PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE FOR WOMEN.

April, 1892.

A century has passed since Mary Wollstonecraft published her “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” and Maria Edgeworth, with greater tact and knowledge of the world, pleaded for the higher education of women in her “Letters to Literary Ladies.” Whatever views we may hold as to the change, there can be no doubt that the modes of thought and of life of women in all classes have altered considerably, for good or for evil, in the last hundred years. It is, however, possible to exaggerate the change, and to be mistaken both as to its causes and its resulting tendencies; and now that there are signs of a new departure, it may be as well to take stock and consider how we stand at present.

First and foremost the question presents itself, How do women stand now with regardto that all-absorbing occupation obtained through marriage? Their position in industry is so vitally affected by their attitude towards marriage, and by the attitude of those around them, they are so constantly called upon to balance an industrial gain with social loss, that before all things it is necessary to see on what the expectation of marriage is grounded and the effect produced by it on efficiency and wages. After marriage we should estimate not so much the effect of marriage on industrial position, but rather the effect of industry on domestic life.

In calculating the possibilities of marriage on a statistical basis, the method is frequently adopted of subtracting all the widows from the population and pointing out that in the remainder (the widowers not being subtracted) there is a slight surplus of men; the moral is drawn that every woman can get married if she will only make herself agreeable, and not be too particular. Putting aside the practical objection that all men are not able to support a wife, and the sentimental onethat numerical equality does not guarantee mutual attraction, this method of calculation ignores several important facts. One of these is the preference that men feel for women younger than themselves as wives and that women feel for men older than themselves as husbands. Granted an equal number of males and females between the ages of eighteen and thirty, we have not therefore in English society an equal number of marriageable men and women. Wherever rather late marriage is the rule with men—that is, wherever there is a high standard of comfort—the disproportion is correspondingly great. In a district where boy-and-girl marriages are very common, everybody can be married and be more or less miserable ever after; but in the upper middle class equality in numbers at certain ages implies a surplus of marriageable women over marriageable men. Nor do equal numbers at the same age imply equal numbers in the same locality. Women’s work and men’s work cannot always be found in equal proportions in the same district; and class habits may affect the stream of migration differently. Thedaughters of working-men go out to service or emigrate, while the daughters of well-to-do people stay at home; while, on the other hand, the percentage of sons of professional men who go to the colonies or to India is probably much greater than the percentage of sons of working-men. There is a probability, therefore, that the sexes will be distributed unequally in different districts and also in different classes of society.

1881.—Number of Females to every 100 Males in

[1]I have made no attempt to estimate the error introduced into the Census by falsehood.

Taking the Census returns for 1881, and comparing England and Wales with London, we find that, whereas in the former there were 105 females to 100 males, in the latter there were 112 females to 100 males. Hereat once we have a marked local difference, and if we take special districts of London and compare them with each other we shall find a greater disparity.

According toMr.Charles Booth’s classification in “Labour and Life,”[2]Kensington has 30·4 per cent. of middle and upper class people (classesG.andH.), Hackney 24·2, Islington 20·9, London 17·8, Pancras 15·2. The percentage of these classes in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, and Whitechapel is too small to be taken into account, but Shoreditch has 59·8 per cent. “in comfort,” while Bethnal Green has 55·4. The order of these districts is, therefore, exactly the same whether we arrange them according to preponderance of females over males, oraccording to well-being. Whitechapel is set apart from the rest, most probably by the peculiar effects of the Jewish immigration. Putting aside for the moment the question whether the preponderance is entirely due to the servant class, there can be little doubt that it is connected with the servant-keeping classes. Between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five the merely migrant portion of the community seem to have disappeared, large numbers of shop-assistants, domestic servants, etc., having married and settled down amongst their own class. Between these ages but a small percentage of unmarried people marry; they are, or should be, in the prime of life, and for several reasons it is a period to notice, especially in estimating the proportion of men or women who remain unmarried.

[2]For brevity I use the letters assigned byMr.Booth to the various classes, with the signification he has attached to them, viz.:Poor.A.The lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals.B.Casual earnings.C.Intermittent earnings.D.Small regular earnings.In Comfort.E.Regular standard earnings.F.Higher-class labour.G.Lower middle class.H.Upper middle class, etc.

