The Invisible Woman: Aspects of Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain 2005922123, 9780754635727

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
General Editor's Preface
List of Figures
List of Contributors
Introduction
PART I: WOMEN IN THE DOMESTIC SPHERE
1 The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
2 The Representation of Housework in the Eighteenth-Century Women's Press
3 Needlework and the Rights of Women in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century
4 Governesses of the Royal Family and the Nobility in Great Britain, 1750-1815
PART II: WOMEN IN MALE STRONGHOLDS
5 The Labour and Servitude of Women in the Highlands of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century
6 Women in the Army in Eighteenth-Century Britain
7 Hospital Nurses in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Service without Responsibility
8 Claiming their Place in the Corporate Community: Women's Identity in Eighteenth-Century Towns
9 Women Barred from Masonic 'Work': A British Phenomenon
PART III: WOMEN AND THE CULTURAL SCENE
10 The Actress and Eighteenth-Century Ideals of Femininity
11 Women in Action: Elizabeth Inchbald, Heroines and Serving Maids in British Comedies of the 1780s and 1790s
12 Profession: Siren—The Ambiguous Status of Professional Women Musicians in Eighteenth-Century England
13 The Lee Sisters: Eighteenth-Century Commercial Heroines
14 Eighteenth-Century Images of Working Women
Index

Citation preview

The Invisible Woman

The Invisible Woman Aspects of Women's Work in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Edited by ISABELLE BAUDINO

Ecole Normale Superieure Lyon, France JACQUES CARRE

Universite, Paris IV-Sorbonne, France CECILE REVAUGER

University of Bordeaux III, France

~~ ~~o~;!~n~~:up LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright ©Isabelle Baudino, Jacques Carre and Cecile Revauger 2005 The editors have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data The invisible woman : aspects of women's work in eighteenth-century Britain. -(Studies in labour history) 1. Women employees - Great Britain - History - 18th century 2. Women - Great Britain- Social conditions- 18th century I. Baudino, Isabelle II. Carre, Jacques III. Revauger, Cecile 331.4'0941 '09033 Library of Congress Control Number: 2005922123 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3572-7 (hbk)

Contents s

General Editor Preface List of Figures List of Contributors

vii ix XI

Introduction I. Baudino, J. Carre and C. Revauger PART I: WOMEN IN THE DOMESTIC SPHERE

2

3

4

The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Gilly Lehmann

9

The Representation of Housework in the Eighteenth-Century Women's Press Marie-Claire Rouyer-Daney

27

Needlework and the Rights of Women in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century Christine Hivet

37

Governesses of the Royal Family and the Nobility in Great Britain, 1750-1815 Sophie Loussouarn

47

PART II: WOMEN IN MALE STRONGHOLDS

5

The Labour and Servitude of Women in the Highlands of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century Marie-Helene Thevenot- Totems

59

6

Women in the Army in Eighteenth-Century Britain Guyonne Leduc

75

7

Hospital Nurses in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Service without Responsibility Jacques Carre

89

vi

8

9

The Invisible Woman

Claiming their Place in the Corporate Community: Women's Identity in Eighteenth-Century Towns Deborah Simonton

101

Women Barred from Masonic 'Work': A British Phenomenon Cecile Revauger

ll7

PART III: WOMEN AND THE CULTURAL SCENE 10

II

12

13 14

The Actress and Eighteenth-Century Ideals of Femininity Severine Lancia

131

Women in Action: Elizabeth Inchbald, Heroines and Serving Maids in British Comedies of the 1780s and 1790s Angela J. Smallwood

139

Profession: Siren-The Ambiguous Status of Professional Women Musicians in Eighteenth-Century England Pierre Dubois

147

The Lee Sisters: Eighteenth-Century Commercial Heroines Marion Marceau

161

Eighteenth-Century Images of Working Women Isabelle Baudino

173

Index

183

Studies in Labour History General Editor's Preface Labour history has often been a fertile area of history. Since the Second World War its best practioners-such as E. P. Thompson and E. J. Hobsbawm, both Presidents of the British Society for the Study of Labour History-have written works which have provoked fruitful and wide-ranging debates and further research, and which have influenced not only social history but history generally. These historians, and many others, have helped to widen labour history beyond the study organised labour to labour generally, sometimes to industrial relations in particular, and most frequently to society and culture in national and comparative dimensions. The assumptions and ideologies underpinning much of the older labour history have been challenged by feminist and later by postmodemist and anti-Marxist thinking. These challenges have often led to thoughtful reppraisals, perhaps intellectual equivalents of coming to terms with a new post-Cold War political landscape. By the end of the twentieth century, labour history had emerged reinvigorated and positive from much introspection and external criticism. Very few would wish to confine its scope to the study of organised labour. Yet, equally, few would wish now to write the existence and influence of organised labour out of nations' histories, any more than they would wish to ignore working-class lives and focus only on the upper echelons. This series of books provides reassessments of broad themes oflabour history as well as some more detailed studies arising from recent research. Most books are single-authored but there are also volumes of essays centred on important themes or periods, some arising from major conferences organised by the Society for the Study of Labour History. The series also includes studies of labour organisations, including international ones, as many of these are much in need of a modem reassessment. Chris Wrigley British Society for the Study of Labour History University ofNottingham

List of Figures Fig. 5.1 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 52 (author's collection)

69

Fig. 5.2 From: Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772] (London: Benj. White, 1776), 328 (author's collection)

70

Fig. 5.3 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 85 (author's collection)

71

Fig. 5.4 'Graddaning' (Sketch from the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, Edinburgh)

72

Fig. 5.5 From: Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772] (London: Benj. White, 1776), 246 (author's collection)

73

Fig. 5.6 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 130 (author's collection)

74

List of Contributors IsABELLE BAUDINO is lecturer in British cultural history at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon. She works on Georgian art and aesthetics. She has published Peinture et historicite: les mutations de la peinture d'histoire en Grande-Bretagne, 1707-1768 (Liiie, 1997). JACQUES CARRE is professor of British cultural history at the Sorbonne (Universite Paris IV). He currently works on poverty and charity in the Georgian and Victorian ages. He has edited Ecrire la pauvrete: les enquetes sociales britanniques aux XJXe et xxe siecles (Paris, 1995) and Les Visiteurs du pauvre: anthologie d'enquetes britanniques sur la pauvrete urbaine, XJXe-xxe siecles (Paris, 2000). PIERRE DuBOIS is lecturer in British cultural history at the Sorbonne (Universite Paris IV). He works on music and aesthetics in the Georgian age. He has published L 'Orgue dans la societe anglaise: ethique et esthetique de la moderation (Lille, 1997) and is currently editing Charles Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (to be published by Ashgate). CHRISTINE RIVET is a lecturer in the English department at the University of Caen. She works on eighteenth-century literature and the condition of women. She has published Voix de femmes: roman feminin et condition feminine de Mary Wollstonecraft aMary Shelley (Paris, 1997). SEVERINE LANCIA is completing a doctoral thesis on the social status of late Georgian actresses. GUYONNE LEDUC is professor of English literature at the Universite Charles de Gaulle in Lille. She has published L 'Education des Anglaises au XVIIIe siecle: la conception de Henry Fielding (Paris, 1999) and edited L 'Education des femmes en Europe et en Amerique du nord de la Renaissance a 1848 (Paris, 1997). GILLY LEHMANN is a professor in the English department at the University of Franche-Comte in Besan~on. She is the author of several articles, in English and in French, on seventeenth and eighteenth-century cookbooks and cookery. She is a contributor to the New DNB and to the Oxford Companion to Food. Her most recent publication is The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Prospect Books, 2003). SoPHIE LoussouARN is a lecturer in the English department at the Universite de Picardie in Ami ens. She works on the education of women and on manners in the Georgian age.

xii

The Invisible Woman

MARION MARCEAU is a lecturer in the English department at the Universite of Paris IX-Dauphine. She has written a thesis on the life and work of the late eighteenth-century novelists Sophia and Harriet Lee. CECILE REvAUGER is professor of British cultural history at the Universite Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux. She works on the history of freemasonry and the history of ideas. She has published Le Fait Ma9onnique au XVIIJe siecle en Grande-Bretagne et aux Etats-Unis (Paris, 1990) and edited Pauvrete et assistance en GrandeBretagne, 1688-1834 (Aix-en-Provence, 1999). MARIE-CLAIRE RoUYER-DANEY is professor of English at the Universite Michel de Montaigne in Bordeaux. She is a specialist of the Georgian stage and also works in women's studies. DEBORAH SIMONTON teaches at the University of Aberdeen. Her recent publications include Gendering Scottish History (Glasgow, 1999) and A History of Women:S Work, 1700 to the Present (London, 1998). ANGELA J. SMALLWOOD is a senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Nottingham and was awarded a British Academy Readership to launch her research into eighteenth-century women playwrights. Her recent publications include: 'Women and Theatre' in V. Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1700-IBOO (Cambridge, 2000) and Plays ofElizabeth lnchbald, Vol. 6 of D. Hughes (gen. ed.), Eighteenth-Century Women Playwrights, (London, 2001 ). MARIE-HELENE THEVENOT-TOTEMS is professor of Scottish Studies at the Sorbonne (Universite Paris IV). She has collaborated in creating the CD-ROM 'Georgian Cities' (Paris, 2000) with a research team from the Sorbonne. She is the author of La decouverte de l 'Ecosse du XVIIJe siecle a travers les recits des voyageurs britanniques (Paris, 1990, 2 vols) and she has published many articles on eighteenth century Scota1nd.

Introduction I. Baudino, J. Carre and C. Revauger

Since Alice Clark's pioneering study 1 most social historians writing about working women in pre-nineteenth-century Britain have tried to throw light on fairly large occupational groups of working women, such as factory workers2 or domestic servants,3 often in an attempt to reach some conclusive evidence as to the evolution of their general standards ofliving. 4 Another approach has led feminist historians to look for the major reason for working women's exploitation: was it class? was it gender?5 Without ignoring these crucial questions, the present book, written by cultural historians, focuses on the status of small, sometimes even tiny groups of women holding fairly marginal positions in the labour market, and often employed on an irregular basis. Women like housekeepers, hospital nurses, camp followers, governesses, actresses, musicians, to take some of the cases examined here, generally did not have stable, permanent employments. Even female tradesmen, sometimes succeeding a husband or brother, often worked only for a short period of their lives. The temporary, unreliable character of such work can of course be partly related to the changing needs of women at different periods of their lives, but it also has a lot to do with the status of women's work at the time. One major field of enquiry in this book is therefore the degree of recognition of women's skills in Georgian society. Many jobs occupied by women were related to domestic skills, and for this reason most employers refused to confer them a high status on the labour market. It has often been remarked by historians that domestic

2 3 4

5

Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1919). Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London: Routledge, 1930); Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1956); Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). Bridget Hill, Women, Work and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England, 2nd. ed. (Montreal & Kingston: MeGill-Queen's University Press, 1994); Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850 (London: Macmillan, 1996). For a presentation of the controversy over the relative importance of sex oppression and class oppression, see chapters 2 and 3, respectively by Bridget Hill and Judith Bennett, in Pamela Sharpe ed., Womens Work: The English Experience 1650-1914 (London: Arnold, 1998).

2

The Invisible Woman

work was not recognized as 'real' work. 6 And even salaried work outside the home was far from being primarily considered in terms of skill. For example a servant's place was seen above all as the proper station for a poor girl, rather than as a proper job, or even a source of income. In fact, many types of female employment were hardly perceived as 'work' at all: governesses' work was mostly seen as an extension of maternal duties; and actresses' performances as a morally suspect mixture of art and exhibitionism. These two examples, examined in the present book, alert us to the necessity of constantly relating women's work, from the most menial to the most 'artistic', from the hearth to the stage, to the construction of femininity in the eighteenth century. The notion that a woman might have a profession (and the corresponding status and income) was almost unthinkable, as Mary Wollstonecraft complained in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): How many women thus waste away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads ... 7

And yet, some of the occupations examined here, such as those of housekeepers in the houses of the gentry, matrons in the new infirmaries, businesswomen in various trades, involved highly skilled supervisory tasks. As for the actresses and musicians discussed in the third part of this book, they had undergone serious training and often achieved considerable professional competence. One major contention of this book, then, is that the contemporary perception of the range of women's employments did not correspond to what it really was: far from being employed exclusively in domestic and pseudo-domestic tasks, working women were also found (or should we say hidden away?) in supervisory and professional jobs. This contention has led us to deal with a second major issue, that of the representation of women's work. It is not just the relative lack of archival sources on women's work that invites the cultural historian to use indirect evidence as found in the press, in essays, even in plays and pictures. As shown by Pierre Dubois, in the case of musicians, and Isabelle Baudino, in the case of street-sellers, the texts and images showing women at work have an ideological significance. They tend to ignore women's skills and their actual conditions of work, in order to concentrate on their supposedly 'natural' abilities, which often boil down to sexual characteristics. The reality of women's work was then often denied or distorted in the name of a postulated essence of woman. For example, as soon as a woman was 'in the public eye', either on stage, or in a picture, the question of her identity was implicitly raised. Why should she be offered for public inspection, if her proper place was the seclusion of domesticity? The only possible answer was: as an object of (male) desire. Yet when she was engaged in paid work, a woman could no longer be exclusively considered a sexual object. And then her identity as a worker tended to become

6 7

See for example Caroline Davidson, A Woman s Work is never Done: A History of Housework, 1650-1850 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1982). Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman [1792] (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1999) 230.

Introduction

3

invisible, or more accurately unrepresentable. Thus it was only in virtue of their picturesqueness that working women were included in George Walker's Costumes of Yorkshire (1814 ). This relative invisibility of the Georgian working woman should precisely invite us to reconsider the codes of representation as historical evidence. The reader will fmd here case-studies of women's work in three different environments: first middle- and upper-class households, secondly male-dominated communities and institutions, and fmally the world of the arts. The first part of the book features women working and ladies living in genteel households. They were inevitably involved in class relationships, yet what the present contributors concentrate on is status rather than class, trying to identify the distinctions between menial and supervisory tasks, between skills and accomplishments, between dependent and autonomous work. It is shown here that the eighteenth century saw a general downgrading of domestic work, accompanied by a new distribution of roles among the women in the household. Thus, in the first chapter, Gilly Lehmann explores the domestic background of the new female gentility: while the fashionable lady increasingly despised domestic management, this task was now taken up by the new class of professional housekeepers. This increasing estrangement of the genteel woman from domestic tasks is further explored by Marie-Claire Rouyer-Daney in chapter 2 where she examines the picture of housekeeping provided by magazines for middle-class women from the 1750s. Their pages reflected an uneasiness with the new fashionable ideal of elegant idleness that Wollstonecraft so pungently criticized in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. At the same time, in a context of moralization of conjugal life, the magazines recommended a sublimated form of domestic work, as they praised the merits of certain 'accomplishments' like needlework and embroidery. Christine Rivet, however, warns us in chapter 3 against systematically identifying needlework as a symbol of women's alienation. Using literary sources, she shows how needlework, after all, could be perceived as a useful skill in the context of charitable work, and even Gust like hack-writing!) as a humble job providing some modest independence to single women. The imaginary world of a novel thus allows us to explode the stereotype of useless needlework, and to see how such typically domestic work may be related to the world outside the home. The fourth chapter, by Sophie Loussouarn, takes the reader into the highly conservative atmosphere of royal and aristocratic mansions. In the royal family, the late eighteenth-century governesses were still comparable to the waiting gentlewomen of the previous century, and were indeed part of the establishment. But in aristocratic country-houses, on the contrary, governesses belonging to a much humbler social sphere increasingly took over the teaching formerly performed by the lady of the house, in striking parallel with the emergence of the housekeeper as professional domestic manager. The second part of the book begins by three chapters illustrating the relentless exploitation of working women in various environments that can be described as 'male strongholds', and where women's work was restricted to domestic, or rather pseudo-domestic, drudgery. Life in Scottish clans, in the army, in the infirmaries, involved working women in some sort of public life in the sense that they daily met people outside their immediate family circle. Yet for them the frontier between the 'sphere' of domesticity and the outside world was far from clear. Our case-studies suggest that working outside the conjugal household did not necessarily foster

4

The Invisible Woman

autonomy and independence. The curiously parallel cases of the slave-like Highland wives, explored by Marie-Helene Thevenot-Totems, and of women camp-followers, studied by Guyonne Leduc, provide examples of the inability of women to secure either respect or status in the more archaic male-dominated milieus. For example women working in the army often tended to be considered as prostitutes. Yet campfollowers were in fact mainly housekeepers, sutlers, nurses, laundresses, cooks (and even occasionally soldiers). The extreme case of the Highlands gender structure interestingly contrasts male idleness with female industry, and the reader will note the shocked response of enlightened travellers faced with what was for them an exotic Highlands culture, and connecting economic backwardness with archaic gender roles. In the case of hospital nurses, studied by Jacques Carre, one finds a less unusual but more sophisticated form of female exploitation by males. Nurses were not just the general drudges of the new Georgian 'infirmaries'. They were also constantly reminded of their ignorance by the medical men who dominated these charitable but science-driven institutions. They thus found themselves in an impossible situation, being reproached with irresponsibility while they were refused any kind of training before the nursing reforms of the mid-Victorian age. The world of urban commerce was also dominated by men, in particular through guilds and corporations. But here the prospects were less dark for ambitious women. Economically dynamic cities could be a favourable environment for businessminded women. As Debbie Simonton shows in the case of commercial Aberdeen, a small percentage of women, often widows or single women, managed to become independent by setting up their own small businesses, especially in trades seen as feminine (such as millinery, mantua-making, lace-making, etc.). Some of these women might enter into female partnerships, take apprentices, even join guilds, and sometimes secure an enviable economic position and social status. Simonton's chapter thus confirms the fmdings of Hannah Barker about women's involvement in the urban printing trade: 'Neither technological innovation nor the development of "separate spheres" ideology appear to have made women less likely to play active roles in heading businesses.' 8 The last, and most impregnable male stronghold examined here is freemasonry. In the days of 'operative' masonry, a few women, surprisingly, had been admitted into the stonemasons' guilds of the seventeenth century. But when, at the beginning of the next century, the masonic lodges ceased to be actual working units and became for the most part social clubs, in keeping with the mainstream men's clubs and coffee-houses, women had to leave. They were no longer welcome as full members of the lodge but only encouraged to boost the ego of their husbands by doing charitable work and thus operating for the good name of the lodge. The third part of this book is devoted to some of the connections between women's work and the 'public' world of leisure and culture-first with women performing in public and secondly with the representations of women at work.

8

Hannah Barker, 'Women, work and the industrial revolution: female involvement in the English printing trades, c.l700-1840', in H. Barker and E. Chalus, eds., Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997) 100.

Introduction

5

Severine Lancia and Pierre Dubois illustrate the problematic status of actresses and professional female musicians in an age when public appearance on stage was often interpreted as a commercialization of the female body, and was therefore morally repellent. Public opinion tended to ignore the artistic skills and techniques that had to be acquired by them, and to consider that what was exhibited was themselves rather than their art. Singers and actresses provide good examples of the reduction of women's qualifications to a mere 'essence', a downgrading that tends to deny not just the skills, but the very existence of women's work. In the late eighteenth century, however, there was an increasing interplay between the stage and the town, in the sense that fashionable female behaviour could now be influenced by plays, as well as the reverse. Lancia demonstrates how new types of heroines, especially in genteel sentimental comedies, had an influence on the current behaviour and/or image of some actresses who now began to boast about their genteel way of life. On the other hand, as Angela Smallwood shows, some of Elizabeth Inchbald's upper class heroines borrowed some of their vitality from the stock character of the proactive maidservant, without sacrificing their claim to femininity. Here the stage seemed to open the way for a possible redefmition of socially acceptable female behaviour. In real life, some single women even managed to combine several images of womanhood at the same time: the Lee sisters, as Marion Marceau demonstrates, managed the feat of simultaneously living several lives at the same time, as school mistresses, fashionable ladies as well as commercial authors of Gothic fiction. But would have this been possible outside the sophisticated world of Bath or London? This part of the book concludes on Isabelle Baudino's study of the relatively scarce pictures of working women. As she remarks, there was a general 'euphemization' of women's work in the eighteenth century whenever it was publicly visible or represented by artists. This was clear not just in the 'pretty' pictures of girls in the engraved series The Cries of London. More generally the quasi-absence of images of professional women or of women carrying out their own businesses distorts the reality of their involvement in such activities. Whereas men were represented as writers, painters or actors, it was not the case for women. There is no female equivalent of the superb portrait by Hogarth of Garrick as Richard III. Dubois recounts the telling story of Elizabeth Linley-Sheridan who was painted by Reynolds in the guise of Saint Cecilia, but only after she had given up her career as professional singer to become a presumably modest and virtuous wife. The case of women painters is specially interesting since they appear to have been reluctant to represent themselves in the practice of their art. Mary Grace's self-portrait, which she dared to entitle Mrs Grace, paintress is an exception and even Mary Moser or Angelica Kauffmann, tended to avoid direct references to their profession or to conceal them behind mythology. 9 Both Moser and Kauffmann, who were among the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768, were even excluded from the group portrait of academicians that Johann Zoffany painted at the beginning of the 1770s. In The Academicians at the Royal Academy, they do not appear in the flesh, but as mere pictures facing each other on the wall whereas 9

On Mary Grace see Marcia Pointon, Strategies for Showing. Women, Possession and Representation in English Visual Culture 1665-1800 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1997).

