Excerpt from Chapter 2
OCCUPATIONS
working women simply did not exist (except for an exceptional minority who
became famous actresses. The expression ‘women’s work’ was
synonymous with low pay and low status. It was almost invariably without
promotion, authority, pension or security. Even nursing was ‘disorganised
and disreputable’ until Florence Nightingale turned it into a profession in
the 1860s. There were at least 2.8 million and maybe as many as 3.1 million
women working for wages in the 1850s, the highest ever recorded and a
proportion not seen again until after 1945. The 1851 Census revealed that
three-quarters of spinsters and one-quarter of widows were gainfully
employed. The employment of wives is less easily stated, as will be
explained later.
It was taboo for well-educated, middle class girls to attempt to make a living from
their skills because masculine pride dictated that men should support their
womenfolk. Take, for example, Brighton resident Sophia Jex-Blake, who in the
late 1840s wanted to teach maths. Her father grudgingly allowed her to, but would
not permit her to accept the salary. However, some middle class women — known
as ‘distressed gentlewomen’ — were forced to support themselves by their own
endeavours. Writer Anna Jameson (who lived in Brighton 1854–60) noted that if
one considered the widows or daughters of ‘attorneys and apothecaries,
tradesmen and shopkeepers, banker’s clerks &c, in this class more than two-
thirds of the women are now obliged to earn their own bread.’ A few might find
employment as a personal companion; for example, Jane Weeks, a spinster
of twenty-six, was a ‘Company Keeper’ in Brightling in the 1850s. Virtually
all women had the necessary experience to perform needlework and any
woman with a modicum of education could be a governess. These were also seen
as ‘natural’ professions for women and appropriate even for those of the middle
class. These were, therefore, very overcrowded occupations.
For working class women there were plenty of jobs performing ill-paid drudgery
for their social superiors. Most lived in varying degrees of poverty, despite being
employed for ten to sixteen hours a day. For example, although Joanna Taylor
worked as a laundress in Hastings for fifty years, she was unable to put anything
aside for her old age and when she became too old to work had no choice but to
apply for parish relief. The highest ranking employment that a working class
woman could obtain was as matron of a public institution and even then her
status automatically dropped a step if a male governor or master was employed.
Although women in Sussex worked in nearly 200 different occupations, over 80%
were in just five jobs: domestic service, the clothing trades, laundering, lodging
house keeping and shopkeeping. David Foster’s survey of the directories that
were published about 1848 identified women in 150 trades in Sussex. Of these,
22% were in retailing, 24% in manufacturing (mainly in the clothing trades) and
13% in the service sector (such as lodging house keepers and bathing-machine
proprietors). In eighty-five cases, a woman was the only member of her sex in that
trade.2 While towns in other parts of Britain had large factories and textile mills,
Sussex had no single large employer of women. In Stedham, some women
worked in a paper factory and, in the Worthing area, a small number was involved
in brickmaking. According to M. Beswick’s study of the brickmaking industry,
women were employed only on a casual basis when men were not available:
‘The women of the family were frequently pressed into service in the yard
when labour was in short supply.’
Census abstracts show that in Sussex in 1851 there was no occupation in which
the sexes came even close to being equal in number. Men comprised 99% of
labourers, 98% of the employees of national and local government and the
learned professions, and 80% of those working with minerals or vegetables and
possessing or working the land. Women comprised three-quarters of those
engaged in ‘entertaining, making clothing, and performing personal offices’, and
two-thirds of those involved in ‘literature, the fine arts and the sciences.’
According to the 1861 Census, 63% of Sussex women were ‘unwaged or
undefined’. This figure included women with annuities, pensions, and allowances
given by relations; wives supported by husbands; inmates of workhouses, gaols
and asylums; and those receiving parish relief. The remaining 37% (43,235
women) were self-supporting: 5% derived their income from property ownership
and 32% either worked for someone or ran their own business.
Women usually gained more responsibility and status if they could establish a
small business rather than being employed. Not only could they keep the fruits of
their labour; they could, in theory at least, work in areas that were closed to them
as employees. Most women with small businesses were laundresses,
needlewomen, milliners and dressmakers, work which they carried out in their
own homes. Opening a shop took capital, which few women had or could raise. A
lower middle class woman with a small inheritance might establish a millinery
shop; a working class woman with a little capital might open a small grocery or
secondhand clothes (then called ‘left-off clothing’) shop, usually in a poor area.
