Bloody Brilliant Women. Cathy Newman

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СКАЧАТЬ other voluntary associations. But many girls were unable to take advantage of school places because their families were poor. A child in service, rather than in school, meant financial security, a situation that is portrayed in Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical Lark Rise to Candleford sequence of novels:

      As soon as a mother had even one daughter in service, the strain upon herself slacked a little. Not only was there one mouth less to feed, one less pair of feet to be shod, and a tiny space left free in the cramped sleeping quarters; but every month, when the girl received her wages, a shilling or more would be sent to ‘our Mum’.20

      Most middle-class families had at least one servant. As the feminist historians Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser pithily observe: ‘For men, the dividing line between middle and working class was usually measured in income; for women, it lay in the difference between being a servant and being able to afford one.’21

      Charles Booth estimated that 30 per cent of London families could not live on a man’s wages alone. In order to supplement their husbands’ earnings, working-class wives took on piecework – usually sewing or knitting – either at home or in attics or cellars supervised by a ‘sweater’. Abuse and malpractice in the ‘sweated work’ industry was rife, both at home and in factories. The extent of it was exposed by one of the late-Victorian period’s great whistleblowers and one of the most impressive activists of the era: Ada Nield Chew.

      The second child in a family of thirteen, Chew was born on 28 January 1870 to William Nield, a brickmaker, and his wife Jane, in Audley, Staffordshire. At the age of eleven she left school to help look after her family, which included an epileptic younger sister; she fitted in paid work where she could.

      After the family moved to Crewe in 1887, Chew found work in the Compton Brothers clothing factory. But it was miserable and exploitative, so in 1894 she sent the Crewe Chronicle a series of anonymous letters savagely criticising the pay and conditions of the women who worked at the factory, especially as compared to those of their male colleagues doing the same work.

      This was a risky undertaking, but for Chew the alternative was unthinkable: ‘As long as we are silent ourselves and apparently content with our lot, so long shall we be left in enjoyment of that lot.’22 Bear in mind, when reading this extract from her second letter to the Chronicle, published on 19 May 1894, that Chew had no formal secondary education and taught herself to write by reading novels and magazines:

      And now to take an average of a year’s wage of the ‘average ordinary hand’, which was the class I mentioned in my first letter, and being that which is in a majority may be taken as fairly representative. The wages of such a ‘hand’, sir, will barely average – but by exercise of the imagination – 8 shillings [approximately £42 in today’s money] a week. I ought to say, too, that there is a minority, which is also considerable, whose wages will not average above 5 shillings [approximately £26] a week. I would impress upon you that this is making the very best of the case, and is over rather than understating. What do you think of it, Mr Editor, for a ‘living’ wage?

      I wish some of those, whoever they may be who mete it out to us, would try to ‘live’ on it for a few weeks, as the factory girl has to do 52 weeks in a year. To pay board and lodging, to provide herself decent boots and clothes to stand all weathers, to pay an occasional doctor’s bill, literature, and a holiday away from the scope of her daily drudging, for which even the factory girl has the audacity to long sometimes – but has quite as often to do without. Not to speak of provision for old age, when eyes have grown too dim to thread the everlasting needle, and to guide the worn fingers over the accustomed task.23

      As well as paying for their own materials, women workers had to shell out for hot water to make the tea they drank. Their managers were so inefficient at apportioning labour that the only way the women could earn a living wage was by taking work home with them, which added another four or five hours to the working day – and this had to be fitted in, remember, around household chores like cooking, cleaning and looking after small children.

      Once her identity as the author of the letters was exposed, Chew lost her job. But she had been talent-spotted by the Independent Labour Party – a precursor of today’s Labour party – and the burgeoning suffragist movement.

      Plenty of other women shared Chew’s passion and panache. By the time Annie Besant helped to organise a strike of the female workers at Bryant & May’s match factory in east London in 1888, Besant was already well known for her part in a notorious obscenity trial. Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, head of the Secular Society she had joined in 1875, used the National Reformer magazine to promote a progressive agenda that included education, suffrage and, especially, birth control. The pair were arrested after they published a cheap book intended to educate poor women about contraception.

      Although Besant and Bradlaugh were found guilty of obscenity, the verdict was overturned on a technicality. Bradlaugh went on to become an MP. Besant was, predictably, hit harder: the scandal of the trial cost her custody of her daughter. But the trauma of this loss seems only to have catalysed her activism.

      She was moved to righteous fury when she learned at a Fabian Society meeting of the conditions endured by Bryant & May’s mostly female workers. As if the litany of industrial injustices (fourteen-hour working days, poor pay made poorer still by an unfair system of fines) wasn’t long enough, the ‘matchgirls’ had to endure a uniquely horrible side-effect of handling the white phosphorous used in match-making: ‘phossy jaw’.

      Vapour from the phosphorous caused the lower jaws of workers to become distended and deformed – and even glow in the dark. Abscesses would form and over time the jaw bone would simply rot away. On 23 June 1888, Besant published an article in The Link, the newspaper she co-edited with the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead, exposing practices at the factory. A follow-up piece took the form of a letter to Bryant & May’s middle- and upper-class shareholders. It’s a masterpiece of campaigning rhetoric:

      Do you know that girls are used to carry boxes on their heads till the hair is rubbed off, and the young heads are bald at fifteen years of age? Country clergymen with shares in Bryant & May’s, draw down on your knee your fifteen-year-old daughter; pass your hand tenderly over the silky, clustering curls, rejoicing in the dainty beauty of the thick shining tresses …24

      Bryant & May’s response was swift and brutal: they tried to force their workers to sign a statement saying they were content with their lot. When one group refused and were sacked, 1,400 other workers went on strike in solidarity. With the help of trade-union pioneer Clementina Black, and Catherine Booth, who with her husband William co-founded the Salvation Army, Besant helped the women to organise and fight back. She became head of the Matchgirls’ Union and secured a significant climbdown. On 21 July 1888, stung by the bad publicity, Bryant & May agreed to end the fines system and re-hire the women it had sacked.

      It was the first time a union of unskilled workers had got what they wanted from a strike. But it was in some ways a Pyrrhic victory as Bryant & May continued to use white phosphorous until 1901, despite knowing full well it was toxic. After Catherine Booth died in 1890, William honoured her memory by opening the Salvation Army’s own match factory where only the harmless but more expensive red phosphorous was used. ‘Remember the poor matchgirls!’ cried their adverts.

      Not until the new century were other trades regulated in the same way. Part of the problem was that, while unions existed for men, they were reluctant to allow women to join them. Women were regarded as cheap rival labour, threatening men’s livelihoods. Frustrated by this, bookbinder Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Protective and Provident League (WPPL) in 1874. It soon represented women in a mass of industries, including making jam, tights and cigars.

      The nail- and chain-making СКАЧАТЬ