Part 4

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 Class H. I have no means of separating the two. Imagination may be stimulated by perusing the employment columns of such a paper as The 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 return for 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 heart into 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 for women, 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 are maintaining, 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.

THE EXPENDITURE OF MIDDLE CLASS WORKING WOMEN.

December, 1898.

In making an appeal to middle class working women to keep and utilise their accounts of expenditure, some little explanation is necessary of the ends to be furthered by such tedious labour. For the keeping of such accounts is to most people a weariness and a vexation. One friend of mine declines to make the attempt because it makes her miserable to have the smallness of her income and the gloominess of the future brought before her mind with such regularity. Another after six months’ trial has suffered a relapse because keeping the account spoilt all the pleasure of spending. Many are afraid that moralists will denounce their expenditure as misdirected and extravagant, and, although living within their income, prefer to remain uncertain as to the amount they spend on what others may regard as mere vanities.

There are two questions which every woman who may have to be self-supporting should ask herself:--

(1) Is the salary which I am efficient enough to earn sufficient to maintain that efficiency for a considerable number of years?

(2) In middle age, when I may be entirely dependent on my own exertions, shall I be more, or shall I be less, competent to earn a salary sufficient to maintain the standard of living to which I have been accustomed?

The cost of efficiency is higher than the cost of living, a fact which is not sufficiently recognised by the middle class working woman or by her employers. The habits of domestic life which make it incumbent on women to make the best of a fixed income cling to them as wage-earners. They do not sufficiently realise that the drain on their vitality, effected by their daily routine of continuous and often monotonous exertion, must be met by fresh streams of energy which can only be produced under present conditions by deliberate search for recreation and by a greater expenditure of money than a purely domestic life demands.

Some curious results of the movement in favour of securing economic independence for women may be observed at the present time. The theory has of course in many cases been reduced in its application to an absurdity. Parents who thirty years ago would have expected all their daughters to stay at home until they were married, now with equal unwisdom wish them to pass from the school to the office, regardless of their natural bent, and as careless of their future prospects as before. Girls fitted by Nature for a home life, and for nothing else, lose their brightness and vitality in sedentary drudgery, losing at the same time all prospect of an escape from it.

So also from a system under which the womenkind were expected to devote their evenings entirely to smoothing away the wrinkles and dispelling the bad tempers of their fathers and brothers after their harassing day’s work, we have suddenly passed to one under which all the daughters may come home equally cross and equally tired, with no hope that others will do their repairs for them, whether of temper or of clothes.

But there are well-to-do families where the competent mother has no desire to hand over her duties to her daughters, and where their happiness is still the chief consideration. Here girls are allowed to earn--not their living--but an income by which they may relieve their parents of some of their cost of living and at the same time live at a greater cost. From both a social and an economic point of view there is much to be said for this plan, provided both parents and daughters realise that the latter have not, under this system, achieved economic independence, or the power to be economically independent. The girl who earns £100 a year by her work and receives another £100 a year in one form or another from her father is in all probability underselling no one; and indeed, in the consciousness that she is only being paid half her cost of living, may even, by her liberal views of what is a good salary, be inciting her less luxurious colleagues to raise their standard of living and remuneration. But if her work is not of a kind that gives training and power to pass on to higher paid posts, the woman worker in middle life will be in almost as unhappy a position if obliged to be self-supporting as the helpless women who thirty years ago used to advertise for posts as companions or governesses, stating as their only recommendation that they had never expected to have to perform the duties of either situation.

Women never will and never can become highly efficient and continue so for any long period on the salaries which they at present receive, or even on the salaries with which, as a rule, they would be contented if they could get them. Vitality and freshness of mind, when youth is gone, cannot be maintained within the four walls of the class room or office, on incomes too small to admit of varied social intercourse, or of practical beneficence. Without the latter power the middle-aged unmarried woman can feel that she has small claim to live, and, in such a case, if her daily work does not in itself call for its exercise, she has little desire to.

What is our standard of living, then? and how much more will it cost us to maintain that standard when the whole effort to maintain it falls upon ourselves? To answer these questions we must have definite accounts of expenditure.