6

The Invisible Woman

their male counterparts are taking part in an instructive life class. It has been said that the painter had deemed it improper to show women looking at nude men. Yet drawing from life was an essential part of artists' training and by denying women access to these classes, he was casting doubts on the reality of their presence and thus of the reality of their academic status. It is clear that working women were even less appropriate subjects for academic painters. The strict definition of genres excluded images of industrious people from history paintings or landscapes and even from portraits. The bias against them is obvious since practically no illustration of female work inside households can be found. I 0 William Hogarth was something of a maverick when he painted pictures such as Heads of Servants or The Shrimp Girl in the 1750s. Indeed work was generally never represented per se but only appeared in the setting of everyday life scenes. On the rare occasions when labouring women were represented, they tended in fact either to be idealized or ridiculed. One can easily figure out that drudging servants or sellers carrying very heavy quantities of goods were far from picturesque. Yet, in engravings, they were inevitably translated into elegant figures or quaint characters. Both idealization and ridicule in the modes of representation betray the uneasiness and disapproval of eighteenth-century British society towards all female workers, even when they belonged to the lower classes. Since helplessness was considered as an intrinsic feminine quality, producing an image representing women capable of earning their livelihood was almost unthinkable. The reluctance of artists to picture women's work is typical of the general blindness of the Georgian elites to women's work. When this work took place within the domestic circle, it seemed so 'natural' as hardly to raise an eyebrow. Lady Pennington's An Unfortunate Mother's Advice to her Absent daughters (1761) clearly stated: 'The management of all domestic affairs is certainly the proper business ofwoman.'ll But women's salaried work outside the home was a different matter altogether, as it had a potentially destabilizing, even transgressive effect in British society. This may be why it, too, was kept invisible.

I0

II

For a detailed analysis of this situation see more particularly Tim Meldrum, 'London Domestic Servants from Depositional Evidence 1660-1750: Servant-Employer Sexuality in the Patriarchal Household', in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe' eds., Chronicling Poverty: The Voices and Strategies ofthe English Poor, 16401840 (London: Macmillan, 1997) 47-69. Lady Pennington, An Unfortunate Mothers Advice to her Absent Daughters [1760] (Dublin, 1790) 77.

PART I WOMEN IN THE DOMESTIC SPHERE

Chapter 1

The Birth of a New Profession: The Housekeeper and her Status in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries Gilly Lehmann

Although there have now been several studies of eighteenth-century servants since Hecht's book, The Domestic Servant Class, appeared in 1956, most have enlarged our knowledge by focusing on servants in general, with particular emphasis on women and on service in houses below the level of the aristocracy, whether in the analysis of the parish settlement examinations at St Martin's-in-the-Fields by D. A. Kent (1989), 1 which attempted to make more visible the unseen body of maidservants working for the urban middle class, or more recently in Bridget Hill's book, Servants ( 1996), which explores lesser-known aspects of domestic service among the gentry and professional class, such as the widespread use of kin as servants, or the relationship between master and servant. The aim of the present study is to focus on a specific job, that of the housekeeper, who was at the top of the female domestic hierarchy, in order to examine the questions of job status, wages, and why women servants, even the most highly placed, were apparently so under-valued, in terms both of image and rewards. In order to try to answer these questions, it is necessary to begin by looking at how the job developed, and who did it; both of these problems are rather more complicated than one might imagine. Surprisingly, the use of the word 'housekeeper' to refer to a woman in charge of supervising the household, is not attested before the eighteenth century: the references given by the OED (Compact Edition, 1991) date from 1724 and 1766. And yet the activity of 'housekeeping' and thus the word 'housekeeper' to designate the person who performs such an activity date back much further. The earliest meaning of the fust word refers to the maintenance of a house, and thus a 'housekeeper' in the fifteenth century was simply a householder; by the sixteenth century the first word was also being used (with a qualifying adjective) to mean keeping a good table, and the 'good housekeeper' was one who kept open house and offered hospitality. The use of the word 'housekeeper' to mean a person in charge of a house, or indeed an office, dates from 1632, and the citations given by OED all refer, without exception, to men. Thus the early modem uses of the word covered a variety of situations, and

D. A. Kent, 'Ubiquitous but Invisible: Female Domestic Servants in Mid-Eighteenth Century London', History Workshop 28 (Autumn 1989): 111-128.

10

The Invisible Woman

it is often difficult to disentangle the precise meaning in texts dating from before the nineteenth century. By the time the word took on its modem meaning it had acquired the idea of domestic management, but was also linked to the public face a household presented to the world as a dispenser of hospitality. As we shall see, these apparently arcane considerations do have a bearing on the development of what seems to have been a relatively new profession in the eighteenth century. How did an upper-class household manage its domestic affairs before the arrival of the housekeeper? The standard answer to this question has traditionally looked at the aristocratic model of the household. Before domestic service became feminized (and exactly when this took place is a matter of debate, with some historians situating it at the beginning of the nineteenth century, others proposing a late seventeenthcentury take-off point2), household management in the great houses was shared among various male servants, such as the steward, the acater, and the clerk of the kitchen; some of the duties which were later to become part of the housekeeper's role were carried out by the mistress of the household herself. Until the seventeenth century, virtually all the servants in an aristocratic household were men, apart from the nurses and laundrymaids. The only other women were the lady of the house and her daughters, and the waiting-gentlewomen who acted as companions and upper servants to the ladies of the family. Not until the middle of the seventeenth century did this almost exclusively male household begin to accommodate more women, and thus not until this period did housekeepers begin to appear. This is the picture presented by most commentators who have focused on the upper classes. 3 But this model conveniently ignores what was going on lower down the social scale, and as a result has presented over-simplified conclusions about female involvement in the day-to-day running of the upper-class household. Even in Tudor times, mistresses and female upper servants performed at least some of the tasks which we now associate with the housekeeper, the degree of involvement varying according to the social status of the household. A few examples from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will demonstrate the variety of situations even amongst the upper classes. It was only in the very grandest houses that the all-male domestic establishment was the norm. Here, the lady of the house was not involved in any managerial role, although she and her waiting-gentlewomen shared the prestigious household tasks of preparing medicines and sweetmeats. These upper servants were drawn from the

2

3

Evidence for a nineteenth-century date is set out in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 388-95; for a late seventeenth-century date, with signs of increased specialization in women's tasks, in Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989; London: Methuen, 1991 ), 218-20. For a discussion of the question, see Bridget Hill, Servants (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996), 35-43. See, for instance, Girouard, Life in the English Country House (1978; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 27-8, 82-83, 142; Dorothy Marshall, The English Domestic Servant in History ([London]: George Philip/Historical Association, 1949), 6-7. See also the comment by C. Anne Wilson on the housekeeper's post being 'relatively new' in the later seventeenth century, in her essay on 'Stillhouses and Stillrooms', in The Country House Kitchen, 1650-1900, ed. Pamela A. Sambrook and Peter Brears (1996; Stroud: Sutton/National Trust, 1997), 140.

The Birth of a New Profession

11

ranks of respectable society, and service in a grand household was a way to learn household skills, and to make useful contacts and perhaps an advantageous marriage. 4 Early in the seventeenth century, Lady Anne Clifford (1590-1676) recorded in her diary that she and her maids shared such domestic activities as gathering fruit, making sweetmeats, and even on one occasion tossing pancakes at Candlemas. 5 This was during her first marriage, when she lived at Knole from 1608 to 1619; although Lady Anne kept a record of her own expenditure, mostly on rewards to messengers, she had no need to trouble herself with the running of the great house: the 1613 list of the household shows that there was a steward, an auditor, and two clerks of the kitchen. The list records the presence of six gentlewomen, who dined at the 'parlour table', but the only other women servants worked in the nursery or the laundry, with the addition of a dairymaid. 6 At the end of her life, in 167 6, Lady Anne recorded that one of her waiting-gentlewomen, Mrs Frances Pate, made preserves and sweetmeats for her; in other words, the servant had taken over a task which was normally shared by the lady and her gentry companions.? In such grand establishments, there was no need for a housekeeper, but the fact that the mistress and her waiting-gentlewomen were associated in some domestic activities is a significant pointer to later developments. Another point is that these waiting-gentlewomen were much more likely to be literate than the lower servants, and would therefore be in a position to help the mistress with such tasks as keeping her private accounts, copying receipts, and transmitting written instructions to the other servants. Even very slightly lower down the social scale, however, there are signs of a much greater female presence. One Tudor lady who was an expert in medicine, Lady Grace Mildmay (1552-1620), prepared remedies herself, and when she was away from home, sent precise instructions to her maid Bess, her 'housekeeper', about making them; 8 quite what Lady Mildmay meant by the term is uncertain. It is impossible to determine whether Bess was the housekeeper in our sense of the term, or simply a personal maid who stayed at home and thus 'kept the house'. Another, less ambiguous, Tudor reference to the 'housekeeper' comes from the accounts of

4

5 6 7 8

One example of a woman learning medical skills is the famous Bess of Hardwick (? 1527 -1608), who met her first husband when they were both attached to the household of Lady Zouch (Bess apparently shared in the task of nursing her future husband through an illness), and later, as a young widow of respectable parentage but little fortune, joined the household of the Marchioness of Dorset in 1545, where she met her second husband, Sir William Cavendish, whom she married in 1547. Towards the end of her life, Bess employed a housekeeper, Ellen Steward, at Chatsworth, while she herself resided at Hardwick, where the household was in the hands of a steward and a clerk comptroller. See David N. Durant, Bess ofHardwick (1977; London: Peter Owen, 1999), 1-12, 183. See D. 1. H. Clifford (ed.), The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1990), 52, 57, 62, 68. The list is reproduced in V. Sackville-West (ed.), The Diary of Lady Anne Clifford (London: Heinemann, 1923), lvii-lxi. See Clifford (1990), 255,261. See Linda Pollock, With Faith and Physic: the life ofa Tudor gentlewoman, Lady Grace Mildmay (London: Collins & Brown, 1993), 140-141.

12

The Invisible Woman

Sir William Petre at lngatestone: in 1550 the quarterly wage lists show that although there was a male house-steward, acater and cook, there was also a housekeeper, Mistress Percy, as well as the more usual nursemaid, plus four other maids. The housekeeper received the same wages, 1Os. a quarter, as the butler and the cook (while the house-steward and the acater received no wages but held farms at low rents), 9 and the courtesy title in the wage lists indicates that she was on a par with the two waiting-gentlewomen who were employed in 1554, when Petre's household had grown from 17 to 60 servants. At a lower level of society again, even the gentlewoman who had a number of servants was her own housekeeper. The diary of Lady Margaret Hoby (1571-1633) for the years 1599-1605 shows her spending her days in private devotions, reading, sewing, and ordering her household. This last activity was mostly supervisory, and included keeping an eye on outdoor work on the estate, as well as on the work of the indoor servants. Within doors, she gave orders to the servants, paid bills and kept the accounts, but she also made remedies, preserves and sweetmeats herself, although she did not normally cook food for dinner. There was a big difference in the status of kitchen and still-room, the latter being the domain of the mistress of the house, where she prepared distilled waters and preserves and sweetmeats. 1o The other important part of her role as mistress of the house was to doctor neighbours and servants: dressing sores and wounds was a regular occurrence. 11 The daughter of a prosperous Yorkshire landowner, she had been trained in these activities by service in the household ofthe Countess of Huntingdon. Lady Hoby's diary shows the vast extent of the skills involved in 'housekeeping', at a time when the notion of hospitality still implied various services to the local community: feeding and sometimes housing casual guests, putting on a show of largesse for visiting dignitaries, offering medical assistance to dependants and neighbours. 12 Here, the 9

10

11 12

See F. G. Emmison, Tudor Secretary: Sir William Petre at Court and Home (London: Longman, 1961), 151-152. The association of remedies and sweetmeats may seem surprising, but it must be remembered that sugar was originally used medicinally. Seventeenth and early eighteenth-century still-rooms and still-houses contained equipment for both distilling and making dishes for the banquet course; one example of this is the 1677 inventory of the still-house at Ham House, which contained stills, preserving-pans, and an oven, as well as a variety of other equipment; the black and white marble flooring shows that this was the domain of the lady of the house, and the doorway was situated to enable her to reach the still-house without passing through the servants' quarters. See C. Anne Wilson, 'Stillhouses and Stillrooms', in The Country House Kitchen, 1650-1900, ed. Pamela A. Sambrook and Peter Brears (1996, Stroud: Sutton/National Trust, 1997), 138-140. Another example is found in the 1710 inventory ofDyrham Park, where the still-room contained a limbeck and scales and weights for measuring tiny quantities, but also a copper preserving-pan, biscuit pans (indicating the presence of an oven), and fifty glasses for sweetmeats and creams. See Christina Hardyment, Home Comfort (London: Viking/National Trust, 1992), 42. See Dorothy M. Meads ( ed. ), The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 1599-1605 (London: Routledge, 1930), passim. For a discussion of the implications of hospitality, particularly for women, see Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), especially pp. 1-22, 178-183.

The Birth of a New Profession

13

mistress made remedies and preserves herself; these skills were more specialized than general cookery, and required precise measuring of expensive ingredients as well as the ability to read a receipt. Lady Hoby's personal maid, Annie France, was illiterate, and so it is not surprising to fmd Lady Hoby sewing with her maids, but preserving alone. Such examples are easy to find, and give a picture of increasing involvement in domestic management and in certain tasks on the part of the mistress of a household and her women servants as soon as one goes even a little down the social scale, and it seems clear that some households did employ housekeepers well before the seventeenth century. Even in the seventeenth century, however, they were probably not employed in very great numbers: it is significant that when the justices of Buckinghamshire set wages at the Easter sessions in 1688, they fixed the wages of cook-maids and dairy-maids at £2 lOs. a year, and those of other maid servants at £2; no mention was made of housekeepers. 13 But after the Restoration, the housekeeper does become more obviously visible. One household whose staff can be followed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that of the Brownlows of Belton, shows the shift to more women servants in the seventeenth century. Whereas the 1617 accounts and documents from the 1660s and 1670s show that men still dominated in the household (in 1679 there were thirteen men and four women), and that the steward and cook were both men, by 1691 there was a housekeeper and a woman cook. 14 That housekeeping was just beginning to be a recognized job is shown by the various books of advice to women written by Hannah Woolley (c. 1622-after 1674) and others. Woolley herself served a 'Noble Lady' as what would in modem parlance be called her 'personal assistant', and it was from this employer, who recognized her talent and bought her books, as well as from her family, that she picked up the lore she then transmitted to others through her books. In 1670, in the second part of The Queen-like Closet, Woolley gives advice to several categories of servant: the cook, the cook-maid, the butler, the carver, and the servants, male or female, who wait at table; these pages are followed by directions to the 'Gentlewomen who have the Charge of the Sweet-Meats, and such like Repasts' . 15 The directions explain how to set out the banquet (i.e. dessert) course in summer and winter, and Woolley explains that she gives these instructions in order to help gentlewomen who are forced to become servants because of family impoverishment due to 'the late Calamities, viz. the late Wars, Plague, and Fire' .16 Three years later, a book which bears Woolley's name on the title-page (but which was, in fact, a compilation based on her work with additional material lifted from a variety of sourcesl7), The Gentlewomans Companion, a guide for the upwardly and 13 14 15 16 17

See G. E. Fussell and K. R. Fussell, The English Countrywoman (London: Melrose, 1953), 95. See Elizabeth Cust, Records of the Cust F amity, Series 2: 'The Brownlows of Belton 1550-1779' (London: Mitchell Hughes & Clarke, 1909), 40, 61, 77, 97, 169. Woolley, The Queen-like Closet (London: R. Lowndes, 1670), 370-383. Woolley (1670), 378-379. For a discussion of the authorship of this book, see Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity (Ann Arbor, Michigan UP, 1989), 172-174. Woolley herself rejected the book, although she did say that it was based on her own writing. See below, n. 21.

14

The Invisible Woman

downwardly mobile, gives directions to a wider range of lower servants (the positions are those of chamber-maid, nursery-maid, cook-maid and under-cookmaid, dairy-maid, laundry-maid, house-maid and scullery-maid), 18 and suggests a further opening for gentlewomen, who are advised of the skills required to take up positions either as a waiting-gentlewoman, or as a housekeeper. There is some overlap in the requirements for the two jobs: candidates for both must have a good knowledge of preserving, but whereas the waiting-gentlewoman is expected also to dress well, to write good English, to be able to do basic arithmetic, and to carve well, the housekeeper must be 'grave and solid', 'able to govern a Family', skilled in distilling and making 'spoon-meats' (in other words, foods and medicines for the sick), purchasing supplies, and generally supervising the household.l9 The advice and even the receipts in this book were taken up later in the anonymous handbook for servants, The Compleat Servant-Maid (1677), which was compiled from the manual attributed to Woolley; this later book was still being reprinted in 1729, suggesting that the comments published in 1673 remained valid well into the eighteenth century. What is obvious here is that the mistress's role is being divided between these two servants, the waiting-gentlewoman taking on the more 'public' aspects, the housekeeper acting behind the scenes. The Gentlewomans Companion deplores the lack of education given to girls of good birth, who, when reduced to seeking paid employment, are often forced into inferior positions, having to become mere chamber-maids, instead of taking on the more honourable positions which would enable them to maintain status. The advantages of the two good jobs are enumerated: proximity to their employer, sitting at their mistress's table for meals, being treated with respect by the rest of the servants, wearing good clothes and earning a 'considerable sallary'. 20 This rosy picture is followed by dire warnings about the fate of unqualified girls, who are 'only fit companions for Grooms and Footboys'. Woolley's own career, recounted in a somewhat boastful autobiography which appeared in the supplement added to The Queen-like Closet from the third edition of 1675 (but which had already appeared in greatly embellished form in The Gentlewomans Companion21 ), shows her playing parts of both these roles during her years of service from the age of seventeen with the 'Noble Lady' who encouraged her to exercise her skills, particularly in medicine; clearly, Woolley was a valued servant who was on intimate terms with her employer. The more detailed version of Woolley's life, which must be regarded with suspicion since it differs

18 19 20 21

The Gentlewomans Companion (London: A. Maxwell for Dorman Newman, 1673), 207-217. The Gentlewomans Companion (1673), 205-206. The Gentlewomans Companion (1673), 204. See The Gentlewomans Companion (1673), 10-14, and The Queen-like Closet (ed. 5, London, 1684), supplement pp. 8-12. The latter version is the authentic one; later in the supplement, Woolley complains bitterly that Dorman Newman, the publisher of the first edition of The Gentlewomans Companion, had employed another author to transform her book, The Ladies Guide, which she had written 'about Eight years or more since' (1684: 93), in other words around 1665-6. The spurious version contains far more detail.

The Birth of a New Profession

15

from her 'official' version, gives an even more interesting view of the servant as privileged companion: according to this version, one employer taught her preserving and cookery, and then from another lady she acquired such accomplishments as writing, reading aloud, carving, and the rudiments of medicine; by the time she left this lady, after seven years, Woolley had risen from governess to become her lady's 'Woman, her Stewardess and her Scribe or Secretary'. Even though we must consider this version of her life to be fiction, showing an upper servant combining the skills and the roles of both waiting-gentlewoman and housekeeper, and mastering an impossible range of accomplishments, it is interesting to note that the author of this improved version of Woolley's career does not consider the term 'housekeeper' adequate for such a servant: this job-title is eschewed in favour of a feminized version of that of the steward, the highestranking man-servant in the aristocratic household. In spite of the book's propaganda about the prestige of the two jobs open to well-qualified gentlewomen, the supposed author does not fmd the title of her lady's 'woman', or indeed 'housekeeper', adequate for herself. This is a clear sign that the shift towards employing women rather than men (seen in the proliferation of specific job descriptions in The Gentlewomans Companion) meant lower wages and lower status, and soon the vicious circle of diminishing returns would contribute to the devaluation of household skills, whether practised by women servants or the mistress herself. At the end of the seventeenth century, however, the active mistress was still the norm in all households below the very greatest. In spite of the instructions to servants capable of replacing the mistress in every aspect of her supervisory role, there is nothing in the books by Woolley and her imitators to suggest that a lady could abandon her domestic cares, and Woolley's account of her own prowess shows that it was actively fostered by aristocratic employers. The instructions to the ladies in all these books exhort them to acquire the same skills as their upper-class employees, in order to guide rather than be guided by their servants; it is, however, noteworthy that by 1673 the author feels obliged to stress that cookery is not 'dishonourable' .22 Attitudes to domestic skills were changing, and while the stillroom activities of preserving and distilling kept their prestige into the early years of the eighteenth century, partly because of the cost of the raw ingredients and of the equipment, cookery was already becoming an activity with which a lady could not be familiar without loss of status. In 1694 a book of advice to ladies pointed out that they should not meddle in cookery, because 'it is not very pleasing to their Maids, whose proper Province it is' .23 Soon, other household skills would go the same way. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, there was a torrent of complaint from the moralists that ladies had become idle, frivolous creatures who disdained all household activities; as one commentator put it in 1722: The great Fatigue, or rather Slavery, of House-keeping[ ... ] is but too much neglected by Ladies of Fashion, as [ ... ]too mean and insignificant for Persons of their Quality; and

22 23

The Gentlewomans Companion (1673), 112. See also an earlier book by Woolley, The Cooks Guide (London, 1664), dedication to Mary Wroth. The Ladies Dictionary (London, 1694), 420.

