Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention. Cathy Newman

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 industry, based in the Black Country, was one of the most dangerous. In 1910 it became one of the first trades to be regulated when the Scottish trade unionist Mary MacArthur, who had become secretary of the WPPL after it turned into the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1891, organised a strike of female chain workers at Cradley Heath. In a landmark ruling she secured for them a minimum wage, famously observing that ‘women are unorganised because they are badly paid, and poorly paid because they are unorganised.’25

      In 1893 the WTUL’s treasurer May Abraham became one of the first two female factory inspectors. The other was Mary Paterson, who was based in Glasgow. Abraham’s Royal Commission on the Employment of Labour, focusing on the weaving industry, stresses the massive regional variation in women’s pay – 24 shillings a week in Lancashire compared with 18 in Yorkshire – and describes in horrifying detail the damp but boiling-hot conditions where the weavers worked. Adelaide Anderson’s 1922 study Women in the Factory is even worse. She describes how the dust inhaled by women spinning silk caused them to cough up silkworms.

      Abraham and Paterson were paid salaries of £200 a year, much less than their male counterparts, but they achieved impressive results, including the early identification of asbestos as a health risk. Inspector Lucy Deane warned in a 1898 report of the ‘sharp glass-like jagged nature of the particles’, and pointed out that ‘where [the particles] are allowed to rise and to remain suspended in the air of the room in any quantity, the effects have been found to be injurious as might have been expected.’26 Her report was ignored until 1911 when clinical evidence linking asbestos to lung disease was finally gathered.

      Thanks to these women’s efforts the Factory Act of 1895, which extended and amended previous Factory Acts, would place a much greater emphasis on workers’ ‘health and safety’ – a phrase coined, by the way, by a woman: Audrey Pittom, Deputy Chief Inspector of Factories in the mid 1970s.

      The WTUL also claimed credit for later legislation such as the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897, which established the principle that those injured in the workplace should be compensated, and was ultimately responsible for the Shops Act 1911. One of the great welfare reforms of Lloyd George’s Liberal government, this set a maximum working week of sixty hours and gave shop assistants a weekly half-day holiday. Happy days!

      Being a shop assistant in one of the newfangled department stores springing up in towns and cities across the country or waitressing was now an option for working- and lower-middle-class women, who had previously had something of a Hobson’s choice of factory work or service.

      At first, shop owners exploited the abundance of cheap, deferential labour with predictable cynicism. When assistants ‘lived in’ a store – a common practice at the time – their lodgings were often squalid. What’s more Thomas Sutherst, president of the Shop Hours Labour League in the 1880s, wrote: ‘the shop assistant in these days is obliged to submit to the intolerable fatigue of standing for periods, varying according to the locality, from thirteen to seventeen hours a day.’ We might bemoan twenty-first-century interning, but it was nothing to what women then experienced. They were often ‘apprenticed’ for several years during which they were paid pocket-money wages.

      A young woman called Margaret Bondfield took a leaf out of Ada Nield Chew’s book when she wrote a series of pseudonymous articles for The Shop Assistant exposing shoddy, exploitative practices in department stores in Brighton and London. Living in, she experienced overcrowded, insanitary conditions and awful food as well as what she called ‘an undertone of danger’. Bondfield was expected to work between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks per year. Little wonder she had already become an active trade unionist by 1896, when the Women’s Industrial Council suggested she work as an undercover agent, reporting back to them – and the wider world, through a column in the Daily Chronicle – on the abuses she found.

      Despite her limited education, Bondfield went on to enjoy a long, illustrious political career, founding the Women’s Labour League (WLL) in 1906 and becoming both the first woman to chair the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the first female cabinet minister, as Minister of Labour in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929–31.

      Decades before Bondfield made history in this role, the choice of work available to women was expanding. As early as the 1860s, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Rye had managed, through their Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, to secure jobs for women in banks and insurance companies. The booming communications sector offered other opportunities. In 1869, the year the Telegraph Act of 1869 handed the Post Office a monopoly on telegraph services, most of the 6.8 million telegrams sent in Britain would have been dictated to women. By 1914, 7,000 women were employed by the Post Office and 3,000 in other government services. But there were massive barriers remaining, not least that women had to give up their jobs once they married. And, of course, they were paid significantly less than men.

      Actually, the gender pay gap was an issue in all white-collar clerical jobs. At the Prudential insurance company, male clerks earned up to £350 a year while few women made more than £60. Women had to shoulder the burden of dressing smartly on low wages or risk losing their jobs for being scruffy.

      While equal opportunity at work was still a distant dream for late-Victorian feminists, there were plenty of battles to be fought at home. The nature of the middle class was changing. The difference between lower-middle and upper-middle was becoming more defined in terms of manners and outlook, and the number of servants a family could afford to hire: just a cook and a maid-of-all-work? Or an array of different kinds of help? At the top of the scale, what mattered was that the house was beautiful – and by extension the woman beautiful, for she occupied the centre of this world, holding its elements in genteel suspension.

      Rooms in late-Victorian upper-middle-class homes grew cluttered as hoarding fine things became a moral prerogative – conveniently for those who wanted to be both genteel and righteous; to reconcile, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, ‘piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass’.27 As the design historian Deborah Cohen notes: ‘Women’s СКАЧАТЬ