UNEMPLOYMENT
If a woman could not work through sickness or lack of available employment, and
had no one to support her, she had few choices. There were no national
unemployment or sickness benefits, only small handouts from the parish. After
1834 it became harder than before to obtain even small sums from the parish
and, in any case, such ‘outdoor relief’, as it was called, was rarely given to single
women. They were supposed to obtain instead ‘indoor relief’ by entering one of
the many grim workhouses that were spread across the county (and the country)
by the late 1830s. As the only alternative was to go ‘on the street’ as a hawker,
beggar, thief or prostitute it is hardly surprising that many women either married or
cohabited with a slightly more affluent man, swapping domestic and other
services for financial support. This inevitably placed the woman in a
subordinate position within the relationship and usually resulted in having
more mouths to feed.
Friendly or benefit societies offered a modicum of financial support to employed
subscribers over short spells of illness or injury, but these were mainly for men
and the vast majority of working women had no access to them. From the 1850s
a few were established for women; one of them, the St Mary’s Female Assurance
Society, was established in Hastings. It invited applications for membership from
‘females whose time is money, and who, in sickness, can ill afford to lose that
time’.
WIVES
The idea that in the nineteenth century all married women did not work is a
myth, so far as the poorer classes are concerned. Traditionally, all members
of a family were involved in home-based trades, but the process of industrial
revolution gradually divided the sexes into ‘breadwinner’ and ‘housewife’. Keeping
his wife out of the workplace came to signify respectability and increased a man’s
social status. It became an ideal to which many members of the ambitious working
class aspired, but few achieved. Nonetheless, it led people with pretensions to
gentility to conceal wives’ paid employment.
The likelihood of a wife’s being employed depended on her husband’s income. If
he was a skilled worker she might devote herself to raising a family; if a trader,
she might join him in business. But should she marry a labouring man, or one
whose employment was seasonal, or insecure, or who became unable to work
through infirmity or alcoholism, she might need to earn money throughout her
married life.
It should not be supposed that married women worked for wages only in dire
financial circumstances; many Sussex wives were employed, or ran businesses,
even though their husbands appear to have been able to support them. In
Brighton, for example, feathermaker and French florist Mary Gillman was married
to a dyer, while in Hastings egg-merchant Elizabeth Collins was married to a
shoesmith. In workhouses it was typical for the matron to be the wife of the
governor and the schoolmistresses to be the wife of the schoolmaster. Many
women combined careers with motherhood; for example, schoolmistress and
sexton’s wife Jane Smith of Hastings was the mother of two children, and the
aforementioned Mrs. Collins was raising seven while running her egg business. It
is interesting to note that working mothers were so prevalent in mid-nineteenth-
century Sussex that churches opened crèches especially to cater for them.
The 1851 Census was fundamentally flawed in relation to wives’ work. It reported
that 2.8 million women* in England and Wales, and 22% of all married women
over twenty were in paid work. These figures are now accepted by historians to
be underestimates. One reason for the inaccuracy is that census enumerators
were instructed that ‘The profession of wives … living with their husbands and
assisting them … need not be set down.’ In 1851 the typical business was a
family one, and so the number of working wives omitted from the census must
surely run into hundreds of thousands.
To give just one example, Harriet Fisher of 56 High Street, Hastings, advertised
and was listed in trade directories as a confectioner, and another source*
confirms that she worked in and managed, the shop. However, according to the
census, her husband was the confectioner and Harriet was officially recorded as
‘unoccupied’.
A second reason for the census’s inaccuracy lies with the women themselves. For
many reasons, they did not tell the census enumerators that they worked for
wages. Some of them wanted to protect their husband’s dignity by pretending that
he earned enough to support them. Others did not see their work as sufficiently
important to be worth mentioning. Typically, wives’ paid work was unskilled, part-
time, casual, seasonal or domestic. A wife might not declare that she was a paid
childminder, went out charring or performed paid work in her own home, for
example other people’s laundry, needlework, or the manufacture of small items
such as boxes. She, or whoever gave the family’s employment particulars to the
enumerator, may not have deemed such lowly labour worthy of the title
‘occupation’.
As the census cannot be relied upon to tell us the number of married women who
were employed, we may consider other sources. Harriet Martineau analysed the
1851 Census data and concluded that half of Britain’s six million women worked
for wages; that is, 200,000 more than the census showed. Bessie Rayner Parkes,
a Sussex resident and specialist on female employment, computed that 3.1 million
women were gainfully employed in 1860, of whom 1.5 million were married. She
reckoned that 37% of married women worked, considerably more than the census
figure of 22%. As the century progressed, real wages for skilled men rose, and
more of them were able to support their wives. Whereas about one in four wives
worked for wages in the 1850s, only about one in ten did so by 1911.