16

The Invisible Woman rather fit for Women of inferior Rank and Condition, as Farmers Wives, &c. or, at best, is most proper for their Housekeepers; when at the same time this is only an Excuse for their Laziness.24

Of course, such complaints are as much evidence of male anxieties, linked to the eighteenth-century terror of the debilitating effects of the rise of'luxury' on the moral and economic health of the nation, as of what was really happening amongst upperclass women, but there can be no doubt that many women would have liked to retire from active household involvement, even though reality usually conspired to prevent this. After all, as Peter Earle points out when discussing the jobs open to women, 'neither men nor women worked in 1700 if they did not have to' ,25 and it must be remembered that household tasks were far more arduous then than today, a point developed at some length by Caroline Davidson in her history of housework (A Woman s Work Is Never Done, 1982). The fact that so many women were unable to leave household tasks to a body of efficient and disciplined servants did not necessarily diminish their desire to do so, even though such a domestic ideal was virtually unattainable. Study after study from Hecht onwards has shown that servants were a volatile group, liable to flit from one job to another, constituting a 'supremely unreliable workforce' .26 In spite of the practical difficulties, active participation in household tasks was increasingly seen as demeaning as the century wore on, and even Amanda Vickery, who makes a vigorous case for the 'status and satisfaction to be drawn from genteel housekeeping', points out that household management was supposed to be invisible, with the lady assiduously concealing all signs of her own industry.2 7 This does not argue for any very positive status attached to housekeeping: while men might be lost without the services of their wives or housekeepers, it was the negative consequences of the absence of such a useful person which received comment rather than the affirmative value of services actually rendered. There is a substantial body of evidence to show that the lady who was an active housekeeper was seen as rather ridiculous in the eighteenth century, and inevitably this negative image rubbed off on the upper servant. Conduct books and other publications aimed at ladies warned them of the dangers of displaying their housekeeping skills: as Eliza Haywood put it in the Female Spectator, a lady of condition who spent too much time on household matters might acquire the reputation of a 'notable house-wife, but not of a woman offme taste' .28 Novels reinforced the message: Pamela, the eponymous heroine of Richardson's novel (and it must be noted that the domestic world here is very old-fashioned), proposes that after marriage she will continue to assist the housekeeper, but once married she does no such thing; Tabitha Bramble, in Smollett's Humphry Clinker, is ridiculed for being a hands-on housewife of the old school, worrying about

24 25 26 27 28

John Essex, The Young Ladies Conduct (London, 1722), xxxiv-xxxv. Earle, 'The Female Labour Market in London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries', Economic History Review Series 2, 42,3 (1989): 342. This phrase is taken from Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman s Daughter (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1998), 135. Vickery (1998), 130, 131. [Eliza Haywood], The Female Spectator (1744-46; London, 1748): vol. III, 154.

The Birth of a New Profession

17

the productivity ofher daicy. 29 Even the bunch of keys at a lady's (or, one might add, housekeeper's) waist, which Amanda Vickery sees as a badge of 'female domestic authority', an honourable symbol of her 'unproductive' but none the less necessary household activity,3° acquired very negative connotations: when the anonymous author of a tract denouncing the power of the upper servants over the lower wanted to fmd a suitably infamous badge of office for the housekeeper, he proposed 'a Bunch of Keys [ ... ] fastened to her Neck, like a Solitair, with a black Velvet Collar', and in his proposals for reform, he announced that the good housekeeper, who acted fairly towards the other servants, would be excused 'from her sollitair ofKeys'. 31 While it might be objected that what was infamous for the lady was not so for the upper servant, this last example points to a degree of conflation, at least in situations where the upper servant replaced the mistress. The poor image ofhousekeeping and thus of housekeepers in the eighteenth century is due to a host of interconnected factors which go beyond the diminishing value of traditional housewifely skills amongst the upper classes. The rise of the housekeeper coincides with the retreat of the mistress in the grandest homes, but it also coincides with a shift in the status of upper servants in general, male and female, as the tradition of gentry service in aristocratic households withered. Increasingly, the men employed in great houses were no longer drawn from the gentry but from lower down the social scale, from the ranks of tenant farmers or urban professionals, and this contributed to diminish the status of servants as a whole. Women servants too were less recruited from the gentry than from their social inferiors. This, combined with the desire of those who aspired to join 'polite society' to distance themselves from the vulgar, was a major factor in the devaluation of women servants. While in the seventeenth century the aristocratic mistress and her gentlewomen were associated in many household activities, the breakdown of this model in the eighteenth century, with a transfer of responsibilities to the servant, could not but diminish the status of the person who now performed the role which had once been a badge of social standing. The prestige associated with these activities, no matter who performed them, was also in decline, and not simply because of the image of the ideal lady as a creature of leisure. Changing tastes in food also played an important part in this loss of status. There is plenty of contemporary comment to show that the seventeenthcentury gentlewoman's skill in preparing sweetmeats and remedies was widely appreciated; her ability to put on a magnificent banquet-course and to help the sick conferred prestige and, as Felicity Heal points out, gave her a gratifying role to play. 32 Seventeenth-century printed cookery books are full of receipts such as 'Sweet-meats of my Lady Windebanks', or 'The Lady Giffords cordial Water' ,33

29 30 31 32 33

For other examples from novels and periodicals, see Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 123-124. Vickery (1998), 135. A Treatise on the Use and Abuse ofthe Second[. .. } Table (London, [c. 1750]), 22, 64-65. Heal (1990), 183. These receipt titles are culled at random from two books: Kenelm Digby, The Closet [. .. }Opened (1669; reprint, Totnes: Prospect, 1997), 212; A Queens Delight (1655; facs. reprint, London: Prospect, 1984), 105.

18

The Invisible Woman

and manuscript collections of receipts contain even more such named items. But in the eighteenth century French cuisine displaced the banquet course as the vehicle for a display of luxury, and doctors' prescriptions ousted traditional family remedies, albeit very much more slowly. By the middle of the century, cookery books were giving receipts for French made dishes and sauces, and traditional sweetmeats no longer occupied vast sections of the books; at the same time, cookery writers often announced that remedies were the province of doctors and they would not meddle with such matters. 34 These changes cut off two areas of feminine expertise, and placed both cookery and medicine firmly in the hands of men, simultaneously contributing to the perception of men's work as being specialized and skilled while women's work was general and unskilled. (Although women continued to produce family medicines in the eighteenth century, they now usually sold them to a local clientele, 35 and the fact of selling rather than giving transformed the honourability of feminine medicine as it moved away from its connection to hospitality.) Finally, the movement towards employing women servants rather than men (and most of the women were employed in the unskilled areas of housework) also depressed the value placed upon them. As was noted earlier, exactly when the balance between men and women servants within the house tipped in favour of women is a contentious point. The Occupational Census of 1851 showed that the ratio of men to women was 1:8, rising to 1:11 by 1871, but Gregory King's figures in 1685 show a ratio of 15:13, which suggests that the balance was already changing at the end of the seventeenth century, and in 1806 Patrick Colquhoun estimated the ratio as 1:7. From these figures, Bridget Hill concludes that feminization took place rather earlier than has sometimes been suggested. 36 Many commentators on domestic service in the past see the 1780s as an important turning-point, concentrating on the well-documented consequences of the tax imposed on male servants in 1777 and not repealed until 1937. Employers tried to keep men servants only for the more 'visible' positions, such as butler or footman, where they would be noticed and thus impress visitors, with a resulting increase in the number of women servants. 37 But it is probable that the tax did no more than accelerate an existing trend; what it did do, however, was to emphasize the prestige gap between men and women within the servant body. What seems certain is that women were more present, even if they were not as visible as men: it is often difficult to be sure of the numbers of women employed in a household because they were invisible. In 1784 Franc;ois de la Rochefoucauld noted that an English nobleman might have 'thirty or forty menservants', but that

35

The two great best-sellers of the eighteenth century, Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (1747), and Elizabeth Raffald's The Experienced English House-keeper (1769), both make this point about medicine in their addresses to the reader. They also both give, albeit reluctantly, large numbers of French receipts. One example of this is Elizabeth Shackleton's rabies medicine; see Vickery ( 1998), 154-

36 37

Hill (1996), 41-43. See Caroline Davidson, A Woman s Work Is Never Done (London: Chatto & Windus,

34

155.

1982), 180-181.

The Birth of a New Profession

19

usually women did the cooking and all the housework, and that 'great numbers of women' were needed. 38 It is thus reasonably safe to say that women were more present as servants even in grand houses in the eighteenth century; feminization was not merely the result of the ever-increasing numbers of maids of all work employed by single-servant households. While the increased female presence made housekeepers more prevalent, they were also more necessary to supervise the enlarged female staff. eighteenth-century manuals for servants are often very uninformative about the duties of the housekeeper, preferring to concentrate on moralizing homilies aimed at the lower servants (Eliza Haywood's Present for a Servant-Maid (1743) is a case in point), but the books of advice that do mention the housekeeper show that although her job was much what it had been in the late seventeenth century, her responsibilities were growing. Anne Barker's description of the housekeeper's work includes superintending 'all the household affairs', directing the maid-servants, ensuring that visitors are treated well, purchasing good-quality provisions at reasonable prices, looking after all the household goods and chattels, recruiting new servants, and being the first person to rise and the last to go to bed in order to assure herself that all is safe. With such requirements, it is hardly surprising that the author recommends a woman 'of age and experience', 'a grave, sober, virtuous person'. 39 What is strikingly different from the manuals of the 1670s is that there is no indication of the gratifications to be expected by the faithful housekeeper; on the contrary, she is expected never to leave the house except to go to church, and she is to have as few visitors as possible. And even with such an exhaustive and exhausting catalogue, Barker omits some of the duties expected of a housekeeper. Other job descriptions complete the picture. In 1790 The Ladies' Library states that she should organize household supplies, recruit servants, deal with tradesmen, plan entertainments, draw up bills of fare, arrange the dessert, and be familiar with all aspects of cookery and confectionery; the text also points out that the housekeeper often combined her job with that of lady's maid or cook, thus increasing the demands placed upon her. 40 Several cookery books confirm these extras: books which give advice on forming a bill of fare place the responsibility for this on the housekeeper;41 books on confectionery say that the housekeeper usually replaced the confectioner (employed only in the grandest houses), and the instructions in these books show a new area of expertise, making ices for desserts and

38 39

40 41

A Frenchmans Year in Suffolk, ed. and trans. Norman Scarfe (Suffolk Records Society 30; Woodbridge: Boydell, 1988), 19. Anne Barker, The Complete Servant Maid (London, [c. 1765]) 15-17. In 1773 Anthony Heasel 's book, The Servants Book of Knowledge, contained much the same requirements, to judge from the extracts quoted by Hecht. Since these two books were both printed for J. Cooke, the suspicion must be that they were slightly different versions of the same book. The Ladies' Library (London, 1790), vol. 2, 61-64. See, for instance, The Modern Method of Regulating and Forming a Table (London, [c. 1750]) iii; [B. Clermont], The Professed Cook (1767; London, 1769), iv-vi.

20

The Invisible Woman

entertainments. 42 The nobility and gentry even sent their housekeepers to learn the latest fashions by watching the experts at work in the famous London firm of Negri and Gunter. 43 Advertisements for housekeepers show that they were often expected to supervise the cook, and even to do some of the cooking themselves; an advertisement in the York Courant in August 1764 stated that although the housekeeper would have a cook under her, she must 'attend the kitchen' and must 'understand Cookery and making Sweetmeats perfectly well' .44 And all this takes no account of employers who wanted to combine two jobs: the housekeeper might well be expected to double up as lady's maid, cook, and even dairy-maid. Finally, the housekeeper might well be required to show visitors round the house and collect the admittance fee, 45 an aspect of the commercialization of earlier traditions of hospitality. In spite of the vast extent of the skills a housekeeper was expected to possess, and the responsibilities she was required to assume, her status and her rewards were not very great. Conventional wisdom sees the housekeeper as one of the upper servants, since, like the steward, she had her own room and ate at the second table in houses where such distinctions were made. 46 Swift's satirical Directions to Servants (1745) links the housekeeper and the steward, and the cook and the butler, who form pairs to collude in defrauding their employers. 47 In theory, then, she was on a par with the steward, but her pecuniary rewards do not confirm this, either in theory or in practice. When John Trusler estimated the wage-bill for a hypothetical 'man of rank and fashion' in 1796, he proposed paying the upper men servants £60 (to the steward) or £50 (and this list includes the butler, two grooms, two footmen, and the gardener), and the upper women servants £50 (to the cook) or £40 (to the housekeeper and the lady's maid); the inferior servants, men and women, were to receive £25. 48 Even in 1796, with rampant inflation, this is very generous: Hecht's lists show no such lavish payments to women in the 1790s. But generous as Trusler's salaries are, they place the housekeeper below all the upper men servants who were such an important part of an employer's display of status. Hecht's table

42 43 44 45 46

47 48

See, for instance, [Borella], The Court and Country Confectioner (London, 1770), 2-3. See Robert Abbot, The Housekeepers Valuable Present (London, [c. 1790]), preface. Quoted in Jane Holmes, 'Domestic Service in Yorkshire 1650-1780', unpublished doctoral thesis, University ofYork, 1989, pp. 70-71. See J. J. Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1956), 171-172. For an example of this practice, see Holmes, thesis, p. 48 (in 1767 at Wentworth Woodhouse, where the steward, housekeeper, chaplain and clerk of the kitchen ate in the steward's room, while the other servants ate in the servants' hall); Hecht (1956: 63) states that the housekeeper was the house-steward's opposite number. [Jonathan] Swift, Directions to Servants in General (London, 1745), 44, 92. Swift pays very little attention to the housekeeper, but he has a field-day with the cook who, of course, offers far more opportunities for revolting detail. [John] Trusler, The Way to be Rich and Respectable (1787; London, ed. 7, 1796), 6566. The first edition gives a wage-table only for a more modest establishment of two menservants (at £12 and £9 each) and two maids (at £7 each) plus an unpaid boy. See pp. 15-20.

The Birth of a New Profession

21

of wages gives the salaries of twenty-one housekeepers, the highest-paid receiving £30 (in 1734), the lowest £6 (in 1768). The average wage in Hecht's table is just under £13.10s., the median wage being £18. Hecht also found two housekeepers who combined the job with that oflady's maid, at salaries of 10 or 15 guineas, and eight cook-housekeepers, whose salaries ranged from £10 to £25. Meanwhile, men in comparable positions were receiving much higher salaries: for the nine housestewards the range was from £40 to £100, and for the four clerks of the kitchen (a dying breed) from £30 to £100; butlers are closer to the housekeepers, with a range for the fourteen cases of £6 to £57. 1Os, although these figures are extreme, the more usual range being £10 to £30. A comparison with other women servants shows that cooks received anything from £3 to 20 guineas; housemaids £4 to £10. 49 Hecht attributes the disparities within groups to the level of skill of the employee, the scope of his or her duties, the scheme of payment adopted and the location of the place where the servant was hired. In fact, a comparison of wages within single households for a limited period suggests that the employer's status was the determining factor. In a very grand house, the housekeeper would earn less than the male upper servants, but her salary still placed her well above the run of ordinary maids: in 1734 the duke of Newcastle was paying his housekeeper, Anne Elliot, £30, while the steward, Robert Burnett, earned £50, the French cook £50, the French confectioner, Daniel Tiphaine, £60, the butler £8 (but an earlier list for 1733 gives the more plausible figure of £20) and the ordinary maids £6. 50 In about 1763 the marquis of Rockingham at Wentworth Woodhouse paid his housekeeper £20, his house-steward £30, his cook £52.12s., his confectioner £42 (with salaries like these, it is probable that these last two men were the Mr Blanche and the Mr Negri identified in earlier lists as the cook and the confectioner), and ordinary maids £2.10s.51 One exceptionally mean aristocrat was the fourth duke of Bedford, who paid his housekeeper a mere £12 in the 1750s, while the butler, the French cook and the confectioner all received between £50 and £60.52 Lower down the social scale, in 1725 John Meller of Erddig paid £21 to his cook, £10 to his housekeeper and to his butler, £8 to his coachman, and £2.10s. to the lowlier maids who were at the bottom of the salary scale; 53 similarly, William Constable at Burton Constable in Yorkshire paid the same salary, £10, to his butler, his housekeeper and his woman cook in 1752;54 a new recruit to the gentry, William Gossip of Thorp Arch, paid his housekeeper a salary that varied from £5 to £9 in the 1750s, while the gardener received 9 guineas, and the butler £6. 55 In houses where the mistress shared the role of housekeeper with a servant, who was often described as a cook-housekeeper, the rewards were much lower: in the 1770s Elizabeth

49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Hecht (1956), 142-148. See British Library, Additional MS 33137, ff. 397-398; the 1733 list is f. 374. See Holmes, thesis, 78. See Gladys Scott Thomson, The Russells in Bloomsbury (London: Cape, 1940), 225-230. See Merlin Waterson, The Servants' Hall (London: Routledge, 1980), 26. See Holmes, thesis, 77. See Brett Harrison, 'The Servants of William Gossip', Georgian Group Journal 6 (1996): 137-139.

22

The Invisible Woman

Shackleton paid her cook-housekeepers £5 while the other maids received 4 guineas; 56 earlier, in the 1740s, Elizabeth Purefoy was offering £3 or £3 I Os. for a cookmaid (who was also expected to work in the dairy and help with the washing), and once, in despair at the difficulty of finding a suitable candidate, was prepared to go as high as £4; a house-maid would be given £2. 57 Clearly, the wages differential between a housekeeper and the lower women servants was much smaller amongst the lesser gentry, where the mistress still expected to supervise the servants, than in the grand houses where the housekeeper might earn five to eight times as much as the house-maids. Service in a great house was much more desirable, and not only because of the wages: although of course the needs of a grand house required more specialized skills than those demanded in a lesser establishment, it should also be noted that the workload was smaller in the great houses, precisely because of the existence of specialized departments. Jane Holmes cites the case of one woman who preferred to take a job as a housekeeper rather than go into business, 'thinking that she may be easy in it'. 58 Three case-histories, taken in chronological order, will attempt to shed light on some aspects of the housekeeper's career, and perhaps on how her role and status evolved. At the very end of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Haggerston, a member of the gentry with an estimated income from rents of £I ,200 a year, employed a distant cousin as his housekeeper. 59 Cousin Fleetwood Butler headed the household, with a salary of £8, while the other servants' wages went from £3 for the butler to£ I for the three maids and £0.10.0 for the 'swine boy'. In all, there were six men servants and five or six maids. Although the numbers of servants fluctuated slightly, Cousin Fleetwood was still earning more than the bailiff in 1702. The accounts show that the housekeeper controlled the household and paid the staff, and that she was responsible for purchases of food and drink, and of glasses and crockery. The bald facts taken from account books cannot tell us anything about the relationship between employer and relative-employee here, but the salary indicates that Cousin Fleetwood was at least valued as a servant if not as a relative. This is unusual, perhaps because here the employment of a relative is in a prosperous household, whereas most eighteenth-century examples are from more modest establishments, where economy dictated that the poor relation was forced to serve as an unpaid housekeeper, and was treated as a servant rather than one of the family. 60 In wealthier households, this was a practice which died out during the eighteenth century: Francis Grose noted that as a young man he had seen 'a certain antiquated female, either maiden or widow, commonly an aunt or cousin' acting as 56 57 58 59 60

See Vickery (1998), 137. See G. Eland (ed.), Purefoy Letters 1735-1753 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1931), vol. I, 142-147. Holmes, thesis, 71-72. This case-history is based on Ann M. C. Forster (ed.), 'Selections from the Disbursements Book (1691-1709) of Sir Thomas Haggerston, Bart', Surtees Society 180 (1965). Bridget Hill documents many cases of this at a level below that of the gentry, in her chapter on kin as servants; see Hill (1996), 115-127. Jane Holmes (thesis, p. 61) points out that relatives living in as servants had disappeared from wealthier families by the eighteenth century.