[2]For brevity I use the letters assigned byMr.Booth to the various classes, with the signification he has attached to them, viz.:

Poor.

In Comfort.

It is difficult to decide whether we should compare the number of unmarried women with the number of married women only, or with the number of married women and widows. If our object is to find the percentage of women who marry, widows should be included with married women; if we wishto estimate the number of women who may have to support themselves, a large number of widows should be added to the number of spinsters. Except for the age period from 35 to 45, widows are not considered here at all.[3]

[3]No allowance has been made for false returns as to civil condition. Men in the wealthier districts who return themselves as single, although supporting women in another class, should be regarded as married; but the women themselves for the present purpose are rightly treated as married or widowed in accordance with their Census returns.

1881.—Unmarried Women to 100 Married Women.

In this table, which deals with women only, Whitechapel would take its right place betweenSt.Pancras and Shoreditch, as inMr.Booth’s classification, indicating that theabnormal figures in the other table are due to a preponderance of male immigrants over female immigrants of a race which prevents inter-marriage with the English population. England and Wales takes its place, so far as the ratio at the age of 35 to 45 is concerned, afterSt.Pancras, from which the inference may be drawn that London either possesses a larger percentage of the servant-keeping classes, or that these classes employ more servants than is the case in England and Wales. Both the tables show that we are right in selecting the age-period 35-45, when men and women have left off marrying, and have not begun dying, for special study in connection with industry or marriage.

In all England and Wales, then, the proportion of women who may be expected to remain unmarried is, roughly speaking, one in six; in London it is one in five. The important question arises, Are these chances equally distributed? On the face of it, it would seem not; but people readily point out that the greater ratio of middle-aged spinsters in Kensington, Hackney, and Islington, as compared with Shoreditch orBethnal Green, is easily explained by the number of servants who naturally, if unmarried at this age, congregate in the richer districts, but would, if distributed among the working-class districts, make the ratios fairly equal. The explanation sounds so plausible, that, were it not that experience has convinced me that in the educated middle class there is a surplus of women over men above the average, I should have accepted it without further inquiry. But by a study of the Census for 1861 (in many respects an ideal one so far as the tabulation of facts is concerned) and of the unpublished official returns of 1881 for Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Hackney, and Kensington, I find that, supposing all the middle-aged indoor domestic servants to be single, they nevertheless are not more than one-third of the single women in each district. Of the outdoor domestic servants, such as charwomen, the percentage under 25 years of age is so very small that it may fairly be assumed that the great majority are married women or widows, and that the exceptions to this rule will be balanced bythe exceptions to the rule that the middle-aged indoor domestic servants are single women. Shoreditch and Bethnal Green (with almost exactly equal populations) give us together a ratio of 11·6 unmarried women between 35 and 45 to 100 married women at that age as the normal for a working-class district without any upper middle class. Kensington (including Paddington), with a population of 270,000, contains 70 per cent. of working-class inhabitants; the surplus women, whether servants or otherwise, are to be found in the houses of the 30 per cent. of middle and upper-class inhabitants. Roughly speaking, then, to every 70 working-class married women in Kensington we may assign 8 unmarried women, and to the remaining 30 married women between 35 and 45 years of age we must assign 54 unmarried women. To every 76 working-class married women in Hackney we may assign 9 unmarried women at this age-period, leaving 18 unmarried women to the remaining 24 married women. One-third of these being domestic servants, if we subtract them, we have left in Kensington in Classes G and H 36unmarried women to 30 married women, and in Hackney 12 unmarried women to 24 married women. It follows, therefore, that in Kensington, excluding domestic servants, more than 50 per cent. of the women between 35 and 45 in the servant-keeping classes are unmarried, while in Hackney about 33 per cent. of the same class are unmarried.