Owing to property laws and social customs, official documents — such as deeds
and licensing records — also fail to help us discover the extent of wives’ work in
family businesses. Social custom dictated that only the husband’s name be used
for publicity, although a few people disregarded this. So, although it was
customary for a small shop or business to be run jointly by husband and wife, it
appeared only in the husband’s name. Often, the only record of wives carrying
out such work is hidden, like a needle in a haystack, within documents unrelated
to female employment. These sources reveal that wives not only served the
public but worked behind the scenes, stocktaking, ordering and book-keeping.
Only from the reminiscences of Thomas Brett do we know that a woman in
Hastings was her husband’s chauffeuse. Anna Maria Savery, who married a busy
surgeon in 1829, ‘was seen almost daily out driving with the doctor in his
professional rounds, and taking command of the horse and carriage’.Similarly,
during an embezzlement case in Brighton in 1868, it emerged that a Mrs.
Maynard worked as her husband’s book-keeper.* Such employment was of
course omitted from the census returns, because they were instances of ‘wives
assisting husbands’.
How people organised their finances in the nineteenth century is a subject worthy
of research and is outside the scope of this book, and so I cannot say whether
wives working in family businesses were paid a wage or given a share of the
takings for their personal use. Everything a woman earned belonged to her
husband in any case, so for him to pay her for working in ‘his’ business, while still
legally retaining ownership of her wages, would have been a little absurd. It
seems likely that the husband gave his wife an allowance to run the household,
regardless of whether or not she worked in the business.
Very few women were recorded in directories and censuses as being in
partnership with their husbands. One was Rebecca Fenner of Mayfield: she
and her husband were tailors and woollen-drapers who also acted as agents
for the Phoenix Fire & Life Assurance company. At Steyning, George and Harriett
Mitchell were brewers, maltsters, farmers and coal merchants. Priscilla Brown of
St Leonards was a partner in her husband’s business (he was a master-
bricklayer employing three men) and 'Mrs. and Mr. Thomas Baker' were clothes
dealers in Duke St, Brighton.
A pub, small hotel, or lodging house, although listed in a man’s name,
was usually run jointly by a married couple and, in some cases, the wife had
sole charge while her husband followed a different occupation. A married
woman could not be a licensee, regardless of the circumstances. Even if her
husband took no part whatsoever in the business, it was always licensed in
his name. In 1864 Mr. Brockwell, summonsed to court in relation to a
Hastings lodging house registered in his name, explained that he knew
nothing about the business: it belonged entirely to his wife while he worked
elsewhere. Under the laws of coverture, the law found him responsible.
When in 1844 the licensee of the Horse and Groom in Worthing — widow
Elizabeth Hopkins — remarried, the licence had to be transferred to her new
husband, Henry Budd. Elizabeth carried on as landlady, but the records appear
to show that Mr. Budd replaced Mrs. Hopkins. Jane Cox, whose husband was a
complete invalid, supported the whole family, including four children, by running
the Dun Horse beer-shop at 29 Albion Street, Hastings, for three years from
1857. However, the licence was not transferred to her until after her husband’s
death in 1860. These two examples illustrate how easily women’s participation
was hidden and how hard it is for historians to establish the extent to which
married women ran licensed premises. For instance, if a list of licensees shows
fifty women and fifty men, we cannot tell in how many cases the male name
conceals a licensee who was a married woman.
In businesses that did not require licensing, wives could be listed in the census
and other documents as the proprietor, provided she could overcome what Helen
Taylor called women’s ‘timidity and dread of exposing their names to public
observation’. Women very rarely inherited family businesses from their fathers
because they were passed over in favour of sons. It was more frequent for a
woman to inherit from her husband.
WIDOWS
The most powerful evidence of wives’ involvement in family businesses was the
universal practice of their taking over, seemingly automatically, after their
husbands’ death. Records show that this was the custom long before 1800. Most
interestingly, by this method women became the proprietors of trades that were
considered unsuitable for them: blacksmith, butcher, glazier, plumber, painter,
farrier, brickmaker, currier, cooper, gas fitter, coal merchant, fly proprietor,
builder, cabinet maker, copperplate printer and harnessmaker. No woman would
have been accepted as an employee into any of these kinds of trades, either as
a manager, a worker or an apprentice; and yet many women ran such businesses
successfully and, in some cases, expanded them as they prospered.