The Birth of a New Profession

23

housekeeper to unmarried or widowed gentlemen, but that now 'this being is no more seen, and the race is[ ... ] totally extinct' .61 Grose's unflattering portrait of this character, with her jingling bunch of keys, her cordials and her preserves, is another reminder that the housewife/housekeeper, an honoured personage in the seventeenth century, had become a figure of fun. The case of the housekeeper employed by a new recruit into the gentry is illustrated by the papers of William Gossip (1705-1772).62 Gossip's father was a Yorkshire mercer who had made a fortune in trade, and the son set up as a landed gentleman, buying his country estate at Thorp Arch in 1749. During his early married life in the 1730s, Gossip lived in York; there, he employed one man servant, a valet, at a salary of £4 and later £5 a year, and five women servants: a nursemaid (at £2), a cook (at £3 or 3 guineas), a lady's maid for Anne Gossip, a chambermaid and a housemaid. There was as yet no housekeeper. This changed when the Gossips moved to the country, even before the completion of their new house in 1756. A letter dated 1748 sets out Anne Gossip's requirements for a housekeeper, who 'must not be too fine a Lady', but must be capable of controlling the other servants and making sure that they performed their duties, able to tum her hand to any work, including cooking and washing, and a prudent fmancial manager; Mrs Gossip was prepared to pay £5 a year. Whether the Gossips found such a candidate is doubtful: the accounts do not show an identifiable housekeeper who stayed for any length of time until 1755, when a woman called Agar was paid £8.5.0. She was, however, unsatisfactory, and the Gossips looked out for a replacement. A friend found them a suitable forty-year-old, who was prepared to come for £10 a year, but she was a Methodist, and the Gossips objected on the grounds that she would be forever out at meetings. Agar was replaced by Wilson, who was clearly more satisfactory, since in August 1756 she was given 1 guinea over and above her annual wage of £3.19.0. Her wages rose steadily, to £6 in 1758 and £8 by 1761. She was followed by a Miss Wildblood and by others, but returned to the Gossips in 1765 at £9 a year. Over the same period Gossip's postilion-cum-groom was paid £4, his gardener 9 guineas, and his butler £6 to£ 14. Although Wilson was clearly a valued servant, she received less for her very extensive duties than the upper men servants. Another interesting feature of this case is the apprehension expressed by Anne Gossip of an employee who might be too 'fine', suggesting the potential for rivalry and conflict between the mistress in a family newly risen into the gentry and a servant who might not be far below her in terms of social origin. The fact that the duties of the mistress and the servant overlapped was a supplementary complication in an uneasy relationship. The best-documented example of the housekeeper who made a successful career after her years in service is Elizabeth Raffald (1733-81). She was born Elizabeth Whitaker in Doncaster; little is known of her parents, Joshua and Elizabeth Whitaker, but she received an adequate education, including a little French, before leaving home. Elizabeth went into service when she was about 15 years old. Her last job, which she started in December 1760, was as housekeeper to Sir Peter and Lady Elizabeth Warburton of Arley Hall in Cheshire, a household with aristocratic 61 62

Grose, The Olio (London, 1792), 40-41. This case-history is based on the article by Brett Harrison (1996): 134-143.

24

The Invisible Woman

connections, since Lady Elizabeth was the eldest daughter of the earl of Derby. At Arley there was a house-steward, Peter Harper, who was responsible for the fmances, the house and the estate; the new housekeeper was in charge of the female servants, and of buying most of the everyday food supplies which were purchased locally (goods from London and the large meat bill were paid by the steward) from her imprest account; she also did all the preserving and pickling, made country wines, table decorations and dishes for the dessert course. For all this, she was paid £16 a year, £4 less than the head gardener, John Raffald. The housekeeper and the gardener married on 3 March 1763, and on 23 April they left Arley to set up in business in Manchester, where John Raffald's family owned market gardens and a nursery. Elizabeth Raffald soon set up a shop in Fennel Street, and put her experience to immediate use, selling a range of foods from decorative confectionery and cakes to York hams and Newcastle salmon, and opening a register office for the supply of servants, for a fee of 1 shilling paid either by the employer or by the servant seeking a place. Her own experience in service had shown her what would be profitable. In August 1766 the Raffalds moved to a more central location in Market Place, where the shop continued to prosper. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Raffald continued to maintain friendly contact with Arley Hall, supplying the house with food from her shop and visiting in an expensive post chaise. The climax of her success came with the publication of her cookery-book, The Experienced English House-keeper, in 1769: over 800 subscribers bought the book at the pre-publication price of 5s, and the success of the book is confirmed by the seven editions which were published in the author's lifetime, with further editions until 1834, not to mention the innumerable plagiarisms from it. In 1772 she brought out the first Manchester Directory, and in the same year the Market Place shop was sold and the Raffalds moved to the King's Head inn in Salford; Elizabeth's unmarried sister Mary opened a shop opposite which carried on the confectionery trade and the register office. But from this point the business went downhill, apparently because of John Raffald's heavy drinking; they were forced to leave the inn, and Elizabeth made ends meet by taking over the catering when her husband became master of the Exchange coffee-house and by publishing a third edition of the directory. She died on 19 April 1781, leaving her sister to profit from her commercial success by opening a cookery school advertised as being run by the 'Sister to the late Mrs. Raffald' .63 Raffald's career shows that experience in service could be a way to a successful business, but of course, a woman's efforts could be in vain if her husband, who ultimately controlled all her money, was a spendthrift. Financial uncertainties notwithstanding, Raffald's case demonstrates that a housekeeper could be regarded with affection by her employers, and could later gain the respect of the community as a businesswoman putting her experience in service to good use.

63

This account of Elizabeth Raffald is based on two complementary biographies by Roy Shipperbottom: 'Elizabeth Raffald (1733-1781)' in Harlan Walker (ed.), Cooks and Other People: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 1995 (Totnes: Prospect, 1996), 233-236; the introduction to the reprint of Raffa! d's cookery book, ed. Ann Bagnall (Lewes: Southover, 1997), vii-xvii.

The Birth of a New Profession

25

These case-histories illustrate the diversity one meets when exammmg a particular servant group, hardly surprisingly, since so many households, from those of aristocrats to those of tradesmen, now employed servants. Housekeepers were employed in homes ranging from the very grand to those of the lesser gentry and the prosperous middle class, but in terms of status and rewards, and in the extent of their tasks, there was a vast difference between the ends of the spectrum. Paradoxically, it was where the mistress of the house still played a supervisory role herself that the housekeeper had to work hardest, and for proportionally the least reward; in houses where there were enough specialized staff to render the mistress's services superfluous the housekeeper's job was easier and better rewarded. Unfortunately for those lower down the social scale, the image of the smooth-running household with its idle mistress was a powerful one, an ideal to which many aspired, since practical involvement with the tasks of housekeeping tarnished a mistress's gentility. The image was no less powerful for being unattainable: very few mistresses were in the fortunate position of Susanna Whatman, who apparently delegated all supervision of her servants to her housekeeper, Hester Davis, although not without setting out in writing detailed instructions to make sure that everything was ordered to her liking. 64 The result was that most mistresses were constantly tom between leaving things to the housekeeper and other servants (in pursuit of the genteel ideal of the lady) and checking up themselves (in pursuit of the genteel ideal of the well-run house), thus generating conflict with the servants and frustration on both sides. The confusion between the housekeeper as 'keeper of the house' (i.e. the mistress) and as a servant, still apparent in the varied meanings of the word even in the 19th century, meant that the status of the one was in dissociable from that of the other. Thus the wife was often seen as an unpaid servant, and the housekeeper, even though paid, had to be inferior to the wife. The reasons why the housekeeper was so under-valued were more complex than the simple question of her sex.

64

See Christina Hardyment (ed.), The Housekeeping Book ofSusanna Whatman (London: Century/National Trust, 1987), 4, and Susanna's text, 37-54.

Chapter 2

The Representation of Housework in the Eighteenth-CenturyWomen's Press Marie-Claire Rouyer-Daney

It is generally agreed that the notion of gender differences was conceived in the

eighteenth century which confined women to the private sphere. The women's press which was to develop the domestic ideology appeared at the same time and ought to give an insight into what was expected of the ideal mistress of the house. If women's work within the house was indeed a recurrent topic in those periodicals, the housewife's tasks were rarely described in their concrete reality, whereas domestic duties were enhanced as the unique vocation of wives and daughters. The material that I have used spans the whole century, in order to discover to what extent the domestic ideology was constructed progressively. To that end, I shall compare the discourse about domestic occupations in the early eighteenth-century essay papers, such as The Visiter (1723-24) or The Female Spectator (1744-46), which have received critical attention, namely from Kathryn Shevelow and Claire Boulard, 1 with their treatment in the second generation of women's periodicals, which have been so far scantily documented: 2 The Lady's Magazine (1759-63), The Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770-1832) and The New Lady's

2

Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989); Claire Boulard, Presse et socialisation feminine en Angle terre de 1690 a 1750: Conversations a l 'heure du the (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000). The mid and late eighteenth-century periodicals were first documented in two pioneering studies: Cynthia L. White, Womens Magazines 1693-1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970) and Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women s Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Queen Victoria (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972). They have been briefly examined in critical works on the earlier press (see note 1) or on the nineteenth and twentieth-century women's press such as Margaret Beetham, A Afagazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman s Magazine, 1800-1914 (London, Routledge, 1996) and R. Ballaster, M. Beetham, E. Frazer and S. Hebron, Women s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman s Magazine (London: Macmillan, 1991 ). Specific studies include: Jean Hunter, 'The Lady's Magazine and the study of Englishwomen in the eighteenth century', in H. Bond Donovan and W. Reynolds McLeod eds., Newsletters to Newspapers: Eighteenth Century Journalism (Morgantown: School of Journalism, West Virginia University, I 979) and Marie-Claire Rouyer, 'Les Espaces de !a feminite dans les magazines pour dames de !a seconde moitie du XVTIJe sieclc', Bulletin de la Societe d'Etudes Anglo-Americaines des XVJJe et XVIll" siecles 47 (1998) 169-190.

28

The Invisible Woman

Magazine or Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1786-95). Their titles prove that the term 'lady' was preferred precisely at the moment when their growing readership included the middle-classes. The price of a monthly issue, 6d., placed the magazines in the category of the 'popular' periodicals, according to Robert D. Mayo,3 that is addressed to the new class who, not only could read, but had also recently acquired reading habits. Moreover the bound yearly volumes were more easily accessible through the lending libraries. The front page announcements of the first issues emphasized the wide social spectrum of potential readers. The Lady s Magazine of 1770 addressed 'the Housewife as well as the Peeress'; The New Ladys Magazine of 1786 described itself as 'the most agreeable Companion to female Readers of every Rank and Condition'. In fact the ideal 'lady' to be fashioned was an idle middle-class woman, carefully differentiated from the artisans' and shopkeepers' wives who had to divide their time between shop and house. Although household care featured among the natural assignments of the wealthier woman, it could not keep her occupied all the time, since the material chores were performed by servants. So the educational programme of the female press was meant to supply a new idle class with domestic occupations that would protect them from the loose manners associated with aristocratic leisure. The activities suggested in order to fill up time usefully, such as reading-and in the first place reading the magazine-, were all designed to develop an ideal of femininity intended to adapt women to the domestic sphere. Thus the periodicals trod the same ground as the conduct-books which, according to Nancy Armstrong, 4 had already erased the distinction between labour and leisure, both construed with reference to the new ethics of domesticity which defined all female activities as duties. In the conduct-books as in the periodicals, women's occupations, circumscribed within the home, were named 'employment', which simply meant 'employing one's time'. Among those occupations, the domestic chores were designated by the term 'housewifery', endowed with a derogatory connotation because it referred to the tasks which the women from the middle ranks would be relieved of. It was eventually replaced by 'domestic reconomy'. After its first occurrence in 17105 the word was in current usage from 1760, when The Lady s Magazine, in its August issue, devoted an article to the subject. The term designated a new conception of the qualities required from the mistress of the household, which the magazines would help her to develop, while supplying hardly any information on the practical skills involved. Indeed the only detailed descriptions of some household chores were occasionally to be found in male readers' letters (usually faked) attributed to shopkeepers who often complained about the domestic incompetence of their wives or daughters who aped their betters and forgot the duties of their condition.

3 4 5

Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines 1740-1815 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1962) 80-83. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987) 64-65. See O.E.D. citing its first occurrence in The Tatler (171 0): 'the manner in which a household or a person's private expenditure is ordered'.

The Representation of Housework

29

Before examining that satirical representation of housework, I will try to show how the serious discourse defming women's occupations at home hinged upon the periodicals' educational programme and followed its evolution from the essaypapers to the magazines. In order to observe that evolution from its origins, this investigation will start with an extract from an article by Addison in The Guardian, which did not address an exclusively female readership, but pursued the task initiated by The Tatler and The Spectator, namely the education of the fair sex. This scene of female domestic bliss was printed in the issue no. 155 (1713): The Excellent Lady, the Lady Lizard in the Space of one Summer fumish'd a Gallery, with Chairs and Couches of her own and her Daughters' Working and at the same Time heard all Doctor Tillotson's Sermons twice over. It is always the custom for one of the young Ladies to read, while the others are at Work: so that the Learning of the Family is not at all prejudicial to the Manufactures. I was mightily pleased, the other Day, to find them all busie in preserving several Fruits of the Season, with the Sparkler [the youngest daughter] in the midst of them, reading over The Plurality of the Worlds. It was very entertaining to me to see them dividing their Speculations between Jellies and Stars, and making a sudden Transition from the Sun to an Apricot, or from the Copernican System to the Figure of a Cheese-cake.

That idyllic picture harmoniously combines a variety of culinary, cultural and edifying activities, thus enabling some genteel women to synchronize the fulfilment of their duties. Beneath the humorous tone, the rhetoric eloquently charts the strenuous and acrobatic itinerary of the female readers of Fontenelle who, after an exalting ascent to the starry dome, are suddenly brought down to earth, back to a natural order more consonant with the priority of their duties, 'from the Copernican system to the Figure of a Cheese-cake'. Addison's patronizing humour introduces a comic deflation of women's aspirations to scientific knowledge. In attributing the word 'Speculations' to the astronomic and culinary sciences alike, he devalues the intellectual activity which women were encouraged to pursue along with their domestic duties. The task that illustrates housework was not chosen at random. Making fruit preserves and sweetmeats belonged to the noble section of cookery and fell to the mistress of the household among the gentry. Indeed the exemplary scene devised by Addison is obviously located in the country. That setting corroborates Nancy Armstrong's observations about the contemporary conduct books in which female domestic duties were still defined with reference to a rural social pattern, even though those manuals, like Addison's essaypapers, were read by an increasing number of urban dwellers. 6 It seems that the genteel connotation associated with the particular culinary task mentioned in The Guardian endowed it with an emblematic value: when Mr Spectator was promoting the beneficial influence of his paper upon the ladies, to fill up their idle days, he ironically alluded to their domestic responsibilities thus: 'Their greatest Drudgery [is] the Preparation of Jellies and Sweetmeats. ' 7 As a matter of fact 'the whole art of Pastry and Preserving' 6 7

Armstrong 69-70. The Spectator no. 10 (March 12th 1710-11).

30

The Invisible Woman

was included among the female accomplishments taught in girls' boarding-schools together with 'the Needle, Dancing and the French tongue'. 8 Needlework was indeed the second commendable manual occupation for idle women, which received a sarcastic treatment from Mr Spectator in an essay written by Tickell. 9 In answer to a letter complaining about the loss of favour of embroidery among the younger generation, Tickell ironically praised the merits of that domestic art which, unlike painting, required so much concentration that it would prevent women from chatting and gossiping. In the first essay-papers written by women (or at least by a female persona), launched in the wake of The Spectator, the discourse about domestic occupations assumed a different tone, even occasionally subversive, thus echoing the early feminist criticisms of women's social status.IO A female reader of The Visiter (no. 35, 6 Dec. 1723) protested against the drudgery of 'Domestic Affairs', considered as the only employment suitable for women. During the same decade, in The Ladies' Journal (no. 2, 24 Jan. 1726-27), a male correspondent was urging the female sex to fight against 'the tyranny of Custom [and] steal a few Minutes from the Needle to improve their Minds'. Twenty years later, in her Female Spectator, Eliza Haywood warned her readers against the common ambition to become a 'notable Housewife', which amounted to mastering the skills of a competent housekeeper, instead of seeking to improve her mind in order to become 'a Woman of Fine Taste.' 11 If the promotion of study was on the agenda of the essay-papers, it was not always presented as a more rewarding alternative to household care, but most frequently as an additional benefit to the fulfilment of domestic duties. In the second issue of The Visiter (25th June 1723), women's right to knowledge was claimed with reference to two major female roles, that of hostess for her husband's guest and of manager of the household economy: ... though I think Household Oeconomy a very great Perfection in a Woman, and what everyone of them ought to be Mistress of, yet I wou' d not have them sit down with knowing how to make a Pudding, and pleat their Husbands Neckcloths, as the only Knowledge that is necessary for them. For my Part I should be full as anxious to have my Wife capable of entertaining my Company, as getting them an elegant Dinner. [ ... ] It seems to me the most absurd Notion that Men in all Ages have run into, that a Woman of superior Understanding is incapable of managing a Family, when certainly no other can do it as they ought: it is very sure that the greatest Ideot of a Woman may, as far as setting out a Table goes, know how to direct: but to know how to regulate the Expence of it between the two dangerous Extremes of Covetousness and Extravagance, requires a very steady Judgement.

That apparently militant discourse established a hierarchy in women's abilities: the technical skills were devalued, as in the previous quotations; the intellectual skills were

8 9 10 11

Advertisement in The Spectator no. 5 (March 1st 1712). The Spectator no. 606 (Oct. 13th 1714). See Shevelow 150-151. The Female Spectator (London: 1747) III 125.

The Representation of Housework

31

appreciated for their ornamental value; the most valuable qualities were moral ones which ensured a sound fmancial management. 12 The word 'regulate' here applied to household expenses, took on a paradigmatic value in the contemporary didactic discourse. What was at stake was the containment of female desire within a double enclosure: the physical space of the house and the boundaries of prudential ethics. The mid-century magazines were to develop the idea of the compatibility of knowledge and domestic duties but were no more forthcoming where practical skills were concerned. The new format of the magazine, with its miscellaneous structure, tried to preserve the editorial voice of the essay-paper with regular columns entitled 'The Friend ofthe Fair Sex', 'The Young Lady's Preceptor', or 'The Matron'. The latter editorial persona, under the name of Mrs Grey, made a monthly appearance in the second Lady s Magazine, from its birth in 1770 until she transferred her column to The New Lady s Magazine in 1786. The editorial voice had a normative function in matters of social manners and moral conduct and continued the exchange initiated in The Tatter and The Spectator between editor and readers, through a selection of their correspondence. The debate on women's 'employment' and on the type of knowledge suitable for their domestic duties was a recurrent topic in that dialogue. At the same time the periodicals implemented a self-styled educational programme in a medley of literary reviews, travelogues, edifying fiction, poetry, extracts from books of history, geography, botany, as well as cooking recipes, embroidery patterns, fashion prints and music scores. Cooking recipes did not become a standard feature of the women's press until the nineteenth century. They first appeared in The Lady s Magazine in April 1763, in a series of articles entitled 'A System of Cookery' which was continued for over a year. According to the editor, the introduction of that column was an unexpected consequence of the end of the Seven Years' War: As the War is now happily at an end, there will, in all probability, be a dearth of news, or at least of such news as is worth the notice of our fair readers, we have thought proper to lessen that department and to add in its room a compleat System of Cookery; which will be continued from month to month in alphabetical order, till the whole is compleat: to which will be added proper directions for genteel entertainments for every month in the year, so contrived as to be of real service to our subscribers.

Thus cookery made a discreet entrance to replace the 'Foreign Intelligence' column which offered an opening on to the public sphere. The comprehensive and methodical 'System of Cookery' followed the model of the very popular Art of Cookery by Hannah Glasse (1743) who had set the trend of a national style of cooking, breaking away from the court style and the French vocabulary which was declared obsolete and beyond the understanding of an English family cook. Each monthly instalment was completed with standard menus adapted to seasonal produce, and instructions for the laying out of dishes on the table, occasionally illustrated with prints. 12

See also Shevelow 163 who comments upon that extract from The Visiter with reference to Steele and Addison's educational programme in The Tatter and The Spectator.

32

The Invisible Woman

Household pharmacopoeia was also present in The Lady s Magazine, in shorter series such as some extracts from Isabella Moore's Every Man His Own Physician printed in four instalments in 1764. The manufacturing of potions, salves and ointments, traditionally included in cookery books, was a function of the rural gentlewoman who ministered to the sick of the parish. The Lady s Magazine's readers could also learn about home-made cosmetics and benefit from advice about personal and household hygiene which became more frequent in the last decades of the century together with articles on the care of young children and nursing. The circulation of the magazines in the provinces 13 accounted for the occasional occurrence of articles on the duties of the landowner's wife, such as those 'Practical Directions in the Management of Poultry and Bird. These as far as they relate to the Table make a considerable Branch of female Oeconomy' (The Ladys Magazine, May 1773). No such practical directions were provided for the management of the household. Articles entitled 'On the proper Treatment of Servants' or 'Of Behaviour to Servants' (The Lady s Magazine, Feb.l773), read as a string of moralizing anecdotes on the dangers of indulging in familiarities with one's chambermaid. When Mrs Grey, in her column, dealt with the proper use of domestics, she merely expatiated on the necessity to maintain a strict moral surveillance and to set a good example (The Lady s Magazine, Sept. 1775). If the representation of household management remained most often abstract and ideological, the other female occupation, par excellence, needlework, featured both as the object of an instructive debate on the very notion of middle-class women's work, and as a selling proposition from the periodicals which offered needlework patterns. The discussion of the merits of needlework was enframed in the wider debate on girls' education. Whereas, in The Female Spectator, Eliza Haywood reproved the mothers who insisted on 'keeping [their daughters] at theN eedle', instead of encouraging them to keep their minds busy with a book, 14 only a few magazine readers' letters still supported the acquisition of knowledge as a more rewarding employment than manual tasks, which could be, and actually were, performed by servants. In the successive Lady s Magazines, the new fashion for handiworks, such as knotting, netting or paperfiligree was not criticized for nurturing intellectual vacuity. The controversy revolved around their moral and economic utility. 15 Those who lashed out against the newfangled frivolous occupations were often older readers, female or male, such as 'A Single Man' who sent this contribution in 1778:

13 14 15

See Jan Fergus, 'Women, Class, and the Growth of Magazine Readership in the Provinces, 1746-1780', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 41-56. The Female Spectator, III 125. The vogue of paper filigree work in the 1780's gave rise to a debate about its cost in The New Lady s Magazine which was, at the same time, contributing to its commercial success with its 'Candid Review [of] the Guiding Assistant to Paper Filigree Work-in Six Weekly Numbers; Each of Which contains Two Sets of various original Patterns, executed in real Paper Filigree, by Charles Styart, 5s.3d. each' (July 1786) and its 'Historical Account of the Origin and Progress of Paper Filigree-Work, with an accurate description of the present Pattern' (Nov. 1786).

