The politics of work: Feminism, professionalisation and women inspectors of factories and workshops

Women's History Review

Volumn 13, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 233-262

  Livesey, Ruth ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33748321363     PISSN: 09612025     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09612020400200391     Document Type: Review

References (50)

1. Miss L. Marshall, Report of the Conference of Women at Bristol, Charity Organisation Review (1892), pp. 413-442 (p. 442)
2. Ada Heather-Bigg, for example, was one of several women who combined campaigning for SPEW and the WPPL during the 1880s. For the role of the Langham Place Group in nineteenth-century feminism and its relationship with liberal political theory, see Barbara Caine (1997) English Feminism, 1780-1980, pp. 93-115 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)
3. See Patricia Hollis (1987) Ladies Elect: women in English local government, 1865-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press) for a detailed examination of the campaign for and election of women Guardians and School Board members
4. Isabella Ford (1904 facsimile reprint) Women and Socialism, in Marie Mulvey Roberts (Ed.) The Reformers: socialist feminism, p. 17 (London: Routledge, 1993)
5. Laura Prieto (2001) At Home in the Studio: the professionalisation of women artists in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press)
6. Regina G. Kunzel (1993) Fallen Women and Problem Girls: unmarried mothers and the professionalisation of social work, 1890-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press)
7. June Hannam (1997) Rosalind Paget: the midwife, the women's movement and reform before 1914, in Hilary Marland & Anne-Marie Rafferty (Eds) Midwives, Society and Childbirth: debates and controversies in the early modern period, pp. 81-100 (London: Routledge)
8. Rose E. Squire (1927) Thirty Years in the Public Service: an industrial retrospect (London: Nisbet)
9. Adelaide Anderson (1922) Women in the Factory: an administrative adventure, 1893-1921 (London: John Murray)
10. Hilda Martindale (1944) From One Generation to Another: a book of memories (London: George Allen & Unwin)
11. see also Hilda Martindale (1938) Women Servants of the State, 1870-1938: a history of women in the Civil Service (London: George Allen & Unwin)
12. Gertrude Tuckwell (1931) Constance Smith: a short memoir (London: Duckworth)
13. Mary Drake McFeely (1988) Lady Inspectors: the campaign for a better workplace, 1893-1923 (Oxford: Blackwell)
14. Helen Jones (1988) Women Health Workers: the case of the first women factory inspectors in Britain, Social History of Medicine, 1, pp. 165-181
15. Jones, 'Women Health Workers', p. 171
16. Rosemary Feurer (1988) The Meaning of'Sisterhood': the British women's movement and protective labor [sic] legislation, 1870-1914, Victorian Studies, 31, pp. 233-260 (p. 250)
17. Philippa Levine (1990) Feminist Lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment (Oxford: Blackwell) pp. 157-175 (p. 165)
18. Lucy Deane Business Diary, 30 March 1896, MRC, MSS 69/1/15. Ada Heather-Bigg was a prominent activist in SPEW and the Vigilance Association (the Personal Rights Association after 1886) throughout the 1880s and 1890s. Lucy Deane first met her in November 1893 at the women workers' conference in Leeds: 'Travelled up with ... Miss Heather-Bigg -excitable & impractical Women's Industrial Union & Sanitary Assoc. - said she took great interest in me & would back me up in my endeavours, -Individualist, i.e. the Worn. Indus. Union is against limiting labour of women by factory regulations ... & against bringing laundries under [factory regulations]'. Lucy Deane Business Diary, 7 November 1893, MRC, MSS 69/1/1
19. At a meeting of the Women's Emancipation Union in 1896 Deane was frustrated at not being able to allay the fear 'that the F. Acts will turn women out of work' as 'Being officials we couldn't stand up & say that this is not the case - that legislation by improving calibre of women makes them too valuable to be turned out'. Lucy Deane Business Diary, 14 October 1896, MRC, MS 69/1/16
20. Emilia Dilke took over the leadership of the then Women's Protective and Provident League on the death of Emma Paterson, its founder, in 1887. Over the next five years the League, which promoted the organisation of working women, changed its name to the Women's Trade Union League and its policy from anti-interventionist to pro-legislative. For an analysis of the WTUL and its role in the changing feminist attitude to protective legislation, see Feurer, 'The Meaning of Sisterhood'
21. Josephine Butler (1869) Women's Work and Women's Culture, p. xxxi (London: Macmillan)
22. The campaign to prevent the prohibition of women pit brow workers during 1886-87 is the best known of these many efforts now, thanks to Angela John's admirable work; see Angela V. John (1980) By the Sweat of Their Brow: women workers at Victorian coal mines, pp. 125-168 (London: Croom Helm)
23. For example, the efforts of the Langham Place associate, Emily Faithfull, in establishing the Victoria Press, staffed by female compositors; see Lee Holcombe (1973) Victorian Ladies at Work: middle-class working women in England and Wales, 1850-1914, pp. 18-20 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles)