Details of the day-to-day running of small businesses are scarce and it is
difficult to establish women’s involvement in ‘male’ manual trades. Prejudice may
lead us to assume that women performed none of the work themselves but we
have no way of discovering the truth. Modern-day sexist assumptions about
Victorian women may be wrong: after all, photographic evidence exists that a
widow worked as a gravedigger in Sussex in the 1880s, having taken over the job
from her late husband. Work requiring an apprenticeship is unlikely to have been
undertaken by the woman herself. An embezzlement trial in 1841 revealed that a
widow, Martha Brook, who inherited her husband’s milk business at Preston, took
no part in the work. She engaged a man as a milk-carrier and her son as manager
and book-keeper.
Many women who took over their late husbands’ trade clearly stated this in their
advertisements. Perhaps they wanted to announce that it was ‘business as
usual’, despite the man’s demise, or to reassure society in general that they were
widows struggling nobly to support their families, and not ‘strong-minded’
Bloomerists audaciously setting up in a male trade.
Hannah Brazier was born in Framfield in 1816. She married Thomas Pullinger
and lived at 21 Dean Street, Brighton, and later in Union Street, where he had a
business as a picture frame maker and gilder, apprenticing his two teenage sons
to the trade. Widowed in 1862, she took over the business and is listed in her
own name in the trades directories as a carver and gilder, while her son is shown
in the 1871 Census as a gilder and framemaker. In her hands the business
prospered and expanded; by 1881 she was also selling books, was occupying 8,
9 and 10 Union Street and employing three men and four boys. Her sister-in-law
and sister were employed as her housekeeper and cook. She handed the
business on to her son William, who by 1901 was listed as an employer, a
bookshop and circulating library, a ‘manager of fine art gilding’, and also as a
registrar of marriages, at 7, 8, 9 and 10 Union Street and also at London Road.
Hannah Morton was born in 1806 in Derbyshire. She and her husband
moved to Hastings and opened a china and glass business. By 1841 she was
a widow with children aged two, five and fifteen. The business became very
successful, and she removed it from 27 High Street to larger premises at
number 43. Later she opened further branches, one at 13 Castle Street and
another at 72 Norman Road, St Leonards, where her widowed daughter Mary
Ann was manager. Mrs. Morton retired in 1877 and lived above her shop at 43
High Street until her death ten years later. Two of Mrs. Morton’s shop receipts,
beautifully illustrated with an etching of the Crystal Palace, are preserved at
Hastings Museum. The receipts are headed ‘H. Morton’ and do not, therefore,
reveal the gender of the shops’ owner — a further example of how women’s
participation in trade can so easily be rendered invisible.
Ann Kenney (born 1811) of 26 Upper St James’s Street, Brighton, was married in
the 1830s to a master butcher employing two men who lived on the premises.
She had three children and a resident servant. Widowed in her forties, she took
control of the business, retaining one of the two butchers. She retired by 1881
and moved to 12 Rock Street, where she lived with her daughter Frances, a
confectioner’s assistant.
Charlotte Osborne, née Sargent, was born in 1814. She was involved in many
retail enterprises in a career spanning forty years, as well as bearing thirteen
children by two husbands. Her first husband was a cabinetmaker, and while
married to him she was a furniture seller at 43 George Street. Later she opened
a stationer’s shop, first at 27 Castle Street and later at Caroline Place. After
being widowed she married a printer, and opened a fruit shop at 55 George
Street. This was later a Berlin Wool and Fancy Repository in the 1850s. Widowed
again in 1861 she took over the printing business, employing her son as
compositor. Mrs. Osborne died in 1898 at the age of eighty-four. The printing
press is on display at Hastings Old Town Hall Museum, where it is labelled as
having belonged to Mr. Osborne; Mrs. Osborne is not mentioned. And so another
woman is hidden from history.
In 1861 Sarah Neve (b1810) of 9 Undercliffe, St Leonards, was married to a
master plumber, painter and glazier employing twenty men and two boys. When
he died in 1864 she took over the business and advertised in trades’ directories.
She died in 1896.
End of excerpt from Chapter 2. To continue reading this chapter
order your copy of Women of Victorian Sussex
Go on to an excerpt from Chapter 3
OCCUPATIONS
- The economical position of women is one of those subjects on
which there exists a ‘conspiracy of silence.’ While most people,
perhaps, imagine that nearly all women marry and are supported
by their husbands, those who know better how women live, or
die, have rarely anything to say on the subject.