The servant-keeping classes, as I have described the groups thatMr.Booth has called Classes G and H, include everyone with an income of £150 a year and upwards, and, were statistics available, it might perhaps be shown that the unmarried women are, to a large extent, the daughters of clerks and professional men. The tradesman class do not find it nearly so difficult to provide for their sons and set them up in business as is the case in the salaried class; and it is an advantage from an industrial point of view for tradesmen to have wives who can help them in various ways. Emigration is probably more frequent in the salaried class; and where the sons are obliged to emigrate, it frequently happens that the daughters have to work for their living. In this class Ibelieve the inequality of the sexes is greatest, and the probability of marriage least. In this class, therefore, the importance of an industrial training which shall enable women to earn a competency through all the active years of their life, which shall enable them to remain efficient workers and to provide for old age, is greater than in any other.

As my object is not to point out how marriageable women may get married, but to show that a considerable number of women must remain unmarried, a table showing the inequality of numbers of the unmarried of both sexes in different districts in London is given. The districts are arranged in the order of poverty as calculated in 1889; the figures are from the Census of 1881.

Unmarried Women 35-45 to every 100 Unmarried Men 35-45.

[4]The common lodging-houses inSt.Giles’, the Woolwich Arsenal, the Inns of Court and hotels in the Strand, and the Knightsbridge Barracks inSt.George’s, Hanover Square, may help to explain these exceptions to the rule.

As only one-third of these unmarried women are domestic servants, even if we suppose that all the unmarried men belong to Classes G and H, there are obviously not enough men for all the women to be able to marry. Such being the case, we can afford to dispense with mutual recrimination. The women who find it less dishonouring to enter the labour market than an overstocked marriage market are taking the more womanly course in putting aside all thought of marriage. The men who remain unmarried are perhaps in the position of Captain Macheath, overwhelmed by anembarras de richesses, and should be forgiven if they fear to make a choice of one whichmay seem to cast disparagement on so many others of equal merit.

These statistics have been called startling and alarming. They may be startling to men, but can hardly be so to women of the upper class, and I fail to see why they should alarm anyone. If all these spinsters had to be shut up in convents the outlook would be gloomy. But as things are, if only we can secure good pay and decent conditions of life, the lot of all women may be immensely improved by this compact band of single women. It would be difficult to overrate the industrial effect of a number of well-instructed, healthy-minded, vigorous permanent spinsters. A man’s work is not interrupted but rather intensified by marriage; but in the case of women, not only is the wages question very much affected by the expectation of marriage, but much organised effort on their part, whether for improvement of wages or for provision against sickness and old age, must be wasted unless there be a considerable number of single women to give continuity to the management of their associations.Mr.Llewellyn Smith haspointed out that, as mobility of labour increases, actual movement may, other things remaining the same, diminish; and so also I should be inclined to say that it is not marriage that is such a disturbing element in the women’s wages question so much as the expectation of or desire for marriage. In the middle classes, where it is impossible to earn a sufficient income without a long training and years of practical apprenticeship, nothing is so injurious to women’s industrial position as this ungrounded expectation of marriage, which prevents them from making themselves efficient when young, and makes them disappointed, weary, and old when their mental and physical powers should be in their prime.

With this profession of faith in the absolute necessity for the existence of single women I pass on to a brief review of the position of working women, considered in three groups, taking first of all those who belong to the classes whomMr.Booth describes as “poor.” Classes A, B, C, and D, who are 30·7 per cent. of the population of London; then the well-to-do artisans inClasses E and F, who are 51·5 per cent., and lastly the so-called middle and upper classes, who are 17·8 per cent., of London, and should therefore be designated the upper classes.

From the first of these groups are drawn the lower grades of factory girls in East London, who form the majority of match-girls, rope-makers, jam and sweetstuff-makers, and a considerable proportion of the box, brush, and cigar-makers, as well as of the less skilled tailoresses. The children when they leave school do not all go to work at once, but relieve their mothers or elder sisters of the charge of the ubiquitous baby, enabling the former nurse to go to the factory. They stagger about with their charges, or plant them securely on the coldest stone step they can find, and discuss with each other or with nursing mothers in their narrow street the births, deaths, marriages, misfortunes, and peculiarities of their neighbours. Their families live in one or, at most, two rooms, and their knowledge of life is such as to render Bowdlerised versions of our authors quite unnecessary.Sometimes the children take “a little place” as servant-girl, going home at night, but eventually, and generally before they are fifteen, they find their way to the factory. By the time they are one-and-twenty at least a quarter of them have babies of their own to look after; during the next five years the rest, with but few exceptions, get married or enter into some less binding union. To show that I do not exaggerate the proportion of girl marriages in this class, I give a table of the number of girls married under 21 years of age in every 100 marriages that took place in the seven years from 1878 to 1884. The percentage has been calculated for each year, and the mean of the percentage is given.