The Representation of Housework

33

In almost every house I enter, I generally find the girls about some trifling piece of work, such as knotting, netting or twisting purses ... [their] time might certainly be disposed of in a more advantageous manner in the performance of some work of indisputable usefulness; among these might be fairly reckoned the cutting out, contriving, and making of the greatest part of their dress, both necessary and omamental. 16 Those recriminations were judged obsolete, even by Mrs Grey. When other male correspondents complained that their wife or their daughter refused to take care of the household linen and to make their shirts, she proclaimed that utilitarian needlework was an obligation only for those who had to earn a living or to economize on housekeeping expenses. The new middle-class woman was, by status, unproductive, but had to be kept employed in order to avoid the moral and physical devastation caused by idleness. Hence a hierarchy was established between handiwork for relaxation and needlework, which was more exacting and therefore morally improving. In September 1773, 'The Friend of the Fair Sex', an editorial persona of The Lady's Magazine, issued this prescription against the disastrous effects of inactivity, langor, vapours, or fitful and futile agitation: Real and daillabour is necessary: the body ought to be employ'd as well as the mind; to knot is not greater employment than the flirting of a fan; there is a necessity for employment which requires care, like needlework of all kinds. But three or four hours at the needle were sufficient and allowed for an evening recreation, far Jess harmful than card games, retorted a female correspondent in the following issue: How then can an evening be more innocently passed than in knotting and netting, which is, though not a necessary, yet a very pretty embellishment for fumiture?1 7 In between the disciplinary activity of needlework whose economic value had become null, because superfluous, and the leisure activities such as netting, knotting and paper-filigree, authorized for their decorative function, embroidery seemed to meet all the requisites of ladies' manual work. It required laborious perseverance and concentration and also ranked as a form of art, and thus improved taste. For instance, in August 1798, The Lady's Monthly Museum printed an enthusiastic review of the 'Exhibition of Miss Linwood's Pictures in Needlework'. Those copies of paintings by Reynolds and Stubbs were held up as models since 'there cannot be a more excellent school for the study of all ladies, who are desirous of attaining a proficiency in the wonderful art of needlework'. Lastly, in a less ambitious version, embroidery could also be economical; it was, at least, the commercial argument put forward by The Lady's Magazine, when it was launched in August 1770: in each

16 17

The Lady's Magazine (Feb. 1778), reprinted in The New Lady's Magazine, (March 1794). The Lady's Magazine (March 1778), reprinted in The New Lady's Magazine (June 1794).

34

The Invisible Woman

monthly issue the periodical was to offer embroidery or lace patterns meant to adorn handkerchieves, men's shirt fronts and waistcoats, which, in a shop, would cost twice as much as the magazine issue. Those 'curious sprigs' became so elaborate that it was feared they might spoil the young ladies' eyesight. An extract from 'Maxims and Reflections recommended to the Consideration of the Ladies', in The Lady s Magazine of July 1775, summarized all the arguments involved in the debate about ladies' manual occupations in the sitting-room, from the formative virtues of embroidery, to the just balance between effort and grace, useful and ornamental accomplishments, emblematic of middle-class womanhood. Instead of that minute and laborious kind of work which is often practised by young ladies, I should think that slighter and freer patterns, would, for the most part, be greatly preferable. The sight would be in no danger of being strained, much less time would be required to finish them and, when finished, they would produce a much better effect. They would give, beyond comparison, more scope to the imagination: they would exhibit an ease, a gracefulness and a flow that ought to enter, as much as possible, into all the works of taste, and as they would admit a far greater multiplicity of ornaments, so likewise the purpose of utility would be promoted in a far higher degree. From this survey of the range of occupations suitable for ladies, as described and discussed in the female press, the most striking feature, common to household care and decorative handiwork, is the evanescent, almost virtual quality of that work: 'Labour that is not labour', as Nancy Armstrong worded it, 18 was one of the chief ingredients of the gentility which defmed middle-class womanhood. Genuine housework, namely the production of services and goods at home, was relegated below stairs, in the servants' quarter, or to the lower margins of society whose frontier was neatly drawn by class distinctions. Significantly the few concrete evocations of domestic chores which occasionally cropped up in the readers' correspondence always resorted to a humorous or satirical discourse which turned housework into a joke, or an object of ridicule. Besides, the comic portraits or anecdotes, supposedly contributed by male correspondents living in the City, concerned women who were excluded from the sphere of gentility, artisans' and shopkeepers' wives whom the editor advised to remain active and productive. So did Mrs Grey, in The Lady s Magazine of March 1784, who made it clear that, for lowerclass women, the shop was a natural extension of the house: 'Let every inferior tradesman make his wife and daughter serve in his shop, that the latter may not be too refined to serve in the shops of their husbands'. They should not be permitted to cultivate 'improper accomplishments', ' ... that they may live reputably and respectably among their equals and prove useful in their own domestic line'. Here again the editorial discourse was relaying that of the contemporary treatises and essays on the education of girls of humble condition. 19 Parallel to the editorial warnings, the periodicals printed short vignettes, signed by 'Simon Slenderpurse' or 'Christopher Cakeling,' which became set pieces, frequently copied by and from another magazine. Those humorous portraits, in the tradition of the 'character', 18 19

Armstrong 75-81. See Bridget Hill, Eighteenth-Century Women (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984) 62-63.

The Representation of Housework

35

popularized by The Spectator, illustrated various types of deviant or simply eccentric housewives. First those who practised economy with too much zeal : one was a sales addict and her house was cluttered with useless bargains;2° another one had been converted to a new cheaper method of baking bread with potato flour, but her kitchen proving too small for the special oven required, the chimney had to be pulled down and the husband was complaining of the cost of the supposedly economical bread. 21 A third one was bent on producing her own vegetables in the middle of London and was growing herbs and beans in punch-bowls and chamber pots on all the window-sills and in the rain pipes. 22 Another letter, entitled 'On the inconvenience of attending an overcleanly wife' can be credited with the only technical description of housework, albeit a humorous one. It was printed in The New Lady's Magazine in January 1794, and in a slightly different version in The Lady's Magazine of the following August. This extract is from the original article: ... I could very willingly compound to be washed out of my house, with other masters of families, every Saturday night; but my wife is so very notable that the same cleaning work must be repeated every day of the week. All the morning long, I am sure to be entertained with the domestic concert of scrubbing the floors, scouring the irons, and beating the carpets; and I am constantly hunted from room to room, while one is to be dusted, and another run over with a dry mop. Thus indeed I may be said to live in continual dirtiness, that my house may be clean; for during these nice operations, every appartment is flowed with soap, brickdust, sand, scrubbing brushes, hair-brooms, ragmops and dish-clouts.

Such satirical characters are endowed with a realism in sharp contrast with the ethereal environment assigned to genteel ladies. Moreover they provide an inverted image of the application of the domestic virtues commended in the adjoining columns: thrift, prudence, cleanliness. The common point of those calamitous housewives was an exuberant and disorderly activity expressed within the range proper to their station. In the upper classes their equivalent could be found in the 'gidding matrons' and 'jigging wives' taken to task for running from assemblies to parties in pleasure gardens. To be held in check, their desire had to be channelled to a semblance of work that would keep them at home.23 That strategy of containment was spelled out in a redefinition of the very concept of work, which took on different forms according to gender and class. The discourse of the women's press, like that of the conduct-books and other didactic essays, was characterized by the duplicity of their vocabulary. Just as 'employment' meant 'how to employ one's time', 'occupation' was understood as pastime. The economic utility of women's occupations boiled down to the production of superfluities whose

20 21 22 23

Letter from Simon Slenderpurse to Mrs Stanhope, The Lady's Magazine (July 1761). 'The Expense of Oeconomy', sent by Christopher Cakeling, The Lady's Magazine (Supplement for 1795). 'The rural Taste of a London Tradesman's Wife humorously exposed', The Lady's Magazine (Aug. 1794). See Armstrong 81: 'Self-regulation became a form of labor that was superior to labor.'

36

The Invisible Woman

only value was ornamental, or, in the field of domestic economy, was limited to the application of moral principles. Contrary to the monolithic image often established-retrospectively-by feminist criticism of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century women's press, some slight differences can be appreciated in that construction of middle-class womanhood throughout the century. Firstly, class distinction most often remained implicit in the essay-papers which addressed a readership of a higher social level than the magazines, in which, on the contrary, it was enhanced as a result of social mobility. On the one hand, as shown by Armstrong, the domestic ideal which shaped the concept of femininity enabled the rising middle-class, in quest of an identity, to smooth out the numerous and subtle differences between ranks24 which, according to Harold Perkin, characterized the eighteenth-century social fabric, as well as the opposition between rural and urban society. 25 The figure of the 'lady' constructed by the magazines corroborates that analysis. On the other hand, gentility as a class marker increasingly implied exclusiveness. Indeed, in line with Bourdieu's analysis, 'distinction' becomes all the more exclusive as it becomes more widespread socially. 26 Hence the striking division between the lady and her social inferiors enhanced in the 'popular' magazines. Secondly, if domestic occupations were defmed throughout the century as duties, among which intellectual improvement was annexed to the female domestic vocation, in the latter half of the century, the magazines were more concerned with women's decorative function, encouraging them to become consumers through fashion prints and advertisements. Thus the eighteenth-century women's periodicals built up a domestic ideology, but in no way guided women in its practical application. They gradually constructed the confmed space in which the Victorian middle-class woman would develop her skills in home management and surveillance. A new specialized women's press was to transform housework into an exact and moral science which would, from 1859 to 1861, reach its zenith with Mrs Beeton's contributions to The English Womans Domestic Magazine.

24

25 26

Armstrong 69: 'In bringing into being a concept of the household on which socially hostile groups felt they could all agree, the domestic ideal helped create the fiction of horizontal affiliations that only a century later could be said to have materialized as an economic reality.' Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge, 1969) 2229. Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1979) 559-561.

Chapter 3

Needlework and the Rights of Women in England at the End of the Eighteenth Century Chistine Rivet

'I did not like the needle,' Bridgetina declared in Elizabeth Hamilton's! Memoirs of Modern Philosophers 2 (2: 87). Instead of devoting herself to needlework therefore, she turns to philosophy: 'she snatched up a book, and reclining her head upon her hand, while her arm rested on the arm of the chair, she fixed herself in a meditating attitude, truly becoming the character of a female philosopher' (2: 172-173). However, Bridgetina is the grotesque 3 anti-heroine of a novel meant to ridicule the radical philosophers; 4 consequently, her intellectual pursuits are lamentably superficial. The author's other anti-heroine shows no more enthusiasm for needlework: Julia's mother had 'endeavoured to initiate her into the mysteries of cross-stitch, chain-stitch, and gobble-stitch ... the little romp ... did not much relish the confinement necessary for these employments' (I: 143). Repelled by the constraints associated with traditional female crafts, Julia, like Bridgetina, turns to philosophy, but this brings misfortune upon her: the books she reads lead her to a tragic end which she would have avoided, had she followed her mother's example and been content with more feminine occupations. Indeed, she would not have been tempted then to associate with the modem philosophers among whom she met the man who was to cause her ruin; even if she had met him, without the influence of radical philosophy, she would certainly have refused to follow him to London and live with him; she would never have met her downfall which culminated in her death and almost involved prostitution. Needlework could therefore have performed a protective role for Julia. If, as modem women, Bridgetina and Julia reject sewing, the novelist's heroine adopts a very different attitude towards it, as illustrated by this description of the young lady at her work:

I 2 3 4

Elizabeth Hamilton (1758-1816) wrote essays, poems and novels. Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1800). Bridgetina is particularly ugly and badly dressed. See Christine Hi vet, Voi.x de femmes: roman feminin et condition feminine de Mary Wollstonecraft a Mary Shelley (Paris: Presses de I'Ecole Normale Superieure, 1997) 230-231. The author's notes refer the reader to Godwin and Political Justice.

38

The Invisible Woman It was now past twelve o'clock. Already had the active and judicious Harriet performed

every domestic task, and ... was quietly seated at her work with her aunt and sister, listening to Hume's History of England, as it was read to them by a little orphan girl she had herself instructed (I: 107-108).

An exemplary young lady, Harriet is both capable of looking after the household and of being cultivated; for her, housework comes before the pleasure of the mind, and the latter does not exclude the former, as she only listens to Hume's work being read out to her whilst sewing. Elizabeth Hamilton's message seems clear: if the author does not reject education for women, needlework is better suited to them than the new fashion of radical philosophy and feminism. 5 Indeed, Bridgetina is never more than a caricature; she may rebel and reject sewing for philosophy, but she never rises above the level of a farcical character. As for Julia, she may be more attractive to the reader, but she too acts as a foil; she comes to a sad end and her fate acts as a warning. It is Harriet who speaks for Elizabeth Hamilton: 'so far from feeling any derogation of dignity in domestic employment, I always feel exalted from the consciousness of being useful,' Harriet says (1: 197). Useful, Harriet certainly is, as shown by the scene in which the novelist describes her working for her less fortunate neighbours, 'busily employed in preparing baby linen for the wife of a poor labourer, who had been brought to bed of twins' (2: 239). But do Bridgetina and Julia accurately portray the feminists they caricature? Was needlework really one of the battlegrounds on which the feminists and their adversaries were fighting at the turn of the century? It may seem so. Thus, in Mary Hays' 6 Memoirs ofEmma Courtney, 7 the heroine, and not the anti-heroine, declares hatred for sewing: 'I hated the needle,' says Emma (13) who, by contrast, recounts how, as a child, she loved books and physical activity. Emma is none other than the author in this strongly autobiographical novel. If her words seem to echo Bridgetina's, it is because the latter will be based on the same model. 8 Mary Hays' Letters and Essays also bear witness to her dislike of needlework. This is how she portrays Sempronia: The sole accomplishments which she deemed necessary to constitute a good wife and mother, were to scold and starve her servants, to oblige her children to say their prayers, and to go statedly to church, and to make clothes and household furniture from morning till night. (34)

5 6

7 8

For practical reasons, this word will be used to describe what should really be called pre-feminism, as there was no organized movement defending the rights of women at the time. Mary Hays (1760-1843) was the friend both of Godwin and of Mary Wollstonecraft. 'The Rights of Woman, and the name ofWollstonecraft will go down to posterity with reverence,' she writes in her Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous [1793] (repr. New York: Garland, 1974) 21. Memoirs of Emma Courtney [ 1796] (London: Pandora Press, 1987). Bridgetina is a caricature of Emma. Like their model, both women pursue a man with their love, but whereas Emma's passion has tragic consequences, Bridgetina's is merely grotesque.

Needlework and the Rights of Women

39

There is no doubt that sewing is being rejected: it is indeed linked with the mockery of a religion and the lack of moral conscience. It looks as though this attack on needlework is being made in the name of the nascent feminism, as it is sewing which seems to prevent women from fully developing their physical and intellectual potential: 9 'I confess I am no advocate for cramping the minds and bodies of young girls, by keeping them for ever poring over needle-work' (33), we read one page earlier. Indeed, Mary Wollstonecraft, the advocate ofthe rights ofwoman, 10 rises up against needlework in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman: 11 'I have already inveighed against the custom of confming girls to their needle,' she exclaims ( 169), reminding the reader of her former condemnation of the role performed by Rousseau: From [Rousseau' Emile] flows an opinion that young girls ought to dedicate great part of their time to needle-work; yet this employment contracts their faculties more than any other that could have been chosen for them, by confining their thoughts to their persons (75). A conservative who did not hide either her admiration for Hannah More 12 or her contempt for Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane West 13 on the contrary considers the needle to be a useful instrument which she greets in her Letters to a Young Lady 14 as 'our constant preservative from lassitude' (2: 416). As for Richard Polwhele who was going to attack the author of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman so cruelly in a poem entitled 'The Unsex'd Females', 15 he gives pride of place to sewing in the idyllic picture he draws of a traditional family in 'The Family Picture': 16 'And for my girls-ye fashionists, far hence!!Here shines the needle with peculiar grace' (74). Is there then some truth in what is suggested by grotesque Bridgetina, tragic Julia and perfect Harriet in Elizabeth Hamilton's novel? Did one's attitude towards

9

10 11 12

13 14 15 16

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) insists on the common nature of man and woman, a nature based on the reason they share and which sets them apart from mere animals. Although she acknowledges man's physical superiority, she stresses that education tends to increase this slight difference made by nature. Thus she ascribes the sexual characters identified by her contemporaries to culture, not to nature (see chapters 2 and 3 of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman: 'The Prevailing Opinion of a Sexual Character Discussed'). The very title of Mary Wollstonecraft's book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), announced her as a rebel against the sexist society of her time: the notion of women's rights was absurd as women only had duties then. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman [1792] (New York: Norton, 1975). The defender of the monarchy and religion, Hannah More (1745-1833) attacked the rights of men and the rights of women. Jane West (1758-1852) wrote novels, poems, drama, and also educational works. She voiced some very conservative opinions on the nature and place of women in society. Letters to a Young Lady in which the duties and character of women are considered, chiefly with a reference to prevailing opinions (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1806). In Poems (London: Rivingtons, 1810) II, 36-44. Op. cit., V 19-83.

40

The Invisible Woman

needlework go hand in hand with one's attitude towards the nascent feminism? Although it may be the case in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, a work of fiction written with an openly didactic purpose, 17 things were much more complex in reality. The author's position moreover is not quite so clearcut in the case of Julia as in that of Bridgetina: indeed, even though Julia would have been better off had she dedicated herself to sewing instead of mixing with the doubtful characters who were to lead her to an early grave, the novelist does not draw a very attractive picture of needlework when she evokes, with some irony, 'the mysteries of cross-stitch, chainstitch, and gobble-stitch'. Furthermore, she shows sympathy for Julia as a child: 'the little romp did not much relish the confinement necessary for these employments' (1: 145), she explains with affection. Indeed little Julia is not unlike what the tomboy Elizabeth Hamilton used to be. 'She had a playmate of the other sex, by whose example she was stimulated to feats of hardihood and enterprise,' her biographer Miss Benger writes. 18 Thus a strange gap appears between the author's official attitude and her own behaviour. As for Mrs West, she may defend women's traditional functions, but this does not prevent her from occasionally wishing things were different: 'At the commencement of these letters,' she admits in her Letters to a Young Lady, 'I felt discouraged at the extensiveness of the plan, for the due execution of which my numerous domestic duties left me little leisure' (3: 426). It is as though authors such as Elizabeth Hamilton and Mrs West could not be content with the very advice they were giving their readers. The feminists' position towards needlework needs to be reexamined as well. Indeed, although Emma proclains her dislike for sewing in Memoirs of Emma Courtney just as her caricature, Bridgetina, does in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, Mary Hays imagines a very different case in The Victim of Prejudice,1 9 a novel in which the reader can see the heroine's friend busily making clothes for the household while being read to by her husband (1: 94), a scene which, in spite of the very different positions of the novelists on important matters, reminds us of Harriet sitting at her work, listening to Hume's History of England. As for the heroine, far from complaining about having to sew, she would like to support herself by sewing; unfortunately she could not fmd employment in any of the lace, baby linen or other ready-made garment shops as she could not produce the necessary references or securities (2: 89-90). Mary Wollstonecraft too places a character in a similar situation in The Wrongs of Woman: 20 'not having been taught early, and my hands being rendered clumsy by hard work, I did not sufficiently excel to be

17

18 19 20

A writer for The Anti-Jacobin thus notices the presence in Memoirs of Modern Philosophers of some characters he describes as 'excellent people strictly performing the duties of religion and morality' and 'admirably contrasted with the unprincipled disciples of Godwin and his wife'. The Anti-Jacobin, 7 (180 1): 42. Memoirs ofthe Late Elizabeth Hamilton, with a Selection from her Correspondence and other unpublished Writings, ed. Elizabeth Benger (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1818) 32. The only available copy of the novel at the British Library is a French translation, La Victime du pnfjuge (Paris: Lenormand, 1799). In Mary [1788] and The Wrongs of Woman [1798] ed. Gary Kelly (Oxford: O.U.P., 1980).

