Normal Women, page 38
A parliamentary committee set up to explore the wage gap in 1840 heard from a handloom weaver from Stockport:
Joseph Sherwin . . . usually earned 6s 6d a week, and his wife 3s by winding bobbins for two other looms. However, he failed to subtract from his wage, and add to hers, the value of her winding services for his loom. Mrs Sherwin received for winding 3d out of every 1s earned by each of the two weavers who hired her services; each of these weavers, then, earned only 9d for every 1s worth of cloth. Since she could wind for three looms (her husband’s plus two others), Mrs Sherwin could earn the same amount as these two weavers (9d = 3 x 3d). Joseph Sherwin admitted ‘I must pay three-pence out of every shilling, if I had no wife.’
His true wage, then, was only 4s 10d, and his wife’s true wage was 4s 7½d. What by his statement appeared to be a wage ratio of 0.46 (3s / 6s 6d) turns out to be, in truth, almost equal wages. If the wage data that we have overstate male earnings and understate female earnings, then there may be no wage gap to explain.54
Indeed – the committee were on to something! It was not that women were somehow naturally earning a lesser rate – it was that they were not getting paid at all! When Mrs Sherwin worked as a winder for weavers, she was paid, but when she worked for her husband, she was not paid at all. If women were paid money for all the work they did – for husbands as well as employers – there would be hardly any wage gap between men and women. The gap had been created by the tradition that women’s work inside their home is done for free. Even when she was producing sellable goods, Mrs Sherwin earned no money – just as she did when she was producing goods consumed in the home: growing food, cooking, cleaning, home maintenance. Alas! This blinding revelation to the committee made no difference at all in real life – women continued to work for their husbands for free and hours of their labour went unpaid – reducing their earnings and their rate.
The making of pins and needles provided an example of how well-paid craft work that could have been done by well-paid artisan men or women was divided into low-paid piecework, mechanised and – once it was sufficiently low paid and de-skilled – allocated to unskilled women labourers. In 1728, Chambers’s Encyclopaedia described a craftsman’s workshop: ‘The artisan is at the heart of the production process . . . the tempo of production is fixed, and each task requires considerable skill.’55
A century later, in 1835, observer Andrew Ure saw the drive for machines to take skilled work away from artisan workers: ‘Whenever a process requires particular dexterity and steadiness of hand, it is withdrawn as soon as possible from the cunning workman . . . and it is placed in charge of a peculiar mechanism, so self-regulating, that a child may superintend it.’56
Karl Marx described the outcome in 1867: ‘In the automated factory . . . one woman or one girl superintends four . . . machines, and so produces nearly 600,000 needles in a day.’57
Wherever possible, a skilled artisan, making one object from start to finish, was replaced by a team of workers making parts of the object, and then by a machine, making multiples, supervised by a badly paid woman, and often maintained and cleaned by child workers. The woman and children were not to be paid a breadwinner wage since they were supposed to be supported by the father of their family. They needed no training, and they served no apprenticeship to a guild that could set wages. Working in a deafening factory or even in a sweatshop attached to their own homes or set up in their living area, they could not organise for better conditions or wages, and if they complained, they could be easily replaced by other poor untrained women.
The breadwinner wage was explained to working people by political economists who now believed the prosperity of the country depended on low population – as few passengers as possible – and high productivity – a strong engine – which would be achieved by responsible breadwinner men. It was taught by middle-class reformers who believed that a full-time woman homemaker offered the solution to poverty, disease and immorality. It was preached from the pulpits as the way for women to become spiritual leaders in their homes. It was willingly paid to skilled men by the booming industries as the piecework process pushed more and more work towards badly paid women and children. It was agreed by male guilds and unions to protect men’s wages and men’s jobs against women workers. It suited the professions that had already excluded women. It was glamourised in the conduct books and novels that imagined that a true woman could only fulfil her nature in the separate sphere of her home, far from work, unsoiled by cash. It even won over some working-class wives who exchanged poorer wages for themselves for better pay for their husbands. The Female Political Union of Newcastle noted in 1840: ‘Is it not true that the interests of our fathers, husbands, and brothers, ought to be ours? If they are oppressed and impoverished, do we not share those evils with them?’58
The call for a breadwinner wage became a cycle reinforcing inequality for women, as low rates of pay and exclusion from both training and skilled work forced them to depend on men who then had to earn a wage for at least two people,59 demanding a breadwinner wage for skilled male work which employers could afford by paying minimum wages to unskilled women. The many women who could not marry a good earner had no prospect but poorly paid work. Women became ‘industrial lepers’,60 in unskilled jobs that men left vacant because they were so ill paid.