Josephine Butler, 1868
working women simply did not exist (except for an exceptional minority who
became famous actresses. The expression ‘women’s work’ was
synonymous with low pay and low status. It was almost invariably without
promotion, authority, pension or security. Even nursing was ‘disorganised
and disreputable’ until Florence Nightingale turned it into a profession in
the 1860s. There were at least 2.8 million and maybe as many as 3.1 million
women working for wages in the 1850s, the highest ever recorded and a
proportion not seen again until after 1945. The 1851 Census revealed that
three-quarters of spinsters and one-quarter of widows were gainfully
employed. The employment of wives is less easily stated, as will be
explained later.
It was taboo for well-educated, middle class girls to attempt to make a living from
their skills because masculine pride dictated that men should support their
womenfolk. Take, for example, Brighton resident Sophia Jex-Blake, who in the
late 1840s wanted to teach maths. Her father grudgingly allowed her to, but would
not permit her to accept the salary. However, some middle class women — known
as ‘distressed gentlewomen’ — were forced to support themselves by their own
endeavours. Writer Anna Jameson (who lived in Brighton 1854–60) noted that if
one considered the widows or daughters of ‘attorneys and apothecaries,
tradesmen and shopkeepers, banker’s clerks &c, in this class more than two-
thirds of the women are now obliged to earn their own bread.’ A few might find
employment as a personal companion; for example, Jane Weeks, a spinster
of twenty-six, was a ‘Company Keeper’ in Brightling in the 1850s. Virtually
all women had the necessary experience to perform needlework and any
woman with a modicum of education could be a governess. These were also seen
as ‘natural’ professions for women and appropriate even for those of the middle
class. These were, therefore, very overcrowded occupations.
For working class women there were plenty of jobs performing ill-paid drudgery
for their social superiors. Most lived in varying degrees of poverty, despite being
employed for ten to sixteen hours a day. For example, although Joanna Taylor
worked as a laundress in Hastings for fifty years, she was unable to put anything
aside for her old age and when she became too old to work had no choice but to
apply for parish relief. The highest ranking employment that a working class
woman could obtain was as matron of a public institution and even then her
status automatically dropped a step if a male governor or master was employed.
Although women in Sussex worked in nearly 200 different occupations, over 80%
were in just five jobs: domestic service, the clothing trades, laundering, lodging
house keeping and shopkeeping. David Foster’s survey of the directories that
were published about 1848 identified women in 150 trades in Sussex. Of these,
22% were in retailing, 24% in manufacturing (mainly in the clothing trades) and
13% in the service sector (such as lodging house keepers and bathing-machine
proprietors). In eighty-five cases, a woman was the only member of her sex in that
trade.2 While towns in other parts of Britain had large factories and textile mills,
Sussex had no single large employer of women. In Stedham, some women
worked in a paper factory and, in the Worthing area, a small number was involved
in brickmaking. According to M. Beswick’s study of the brickmaking industry,
women were employed only on a casual basis when men were not available:
‘The women of the family were frequently pressed into service in the yard
when labour was in short supply.’
Census abstracts show that in Sussex in 1851 there was no occupation in which
the sexes came even close to being equal in number. Men comprised 99% of
labourers, 98% of the employees of national and local government and the
learned professions, and 80% of those working with minerals or vegetables and
possessing or working the land. Women comprised three-quarters of those
engaged in ‘entertaining, making clothing, and performing personal offices’, and
two-thirds of those involved in ‘literature, the fine arts and the sciences.’
According to the 1861 Census, 63% of Sussex women were ‘unwaged or
undefined’. This figure included women with annuities, pensions, and allowances
given by relations; wives supported by husbands; inmates of workhouses, gaols
and asylums; and those receiving parish relief. The remaining 37% (43,235
women) were self-supporting: 5% derived their income from property ownership
and 32% either worked for someone or ran their own business.
Women usually gained more responsibility and status if they could establish a
small business rather than being employed. Not only could they keep the fruits of
their labour; they could, in theory at least, work in areas that were closed to them
as employees. Most women with small businesses were laundresses,
needlewomen, milliners and dressmakers, work which they carried out in their
own homes. Opening a shop took capital, which few women had or could raise. A
lower middle class woman with a small inheritance might establish a millinery
shop; a working class woman with a little capital might open a small grocery or
secondhand clothes (then called ‘left-off clothing’) shop, usually in a poor area.