24. Feurer notes the centrality of the concept of work to the Langham Place associates and lists the following texts as indicators of this preoccupation: Barbara Leigh Smith (1857) Women and Work (London: Bosworth & Harrison)
25. Bessie Raynor Parkes (1866) Essays on Women's Work (London: Strahan)
26. Josephine Butler (1868) The Education and Employment of Women (London: Macmillan)
27. Josephine Butler (Ed.) Women's Work and Women's Culture
28. Emily Faithfull (1871) Women's Work, With Special Reference to Industrial Employment (London: Victoria Press); Feurer, 'The Meaning of Sisterhood', p. 234
29. Beatrice Webb (1896) Women and the Factory Acts, Fabian Tract 67, reprinted in Sally Alexander (Ed.) Women's Fabian Tracts, pp. 17, 18 (London: Routledge). Webb also cultivated a relationship with the women factory inspectors, in particular Rose Squire, inviting them to a number of informal meetings at her home to discuss the prospect of organising a '"Committee of Experts" for publishing information on factory & industrial legislation' during February 1896: Lucy Deane, Business Diary, MRC, MSS 69/1/14
30. Webb, 'Women and the Factory Acts', p. 19
31. Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1892 xxxv
32. See, for example, the evidence of Mr Edward Shortt and Mr Charles Tees, Charles Booth and Clementina Black, PP 1892 xxxv
33. 'An Onlooker', The Appointment of Women Factory Inspectors, Queen, 4 February 1893, p. 197
34. The Factory and Workshop Act of 1891 Section 3 (2) gave local Sanitary Authorities the same powers of entry and inspection in workshops as the Factory Inspectorate. Kensington Local History Library (KLHL) Monthly Report of MOH, June, 1893
35. KLHL Monthly Report of MOH, June, 1893
36. KLHL Monthly Report of MOH, December, 1895
37. Although the 1890s represented a period of growth for the employment of women as local authority sanitary inspectors, the particular responsibility of the Kensington women inspectors for workshops was unusual. The National Health Society paid for Lucy Deane to travel to Manchester in early 1894 to find out about the women sanitary inspectors employed there. She noted with disappointment that these were more 'Official District Visitors' than inspectors. Whilst retaining women sanitary inspectors throughout the period of this study, the Kensington Vestry gave them increasing responsibility for home health visiting, employing a number of 'Health Visitors' (at a lower salary) to complement this work. This follows the pattern of 'feminisation' and downgrading of women sanitary inspectors' work outlined in Celia Davis (1988) The Health Visitor as Mother's Friend: a woman's place in public health, 1900-1914, Social History of Medicine, 1, pp. 39-59
38. Lucy Deane Business Diary, 16 February 1894, MRC, MS 69/1/3
39. KLHL Monthly Report of MOH, April 1894
40. Martindale, From One Generation to Another, p. 73
41. A background in philanthropic work still continued to be the standard experience required for women factory inspectors into the early twentieth century. Constance Smith was appointed as a senior lady inspector in 1913, after fifteen years of working for the Christian Social Union and the National Organisation of Girl's Clubs in London. Only a few months before her appointment she had been part of a delegation lobbying for the extension of protective labour legislation and the appointment of more women inspectors. See Tuckwell, Constance Smith; Public Records Office (PRO) LAB 14/196
42. Lucy Deane Business Diary, 10 January 1895, MRC, MS 69/1/9
43. Kunzel, Fallen Girls, p. 3
44. Memo from Adelaide Anderson to Chief Inspector of Factories, 13 September 1905, PRO HO 45/10327/132951
45. When the women inspectors were regionalised in 1908 and Rose Squire moved to Manchester to become Senior Lady Inspector in the Northern Division, she felt that finally the support for the lady inspectors in the provinces had come to match that in the metropolis: 'Social service in every form was then attracting women of all classes and various degrees of education in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Bradford, and we of the Civil Service were eagerly consulted as 'experts' on much that was agitating the awakening civic sense of women at that period'. Squire, Thirty Years in the Public Service, p. 184
46. See David Cannadine (1990) The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, p. 246, pp. 281-282 (New Haven: Yale University Press) for a discussion of the influence of the Hardinge family. Margot Tennant was shortly to become the second Mrs Asquith, and was a sister of the Home Office Secretary, H.J. Tennant
47. Harold Perkin (1989) The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880, p. 155 (London: Routledge)
48. Cannadine, Decline and Fall, p. 240 points out that the Home Office finally complied with the Order in Council regarding competitive examination in 1873, but 'the first competitive entrant only arrived in 1880, and patronage appointments continued nevertheless'
49. Hannam, 'Rosalind Paget' p. 87, discusses a similar point made by Rosalind Paget that the Midwives' Institute must move away from the 'narrow outlook of mere trades unionism' to broader social welfare objectives
50. The departments were merged in 1921 after lengthy debate. See McFeeley, Lady Inspectors, pp. 154-159 and Jones, 'Women Health Workers', pp. 175-177