Women’s Work
By the 1850s, women of all classes found themselves deliberately excluded from profitable work, from education, from training, from the guilds and trades, and from the professions and from authority. Even women of property and high status started to nominate a male deputy to perform civic tasks.61
Education and guild membership became exclusively male. Journeymen book binders excluded women from their union in 1779 and tailors from London tried to ban women even from working at home.62 Trades that had been dominated by women were now ‘manned’, and women supported and assisted the spinner, weaver, baker, miller and brewer trades that had been their own. Women could not raise the capital to buy licences and rent equipment and property for big commercial businesses. The booming luxury goods businesses like bookshops, jewellery stores and pharmacies were closed to women, both by the guilds and by the demand for start-up capital. Women could not enter international trade without a bank account and insurance in their own name.63 They were even discouraged from the sport of boxing, where they had earlier been sporting stars. The tone of newspaper reports turned critical, describing women prizefighters as domineering and unwomanly.64
‘Women’s work’ came to mean hard, nasty, low-paid work. As historian Dorothy George commented: ‘It can almost be said that there is no work too heavy or disagreeable to be done by women provided it is also ill paid.’65
Only a shortage of labour – as happened in early nineteenth-century Coventry, Yorkshire and the West Country – saw women work alongside men and get paid the same rate.66
When Samuel Crompton’s long-handed or double spinning mule came into cotton factories from 1820, men captured the new machine. They claimed it was too heavy for women and defined the task as ‘skilled’ work, demanding – and getting – a skilled wage. When the technology changed again, with the invention of the much lighter self-acting mule, which was brought into factories from 1840 and could be worked by women, male spinners refused to allow women on the new machines, forcing them into unskilled tasks as ‘piecers, carders, and tenters’ on lower wages – usually half those of a mule spinner.67
By 1830, women workers outnumbered men in the factories of the cotton industry: 65,000 women to 60,000 men.68 A factory commissioner reported in 1844 that women were doing harder shifts than men: ‘Their labour is cheaper, and they are more easily induced to undergo severe bodily fatigue than men.’69
The introduction of mechanised weaving told the opposite story. Handloom weavers had been the well-paid elite of labourers, mostly working in their own homes, with their wives and children assisting. It was such well-paid work that men tried to exclude women from weaving in the mid-eighteenth century, breaking their looms and threatening women weavers. When power looms were brought in to factories around the end of the century, the weavers opposed them in violent machine-smashing riots. But employers stood firm, employing women and children until extreme poverty, even starvation, forced the traditional weavers into the hated factories on the machines. But they had left it too late to make factory weaving an exclusively male trade. They found women weavers trained up to work on the power looms, organised and paid as skilled workers. In north-east Lancashire in particular, men and women weavers recognised their shared interests and organised together to get equal pay and conditions.70
Not all trade organisations were anti-women. The Grand National Consolidated Trades Union of 1833 recruited women into women-only sections. Lodges included lacemakers, straw bonnet-makers, shoebinders, laundresses, milliners and even ladies’ maids. A lodge for women working in their own homes was proposed; but associations of unskilled poorly paid shift workers could not organise effectively; only when women dominated an industry might they be successful. In Stockport in 1840, the majority of the power loom workers were women (58 per cent) and they undertook industrial action with men. Women stood alongside male workers in strikes and demonstrations from 1808 in Manchester, and in the general strike of cotton workers in 1842. Women organised their own strikes: Loughborough lace runners walked out in 1811 and Kensington washerwomen went on strike in 1842.71
The breaking down of production into small, less skilled tasks meant they could be done by poor women in their homes. The ‘putting out’ or ‘piecework’ system broke the craft of, for instance, tailoring a garment, into many less-skilled repetitive tasks. Women would be supplied by the middlemen with parts of tailoring, lacemaking, shoemaking, buttonmaking and small metalwork – and repeatedly do one part of the process. Sometimes they had to pay a deposit for the raw materials, which could be so expensive that they had to offer their labour for free till the debt was paid off. The materials themselves could be hazardous. Women handled and stored toxic or dangerous products in their homes and could fall sick or be sacked without financial support. Isolated in their dwellings, with wages set as low as possible by the middlemen, the women had little opportunity to compare rates or organise together for better terms. Even after tasks had been mechanised and moved to the factories, women and children were still employed for preparing and finishing factory-made articles in their homes.