Girls Married under 21 years of age in every 100 Marriages 1878-1884.

As girl marriages are more common among the poorer half of East London, and as, unfortunately, in a large number of cases, the legal ceremony only takes place, if it takes place at all, in time to legitimise the offspring of the union, it is obvious that girl marriage is extremely common in the class of which I am speaking. When the husband earns regular wages, even though they may be small, the wife does not as a rule go to the factory, nor even take work out to do at home, for the first few years of her married life. But many factory girls return to work the day after they are married, and those who leave it for several years often return as soon as one of the children is old enough to leave school. Married labour is, of course, irregular labour, and many employers discourage it as much as possible. But it is most to be deprecated on account of the effect on the children. It is unfortunatethat the Census returns, as at present tabulated, give us no means of estimating the extent of the evil. We do not need to know whether men engaged in different occupations are married or single; but there is no fact of more importance with regard to female labour, and the value of such a return would more than balance the expense. The factories where the work cannot be given out (as is the case in match, jam, and cigar factories) contain the largest percentage of married women; and if called upon to choose the less of two evils, married labour in the factory and home work, I should unhesitatingly decide in favour of home work, which, if well organised, need not even be an evil.

The great need of this class is training for domestic life—by which I do not mean domestic service. Herein lies the only effective cure for the industrial and social miseries of the poor. The children are overworked, or else allowed to spend their time in a most dangerous idleness. That men should ask for an Eight Hours Bill when little girls of thirteen or fourteen maybe found in our factories working ten hours seems unwise, if not selfish. Ten hours in a factory is not so wearing to a child as eight hours in school would be, but it is far too long. It makes education impossible, and leaves no room for surprise that married women in the poorest classes sink into a condition hardly above animalism. The two things which struck me most in East London were the amount of wasted intelligence and talent among the girls and the wretchedness of the married women. A secondary education in cooking, cleaning, baby management, laws of health, and English literature, should follow that of the Board School, and the minimum age at which full time may be worked should be gradually raised. By 1905 no one under sixteen should be working for an employer more than five hours a day, and all half-timers should be attending morning or afternoon school. The dock labourers’ wives, having learnt to be useful at home, would appreciate how much is lost by going out to work. Their withdrawal from the labour market and the increased efficiencyof their children, brought about by better home management and education, would both tend to raise wages, provided that a trade union existed to secure that the workers should keep the result of their increased efficiency. Bad cooking, dirty habits, overcrowding, and empty-headedness are the sources of the drunkenness, inefficiency, immorality, and brutality which obstruct progress among so many of the poor, and philanthropic efforts can be better employed in this direction than in any other.

During the last four years the trade union movement, for which Mrs. Paterson worked so unwearyingly and with such dishearteningly small success, has made considerable progress in East London amongst this group. The principal results to be expected from trade unionism amongst these workers are not sufficiently obvious for large numbers to be attracted by them. But even a small union can be most useful in guarding against reductions and in bringing public opinion to bear upon employers who allow their foremen to exercise tyranny and make unfairexactions from their workpeople. The usefulness of a trade union must be estimated in many cases by what it prevents from happening rather than by any positive advantage that it can be proved to have secured.