UNEMPLOYMENT
If a woman could not work through sickness or lack of available employment, and
had no one to support her, she had few choices. There were no national
unemployment or sickness benefits, only small handouts from the parish. After
1834 it became harder than before to obtain even small sums from the parish
and, in any case, such ‘outdoor relief’, as it was called, was rarely given to single
women. They were supposed to obtain instead ‘indoor relief’ by entering one of
the many grim workhouses that were spread across the county (and the country)
by the late 1830s. As the only alternative was to go ‘on the street’ as a hawker,
beggar, thief or prostitute it is hardly surprising that many women either married or
cohabited with a slightly more affluent man, swapping domestic and other
services for financial support. This inevitably placed the woman in a
subordinate position within the relationship and usually resulted in having
more mouths to feed.
Friendly or benefit societies offered a modicum of financial support to employed
subscribers over short spells of illness or injury, but these were mainly for men
and the vast majority of working women had no access to them. From the 1850s
a few were established for women; one of them, the St Mary’s Female Assurance
Society, was established in Hastings. It invited applications for membership from
‘females whose time is money, and who, in sickness, can ill afford to lose that
time’.
WIVES
The idea that in the nineteenth century all married women did not work is a
myth, so far as the poorer classes are concerned. Traditionally, all members
of a family were involved in home-based trades, but the process of industrial
revolution gradually divided the sexes into ‘breadwinner’ and ‘housewife’. Keeping
his wife out of the workplace came to signify respectability and increased a man’s
social status. It became an ideal to which many members of the ambitious working
class aspired, but few achieved. Nonetheless, it led people with pretensions to
gentility to conceal wives’ paid employment.
The likelihood of a wife’s being employed depended on her husband’s income. If
he was a skilled worker she might devote herself to raising a family; if a trader,
she might join him in business. But should she marry a labouring man, or one
whose employment was seasonal, or insecure, or who became unable to work
through infirmity or alcoholism, she might need to earn money throughout her
married life.
It should not be supposed that married women worked for wages only in dire
financial circumstances; many Sussex wives were employed, or ran businesses,
even though their husbands appear to have been able to support them. In
Brighton, for example, feathermaker and French florist Mary Gillman was married
to a dyer, while in Hastings egg-merchant Elizabeth Collins was married to a
shoesmith. In workhouses it was typical for the matron to be the wife of the
governor and the schoolmistresses to be the wife of the schoolmaster. Many
women combined careers with motherhood; for example, schoolmistress and
sexton’s wife Jane Smith of Hastings was the mother of two children, and the
aforementioned Mrs. Collins was raising seven while running her egg business. It
is interesting to note that working mothers were so prevalent in mid-nineteenth-
century Sussex that churches opened crèches especially to cater for them.
The 1851 Census was fundamentally flawed in relation to wives’ work. It reported
that 2.8 million women* in England and Wales, and 22% of all married women
over twenty were in paid work. These figures are now accepted by historians to
be underestimates. One reason for the inaccuracy is that census enumerators
were instructed that ‘The profession of wives … living with their husbands and
assisting them … need not be set down.’ In 1851 the typical business was a
family one, and so the number of working wives omitted from the census must
surely run into hundreds of thousands.
To give just one example, Harriet Fisher of 56 High Street, Hastings, advertised
and was listed in trade directories as a confectioner, and another source*
confirms that she worked in and managed, the shop. However, according to the
census, her husband was the confectioner and Harriet was officially recorded as
‘unoccupied’.
A second reason for the census’s inaccuracy lies with the women themselves. For
many reasons, they did not tell the census enumerators that they worked for
wages. Some of them wanted to protect their husband’s dignity by pretending that
he earned enough to support them. Others did not see their work as sufficiently
important to be worth mentioning. Typically, wives’ paid work was unskilled, part-
time, casual, seasonal or domestic. A wife might not declare that she was a paid
childminder, went out charring or performed paid work in her own home, for
example other people’s laundry, needlework, or the manufacture of small items
such as boxes. She, or whoever gave the family’s employment particulars to the
enumerator, may not have deemed such lowly labour worthy of the title
‘occupation’.
As the census cannot be relied upon to tell us the number of married women who
were employed, we may consider other sources. Harriet Martineau analysed the
1851 Census data and concluded that half of Britain’s six million women worked
for wages; that is, 200,000 more than the census showed. Bessie Rayner Parkes,
a Sussex resident and specialist on female employment, computed that 3.1 million
women were gainfully employed in 1860, of whom 1.5 million were married. She
reckoned that 37% of married women worked, considerably more than the census
figure of 22%. As the century progressed, real wages for skilled men rose, and
more of them were able to support their wives. Whereas about one in four wives
worked for wages in the 1850s, only about one in ten did so by 1911.