Needlework and the Rights of Women

41

employed in the ready-made linen shops' (113), Jemima recalls. For Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays, defending the rights of woman does not therefore imply the systematic rejection of needlework, as is illustrated by what the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman writes in one of her letters to Godwin: 'You shall read whilst I mend my stockings.'21 As for Mary Hays, she even wishes men left sewing to women: 'I never see, without indignation, those trades, which ought to be appropriated only to women, almost entirely engrossed by men, haberdashery, millinery, and even mantua-making' (84-85), the author of Letters and Essays exclaims. The aim pursued by women whilst sewing may well offer a key to the apparent contradictions of our writers; rather than the nature of needlework itself, it may therefore be worth examining the context in which women were sewing. Indeed, Priscilla Wakefield either rejects or recommends needlework, depending on the class of women she addresses. 22 'It is a very erroneous misapplication of time, for a woman who fills the honourable and responsible character of a parent, to waste her days in the frivolous employment of needle-work,' she roundly declares in the pages devoted to the privileged classes (44). However, when she deals with the education of the women of the lower ranks of society, she insists on the importance of the very same occupation, 'useful needle-work in every branch' (11 0). Priscilla Wakefield considered sewing to be the occupation of the poor therefore rather than of women. Indeed, needlework did not seem to be a gendered occupation yet in the less fortunate households at the time: 'In the long winter evenings, the husband cobbles shoes, mends the family clothes, and attends the children, while the wife spins' (193), David Davies wrote in 1795 about Aberdeenshire in The Case of Labourers in Husbandry. 23 Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays shared Priscilla Wakefield's attitude: like her, they either encourage or reject needlework, depending on the social rank of the women they are discussing, as they consider it not as an aim in itself but as a means to an end, a potential source of work and income. Jemima was after financial independence when, faced with the fact that her savings were inexorably dwindling, she thought of sewing in The Wrongs of Woman. So was the heroine of The Victim of Prejudice when, alone and penniless in London, she vainly tried to support herself by plying the same trade. In Original Stories from Real Life, 24 Mary Wollstonecraft had portrayed a poor widow who had managed to support herself through needlework. 25 The simple garments made by Madame Neville in The Victim of Prejudice may not bring her any money, as they are to be used by her family, but Mary Hays stresses that Madame Neville

21 22 23 24 25

Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell U.P., 1979) 241. Reflections on the Present Condition of the Female Sex [1798] (London: Darton, Harvey & Darton, 1817). Quoted by Bridget Hill, Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989) ch. 7, 'Housework'. Original Stories from Real Life [1788] (London: Joseph Johnson, 1791). 'She came to me to beg some pieces of silk to make some pin-cushions for the boarders of a neighbouring school' (148-149). Needlework is another matter in the case of the boarders of the school in question, as it is then an accomplishment.

42

The Invisible Woman

nevertheless contributes to the financial security and well-being of the household: the Nevilles may only have enjoyed an income of sixty pounds per annum but careful management and constant industry meant that they could actually live quite comfortably (1: 94). Mary Wollstonecraft depicted a similar situation in her Original Stories from Real Life: '[Mrs Trueman's] husband, a man of taste and learning, reads to her, while she makes clothes for her children' (47). Authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays do not therefore reject needlework per se but some of its uses. Sewing is indeed in their eyes a fully legitimate activity when taken up voluntarily by women as a means to earn a living or save money; should it however tum into a form of labour arbitrarily imposed on their sex by society and it becomes the object of their criticism. Consequently, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman rises up against the custom which consisted in forcing little girls to practice needlework; 26 Mary Hays too condemns those who would like to make sure that young ladies were forever busy sewing. 27 In such cases, needlework is not a potential source of liberation but a form of slavery, an instrument of torture even. Indeed, Rousseau may consider a taste for sewing a sexual character, 28 but there were women who felt nothing but dislike for needlework: 'Confined to travel over an unwearied seam a mile long,' Elizabeth Carter does not hide her distress. 29 'She did some needle-work, often unwillingly when eager about her letters or Mss.,' we read about Maria Edgeworth in The Black Book of Edgeworthstown. 30 Sewing was moreover a source of cruel suffering for the female body and in particular for the female eyes. Mary Hays thus accuses the traditional occupation imposed on her sex of 'cramping the minds and bodies of young girls.' 31 As she imagines how the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman works at her needle in order to help her old nurse, Mary Wollstonecraft explains that Mary was trying to help the old woman spare her eyes.32 Conservative writers too were very much aware of the risks run by the eyes of those to whom they nevertheless recommended needlework as a most suitable employment. 'Shall radiant eyes that all the world bewitch/Ache with stupour, o'er the tedious stitch?' 'Yes!', Polwhele answered in 'The Family Picture' (42-43). Obviously worried by this problem, Dr Fordyce33 suggested that his readers spare their eyes by choosing less complicated

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

'I have already inveighed against the custom of confining girls to their needle' (169). 'I confess I am no advocate for ... keeping [young girls] for ever poring over needlework' (Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, 33-34). See A Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, 80-81: the author quotes Rousseau who talks of 'primary propensity'; 'chosen for them' (75) are the words Mary Wollstonecraft chooses for her part to describe what needlework was to her female contemporaries. Taken from a letter addressed to Miss Talbot and quoted by Rosamund Bayne-Powell, Housekeeping in the Eighteenth Century (London: J. Murray, 1956) 169. The Black Book of Edgeworthstown and other Edgeworth Memories 1585-1817, ed. Harriet Jessie Butler and Harold Edgeworth Butler (London: Faber & Gwyer, 1927) 241. Letters and Essays Moral and Miscellaneous, 33-34. 'I had a great affection for my nurse, old Mary, for whom I used often to work, to spare her eyes' (130). The Character and Conduct of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell, 1776).

Needlework and the Rights of Women

43

patterns but still advised young ladies to take up sewing, to the great annoyance of Mary Wollstonecraft.34 Supposing women actually found some pleasure in this accomplishment chosen for them by society, the feminists had another reason for disliking needlework which they indeed also criticize because it was no more than a mere pastime, that is to say a waste of time. Rejecting the idea Rousseau had contributed to spread and according to which 'young girls ought to dedicate great part of their time to needle-work' (75), the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman accused this craft of being no more than a mere pastime. Women had lots of time to pass indeed, as the doors to male occupations were being more and more tightly closed upon them. Passing the time: this is the way in which sewing is useful for Mrs West who describes the needle as 'that useful implement ... our constant preservative from lassitude' .35 Mrs West could not be any further from Priscilla Wakefield who calls sewing a 'frivolous employment' in the case of the ladies of the upper ranks of society and describes it as 'useful' only in that of the women of the lower social orders. When he recommends that his readers take an interest in needlework, Dr Gregory explains that it is a way of filling 'some of the many solitary hours [they] must necessarily pass at home'. 36 Was not sewing therefore the opium of women? Busily employed at their work, they were less likely to resent the society which was shutting them up in the domestic sphere, leaving them both useless and bored. Indeed, some women did take pleasure in needlework. 37 However, although the moralists preferred to see women busy sewing rather than rivalling with men in the public sphere, they did not really want them to fmd a source of actual pleasure in this activity. Dr Gregory thus stresses that sewing could not be an end in itself. 38 As for Polwhele, he condemns those whose fingers might be moved by vanity: reminding his readers that their ancestresses used to make tapestries meant to cover the walls of their manors, he mourns the fact that his female contemporaries work on their own dresses. 39 Not only had the women who were busy sewing no time for boredom or discontent, but they had no time either for self-improvement. In Letters and Essays, Moral and Miscellaneous, Mary Hays therefore criticizes the excessive amount of time being spent sewing by Sempronia and stresses that it could have been otherwise employed: Sempronia might have read some books for instance, but 'All attention to literature, she considered as mere waste of time' (34); there was no 34 35 36 37 38 39

'It moves my gall to hear a preacher descanting on dress and needle-work' (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 94). See Addison's Spectator, no. 606: 'If I may ... imagine that any pretty creature is void of Genius ... I must never-the-less insist. .. upon her working, if it be only to keep her out of Harm's way.' A Father :S Legacy to his Daughters [1774] (London: Millar, Law & Carter, 1789) 63. Rosamund Bayne-Powell gives the example of Mrs Thackeray: 'Mrs Thackeray of Cambridge had always a pair of wrist bands or a collar in her pocket ready to be stitched'; she never forgot to take her work along with her when she went out to tea, she adds ( 170). A Father :S Legacy to his Daughters, 63. 'At present, whilst we admire the elegant fingers of a young lady busied in working, or painting her ball-dress, we cannot but think, that her grand stimulus is the idea, "how well she shall look in it"' (43).

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The Invisible Woman

danger that either Sempronia or her daughters might become novelists. By contrast, once married, the heroine in Memoirs of Emma Courtney makes good use of her spare time and reads books on anatomy, medicine and surgery instead of dedicating herself to sewing. Not only did needlework soak up a lot of the precious time which women might have devoted to more profitable activities, but it also prevented their intellectual development, thus disqualifying them from really useful tasks. 'This employment contracts their faculties more than any other' (75), declares the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. By defmition, constraining girls to their needle implies preventing their minds from developing fully. 4 Forbidding women to use the reason nature had given them as human beings, needlework thus appeared as a dangerous source of alienation for them, a means for the sexist society of the time to keep them in a position of so-called natural but in fact artificial inferiority. However, the advocates of the rights of women did not content themselves with criticizing sewing as a form offemale accomplishment: they also happened to attack needlework as a source of independence as they refused to allow it to be the only way for their female contemporaries to contribute to the fmancial well-being of their household or to support themselves. Stressing that women might earn a living by sewing was not very revolutionary indeed: conservative authors themselves were happy to let women sew for a living, for this so-called feminine occupation had the further advantage of keeping women safely ensconced in the private sphere. 'By the employment of her needle, she had procured, during his absence, an honourable and virtuous subsistence for herself and son,' Elizabeth Hamilton writes about one of the female characters of her Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah. 41 By contrast, useful as it might be, needlework was never more than a poor solution for the feminists who would have liked to see women employed at more stimulating and better paid tasks. Mary Wollstonecraft herself experienced the vicissitudes of the life of a seamstress with the Bloods: having sewn so late into the night as not to be able to see any more, she knew the physical and spiritual suffering endured by those who lived off badly paid needlework. 'Few are the modes of earning a subsistence, and those very humiliating,' she writes in Thoughts on the Education ofDaughters;42 in her later Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she wonders what women may have to do in society. She is nevertheless convinced that her sex can perform a part in the world of business, the professions and even politics. True, sewing did allow women to do charitable work. Thus, Elizabeth Hamilton's Harriet sews in order to help the poor. However, because of their faith in women's intellectual powers, the feminists refused to limit female charity to needlework. Mary Hays therefore shows how Emma studies medicine: she assists her husband in his profession and she can even

°

40 41 42

'I have already inveighed against the custom of confining girls to their needle and shutting them from all political and civil employment: for by thus narrowing their minds, they are rendered unfit to fulfil [their] ... duties' (169). Translation ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah, written previous to, and during the Period of his Residence in England, with a Preliminary Dissertation on the History of the Hindoos (London: G. G. & J. Robinson, 1796) I, 106. Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, with Reflections on Female Conduct in the More Important Duties of Life (London: Joseph Johnson, 1787) 69.

Needlework and the Rights of Women

45

help the sick on her own, should the need arise. 43 Whereas Elizabeth Hamilton requires of Harriet that she content herself with the discreet charity traditionally linked with her sex, Mary Hays makes Emma choose a masculine profession which makes her useful to society at large. True, before her marriage, the heroine of The Wrongs of Woman sews in order to help her old nurse, Mrs Mason and her pupils make garments for the poor in Original Stories from Real Life, 44 and Mary Wollstonecraft herself sewed during her residence with the Bloods, but the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman soon gave up needlework to become 'the first of a new genus', 45 that is to say a professional writer. This is precisely what the moralists wanted to prevent, as shown by the warmth with which they recommended sewing to women and by the recurring antithesis between sewing and writing. 'I cannot forbear wishing that several Writers of [the] Sex had chosen to apply themselves rather to Tapestry than to Rime,'4 6 Addison's Spectator already declared. The Miniature reacted just as violently in 1804 when faced with the spectacular success of women's novels in the eighteenth century: this publication proclaimed loudly that the ladies who pored over the web of their complicated plots had better work at darning their stockings. 47 Mrs West echoed such criticism when she imagined that only those who had 'clothed their household with the labour of [their] own hands' should be allowed 'to dress out fictitious characters'. Elizabeth Hamilton too echoed The Spectator and The Miniature when she ironically described the writers of her time in Memoirs ofModern Philosophers as being 'authors by profession ... milliners at their leisure hours' (1: 43), thus suggesting that female writers worked against the natural order of things. Encouraging needlework thus seemed to be a way of censuring female writing. Faced with the potential threat of female competition, should women not fmd sewing a satisfactory pastime or an acceptable paid or charitable activity any more, and should they then wish to work in spheres until then considered as exclusively masculine, traditionalists could only rejoice when they saw the efforts made by those who were still happy to realize their ambitions with their needle, such as Miss Linwood, a lady upon whom The Gentleman sMagazine lavishes praise. Indeed, such panegyric did not cost anything to the male sex: Miss Linwood may have shone, but she did not compete in any way with men through her work. This causes such relief to the author of the account of the exhibition of the lady's works that he forgives her intrusion on the public sphere and even rejoices that the success enjoyed by her first exhibition encouraged her to renew the experiment. 48 All of Miss Linwood's exhibitions met with the same approval in The Gentleman sMagazine whose accounts never tired of what they called 'the superior powers of the needle'. 49 What may be the 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

See chapter 25. 'She requested Caroline to assist her to make some clothes, which a poor woman was in want of' ( 107). Quoted by Claire Tomalin, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft [1974] (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983) 92. No. 606, p. 722. 2 (1804): 16. 69.1 (1799): 235. 79.1 (1809): 252.

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The Invisible Woman

cause of such enthusiasm, especially in a man? Maybe the author was keen to encourage women to follow Miss Linwood's example in order to curb their threatening energies. Indeed, if the lady's works had 'all the effect of a most exquisite painting' ,50 they were not paintings. Miss Linwood was not shunning the needle in favour of paint brushes: 'she had no instrument but her needle,' The Lady s Monthly Museum stresses in an attempt to discourage its readers from looking for nobler tools, for Miss Linwood's needle was supposed to be as capable of creating wonders as Praxiteles' chisel. 51 Instead of entering the male sphere of art, Miss Linwood, a mere seamstress, thus remained on the margins and the Royal Academy could close its doors on her with a clear conscience. 52 If male commentators acknowledged the genius displayed by Miss Linwood, what made the lady's works particularly remarkable in their eyes was in fact the patience they displayed. 53 Moreover, Miss Linwood contented herself with copying male artists, which was a way of paying homage to their creative genius and to hide humbly behind them: her gallery was therefore never more than 'a gallery of imitative art'. 54 Male artists were on display in her exhibitions, not Miss Linwood, as illustrated by the full title of her guidebook, 'The Linwood Gallery of Pictures in Needle-Work; with a biographical sketch of the Painters'. Mary Wollstonecraft would not have been happy with a career such as Miss Linwood's, but then nor would have Hannah More or Jane West, as the latter in fact write expansively, whilst recommending that their female contemporaries should be content with needlework. Although she rejects the feminism ofA Vindication ofthe Rights of Woman, Hannah More bitterly resents the inferior status of the woman writer; 55 as for Jane West, she cannot prevent herself from wishing that her domestic tasks left her more time for writing.5 6 And so it appears that the feminists and their adversaries had less divergent positions regarding needlework than it might have seemed at first sight. Both sides acknowledged that it was a useful activity for the needy but found it a poor medium for those whose aptitudes were above average. The exaggerated declarations about sewing may be explained by the context created by the French Revolution and by the climate of political reaction which followed in England. Keen to preserve order and religion, the enemies of the feminists were clinging to the past, and thus, amongst other things, to needlework: as stressed by Thomas Gisbome, woman had traditionally fulfilled the functions of 'housekeeper and sempstress'. 57 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

70.1 (1800): 560. The Lady's Monthly Museum, 5 (1800): 2. See The Lady's Monthly Museum, 5 (1800): 1-4. The Lady's Monthly Museum praises 'a monument, not only of uncommon genius, but of a persevering industry', 5 (1800): 4. The Lady's Monthly Museum, 5 (1800): 4. See Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1799) II: 12: 'Her highest exertion will probably be received with the qualified approbation, that it is really extraordinay for a woman. ' Letters to a Young Lady, III: 426. See An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex (London: T. Cadell Jun. and W. Davies, 1801) 18. 'Genius, taste, and learning itself, have appeared in the number of female endowments and acquisitions,' Gisbome adds (p. 19).

Chapter 4

Governesses of the Royal Family and the Nobility in Great Britain, 1750-1815 Sophie Loussouarn

The word governess appeared in English in the fifteenth century and referred to a person in charge of the children of the Royal family or the nobility. It was only at the beginning of the seventeenth century that the governess became a proper teacher. In the eighteenth century, numerous learned women who were bachelors or widows worked as governesses, tutors or schoolmistresses. There was a hierarchy between those three types of educators. There were also huge differences in their wages depending on the family for whom they worked. As there was of course no census of the employment of women in the eighteenth century, we have little information on their numbers. Joseph Massie or Patrick Colquhoun do not mention the category of governesses. Nevertheless, if we take into account the number of noble families, we may suppose there were at least 10,000 governesses. Governesses were chosen on psychological, moral and pedagogical criteria. Their knowledge of the topics they taught was rarely taken into account by theoreticians, moralists or journalists, as the following quotation from a ladies' periodical shows: Parents should be very careful in the choice of tutors for their children, and such persons only ought to be encouraged as school-masters and governesses, as are of good repute, and lead such lives as do no discredit to religion.-It is from such only that precept can be expected to have a proper effect; it is these only, who, while they teach them the sciences, will have due care over their morals. 1

Governesses and tutors had to meet a physical, moral and intellectual profile. Parents recruited women with moral and intellectual qualities. The ideal image of the governess was that of a reserved, modest and calm person. This triple characteristic appeared like a guarantee for parents who entrusted their children with them, so as to hand them down the basic knowledge required according to their social background. Governesses became members of the family for which they worked, often developing intimate ties with the children, but they were submitted to the orders of the parents and to the lifestyle imposed on them. To be employed as a governess was a respectable, yet unpredictable job, since the parents could dismiss a governess. The governesses of the Royal family belonged to the aristocracy, unlike

'Essay on Education', The Lady's Magazine (June 13, 1775) VI: 365.

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The Invisible Woman

those of aristocratic families. In the Royal family, tutors were subordinated to governesses. What was the status of the governesses of the Royal family and the nobility from 1750 to 1815? What were their relationships with the parents and the children? What were their working conditions, their stipends, their perks and their living conditions? These are some of the questions raised by the work of governess. The governesses of the Royal family

In the eighteenth century, the Royal family employed governesses and tutors who helped the mothers absorbed by their social life. Governors and governesses of the Royal children belonged to the nobility and the tutors of the princes and princesses had often taught in aristocratic families previously. 2 Governesses were often widows who had acquired an experience of education through that of their children. On the contrary, the younger tutors of the princes and princesses were bachelors, which made them available, whereas dancing and music masters and language teachers were usually foreigners. The governesses of George II and Caroline's children belonged to the aristocracy, whether it be Baroness von Gemmingen, Lady Portland or Lady Deloraine. In the 1730s, George II employed Lady Deloraine as the governess of Princess Mary and Princess Louisa. As a widow, Lady Deloraine had accepted not to remarry when she became governess to the Royal children. She soon became George Il's mistress. The Countess of Portland was also the governess of George II's daughters from 1737 to 1738. Apart from their governess, Princess Mary and Princess Louisa had a dancing master, Mr Garth, who earned £42 a year, a music teacher, Mr Palacet, who earned £100 a year, a clavichord master, Mr Ebelin, who earned £75 a year and a violin teacher, Mr Webber, who earned £75 a year. 3 At the court of George III and Queen Charlotte, the queen was helped by governesses and teachers. Lady Charlotte Finch was in charge of the education of the princes at the court of George III, where she was appointed governess to the Royal children when the Prince of Wales was born in 1762. She was the second daughter of Thomas, first Earl of Pomfret, and was born on February 14th 1725. When she was appointed governess she was the widow of the Honourable Finch, a renowned diplomat and was the mother of five children. As governess of the Prince of Wales, she had rights, privileges and advantages, as the Duke of Devonshire wrote. 4 From 1762 to 1771, she earned £600 a year as governess of the Prince ofWales.s And from 1771 to 1793, she still earned £600 a year as governess of the young prince and princesses. 6 Besides, she benefited from other advantages from March 1783:

2

3 4 5 6

Miss Anne Dorothy Khrome was the governess of Lady Amelia Darcy, the daughter of the four princes' governor, the earl of Holdernesse, before teaching French to the princesses. RA Geo Add MSS 21/181 Geo Add MSS 15/437. Add. MSS 17870 (5-72) Add. MSS 17871 (4) RA Geo. 36839-36945.

Governesses of the Royal Family and the Nobility

49

She was granted £800 'in lieu of diet and all other necessaries with which she has been served from the Household, either in Town or Country, and which she was supplied with by His Majesty's Command from Benevolence to Lady Charlotte Finch personally and not to her as Governess to the Royal Nursery for as such she was entitled to allowance from the Household.