From the second group of working women are drawn our better-paid factory girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large number of our dressmakers and milliners, shop-assistants, barmaids, clerks, and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dressmakers, shop-assistants, and clerks are, however, drawn from the lower middle class, and a few from the professional class. Although this second group is the largest group in London, and probably in England, it is the one about which we have least general information. They have hardly been made the subject of industrial inquiry, do not regard themselves as persons to be pitied, and work in comparatively small detachments. They are nevertheless of more industrial importance than the working women of the first group. Their work is skilled and requires an apprenticeship. They are in the majority ofcases brought into direct contact with the consumer, and education, good manners, personal appearance and tact all raise their market value. In this second group would be included the majority of the Lancashire and Yorkshire weavers by anyone competent to deal with England as a whole; and what applies to the group in London would not apply to this section of it, who occupy a unique position. The extent to which women compete with men is very much exaggerated. Of the three million and a half women and girls who were returned as occupied in industry in 1881 in England and Wales, over one-third were domestic indoor servants, 358,000 were dressmakers, milliners, or stay-makers; midwifery and subordinate medical service, charing, washing and bathing service, hospitals and institutions, shirt-making and sewing employed another 400,000. The textile trades employed altogether only 590,624 women and girls, and of these over 300,000 were in the cotton trade. Their aggregation in large factories and in special localities has attracted to them an undue amount of attention, and thehistory of industry in Lancashire is often given as the history of industry in England, whereas no other county is less typical.

In London in 1881 the number of women and girls occupied in industry was 593,226. Of these, more than 40 per cent. were indoor domestic servants, more than 12 per cent. were engaged in charing, washing and bathing service and hospital and institution service, 16 per cent. in dressmaking, millinery, stay-making, shirt-making and needlework; and of the remaining miscellaneous trades a large proportion are purely women’s trades; even in those where men are employed women and girls are rarely to be found doing the same work as men. Of domestic servants and charwomen there is no need to speak here. Of the laundresses a considerable proportion belong to the first group already discussed, but the ironers generally belong to the second group. An inquiry into their position with regard to wages, hours and sanitary conditions of work is about to be made, and the proposal to bring them under the Factory Acts cannot be considered until the results have beengiven us. Of the wages and hours of work of dressmakers and shop-assistants surprisingly little information is at present available. But one fact is too common to be denied: these girls accept wages which would not be enough to support them if they had not friends to help them; and they endure hard work, long hours, and close rooms because they believe that they are only filling up a brief interval before marriage. The better off their parents may be, the less heed do they give to securing anything but pocket-money wages. These girls are constantly coming in contact with the rich, and have ever before their eyes the luxury and comfort of those who have money without working for it. They are taught to think much about dress and personal appearance, and are exposed to temptations never offered to the less attractive factory girls. They have naturally a higher standard of living, their parents cannot be relied upon to help them after the first few years, and, failing marriage, the future looks intensely dreary to them. There would be little harm in the high standard of comfort of single men in themiddle and upper classes which makes them regard marriage as involving self-denial, if working women all along the line were also earning enough to make them regard it in the same light. In a class more than any other liable to receive proposals of a dishonouring union, which may free them from badly paid drudgery, the greatest effort should be made to secure good wages. Combination is nowhere so much needed, and perhaps is nowhere so unpopular. And yet the difficulties of foreign competition which make attempts to raise wages among factory girls so unsafe, and which make it most undesirable for outsiders, ignorant of trade circumstances, to spread the “doctrine of divine discontent,” are entirely absent here; skilled hands are not so plentiful that they could easily be replaced, and the girls, if assisted by their friends, could well afford to bide their time quietly at home until they had secured good terms.

There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers from another. If social distinctions divide population into horizontal sections, industry cuts throughthese sections vertically. ClassG., or the lower middle class, enter the upper branches of the industries to which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They form the majority of the shop-assistants in the West End and the richer suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary schools with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service clerks, that they join the upper middle class, including under that term the professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treating of this third group of working women I shall confine myself entirely to the position of women in classH., partly because my experience as a high-school teacher has brought me into special relations with girls and women of that class who have to earn their living, and partly because their unconscious even more than conscious influence on the habits and ideals of the girls in the lower middle class is very great.