Owing to property laws and social customs, official documents — such as deeds
and licensing records — also fail to help us discover the extent of wives’ work in
family businesses. Social custom dictated that only the husband’s name be used
for publicity, although a few people disregarded this. So, although it was
customary for a small shop or business to be run jointly by husband and wife, it
appeared only in the husband’s name. Often, the only record of wives carrying
out such work is hidden, like a needle in a haystack, within documents unrelated
to female employment. These sources reveal that wives not only served the
public but worked behind the scenes, stocktaking, ordering and book-keeping.
Only from the reminiscences of Thomas Brett do we know that a woman in
Hastings was her husband’s chauffeuse. Anna Maria Savery, who married a busy
surgeon in 1829, ‘was seen almost daily out driving with the doctor in his
professional rounds, and taking command of the horse and carriage’.Similarly,
during an embezzlement case in Brighton in 1868, it emerged that a Mrs.
Maynard worked as her husband’s book-keeper.* Such employment was of
course omitted from the census returns, because they were instances of ‘wives
assisting husbands’.
How people organised their finances in the nineteenth century is a subject worthy
of research and is outside the scope of this book, and so I cannot say whether
wives working in family businesses were paid a wage or given a share of the
takings for their personal use. Everything a woman earned belonged to her
husband in any case, so for him to pay her for working in ‘his’ business, while still
legally retaining ownership of her wages, would have been a little absurd. It
seems likely that the husband gave his wife an allowance to run the household,
regardless of whether or not she worked in the business.
Very few women were recorded in directories and censuses as being in
partnership with their husbands. One was Rebecca Fenner of Mayfield: she
and her husband were tailors and woollen-drapers who also acted as agents
for the Phoenix Fire & Life Assurance company. At Steyning, George and Harriett
Mitchell were brewers, maltsters, farmers and coal merchants. Priscilla Brown of
St Leonards was a partner in her husband’s business (he was a master-
bricklayer employing three men) and 'Mrs. and Mr. Thomas Baker' were clothes
dealers in Duke St, Brighton.
A pub, small hotel, or lodging house, although listed in a man’s name,
was usually run jointly by a married couple and, in some cases, the wife had
sole charge while her husband followed a different occupation. A married
woman could not be a licensee, regardless of the circumstances. Even if her
husband took no part whatsoever in the business, it was always licensed in
his name. In 1864 Mr. Brockwell, summonsed to court in relation to a
Hastings lodging house registered in his name, explained that he knew
nothing about the business: it belonged entirely to his wife while he worked
elsewhere. Under the laws of coverture, the law found him responsible.
When in 1844 the licensee of the Horse and Groom in Worthing — widow
Elizabeth Hopkins — remarried, the licence had to be transferred to her new
husband, Henry Budd. Elizabeth carried on as landlady, but the records appear
to show that Mr. Budd replaced Mrs. Hopkins. Jane Cox, whose husband was a
complete invalid, supported the whole family, including four children, by running
the Dun Horse beer-shop at 29 Albion Street, Hastings, for three years from
1857. However, the licence was not transferred to her until after her husband’s
death in 1860. These two examples illustrate how easily women’s participation
was hidden and how hard it is for historians to establish the extent to which
married women ran licensed premises. For instance, if a list of licensees shows
fifty women and fifty men, we cannot tell in how many cases the male name
conceals a licensee who was a married woman.
In businesses that did not require licensing, wives could be listed in the census
and other documents as the proprietor, provided she could overcome what Helen
Taylor called women’s ‘timidity and dread of exposing their names to public
observation’. Women very rarely inherited family businesses from their fathers
because they were passed over in favour of sons. It was more frequent for a
woman to inherit from her husband.
WIDOWS
The most powerful evidence of wives’ involvement in family businesses was the
universal practice of their taking over, seemingly automatically, after their
husbands’ death. Records show that this was the custom long before 1800. Most
interestingly, by this method women became the proprietors of trades that were
considered unsuitable for them: blacksmith, butcher, glazier, plumber, painter,
farrier, brickmaker, currier, cooper, gas fitter, coal merchant, fly proprietor,
builder, cabinet maker, copperplate printer and harnessmaker. No woman would
have been accepted as an employee into any of these kinds of trades, either as
a manager, a worker or an apprentice; and yet many women ran such businesses
successfully and, in some cases, expanded them as they prospered.