The governess of George, his brother and sisters, Charlotte, Augusta and Elizabeth, Mary, Sophia and Amelia performed her duty seriously and expressed in a letter to the Queen the high opinion she had of her task, as she was in charge of the instruction, the conduct and the amusements of the Royal children: Your majesty must know what an uncommon stock of spirits and cheerfulness is necessary to go through the growing attendance of so many and such very young people in their amusements, as well as behaviour and instruction, besides ordering the affairs of a nursery. Therefore if your majesty will be graciously pleased to signify to me what the additional attendance is that you require I shall either endeavour faithfully to discharge it, or humbly and fairly own my incapacity for it, which appears to me the only way of acting consistant with the duty of a faithful servant, which I hope I have ever approved myself to your majestyJ

As governess, Lady Finch had a busy timetable so that in 1774 she asked for two days of rest a week to see her friends, which was accepted by the Queen. 8 The Queen organized the timetable of the governesses and tutors ofthe children so that the latter were never alone, but she also took into account the happiness of her employees who replaced her when she was busy with her numerous duties. The Queen and Lady Finch wrote to each other when the latter was in charge of the Royal children during the summer holiday at the seaside at Weymouth in 1780. The letters of the Royal family reveal the trust and the esteem of the King and Queen as well as the affection and gratitude of the princesses towards this outstanding person. Princess Charlotte thus wrote from Windsor on November 11th 1795:

The kindness you express & show me upon the reunion and I may say upon every other during my life time ... I can find no words to express all I wish to say & how I feel your goodness to me, but believe me when I assure you I am most grateful. 9

Princess Mary also thanked her governess for her kindness and her motherly tenderness. 10 Even after she retired, the Queen kept writing to her and sent her a gift as a testimony of her friendship. 11

7 8 9 10 11

RA Geo Add MSS 15/8155. Lady Charlotte Finch to the Queen; Oct 31st 1774. RA Geo. Add. MSS 15/8154 (1774). RA GEO Add MSS 15/445. Princess Mary to Lady Charlotte Finch; November lith 1795. GeoAdd MSS 15/8175. Geo Add MSS 15-447. Windsor February 27, 1808.

The Invisible Woman

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Lady Charlotte Finch was helped by Mrs Coultsworth, the sub-governess, who retired in 1772 and was replaced by Miss Martha Caroline Goldsworthy, the daughter of Burrington Goldsworthy and the sister of the first equerry to the Queen. They were helped by Miss Jane Gomme, the daughter of William Gomme, who had been George III's secretary at the British Embassy in the Hague. Miss Frederica Planta was the English teacher of the princesses from July 1771 until her death in February 1778 and she earned £100 a year, 12 to which £50 was added in 1773 to cover her food expenses and her tea, coffee, chocolate and sugar expenses. Her sister Margaret Peggy Planta was appointed English teacher when her sister died. She earned £100 a year from 1792 to January 1812, when she retired and got an annual pension of £150 until October 1816. Mademoiselle Suzanne Moula and Mademoiselle Krohme, helped by Monsieur de la Guiffardiere, taught French. And in 1772, Princess Charlotte, Princess Augusta and Princess Elizabeth started learning French with Miss Anne Dorothee Krohme, who had been the governess of Lady Amelia Darcy, the daughter of the governor of George III's fourth son. Mademoiselle Montmollin taught sewing to the princesses. There were fifteen teachers in the team managed by Lady Finch. Monsieur Denoyer taught drawing. Mr Roberts taught writing and music was taught by Johann Christian Bach. 13 The governess, Lady Charlotte Finch, was a member of the Royal family. But, the sub-governess, Mrs Coultsworth, and the English teacher, Miss Planta,were lodged in the Queen's House, the latter also having apartments in StJames's. The assistants of the governess were chosen by the King and Queen, who did not relinquish their powers, as one of Queen Charlotte's letters to Lady Charlotte Finch reveals: You said that in coming into the family you get some distress in not having appointed the sub governess. This I believe is a mistake as I find by the king that this place is not to be disposed of by either Governor or Governess but by us alone... but the choice and determination solely is in us.l4

Nothing was left to chance in the organization of the teaching of the Royal children, as Queen Charlotte's recommendations show. The Royal family was a real pedagogical laboratory for fifteen princes and princesses. The Queen looked after the organization of the classes taught by the numerous highly qualified teachers who benefited from a preferential treatment as masters of the Royal children. Their wages did not compare with the £40 a year Mary Wollstonecraft earned in 1786 as governess of the children of Lord Kingsborough. Within the Royal family, there was a clear hierarchy between the tutors and the governesses, the latter being members of the Royal family and taking part in the tea parties and other functions their young students attended. After Lady Finch left, Lady Elgin, a widow and mother of four

12 13 14

Add. MSS. 17870 (73).

Court and Private Life in the Time of Queen Charlotte: Being the Journals of Mrs Papendick, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe and Reader to Her Majesty, ed. Mrs Vernon Delves Broughton (London: Richard Bentley, 1887) I, 64. RA Geo Add MSS 15/8154. Queen Charlotte to Lady Charlotte Finch (1774).

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children who lived in Windsor with the Royal family, became the governess of George III's granddaughter, Princess Charlotte, who wrote: Lady Elgin we have her quite alone at Windsor and she is a most valuable person, she has gone through a great deal but her support and comfort was her true confidence in a most kind and just Providence. She was left a widow my dearest Augustus with the care of three infant Boys and with Child and the day fortnight of her husbands death she lay in of a little girl; she thought that giving herself up entirely to grief would be a most wicked thing, when Providence had been pleased to grant her so fine a family; she has followed them ever since that time through all their different studies her girl has never left her & she now has the pleasure to see them out well Lady Charlotte is a most amiable young woman.l 5

Her gifts as an attentive mother and the esteem of the princesses towards her account for her being selected as the governess of the Prince of Wales's daughter. The governesses of the nobility

The mothers of the nobility who educated their daughters at home expected numerous skills and a good morality from their governesses. But they could not vie with the Royal family who employed about twenty governesses and tutors to hand down the basic knowledge to the heirs to the throne of England. In the second half of the eighteenth century, the employment of governess became widespread in aristocratic families whereas institutions for girls lost their renown. The work of a governess was a full-time job from morning to evening and it left little spare time. Unlike the governesses of the Royal family who belonged to the nobility and were usually widows, the governesses of the nobility were less skilled, younger and bachelors. Governesses were often the daughters of ministers who had no personal income and worked to meet their needs. Some performed this job all their life while others stopped when they married. Some were more educated than others. Nevertheless, the education, the clothes and the manners of a governess showed her social standing. A governess should behave properly to serve well-born people, but her situation depended on the good-will of the parents who entrusted their children to them since she was neither a servant nor a member of the family. Moral qualities prevailed in the choice of a governess and she was often recommended to the family by friends. It was the case of the governess of the Duchess of Portland's children, Elizabeth Elstob, who was recommended by Mrs Pendarves and to whom Elizabeth had been introduced by Hester Chapone, one of her childhood friends. From 1739 onwards, the daughters of Margaret Cavendish Harley, Duchess of Portland, were educated by Elizabeth Elstob (1683-1756), a linguist and a scholar, who was brought up by her brother. Lady Elizabeth, Lady Harriet and Lady Margaret were in the care of the governess with her two brothers, William, Marquess of Tichfields and Lord Edward. But the sons left to attend classes at 15

RA. Geo Add MSS 10/5 Princess Elizabeth to Prince Augustus, May 27th 1791.

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Mr A chard at the age of five, before leaving home to go to a public school, at the age of nine. As for their sisters they were under the aegis of Mrs Elstob who devised for them a curriculum based on religion, virtue, reading, English grammar and history. Elizabeth Elstob remained the tutor of the Duchess of Portland's children from 1739 to 1756, to educate the children, teach them how to speak and understand English and go out with them. In spite of the status of the family for which she worked, she only earned thirty pounds a year.I 6 In some families, the governess was a relatively independent person and highly considered by her masters who had esteem and respect for her. The governess of the daughters of Georgiana and the fifth Duke of Devonshire was recommended by their grandmother, Lady Spencer, who meant to have an influence on the education of Georgiana (1783-1858) and Harriet (1785-1862) through Miss Selina Trimmer, the daughter of Mrs Sarah Trimmer. Selina Trimmer arrived at Devonshire House at the end of the year 1788 and stayed there until the children of the Devonshires were brought up. She had become a member of the Cavendish family. Selina was the ideal governess: she loved children and wanted to do her duty and teach them moral principles.J7 Selina gave full satisfaction to Georgiana who was pleased with the virtue of her children's governess, but was afraid she might be her mother's tool. Indeed the latter trusted Miss Selina Trimmer more than her own daughter, as Georgiana wrote to Lady Spencer in a letter of September 9th 1790: I have, Dst M., a great opinion of Miss T's principles and talents for education, but I see her so alter' d, thinking herself so independent of me not to suspect her especially by the hints she is for ever dropping about yr intentions and notions. Now, Dst M., it was my consolation to think I had such a person about my children, and it is my anxious desire to retain her, but if I ever can discover that she interferes in anything but the care of their education, or that she stands between you and me in any way whatsoever, I could not submit to have a person whom I look'd upon in that light another moment in the house with me. I hope I am wrong, I feel a real regard for her attentions to my poor child.l 8 The Duchess of Devonshire reproached her children's governess with her independence but she showed her esteem for Selina whom she held as her children's guide: 'I respect you as the most virtuous and valuable being I ever knew. I depend on you as the guide & guardian of my dearest children' 19 Selina Trimmer was in charge of teaching reading, writing, arithmetic and French to Georgiana's two daughters. She was helped by an Italian teacher, Nardini. In other families, the governess was in charge of more children. Agnes Porter became at the same time the governess of the three daughters of the second Earl of Ilchester, Henry Thomas Fox and his wife Mary Theresa. Agnes Porter was the

17

Green, 'Elizabeth Elstob: The Saxon Nymph (1683-1756)', in J. R. Brink, Female Scholars, 153-155. Brian Masters, Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1981)

18 19

c. 1062. c. 1397.

16

168.

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53

daughter of an Anglican minister and she started working for the II chester family in 1784, when she was thirty years old. From 1784 to 1793 she lived on their estate at Redlynch and was in charge of the education of the three daughters, Elisabeth Theresa, aged eleven, Mary Lucy, aged eight, and Harriet, aged five and a half. Then from 1796 onwards, she was in charge of the two younger sisters, Charlotte and Louisa, and of their brother Lord Stavordale, to whom she taught reading, writing and arithmetic. She also taught them history, geography, French and English literature. Besides, she gave them moral lessons, made them read the Bible and recite their catechism. At Redlynch, she earned £105 a year and had a bedroom and a room to entertain her friends. She also had a room in the London house of the Ilchesters. One of her letters dating from March 1788 described the day in the life of a governess of the nobility in London: Thursday: rose at half past six, past an hour and a half in my chamber, then went to the harpsichord till nine. A lively breakfast with my three dear friends, after which Lady Elizabeth and I together prepared for Monsieur Helmand: he was very well pleased with the lessons practiced. Afterwards I spent two hours with Lady Mary and Harriot at French, English and music, then 1/2 hour of Numa [J.P. Claris de Florian, The Adventures of Numa Pompilius, 1788] to our mutual satisfaction. Went in the evening with Mrs Matthews to the play, intending to see the heroine of the theatre Mrs Siddons. 20

Agnes Porter was a happy governess who was pleased to work for the Ilchester family and enjoyed the goodness and friendship they showed towards her. She became the governess of her pupils's children and came to live at Penrice Castle from 1799 onwards. The teaching of Agnes Porter varied considerably between her arrival in 1799 when she was in charge of three daughters and her departure in 1806 when the family was made up of eight children. She earned £100 a year between 1799 and 1806; but after she had left Penrice Castle, the Talbots still gave her an annual pension of £30. The daily life of a governess at the time was more that of a member of the Talbot family, since she had known the mother of the children since the age of seven. She spent her free time reading, writing and visiting friends. The governesses benefited from board and lodging in the family for which she worked, which was a nice perk, but the annual wage ranged from thirty to fifty pounds. In October 1786, Mary Wollstonecraft became the governess of Lord Kingsborough's children, in Dublin and Mitchelstown, County Cork, thanks to the recommendation of her friend, Mrs Burgh, and earned forty pounds a year. After some time to adjust, she felt some satisfaction to live in the castle of the Kings boroughs, for a year, in spite of the terrible relationships with the lady of the house, Lady Kingsborough, who was more concerned by her dogs than by her daughters.21 The correspondence of Mary Wollstonecraft and her sister Everina

20 21

The Journals and Letters ofAgnes Porter, ed. Joanna Martin (London: The Hambledon Press, 1998). Mary Wollstonecraft, Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph M. Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979) 120.

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describes the feelings of the young governess who had just arrived in an Irish family, where she was often left to herself as a letter of October 9th 1786 shows: I shall be more alone in my new situation than I ever supposed, as I shall often be left at the country seat with the younger children, as they do spend the winters with their mother in Dublin ... They do reside near Cork-at Mitchelstown-here Lord Kings borough has established a manufactory.22

She was in charge of the three daughters of the Kings boroughs, the eldest one of whom was fourteen: I have committed to my care three girls-the eldest fourteen-by no means handsomeyet a sweet girl-She has a wonderful capacity but she has a multiplicity of employments it has not room to expand itself-and in all probability will be lost in a heap of rubbish miscalled accomplishments. 23

The reader can discover the educationalist in the benevolent governess. Indeed she criticized the conformist education of girls and the vanity of the accomplishments. Mary Wollstonecraft criticized the indifference of Lady Kingsborough towards her children, who were afraid of their mother and took their governess as a substitute mother: All her children have been ill-very disagreeable fevers-Her ladyship visited them in a formal way-though their situation called forth my tenderness-and I endeavored to amuse them while she lavished awkward fondness on her dogs.

The character of the governess was often a substitute for the mother who frightened the children: The children cluster about me-one catches a kiss, another lisps my long name-while a sweet little boy who is conscious that he is a favourite, calls himself my son-At the sight of their mother they tremble and run to me for protection-This renders them dear to me-and I discover the kind of happiness I was formed to enjoy. 24

The governess whose function was to look after the children, to supervise them, to teach them the basics, became a real friend and made up for the relative solitude ofLady Kingsborough's daughters whose life was split from that of their parents. She offered understanding, support and compassion to complaints and sorrows. The relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and her pupils was one of intimate friendship. Even in noble households the life of governesses was uncertain, depending on the families' positions and the children's attitudes. This could bring great

22 23 24

Wollstonecraft 118. Wollstonecraft, Letter to Eliza W. Bishop, Mitchelstown, November 17th 1786 126. Wollstonecraft, Letter to Everina, Mitchelstown, January 15th 1787 132.

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satisfactions when children were gifted but it could also cause numerous disappointments with difficult children. Governesses were nonetheless more privileged than schoolmistresses who had to teach a greater number of pupils and did not enjoy the comfort of aristocratic houses or the esteem due to their skills. The status of governess gradually improved in the first half of the eighteenth century. But there was a change in the second half when aristocratic families employed governesses for their children at home. The work of governess provided a home and a modest wage to a woman, but this position remained precarious, as she was entirely submitted to the goodwill of the employer. Moreover, illness or age could put an end to this employment. Owing to their education, to their working conditions and to their lifestyle, governesses were different from top servants, but the wages of governesses ranged from £30 to £100 in the aristocracy whereas it reached £600 for the governess of George III's children and only a few governesses benefited from a pension after leaving the family for whom they had worked.

PART II WOMEN IN MALE STRONGHOLDS

Chapter 5

The Labour and Servitude of Women in the Highlands of Scotland in the Eighteenth Century Marie-Helene Thevenot-Totems

If the Highlands are nowadays considered to be the undisputed tourist region of Scotland, such was not the case at the very beginning of the eighteenth century. The Highlands did not attract many visitors, for they were reputed to be a poor and inhospitable land, not easily accessible and peopled with 'savages' whose language was totally incomprehensible to foreigners. The Highlands were then a sort of 'terra incognita', completely isolated and tragically inward-looking. But during the eighteenth century several factors contributed to the opening of the Highlands onto the 'civilized world' and brought the inhabitants out of their torpor and tragic isolation, namely the construction of bridges and roads undertaken by the government after the last Jacobite rising of 1745, the improvement of the means of transport and the progressive development of the region thanks to the advances made in agriculture and the setting up of new industries. Yet, before the country of the Gaels drew flocks of tourists fascinated at last by its wild lochs, its majestic mountains and by the likeable ruggedness of its inhabitants, the travellers who were daring enough to venture into this remote country, did not give a very flattering image of it in their travelling accounts. All of them denounced the hopeless situation of this economically deprived area of Great Britain, emphasizing the miserable, even primitive living conditions of the Highlanders, their uncouth manners and their very low intellectual level. Their tribal organization was also an inexhaustible source of amazement. It was in fact very difficult for foreigners to understand the Highlanders' instinctive need to assemble under the protection of one of them acknowledged as their leader because of his bravery, his warlike qualities and his talent for commanding. This organization in clans, placed under the uncontested authority of very powerful chiefs, lasted until 1746. After the Jacobites' defeat at Culloden in Aprill746, George II' s government hastened to start the dismantling of the clans in order to put an end to a latent and harmful feudal system which was a real hindrance to the economic and social progress ofNorthem Scotland. In the clannish communities of that time where men reigned supreme, the lot of women was not to be envied. If they were not fortunate enough to be weiJ-bom or married to a rich and powerful laird, they led a very miserable life, if reports of that period are to be believed. There are in fact very few documents relating to the

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condition of women in eighteenth-century Scotland. Rosalind K. Marshall, author of Virgins and Viragos: A History of Women in Scotlandfrom 1080-1980 (London, 1983), deplores that her book dealing with women's role in Scottish society is mainly confined to the upper classes, since the amount of available documentary evidence concerning the lower classes was rather limited: Any attempt to examine the activies of women in Scotland at a given period is strictly limited by the amount of written evidence available and, naturally enough, the further back in time the researcher goes, the fewer are the documents which have survived ... Even in the seventeenth century, information is largely confined to the upper sections of society, and if the present book appears in time preoccupied with the lives of the aristocracy, this is from necessity, not choice. (12)

In 1989, R. A. Houston begins his article entitled 'Women in the Economy and Society of Scotland, 1500-1800' by the same disappointed observation: The status of women in sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth-century society remains obscure. Often omitted entirely from accounts of the period, women are commonly treated as peripheral and unimportant. Even recent research offers only brief asides about their place in social and economic life. Attempts to render women more visible have concentrated on prominent but atypical members of the upper classes ... There are ... no surviving diaries or autobiographies written by lower-class females. 1

How could it be otherwise? Women of lowly birth in Scotland were mostly illiterate-at least in the Highlands-and could not aspire to keep a diary or write their autobiography. There is no choice then but to draw information from other sources, namely from published or manuscript travelling accounts to examine the activities of Highland women at that time. Even though these eyewitness accounts may be somewhat biased, their great merit is that at least they are the fruits of actual experiences, amply commented and sometimes illustrated with original plates. In that tribal society particular to the North of Scotland, man dictated his law and woman was doomed to obey. Man's superiority was humbly accepted, his will was supreme. Out of duty, respect or perhaps out of fear, woman was submitted to man, whether he be her husband or her master. In the crofts where staple commodities were mainly home-produced, there was a great deal of hard, physical toil and a crofter's wife took no rest during the day, even if she was helped by young servants. At daybreak she would buckle down to various tasks: preparation of the meals for the family and the farm workers-milking of the cows, ewes and goats-feeding of the cattle and poultry-gathering of the eggs-butter and cheese making-beef salting, ham and bacon smoking at the time of the animals' slaughtering in the autumn. Young servants-often poor female relatives having board and lodging in return for their work-would also tackle their chores at dawn under the watchful eye of Scottish Society, ed. R. A. Houston and L. D. Whyte (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) 118-119.

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61

their mistress. The whole domestic drudgery fell to them. They had to wash the floors, to clean the stable, the cowshed and the pigsty and to do the washing in the river in any season. The Englishman Edward Burt, sent to the Highlands from 1725 to 1728 as General Wade's inspector to supervise the progress of road-building by the army in Northern Scotland, was the eyewitness to an amazing sight: young Scottish women washing linen by the river in the depth of winter. The latter were standing in tubs filled with icy water and treading linen with their bare feet turned red with the cold. Burt let his pen linger on that unusual scene in his travelling account published anonymously in London in 1754 under the title Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London and even illustrated it to enlighten his readers on such an uncommon practice (fig. 1): Before I leave the Bridge, I shall take Notice of one Thing more, which is commonly to be seen by the Sides of the River ... that is, Women with their Coats tucked up, stamping in Tubs, upon Linnen by Way of Washing; and this is not only in Summer, but in the Hardest frosty Weather, when their Legs and Feet are almost literally as red as blood with the Cold; and often two of these Wenches stamp in one Tub, supporting themselves by their Arms thrown over each other's Shoulders. (1: 52)

Travellers were either delighted or scandalized by the spectacle of the Scotch trampers but did not remain indifferent, for the young lasses were in the habit of tucking up their skirts and petticoats for fear of wetting them, and of showing their bare legs unblushingly. A certain William Burrell did not seem to be shocked at all but rather amused by this Scottish custom, to judge from his manuscript notes of 1758: 'The method of washing Linnen is ... comical. It is usual to see at the side of every river near a Village, the Women without shoes or stockings, and their Coats tucked up to their Waists, treading the Dirt out of the Linnen, till the Water is discolored, when they put in fresh water and so continue trading till the Linnen is quite clean. ' 2

On the other hand, another traveller was both aghast and terribly embarrassed at the sight of these half-dressed washerwomen. He wrote anonymously in 1704: 'At first I wondered at the sight, and thought they would have been ashamed, as I have, and have lett down their cloaths till I were by; but tho' some would let them down halfe way their thighs, others went round and round without letting down their cloaths at all, or taking any notice of me.' 3 This very particular method of doing the washing was still widespread in Scotland during the whole nineteenth century. The English traveller John Bristed, who set out on foot to discover the Highlands of Scotland in 180 1, relates his meeting at Blair Athol! (Perthshire) '[with] three women in a tub, rivalling Eve in simplicity of nakedness from the waist downwards, and washing linen with their

2 3

William Burrell, 'Description of a Tour Chiefly in Scotland', 1758, National Library of Scotland Ms. 2911, 21. 'North of England and Scotland in 1704'. Blackwood's Magazine 2 (1818): 517.