Women workers, especially those in their homes, constituted a ‘reserve’ work force. When the government needed uniforms and clothing for the 12 years of the Napoleonic wars (1803–15), the work was mostly done by women at home under the ‘putting out’ system, in defiance of the tailor’s guilds trying to protect rates for their male members. Work that could be done more cheaply in a woman worker’s home was called ‘slop work’ and was known to be ‘sweated’ – overworked and underpaid to tight deadlines. The early profits of most industries came not from mechanisation and factories, but from the sweated labour of home-based women workers.72
The widespread use of such women for slop work, even as late as 1906, was highlighted in a report from the Women’s Trade Union Review:
cigarette-making, the beading of ladies’ shoes, the stitching of gloves, chainmaking and the manufacture of hosiery, jewelcases, tennis-balls, belts, ties, furniture, brushes, and saddlery were all homework trades, in which a twelve to sixteen hour day brought in, on average, earnings of 5s (25p) to 7s (35p) a week . . . a dress could have been made by a reasonably paid seamstress in an airy workroom, while the buttons and trimmings were produced by a sweated worker . . . wedding cakes manufactured in hygienic conditions were likely to be packed in attractive boxes glued together in a disease-ridden tenement.73
Not until the nineteenth century would anyone have any concerns that women and children were risking their safety and health in terrible conditions:
The Royal Commission of 1842 included graphic illustrations of women and children working in coal mines
[And Cover] ‘A drawer’ pulling a coal tub, originally published in the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) 1842 report (Classic Image/Alamy)
Women commonly worked underground in coal mines, primarily as part of family teams. While men worked the coal face, women carried or dragged the coal in sledges or tubs through the tunnels to the lifts, or on occasion even up to the surface . . . At lime kilns, women were employed carrying baskets of coal and chalk, while men broke the chalk loose, screened it, lifted the baskets onto the women’s heads, and threw the chalk into the kiln. Both sexes helped hack the coal and chalk into small pieces and fill the baskets . . . Women were employed in the loading of slate onto boats in Devon (after it was quarried by men), where the work was described as ‘immoderately hard’ (by Richard Ayton, an observer in 1814), yet women ‘accomplish as much in a given time as the men do.’74
The terrible work and conditions for women and children working underground came to public notice after an accident at Huskar Colliery near Barnsley in 1838, when 26 children (11 girls) were drowned while working. An inquiry reporting on the conditions made the point that women stripped naked to the waist to work in the heat of the mines and wore trousers for the heavy work. This was as shocking to the elite as the danger of the job.