Details of the day-to-day running of small businesses are scarce and it is
difficult to establish women’s involvement in ‘male’ manual trades. Prejudice may
lead us to assume that women performed none of the work themselves but we
have no way of discovering the truth. Modern-day sexist assumptions about
Victorian women may be wrong: after all, photographic evidence exists that a
widow worked as a gravedigger in Sussex in the 1880s, having taken over the job
from her late husband. Work requiring an apprenticeship is unlikely to have been
undertaken by the woman herself. An embezzlement trial in 1841 revealed that a
widow, Martha Brook, who inherited her husband’s milk business at Preston, took
no part in the work. She engaged a man as a milk-carrier and her son as manager
and book-keeper.
Many women who took over their late husbands’ trade clearly stated this in their
advertisements. Perhaps they wanted to announce that it was ‘business as
usual’, despite the man’s demise, or to reassure society in general that they were
widows struggling nobly to support their families, and not ‘strong-minded’
Bloomerists audaciously setting up in a male trade.
Hannah Brazier was born in Framfield in 1816. She married Thomas Pullinger
and lived at 21 Dean Street, Brighton, and later in Union Street, where he had a
business as a picture frame maker and gilder, apprenticing his two teenage sons
to the trade. Widowed in 1862, she took over the business and is listed in her
own name in the trades directories as a carver and gilder, while her son is shown
in the 1871 Census as a gilder and framemaker. In her hands the business
prospered and expanded; by 1881 she was also selling books, was occupying 8,
9 and 10 Union Street and employing three men and four boys. Her sister-in-law
and sister were employed as her housekeeper and cook. She handed the
business on to her son William, who by 1901 was listed as an employer, a
bookshop and circulating library, a ‘manager of fine art gilding’, and also as a
registrar of marriages, at 7, 8, 9 and 10 Union Street and also at London Road.
Hannah Morton was born in 1806 in Derbyshire. She and her husband
moved to Hastings and opened a china and glass business. By 1841 she was
a widow with children aged two, five and fifteen. The business became very
successful, and she removed it from 27 High Street to larger premises at
number 43. Later she opened further branches, one at 13 Castle Street and
another at 72 Norman Road, St Leonards, where her widowed daughter Mary
Ann was manager. Mrs. Morton retired in 1877 and lived above her shop at 43
High Street until her death ten years later. Two of Mrs. Morton’s shop receipts,
beautifully illustrated with an etching of the Crystal Palace, are preserved at
Hastings Museum. The receipts are headed ‘H. Morton’ and do not, therefore,
reveal the gender of the shops’ owner — a further example of how women’s
participation in trade can so easily be rendered invisible.
Ann Kenney (born 1811) of 26 Upper St James’s Street, Brighton, was married in
the 1830s to a master butcher employing two men who lived on the premises.
She had three children and a resident servant. Widowed in her forties, she took
control of the business, retaining one of the two butchers. She retired by 1881
and moved to 12 Rock Street, where she lived with her daughter Frances, a
confectioner’s assistant.
Charlotte Osborne, née Sargent, was born in 1814. She was involved in many
retail enterprises in a career spanning forty years, as well as bearing thirteen
children by two husbands. Her first husband was a cabinetmaker, and while
married to him she was a furniture seller at 43 George Street. Later she opened
a stationer’s shop, first at 27 Castle Street and later at Caroline Place. After
being widowed she married a printer, and opened a fruit shop at 55 George
Street. This was later a Berlin Wool and Fancy Repository in the 1850s. Widowed
again in 1861 she took over the printing business, employing her son as
compositor. Mrs. Osborne died in 1898 at the age of eighty-four. The printing
press is on display at Hastings Old Town Hall Museum, where it is labelled as
having belonged to Mr. Osborne; Mrs. Osborne is not mentioned. And so another
woman is hidden from history.
In 1861 Sarah Neve (b1810) of 9 Undercliffe, St Leonards, was married to a
master plumber, painter and glazier employing twenty men and two boys. When
he died in 1864 she took over the business and advertised in trades’ directories.
She died in 1896.
End of excerpt from Chapter 2. To continue reading this chapter
order your copy of Women of Victorian Sussex
Go on to an excerpt from Chapter 3
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| Excerpts |
Women of Victorian Sussex
Their Status, Occupations and Dealings with the Law 1830~1870