In every class but classH.the girls can, if they choose, enter industries conducted byemployers with a view to profit. In the section of the factory class where the girls are obliged to be self-supporting there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any considerable period; there is a point above which it would not pay the employers to employ them. The standard of living is, unfortunately, a very low one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed by combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will be employed, however high the wages demanded may be. But the minimum wage is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather determined by the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and part of the cost of food. In classH.women are not employed to produce commodities which have a definite market value, and have therefore no means of measuring their utility by market price. They nearly all perform services for persons who pay them out of fixed income, and make no pecuniaryprofit by employing them. And there is no rate at which we can say that the supply of these services will cease; for the desire to be usefully employed is so strong in educated women, and their opportunities of being profitably employed (in the economic sense of the word “profitable”) are so few, that they will give their services for a year to people as well off as themselves in return for a sum of money barely sufficient to take them abroad for a month or to keep them supplied with gloves, lace, hats, and other necessary trifles. Chaos reigns supreme. And while in this class it seems to be considered ignoble to stipulate for good pay, strangely enough it is not considered disgraceful to withhold it. Teachers are constantly exhorted to teach for love of their work, but no appeal is made to parents to pay remunerative fees because they love their children to be taught.

The children of the upper and middle classes have their education partly given them by the parents of the assistant mistresses and governesses whom they employ. As a proof of this, I give a fewparticulars about the salaries and cost of living of the only section of educated working women in which some kind of order reigns—assistant mistresses in public and proprietary schools giving a secondary education. In these schools, of which a considerable number are under the management of the Girls’ Public Day Schools Company and the Church Schools Company, while others are endowed schools or local proprietary schools, some University certificate of intellectual attainment is almost invariably demanded, and a University degree is more frequently required than in private schools or from private governesses. These assistant mistresses have nearly all clearly recognised, even when mere school-girls, that they must eventually earn their own living if they do not wish to spend their youth in maintaining a shabby appearance of gentility. They regard marriage as a possible, but not very probable, termination of their working career; but for all practical purposes relegate the thought to the unfrequented corners of their minds, along with apprehensions of sickness or oldage and expectations of a legacy. They are women whose standard is high enough for them to be able to spend £200 a year usefully without any sinful waste. In the majority of cases they are devoted to their profession, for the first few years at least; and they only weary of it when they feel that they are beginning to lose some of their youthful vitality, and have no means of refreshing mind and body by social intercourse and invigorating travel, while at the same time the fear of sickness and poverty is beginning to press on them. There are not 1,500 of them in all England, and their position is better than that of any considerable section of the 120,000 women teachers entered in the Census of 1881. The particulars that I give are from the report of a committee formed in 1889 to collect statistics as to the salaries paid to assistant mistresses in high schools. The critics of the report believe that the poorest paid teachers did not give in returns, and that the report gave too favourable an impression of the state of affairs. The number who gave information was 278. The return for the hours of workdid not include the time spent in preparation of lessons and study, both of course absolutely necessary for a good teacher.

Summing up the results, we may say that, of the teachers who joined their present school more than two years ago, one-fourth are at present receiving an average salary of £82 for an average week’s work (the average including very large variations) of thirty-two hours; half (25 per cent. of whom possess University degrees) are receiving an average salary of £118 for a week’s work of about thirty-five hours; and one-fourth (50 per cent. of whom are University graduates) are receiving an average salary of £160 in exchange for a week’s work of thirty-six to thirty-seven hours. These results do not appear unsatisfactory, but it must be remembered that under the phrasemore than two yearsis covered a length of service extending in one case to as many as seventeen years, and of which the average must be taken as very nearly six. Many also of these teachers have had considerable experience in other schools before entering the ones in which they are at present engaged. The condition of the teaching profession as a career for educated women may be summed up according to these averages, by saying that a teacher of average qualifications, who a few years ago obtained a footing in a high-class school, and has continued workingin the same schoolfor six years, at the end of this time is hypothetically earning a salary of £118 a year by thirty-five hours’ work a week for thirty-nine weeks in the year, or slightly over 1s.8d.an hour. A result obtained from so many averages is, of course, entirely valueless as a guidance to any individual teacher, but affords a certain index to the pecuniary position of the profession as a whole.

The prospects of the assistant mistress as she approaches middle age may be judged from the particulars of twenty-four instances in which a change of work had been attended by a fall of income.

