening, however, I'm not going to talk about society as a whole, only the female half of it and here I'm going to concentrate on younger women. This brings me to another great contrast, vast difference between the lives of men and women. We have only to look at photographs of our grandmothers to realise that unisex fashion was far in the future. Little girls in almost all walks of life were conditioned early to accept the difference. As one woman, who was the eldest daughter in a family of six boys and three girls, wrote, “Most of the responsibility in these days was put on the eldest girl. I had three brothers older than myself, but boys weren't expected to do chores about the house”. Perhaps the greatest change in the lives of women of all ages and all classes in the United Kingdom has been the virtual disappearance in the last 100 years of families of six boys and three girls. Here Queen Victoria, whose nine children were born over a period of 17 years, typified the women of the age which bears her name. Another woman remembered that throughout her childhood she been burdened with an overwhelming amount of household chores.
One of the great pleasures of exploring the social history of this period is the great variety of sources available. The census of 1891, available for the first time this year, provides mass of material on the composition of the households, the size of families, the occupations of various members of the household and so on. After 1870, basic literacy which previously had been “patchy”, spread rapidly resulting in a great outpouring of memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, letters, etc. I've made considerable use of sources of this kind and I've also brought with me a selection of these books, many of them available in paperback, for you to look at. Newspapers of the time carry articles, advertisements and other features which shed a good deal of light, even if some may be a little misleading, on the lives of the late 19th century woman. Then as now, relationships with the opposite sex played an important part in the lives of young women, even if the rules were rather different. Girls (generally middle-class girls, I gather, probably because they had plenty of time), wrote to the problem pages of magazines like “Girls Own”.
I thought you might be interested in a few sample pages from the 1891 census for Oundle. This page lists five households in New Street, starting with the Vicarage which had been occupied for the previous 20 years by the Reverend Charles Hopkins. The Vicarage household consisted of the widowed vicar, his middle age sister-in-law, “living on her own means”, and a cook and house maid, both in their 20s and both born outside the County. The next household was headed by Alfred King, bookseller, stationer and printer. who was also a widower. His household consisted of his unmarried sister, age 56, and also “living on her own means”, his three unmarried daughters age 27, 24 and 21, none of whom had any occupation, and a young girl of 18, described as “general servant – domestic”. Then came Mrs Hewitt, the saddler’s widow of 47, who lived with her three children and her widowed mother. James Denton the bank manager, and his wife Ann, had only one child at home, a 10 year old daughter Mary. The Dentons employed two servants, a cook age 24 and a house maid age 21, both of whom, unlike their employers were born locally.
The last household on this page was that of Josiah Beal, an elderly linen draper, whose address was Market Place, and the composition of whose household illustrates another aspect of Victorian life, the presence of unmarried employees in a tradesman or retailer’s household. In addition to Josiah Beal, age 73, his sixty year old wife Mary. His household included his niece, two servants and six other people.
I’ve chosen this page because it gives some indication of the limited options open to unmarried females in their late teens and twenties. For middle class women marriage was still the main career open to them. None of the three daughters of Alfred King worked for a living, neither did Josiah Beal’s niece. What then did they do? Perhaps Alfred King’s daughters helped their father in the shop or waited on their aunt, or did some of the work of the house, which must have been heavy load for 18 year old Caroline Drinkwater, the general servant. Josiah Beal’s niece may have been involved in the drapery business, or she may have helped her aunt with the housekeeping. There were two 17 year old servants, Sarah Tucker and Sarah White. Sarah Tucker was described as a kitchen servant, but it seems unlikely that she was responsible for preparing food for the household of 11. Dress making and millinery were respectable occupations and could be combined with marriage. Shop work, like office work, was becoming increasingly common as an alternative to domestic service, but domestic service servants still remained the most numerous group of female workers. In 1881 one in three of all girls between 15 and 20 were domestic indoor servants. There were of course regional variations, for example in Lancashire many girls worked in the mills, and here in Northants the boot and shoe industry provided employment for women as well as men. Still having said this, an awful lot of girls went into service.
I don't know whether any of you saw TV programme “Out of the Dolls House”. As usual I missed it, but it did catch up with Angela Holdsworth’s book of the title and I saw a brief interview with one of the star turns, Rose Ashton, then in her nineties. Rose, aged 13, had gone to the local hiring fair at Ulverston where she had been hired by a farmer to work seven days a week, including Christmas Day, for six pounds ten shillings for six months! I mentioned Rose Ashton for two reasons. First of all among domestic servants there were far more young girls like her working in single servant households than were in service in establishments, like Apethorpe Hall, where in 1911, 20 women, including 4 laundresses, and seven men were employed in the house itself! But Rose and her family are important from another reason - the types of work undertaken by herself, her daughter, her granddaughter and her great granddaughter. Rose was a domestic servant, her daughter Gladys a shop assistant, her granddaughter Maureen a secretary, and her great granddaughter Catherine an apprentice engineer at Vickers Shipyard, in Barrow-in-Furnace, where all four generations have lived.
But all this was far in the future. What did all these domestic servants who were employed at the turn of the century actually do? Well, every household was different, and employers varied from slave drivers to substitute parents. with most of them somewhere in between.
Extracts from the diary of Mrs Williams (a middle-class London housewife in the 1860s) shows that in some households the turnover in servants was rapid.
That is one side of the coin, now I want to give you some idea what life was like for a girl from an upper middle-class family, who realised very fully how dependent she was for the comforts of life on the family servants. Winifred Whitehead was the daughter of Sir Arthur Fell MP. She describes her life as a child and young girl, first at Ridgeway Place and later at Morriston House, both in Wimbledon. She describes the private dances which were such a pleasure to her. Winifred's account of the baths and nightly arrangements of her youth show some of the changes which have taken place - she then reflects on the part played by the servants.
Leonore Davidoff’s study of “high society”: ‘The Best Circles’, sheds a good deal of light on the way of life which survived to some extent until 1939. All this sounds as if nothing was changing for women in the years before 1914, but of course this was not really true. There were pockets of change in women's lives in the years before the First World War. Some girls, often those from the better off working-class homes, were becoming elementary school teachers. They served an apprenticeship as pupil teachers. Other girls, generally from middle class homes, were getting a good education, similar to their brothers, and a very few even managed to get to University, though often, like Vera Brittain, only after a struggle with their families. When her mother finally agreed to her going to Oxford, she had to face conversations like “How can you send your daughter to college, Mrs Brittain, don't you ever want her to get married?”. In the big cities young women had begun to work in offices and in their spare time some of them seized all the available opportunities to extend their horizons. The fascinating book called “Dear Girl” records through their diaries and letters the friendships of young women, such as Ruth Slate, a clerk in a grocery firm in the city, and Eva Slawson, a legal secretary from Walthamstow. One entry in Ruth’s diary for 1909 shows her attending a meeting with her fiancé, which was organised by the Women's Labour League on behalf of unemployed women. In another entry around the same time, Ruth describes how she missed her train at Charing Cross because she stood for a moment listening to a suffragette meeting in Trafalgar Square. Saturday was half day for the office workers, and, in another extract, Ruth writes how she and Eva spent a free afternoon and evening in January 1909.
One last point, I have only spoken of women in England, but I was looking at this book on life in Vienna and it reminded me that similar changes in women's lives were taking place in other European countries.
Julia Moss 1992
References
Davidoff, Leonore (1986). The Best Circles, Ebury Press, London.
Thompson, Tierl (1987). Dear Girl: The Diaries and Letters of Two Working Class Women 1897-1917, Women’s Press, London.
