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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Parenty's Smoking Machine

After finding a list of bizarre Victorian inventions, I couldn't get the first one out of my head. It was a smoking machine. The list's author claimed that Victorians loved the smell of smoke so much that they used this machine or proposed it for use in bars and clubs, where there weren't enough smokers already.

This put the image in my head of smokers waving around sticks of incense instead of cigarettes, while people nearby react as if they are engaged in some form of aromatherapy. If this sounds ridiculous, its because it is. The smoking machine pictured in the amusing list of bizarre Victorian inventions was called Parenty's Smoking Machine and I found evidence of its intended use for cigarette and cigar manufacturers.

We produce herewith, from La Nature, an illustration of a novel apparatus, called by its inventor, Mr. Parenty, a "smoking machine." Tobacco manufacturers make their cigars out of quite a large number of different leaves, whose physical and chemical qualities have to be combined as to yield an articile that gives out an agreeable odor and burns well. Combustibility, then, is a physical quality that must be estimated for each variety of leaf. Such estimate is made by measuring the time during which a certain style of cigar, made solely from the tobacco to be tested, holds its fire without drawing on it a second time. In this comparative determination the intensity of the lighting is the element that has to be determined and regulated. To accomplish this is the object of the machine under consideration, which is so constructed as to imitate the motions of a smoker, who, at regular intervals, would inhale a definite volume of air with a definite and constant force of suction.

I am omitting the middle of the article because it focuses on the mechanics of Parenty's Smoking Machine, but if you are interested you can find it in issue 54 of Scientific American (23 January 1886).

This ingenious apparatus, which does its inventor great credit, was presented to the Administration of Tobaccos in 1884, and excited great interest at the Anvers Exhibition. 

 Producing a smoking machine for use by the manufacturers of tobacco products makes a lot more sense than using a machine that smokes individual cigarettes to fill a bar with smoke. Sadly, the inventor is only identified as "Mr. Parenty," but a more curious mind might check into the documentation from what was presented to the Administration of Tobaccos in 1884. I suspect, because this was published in 1886, the Mr. Parenty did quite well for himself with this invention.

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