Jobs for Women: the Angel in the Workforce

For 465 years, from 1377 to 1835 [the Ship and Turtle Tavern] was run by a succession of widows. During the Victorian era, the Ship and Turtle Tavern even supplied several of the West-end clubhouses. Source.

And yet we speak of working women as the exception in the Victorian era. Was that the case?

During the Industrial Revolution in the UK, young people (including women) were moving to cities at an unprecedented rate. Usually, a young person would arrive and stay with, or in the neighbourhood of, a person who knew their family, which resulted in regional concentrations of religious and cultural groups. It also created large households of people who were loosely connected.

In these households, everyone did their part (including women and children). Family economics of this type had long been the norm in rural populations, but in cities, women’s work was frequently downplayed, or entirely overlooked, as the emphasis increasingly focused on the male as breadwinner.

Victorian culture’s emphasis on separate spheres overplays the “Angel in the Household” motif, which simply doesn't describe the reality for many Victorian women and families. The obvious example being female heads-of-house, such as widows.

Moreover, the industrial revolution increased the demand for female and child labour, who could be paid less than their adult male counterparts. Still, forty percent of female occupations listed on the census of 1851 were in domestic service, with textiles and clothing services in a near second place. Women did much of the delicate work in factories that produced household goods and participated in trades that suited ideals of femininity, such as kitchen work, sewing, laundry, and retail.

Dore's Woman Pedlar.

While 'upper' working class women rented shops, the 'lower' hawked on the streets and beaches. They sold flowers, toffee apples, ice cream, cold drinks, shrimps, oysters and whelks, and offered donkey and goat rides and even fortune-telling, sometimes by budgerigar. Source.

Even in the middle- and upper-classes, the ideal of the Angel in the Household doesn’t adequately describe all that was taking place. Not only were women, like Rachel Beer, dominating the world of journalism, but many widowed and single-women had no choice, but to earn money to support their standard of living. Some, like Marie Corelli and Lady Jane Wilde (Speranza), did so by writing, but many widows carried on the family business after the death of their spouse. Many middle- and upper-class women could be found working as governesses, running boarding houses, or managing properties for income. Many of these women also played important roles in family businesses as silent partners, bookkeepers, administrative workers, and more.

Three fully-clothed women hiking their skirts at the
shoreline of the beach in Averne, Wallace G. Levison, 1897

By the 1890s, stories of the New Woman, who was educated and independent, began to emerge. Many of these women resented the stereotypes that depicted all women as seeking a husband to support them.

For more information, two excellent sources are the BBC and the Economic History Association.

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First Lady of Fleet Street

Fleet Street was already known in London of the 1890s as the haunt and workplace of news reporters. By the 1890s, journalism was beginning to be an "acceptable" career for women. Perhaps, the most exceptional of these early women journalists was Rachel Beer, who has been made the subject of a book that acknowledges her contributions.

Beer won her place in journalism history by capturing the world exclusive of Count Esterhazy's forgery of the letters in the Dreyfus Affair. Beer was born into the famous Sasoon family and, although she always remained proud of her Jewish roots, she faced prejudice throughout her life and career. She converted to Anglicanism when she married Frederick Beer, whose influence in the publishing industry admittedly afforded many of the opportunities that led to her success.

Still, it takes amazing strength of character in the face of so many obstacles to achieve all she did.

The following is a 2011 Guardian review of the book about her life: First Lady of Fleet Street.

Next month sees the publication of a book about the remarkable Rachel Beer, the woman who famously edited the Sunday Times and The Observer simultaneously.

As the title indicates, she was First Lady of Fleet Street because she was the first female editor of national newspapers.

It helped that they were owned by her financier husband, Frederick, but she proved to be a woman of enormous energy, writing with equal enthusiasm for each paper for several years in the 1890s.

When editing The Observer she was credited with overseeing what would now be called, rightly, a 'world exclusive' - the revelation in 1896 that the document that had been used to convict the French military officer Alfred Dreyfus for treason was a forgery by his fellow officer.

Beer was regarded as both a rebel and a pioneer. At a time when women were still denied the vote, she was barred from frequenting the London clubs that fed her rival male editors with political gossip and also from the press gallery of the House of Commons.

Undaunted, she raised her formidable voice on national and foreign politics as well as taking a controversial stand on social and women's issues.

She was wealthy in her own right, as the scion of the Sassoon family that had amassed a fortune in Indian opium and cotton. Her marriage to Frederick Beer brought together two wealthy dynasties.

But it also brought her strife because her husband's father abandoned the Jewish religion, which led to Rachel being disowned by many of her proudly Jewish family. When her husband died, her family conspired to have her certified.

No wonder the book's sub-title refers to "the fortune and tragedy of Richael Beer". It was written by Yehuda Koren and Eilat Negev, and is due to be published on 24 April.

The book is available through Random House for $30.00.

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