It was well known that hard-working women could be as productive as men. The journalist Henry Mayhew watched a male dust collector in the East End of London in 1840 who was:
shovelling the sifted soil from one of the lesser heaps, and, by a great effort of strength and activity, pitching each shovel-full to the top of a lofty mound, somewhat resembling a pyramid. Opposite to him stood a little woman, stoutly made, and with her arms bare above the elbow; she was his partner in the work, and was pitching shovel-full for shovel-full with him to the summit of the heap. She wore an old soiled cotton gown, open in the front, and tucked up behind in the fashion of the last century. She had clouts of old rags tied around her ankles to prevent the dust from getting into her shoes, a sort of coarse towel fastened in front for an apron, and a red handkerchief bound tightly round her head. In this trim she worked away, and not only kept pace with the man, but often threw two shovels for his one, although he was a tall, powerful fellow.75
Most gravediggers were women. Sarah Arnold worked as the gravedigger for the Southwark burial ground at Long Lane, Bermondsey, for eight years from 1786, taking over from her husband John at his death. Mary Davis dug the graves for a year at Whitechapel in 1785 and Mary Harper was Wandsworth’s gravedigger in 1786.76 Women sextons (or sextonesses) were common across London, responsible for organising the digging of graves and supervising the parish churchyards.77
The emergence of fixed shops in prime locations created roles for shop assistants. Women had been squeezed out of retail work by the belief that it was improper for a young woman to serve at a shop counter, but as the work was de-skilled and devalued, shop work became instantly recognisable as ‘women’s work’ – unskilled and underpaid.78 Most positions were live-in and notorious for extremely long hours and low wages. In 1842, there was an unsuccessful attempt to regulate the working hours, and in the 1860s an effort to frighten women out of the bad habit of evening shopping by alerting them to ‘endangering the health of their own sex, and especially that of the mothers of the future generation’.79 Aristocratic ladies – four duchesses, two marchionesses and six countesses – set an example by agreeing not to shop after 2 p.m. on Saturdays.
No working-class woman, labouring as hard as a man in equally dangerous and unhealthy work, was encouraged to think of herself as morally superior and physically frail. No one thought working-class women were naturally unsuited for the world of work and should be protected in the home. Indeed, the men who brought in the new industries drove working-class women to work harder than ever. The wealthy men protected their wives and daughters, encouraging them into light spiritual work at home as suiting their fragile nature, while brutally exploiting working women in fields, mills, mines and on the streets.
Only when cheap male labourers became widely available did employers and male workers claim the work was too hard or unsuitable for women. There was no official concern about women doing hard labour until 1808 when the Poor Law commissioners worried that women farm labourers were inadequate homemakers because they had no proper domestic training: ‘Agricultural work, if habitual, accustoms the whole frame to action upon too broad a scale for domestic life; the eye becomes regardless of precision and cleanliness, the habits undomestic and unfavourable to personal subordination. It seems agreed on all hands that much field-work in early life is a bad exercise for a woman’s future duties.’
Women labouring hard alongside men were said to be ‘coarse, licentious wretches, scorning all kinds of restraint, and yielding themselves up, with shameless audacity to the most detestable sensuality’.80
‘Chivalrous’ campaigns to keep women out of hard or dangerous work only appeared after working men realised that if conditions were improved for women and children, they would improve for everyone. Women and children found themselves increasingly banned from factory and industrial work in the later years of the nineteenth century, but they continued to struggle for a living in unregulated trades. Henry Mayhew, who observed the poor of London, gave this account of flowersellers in 1851:
Sunday is the best day for flowerselling . . . in the height and pride of the summer four hundred children were selling flowers on Sundays in the streets. The trade is almost entirely in the hands of children, the girls outnumbering the boys by more than eight to one. The ages of the girls vary from six to twenty, few of the boys are older than twelve, and most of them are under ten.
Of flowergirls there are two classes. Some girls, and they are certainly the smaller class of the two, avail themselves of the sale of flowers in the streets for immoral purposes, or rather, they seek to eke out the small gains of their trade by such practices. Their ages are from fourteen to nineteen or twenty, and sometimes they remain out offering their flowers until late at night.