Three of these changes may be at once struck out as changes from the post of private governess, and three others do not lend themselves to easy comparison, because of great differences in the hours of work. Of the remaining eighteen teachers, five have now attained a higher salary than that formerly paid them, four have exactly regained their old income, while nine are still in receipt of a lower salary than that paid them at their last school. These figures point to a precariousness in the position of teachers which has to be seriously taken into account in estimating the prospects of the profession.

But there are many people who, like a certain clergyman’s wife, think that girls are getting “uppish nowadays” when they hear that after three years at Girton and two years’ experience in teaching, an assistant mistress refuses less than £120 a year. There are thousands of mothers like one who wanted a lady graduate as daily governess for her boys “quite regardless of expense,” and who was even willing to pay £30 a year! Wealthy residents of NottingHill and Kensington send their children to high schools whose managers dare not ask more than a maximum fee of £15 a year. For their enlightenment I give the tables of cost of living compiled byMr.Alfred Pollard with the aid of experts. Arithmeticians may amuse themselves with calculating in how many years a teacher, twenty-six years of age, with a salary of £120, may, by saving £16 a year, secure an annuity of £70 a year; and may then attack the more interesting problem of the probabilities of any school retaining her in its employment for that length of time.

Cost of Living.

It will be observed that these teachers are even here supposed to have friends who will put up with them for six weeks. And attention may be especially called to the magnificent sum that can be set apart for educational books and lectures. Frivolous books, such as the works of Walter Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, Browning, R. L. Stevenson, must be presented by friends or borrowed in all their grime and dirt from a free library.

If this is the position of a favoured thousand, the position of the rest may be inferred. Of the whole number, however, a considerable proportion are teachers in elementary schools, and do not come from ClassH.I have no means of separating the two. Imagination may be stimulated by perusing the employment columns of such a paper asThe Lady, where advertisements appear for governesses at unconscionably low salaries, reaching occasionally to almost a minus quantity when some more than ordinarily audacious matron offers a comfortable home to a governess in returnfor the education of her children and twelve shillings a week.

Are girls worth educating? Apparently not, as their parents do not think them worth paying for. The expectation that marriage will in a few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and provide for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know they can make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to train them for really lucrative employment, because they think the money will be thrown away if their daughters marry; they let them work full time for half or less than half the cost of living, out of a mistaken kindness, of which employers get all the benefit. The girls in many cases accept low salaries under the same impression, in others because they are not strong enough to hold out where so many are willing to undersell them. Those who only take up employment as a stopgap until marriage never become really efficient, and when later on they find that there is no prospect of release, they become positively inefficient. Those who have faced facts from the first can throw their whole heartinto their work, but they are heavily handicapped in their efforts towards progress by the bad pay which is the result of the thoughtlessness and folly of those around them. If only the relatives of these girls could realise that at least one-half of them will never be married, and that of the others many will not marry for several years after leaving school, that there is no means of predicting which of them will be married, and that any of them may have to support, not only themselves all their lives, but a nurse as well in old age, the tangle would soon be unravelled. Two things only I would venture to suggest: one, that instead of supplementing salaries and so lowering them, parents should help their daughters to hold out for salaries sufficient to support them, should assist them in making themselves more efficient, and should help them to make provision for themselves in later life, instead of making self-support impossible; the other, that manufacturers and business men should train their daughters as they train their sons. The better organisation of labour should open a wide field forwomen, if they will only consent to go through the routine drudgery and hardship that men have to undergo. An educated girl who goes from the high school to the technological college will find full scope for any talents she may possess. As designer, chemist, or foreign correspondent in her father’s factory she could be more helpful and trustworthy than anyone not so closely interested in his success. As forewoman in any factory, if she understood her work, she would be far superior to the uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses in our factory system would be swept away.

If anyone objects that women who are intensely interested in work which also enables them to be self-supporting are less attractive than they would otherwise be, I can make no reply except that to expect a hundred women to devote their energies to attracting fifty men seems slightly ridiculous. If the counter-argument be put forward that women, able to support themselves in comfort, and happy in their work, will disdain marriage, then those who take this view aremaintaining, not only that it is not true that

Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;’Tis woman’s whole existence.

but also that marriage has naturally very much less attraction for women than for men.

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