The samples that I have to give are all more or less imperfect as regards their form of presentation. The teaching profession is the one from which naturally it will be easiest to obtain returns. Recruited as it is from every rank of life except the aristocracy, and charged with the training for every rank of life--except, again, the aristocracy, who owe little of their education to their governesses--it should present to us through its accounts a corresponding variety of standard of living. It should do so; but I venture to predict that it will not.

My first three budgets were given to me several years ago. They give the expenditure of three assistant mistresses teaching in high schools and boarding during term time in private houses. No. 1 gives the expenditure for one year; No. 2 the expenditure for two successive years; No. 3 the average expenditure for six years. Side by side with them I place the budget for one year of another high school mistress (No. 4) living in lodgings--which I give afterwards in greater detail.

TABLE I.

Accounts of Expenditure of three High School Mistresses boarding in Private Houses, and of one High School Mistress in Furnished Lodgings.

AMOUNT SPENT ON

+------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+ | | 1. | 2 A. | 2 B. | | +-------------+-------------+-------------+ | | £ s. d.| £ s. d.| £ s. d.| |Lodging and board | 41 0 0 | 41 6 0 | 40 4 0 | |Washing | | 2 7 6 | 2 4 0 | |Dress | 10 10 0 | 16 0 0 | 16 0 0 | |Books,newspapers,}| 0 7 9 | 4 1 8 | 3 8 0 | | &c. }| | | | |Travelling | 3 18 0 | 4 15 6 | 4 16 0 | |Holidays | 9 10 10 | 4 5 0 | 5 4 3 | |Amusements | | 1 6 8 | 0 17 6 | |Subscriptions, } | | | | | donations, &c.} | | | | |Presents | | | | |Postage and } | | | | | stationery } | | | | |Miscellaneous | 7 0 0 | 7 3 0 | 9 0 0 | |Doctor and } | 2 0 0 | 0 6 0 | 1 1 0 | | medicine } | | | | |Insurance | -- | -- | -- | |Savings | -- | -- | -- | |Not spent | 25 13 5 | 18 8 8 | 23 18 7 | | +-------------+-------------+-------------+ | Total |100 0 0 |100 0 0 |106 13 4 | +------------------+-------------+-------------+-------------+

+------------------+-------------+-------------+ | | 3. | 4. | | +-------------+-------------+ | | £ s. d.| £ s. d.| |Lodging and board | 50 17 11 | 54 9 3 | |Washing | 3 0 7 | 3 7 11³⁄₄| |Dress | 12 14 1¹⁄₂ | 16 0 5¹⁄₂| |Books,newspapers,}| 3 16 8 | 2 15 4¹⁄₂| | &c. }| | | |Travelling |}17 4 2¹⁄₂ | 12 0 5¹⁄₂| |Holidays |} | -- | |Amusements | | 3 11 5 | |Subscriptions, } | 4 4 5¹⁄₄ | 1 17 11 | | donations, &c.} | | | |Presents | 9 15 7 | 5 18 3³⁄₄| |Postage and } | 1 15 2 | 4 15 1¹⁄₂| | stationery } | | | |Miscellaneous | 3 16 3 | 3 11 11 | |Doctor and } | 3 2 1 | 0 19 5 | | medicine } | | | |Insurance | 23 10 10 | -- | |Savings | 1 13 4 | -- | |Not spent | -- | 20 12 4¹⁄₂| | +-------------+-------------+ | Total |135 11 2¹⁄₄|130 0 0 | +------------------+-------------+-------------+

Included in “Miscellaneous.”

These tables are not so readily comparable as they should be for scientific exactness. The items included under “Travelling” and “Holidays” need to be enumerated. Under the latter head, for instance, are board and lodging included and are railway fares subtracted and placed under “Travelling”? As a fact No. 1 and No. 2 include under “Board and Lodging” only the cost incurred during the school terms; under the head of “Travelling” is only counted the cost of going to school from home and their daily travelling expenses during the school term. The money put down under “Holidays” includes their expenses for the part of their holidays during which they were not at home. The same is, I believe, true in the case of No. 3, but I do not know for what length of time any of them were subsidised by this free board and lodging at home.

On the other hand, No. 4’s accounts are so summarised that the cost of “Holidays” disappears altogether, being broken up into its constituents of board, lodging, travelling fares and amusements. The confusion in this case is remedied in the following detailed table supplied by No. 4.

TABLE II.