'Not the ordinary victorian charity': The society for promoting the employment of women archive

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 49, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 220-230

  Tusan, Michelle Elizabeth ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 24944433309     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/2000.49.220     Document Type: Article

References (34)

1. For Britain, see Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920, Chicago, 1985;
2. Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England, Oxford, 1990;
3. and Lee Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, Hamden, 1973, for discussions of the character and influence of women's networks in nineteenth-century Britain.
4. Other studies that have focused on the influence of particular organizations or campaigns in mobilizing women as activists include: Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, Cambridge, 1993;
5. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society, Cambridge, 1980;
6. F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England, London, 1980;
7. and Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery, London, 1992.
8. See Ray Strachey, The Cause, London, 1928,
9. and Sylvia Pankhurst, The Suffragette Movement, London, 1931,
10. as well as later surveys of the history of feminism in Britain such as Olive Banks, Becoming a Feminist: The Social Origins of First-Wave Feminism Brighton, 1981;
11. Martin Pugh's Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 1914-1959 London, 1992;
12. and Harold Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century, Aldershot, 1990.
13. Recently, historians have started to demonstrate the importance of understanding the business side of women's associational life as another part of the story of women's emancipation. See for example Kathleen Waters Sander's study of the Women's Exchange Movement in the United States, The Business of Charity, Chicago, 1998,
14. and Gillian Scott's study of the Women's Co-operative Guild in England, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women, London, 1998.
15. The first official meeting of the Society where minutes were recorded was held in January 1860. This first report contains a hand-transcribed copy of the by-laws and membership requirements.
16. Boucherett was the last surviving member of her family and a woman of independent means. She was educated at a 'noted ladies school' and described by contemporaries as a strong individualist. 'Obituary', The Times, 21 Oct., 1905;
17. Antoinette Mackenzie, 'Obituary', Englishwoman's Review, Jan. 1906. These two obituaries are pasted in the beginning of the SPEW General Committee Minutes, volume 1901-16.
18. See Candida Ann Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, London and New York, 1987;
19. Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Feminist, Artist and Rebel: a biography, London, 1998.
20. The Society was officially affiliated with the NAPSS in December of 1861. Through this connection SPEW during its early years held a distinguished list of members including Lord Shaftesbury, who acted as president until his death in 1885; Gladstone, Sir Page Wood, and the Oxford Bishops were among its first Vice-Presidents. The NAPSS was disbanded in 1886.
21. Information on the early history and daily functioning of SPEW comes primarily from the Society's minute books and annual reports held at Girton College.
22. Incorporation as a limited liability company was made possible under the Companies Acts of 1856 and 1857. Boucherett was the primary shareholder and was a strong financial supporter of SPEW until her death in 1905.
23. Holcombe, Victorian Ladies at Work, pp. 7-10.
24. 'History of SPEW', Early History Box, SPEW archives, Girton.
25. Gertrude King, Handwritten draft of retrospective statement on SPEW, Early History Box.
26. As note 12.
27. For more on SPEW's direct role getting women into the printing trades and publishing professions, see Michelle Elizabeth Tusan, 'The Making of the Women's Political Press', Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 1999.
28. Boucherett to Bodichon, 29 June 1859, Early History Box.
29. SPEW General Committee Minutes, 9 Jan. 1891. The minutes further reveal that women often approached SPEW with funding requests for their own projects based on skills they already had in areas such as cookery and needlepoint.
30. SPEW Managing Committee Minutes, 29 Oct. 1875. The minutes offer more extensive details of this project: As Messrs. _ Studio at South Kensington at which ladies were employed in painting on China was burnt down on Sep. 17th and as the firm have resolved not to rebuild it, and not to employ ladies any longer in London, the secretary stated that three of those who had been working there for some time had resolved, if possible, to establish a business for themselves. Messrs. _ gave them every encouragement to do this, offering to supply them with pottery colours, etc. at wholesale prices, to underglaze their work and to recommend them for giving lessons, if they have the opportunity of doing so.
31. SPEW General Committee Minutes, 29 Oct. 1880.
32. Comments by Daphne Sidebottom, SPEW Financial Records, Women's Loan Training Fund, 5 Sept. 1963.
33. SPEW Financial Records, Women's Loan Training Program Report for 1966.
34. Comments recorded in the Women's Loan Training Fund Records, 5 Sept. 1963.