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feet, in all glee and merriment' _4 A photograph taken in the isle of Skye between 1873 and 1884, under the reign of Queen Victoria, shows two hotel servants still treading a blanket in a tub with their bare feet in the plain Scottish tradition. 5 These wooden tubs were also used at the farm by the servants to clean the vegetables and to hull barley. Edward Burt was the eyewitness to this special technique which was not very different from that of the linen washing: I have seen Women by the River's Side washing Parsnips, Turnips and Herbs in Tubs with their Feet. .. An English Lieutenant Colonel told me, that about a Mile from the Town [Inverness], he saw, at some little Distance, a Wench turning and twisting herself about as she stood in a little Tub, and as he could perceive, being on Horseback, that there was no Water in it, he rid up close to her, and found she was grinding off the Beards and Hulls of Barley with her naked Feet, which Barley she said was to make Broth with all: and, since that, upon Enquiry, I have been told it is a Common Thing. 6

Edward Burt could not fail to feel compassion for these young servants. He knew their very hard working conditions because he had been able to observe them in his headquarters at Inverness. In his book he denounced the dire poverty in which they lived and the starvation wages they received in exchange for their daily toil: My next Subject is to be the Servants ... my poor Maids, if I may judge of others by what passes in my own Quarters, have not had the best of Chances, when their Lots fell to be born in this Country ... Sometimes there are two or three of them in a House of no greater Number of Rooms, at the Wages of three Half Crowns a Year each, a Peck of Oatmeal for a Week's Diet, and happy she, that can get the Skimming of a Pot to mix with her Oatmeal for better Commons. To this Allowance is added a Pair of Shoes or two, for Sundays, when they go to Kirk ... In larger Families, I suppose, their Standing-Wages is not much more, because they make no better Appearance than the others. (1: 103)

Indeed, mistress and servant shared the same lot. The tasks of each were welldefined but equally heavy, and idleness was not acceptable. Their rare leisure hours were spent in spinning wool or flax with the distaff or with the spinning-wheel in order that the local weaver might then weave the piece of cloth intended for the making of clothes at home. Spinning gave rise to very convivial gatherings in all the villages of the Highlands. Women, young and old, would take their distaff or rock with them and go to a neighbour's to spin-hence the popular expression 'going a rocking'. While hands were busy, tongues were hard at work as well, and people exchanged news in a warm and merry atmosphere.

4 5 6

John Bristed, A Pedestrian Tour through Part of the Highlands of Scotland in 1801, vol. 2 (London: J. Wallis, 1803) 292. See Leah Leneman, Into the Foreground: A Century ofScottish Women in Photographs. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1993. Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to His Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 106.

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Scotswomen never parted with their distaff and used to carry it everywhere, as the traveller James Robertson could observe in Sutherland in 1767: '[Women] are naturally industrious. Wherever they go, they carry their distaff for that is their method of spinning; and I have frequently seen them spinning on the road, while they trudged along with a heavy burden. ' 7 So the main preoccupation of these industrious women was trying not to lose a single minute during the day. It seems that this bustling activity was still peculiar to Scotswomen in rural communities in the early 1900s, for a photograph taken about 1905 shows an elderly Skye woman carrying a huge basket on her back and knitting as she walks. 8 Highland women were expert not only in the art of spinning or weaving (weavers' wives often gave their husbands a hand) but also in the art of fulling cloth. Fulling, which consists in shrinking cloth with moisture, heat and pressure to make it thicker and softer, was still practised with feet or hands in the Highlands of Scotland in the eighteenth century. There is no reference to the daily use of the fulling mill in the published or manuscript accounts of that period. During his second tour in Scotland in the company of the artist Moses Griffith in 1772, the Welsh naturalist Thomas Pennant was much entertained by the sight of a group of women in Skye very busy fulling cloth outdoors while singing Erse songs in a loud voice to give rhythm to their work. Pennant reproduced this colourful scene in his book A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides, 1772 (1774) and enriched his description with a plate (fig. 2): On my return am entertained with a rehearsal of the ... walking of cloth, a substitute for the fulling mill: twelve or fourteen women, divided into two equal numbers, sit down on each side of a long board, ribbed lengthways, placing the cloth on it: first they begin to work it backwards and forwards with their hands, singing at the same time as at the Quem: when they have tired their hands, every female uses her feet for the same purpose, and six or seven pair of naked feet are in the most violent agitation, working one against the other: as by this time they grow very earnest in their labors, the fury of the song rises; at length it arrives to such a pitch, that without breach of charity you would imagine a troop of female demoniacs to have been assembled. 9

Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, during their trip to the Hebrides in 1773, also had the opportunity to witness this ancestral method of fulling cloth, but this time the operation was performed by hand: Last night Lady Ramsay shewed [Dr Johnson] the operation of wawking cloth, that is, thickening it in the same manner as is done by a mill. Here it is performed by women, who kneel upon the ground, and rub it with both their hands, singing an Erse song all the

7 8 9

'Journal of James Robertson', 1767, National Library of Scotland Ms. 2507, 71. See Leah Leneman, Into the Foreground: A Century of Scottish Women in Photographs (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 1993). Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772], 2nd ed. (London: Benj. White, 1776) 285-286.

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time. [Dr Johnson] was asking questions while they were performing this operation, and, amidst their loud and wild howl, his voice was heard even in the room above.IO In addition to the many domestic tasks of the household which naturally fell to women, the latter were also expected to work in the fields, particularly during the harvesting season, and to carry out all the chores men did not deign to do. At harvest time they cut com with the sickle rhythmically and the sound of the bagpipe accompanied their rapid and steady gesture. Then they collected com and tied it in sheaves. A certain Jacob Pattison, who set off on a tour to the Highlands in 1780 to discover Ossian's country, watched Scotswomen working in cornfields in Nairn and admired their dexterity and zeal: 'The women cut down most of the com, and it is pleasing to see with how much activity, and spirit, they use the sickle-if there are any men at work with them the women always take the lead.' 11 At haymaking time women could be seen busy spreading and tossing hay and piling it up in stacks. A plate in Edward Burt's book even shows a frail woman carrying home a huge bundle on her back (fig. 3) Highland women also took part in the threshing and winnowing of com. Men used a flail for beating wheat, but women resorted to a very archaic method which dated back to the 15th century. It was called graddaning and consisted in scorching the ears of a handful of com over a fire in order to bum the chaff and to extract the grain from the husk, as is well explained by Martin Martin, a native of the isle of Skye, in his Description of the Western Islands of Scotland circa 1695 (1703): The ancient way of dressing com, which is yet used in several isles, is called graddan, from the Irish word grad, which signifies quick. A woman sitting down takes a handful of com, and then sets fire to the ears, which are presently in a flame. She has a stick in her right hand, which she manages very dexterously, beating off the grain at the very instant when the husk is quite burnt; for if she miss of that she must use the kiln, but experience has taught them this art to perfection.I2 An anonymous drawing exhibited at the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland in Edinburgh is a perfect illustration of this ancient method still used in the Highlands and Western Islands as well as in the north-east of Scotland in the eighteenth century (fig. 4). Graddaning was followed by winnowing and grinding. Winnows were often very rudimentary. In the small isle of Rum, Thomas Pennant saw one of them made with a sheep's skin stretched round a hoop and perforated with many holes. Grain was ground with the old stone handmill called quern or quairn represented on the plate 'Women at the Quem' in Pennant's travelling account (fig. 2).

10

11 12

James Boswell, The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides [1785] (London: Penguin Classics, 1984) 261. Jacob Pattison, 'A Tour through Part of the Highlands of Scotland in 1780', National Library of Scotland Ms. 6322, II. Martin Martin, A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland circa 1695 [1703] (Edinburgh: Birlinn Ltd., 1994) 243-44.

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Other thankless tasks were the lot of Highland women such as removing the stones from the cultivable fields, hoeing, weeding and manuring the ground. In coastal villages women with creels on their backs had to collect kelp (used as manure) on the seashore, then struggling under their heavy burden had to cover great distances to go and spread it in the fields with their own hands. In the county of Inverness, Edward Burt also saw poor women doing a nasty job on their knees: 'Not far from Fort William, I have seen Women with a little Horse-Dung brought upon their Backs, in Creels or Baskets from that Garrison, and on their Knees, spreading it with their Hands upon the Land, and even breaking the Balls, that every Part of the little Spot might have its due Proportion' (2: 145). During his first tour in Scotland in 1769 Thomas Pennant noticed with indignation that women in far Caithness were treated like real beasts of burden by the farmers who had hired them for the liming of their piece of land: Much lime-stone is found in this country, which when burnt is made into a compost with turf and seaplants. The tender sex (I blush for the Cathnesians) are the only animals of burden: they turn their patient backs to the dunghills, and receive in their keises, or baskets, as much as their lords and masters think fit to fling in with their pitchforks, and then trudge to the fields in droves of sixty or seventy. 13

Women also did their share of peat collecting and transporting at the very beginning of autumn. In the Highlands of Scotland, which were not abundant in coal and wood, peat was a cheap sought-after fuel, all the more so since there was a tax on coal (lifted in 1793). Only rich landowners could afford to have their coal sent from the Lowlands. The poor Highlanders did not hesitate to cover long distances to exploit a peat bog. In spring peat was dug out by men, cut into brick-shaped pieces, then laid out flat to dry in the open air during summer. At the end of summer women helped to transport peat upon their backs in deep baskets, and loaded like mules trudged all the way back to the farm. Then they raised the peat bricks into little heaps against the wall under the roof or stored them in the claig (peat shed) to protect them from the rain. Cattle rearing was also one of the Highlanders' main occupations and their principal source of income. The harsh climate was not particularly favourable to the growing of crops in the area, but cattle breeding compensated for the shortage of arable land. Horses, goats, sheep and cows abounded in the glens. Every summer, whole families used to move with their flocks to the rich pastures on the hilltops. While men were looking after the cattle, women would transform their shieling into a dairy and make butter and cheese. The shieling was a temporary hut, roughly made with branches and sods, and poorly furnished inside. Thomas Pennant was invited to enter one of these shielings during his visit to Jura in 1772 and he gave a detailed description of these cone-shaped huts which looked like Indian tepees (fig. 5): These [shielings] formed a grotesque groupe; some were oblong, many conic, and so low that entrance is forbidden, without creeping through the little opening, which has no other

13

Thomas Pennant, A Tour of Scotland [1769] 3rd ed. (Warrington: W. Eyres, 1774) 183.

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The Invisible Woman door than a faggot of birch twigs, placed there occasionally; they are constructed of branches of trees, covered with sods; the furniture a bed of heath, placed on a bank of sod; two blankets and a rug; some dairy vessels, and above, certain pendent shelves made of basket work, to hold the cheese, the produce of the Summer. In one of the little conic huts, I spied a little enfant asleep, under the protection of a faithful dog.l4

When women were not busy preparing their dairy products, they spent their time spinning, knitting or gathering roots, herbs and lichens for making dye once back in the glen. Men, after strengthening the shielings often damaged by wind and rain, and after repairing some dilapidated furniture, contented themselves with tending the animals in the grazing land. No doubt these months spent there were for them months of relative idleness! The obvious indolence of men in the Highlands and the subjection of women seem to have shocked many travellers, whether they were English, Welsh or even Lowland Scots. Some of them even regarded the Highlanders as responsible for the economic backwardness of their region, and overtly criticized them in their books. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Edward Burt declared that fishing might have been a source of profit not to be sneezed at in Northern Scotland, if the Highlanders had shown a little more enterprise and enthusiasm for work. A very original plate (fig. 6), accompanied by Burt's sarcastic comment, sheds light on the fundamental laziness of some Highland fishermen, who did not feel ashamed of being carried to the shore on women's backs not to get their feet wet: The fishermen would not be mentioned, but for their remarkable Laziness; for they might find a Sale for much more Sea-Fish than they do; but so long as any Money remains of the last Marketing, and until they are driven out by the last Necessity, they will not meddle with Salt Water. At low Ebb, when their Boats lie off at a considerable Distance from the Shore, for Want of Depth of Water, the Women tuck up their Garments to an indecent Height, and wade to the Vessels, where they receive their Loads of Fish for the Market; and when the Whole Cargo is brought to Land, they take the Fishermen upon their Backs, and bring them on Shore in the same Manner. (1: 130)

Women did not complain about being thus exploited-but were they really aware of their slavish condition?-and they passively accepted to be under the yoke of their husband or master, as it is shown by this anecdote told by Burt: An English Lady ... told me lately, that seeing a Highlander basking at the Foot of a Hill in his full Dress, while his Wife and her Mother were hard at Work in reaping the Oats, she asked the old Woman how she could be contented to see her Daughter labour in that Manner, while her Husband was only an idle Spectator? And to this the Woman answered, that her Son-in-Law was a 'Gentleman', and it would be a disparagement to him to do any such Work; and that both she and her Daughter too were sufficiently honour'd by the Alliance. (2: 140-141)

14

Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772], 2nd ed (London: Benj. White, 1776) 246-247.

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This subservience of Scottish countrywomen to men seems to have endured until the end of the eighteenth century, since in 1797 a certain Patrick Walker, author of three manuscript notebooks, was really shocked at the sight of Highlanders, 'the laziest animals alive' ,15 basking in the sun (if there was any ... ) while their wives, sisters or even mothers were toiling away in the fields: The men... are remarkably indolent, and all hard laboreous work is performed by the females. There you may see a poor woman working hard in the field while a great stout, indolent fellow of a husband, son or brother lies on a big stone before the hut basking in the sun, and gaping at the clouds which pass above him without one single reflection ... Were these to work, the country would improve.I6

The near-general illiteracy of women in the north of Scotland also worked against them and contributed to keeping them in this state of inferiority. Despite the laudable efforts of the Sociey in Scotland for Propagating Christian Knowledge, founded in 1709 to increase the insufficient number of schools in the huge territory of the Highlands, 90% of women were still illiterate in 1750 (against 70% in the Lowlands) and in 1770 their illiteracy rate had only been reduced by a third. The number of schools had certainly increased during the eighteenth century, but the vastness of some Scottish counties like Sutherland, Ross and Cromarty and the inevitable scattering of the local population in parishes with a large surface area were hindrances to the government's efforts in the field of school development. Dr John Walker (1731-1803), professor ofNatural History at the University of Edinburgh, undertook six journeys in Scotland from 1760 to 1786. In his Economical History of the Hebrides and Highlands of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1808), he insisted on the necessity to send girls to school-however far it was-in order to initiate them from an early age into the art of spinning and weaving, for the textile industries were in full expansion iri Scotland and promised to be a source of jobs for women: 'It would, therefore, be of great importance, to have them instructed, when young, at the public schools, in the different operations relative to the management of flax, wool, and hemp, and especially in the art of spinning, with which they are but imperfectly acquainted' (2: 348-349). Professor Walker was right. With the development of the linen industry from 1760 and that ofthe cotton iridustry from 1780, manufactures were obliged to hire a local workforce from outside to meet demand. Scotswomen from the Highlands and Western Islands, renowned for being skilful spinners and knitters, were more and more sought-after by manufacturers. At the end of the eighteenth century, 80% of them worked at home to order. This new occupation satisfied them irisofar as it provided them with regular wages and freed them from the drudgery of agricultural work, but their daily tasks were not however made lighter, especially at harvest time when their presence in the fields was still required.

15 16

Patrick Walker, 'Journals of Tours through Scotland. With Notes Descriptive and Historical', National Library of Scotland Ms. 20-5-1, 145. Patrick Walker Ms. 20-5-3, 60.

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Hardworking, submissive, resigned-such were these Highland women of the eighteenth century. How else could it have been in so poor a country, in a maledominated society still feudal in many ways, and in a century in which women, even well-born and literate ones, were considered to be inferior beings and were condemned to obedience and docility? An anonymous poem, entitled 'Woman's Hard Fate' and written 'By a Lady' in 1733, evokes woman's sad lot in eighteenth-century British society. No doubt the plaintive notes of this poem might have found an echo in the remote mountains and glens ofNorthem Scotland: How wretched is a woman's fate, No happy change her fortune knows. Subject to man in every state, How can she then be free from woes?

17

17

Quoted in Eighteenth-Century Women Poets, ed. Roger Lonsdale (Oxford: Oxford University Press; 1989) 136.

Fig. 5.1 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 52 (author's collection)

Fig. 5.2 From: Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772] (London: Benj. White, 1776), 328 (author's collection)

Fig. 5.3 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 85 (author's collection)

Fig. 5.4 'Graddaning' (Sketch from the National Museum of Antiquities of Scotland, Edinburgh)

Fig. 5.5 From: Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides [1772] (London: Benj. White, 1776), 246 (author's collection)

Fig. 5.6 From: Edward Burt, Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland to his Friend in London (London: S. Birt, 1754) I, 130 (author's collection)

Chapter 6

Women in the Army in Eighteenth-Century Britain Guyonne Leduc

Throughout the early period of modem Europe women issuing from the lower social classes were part of armies; a masculine institution by essence, the army always deemed them obstacles but they remained necessary.' Far from the cliched lives of the Amazons, theirs inspired numerous stories of cross-dressed women warriors, as numerous in real life as in Anglo-American and European popular literature.2 Thus they mirror another image of women, particularly in the seventeenth century. When they are not on the battlefield dressed as soldiers, that is cross-dressed, but in the world of camp and train carrying out manual tasks in a useful, determined perspective, an actual 'work', necessary but not recognized as such, hence not rewarded, they are ignored by historians. It is paradoxical then to note that the women who actually get wages for their work are not those who work openly as women but those who, cross-dressed, fight as men. This study of women in the British army situates itself at the crossroads between factual history and that of mentalities. It will first analyse the nature of the sources documenting their presence and roles, then examine their varying statuses or states (accepted, tolerated or clandestines), their conditions of life, their motivations to finally focus on the way they were perceived by patriarchal society. The presence of women in the British army has been proved even if it is not very well known due to their small numbers and the disparity of their situations. Very few studies are devoted to them. St. John Williams's book aims at tracing 'the story of the British Army's women and their changing fortunes from the days of Marlborough and Wellington' so as to 'give them a recognised place in military history'. 3 Some

2

3

See Brian Crim, 'Silent Partners: Women and Warfare in Early Modem Europe', A Soldier and a Woman: Sexual Integration in the Military, ed. Gerard J. DeGroot and Corinna Peniston-Bird (Harlow: Pearson Education Ltd, 2000) 18-32. The archetypal woman warrior can be found in the biography of Long Meg of Westminster (1582) before Middleton and Dekker's The Roaring Girl (1611) describing Mary Frith (alias Moll Cutpurse). See for instance The Valorous Acts Performed at Gaunt ... by Mary Ambree (c. 1600), The Female Warrior (1680) and The Gallant She-Souldier (1655). Noel Trevor St. John Williams, Judy 0 'Grady and the Colonels Lady: The Army Wife and Camp Follower since 1660 (London: Brassey's Defence, 1988) ix, x. See too Michael Brander, The Scottish Highlanders and Their Regiments (London: Seeley Service, 1971) ch. 11 and Anthony Brett-James, Life in Wellingtons Army (London: Allen and Unwin, 1972) ch. 17.

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information can also be gleaned from studies published in the 1980s and partly dedicated to women and the army but not concerning the eighteenth century.4 No systematic study has been done ofwomen in the navy before Stark's book in 1996. 5 A more original subject-women pirates (with Anne Bonny and Mary Read at that tirne)-caught Stanley's attention.6 The theme of women warriors and those transvestied in the army is now sometimes examined thanks to women's history;7 it is also broached in studies concerned with the construction of femininity in patriarchal society. But 'very few [historians] indeed have chosen to explore the pre-twentieth-century military history of women'. 8 Such a situation leads one to wonder as to the causes of such a lack of interest. First it is necessary to put into context the reality of the army, its organisation, that of its support services in particular and the conception of military life itself. As an object of study, military histories, seen from a didactic perspective such as that of battles, only appeared in the nineteenth century. The structures of the army were changing during that period, in particular those of the support services which were less frequently contracted out and increasingly brought under military control, triggering the transformation of camp and train life which eventually led to the disappearance of women's roles.9 Their function in the army was officially recognized only around the middle of the nineteenth century when the army was reorganized and conceptions of sexual difference changed. 10 In the eighteenth century the notion of sexual difference had been rather fluid and gender roles not set; 11 the concept of femininity evolved during 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11

See Barton C. Hacker, 'Women and Military Institutions in Early Modem Europe: A Reconnaissance', Signs 6.4 (1981): 643-671 and Myna Trustram, Women of the Regiment: Marriage and the Victorian Army (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984); see too Antonia Fraser, The Weaker Vessel: Womans Lot in the Seventeenth Century, 1984 (London: Arrow Books, 1997) 181-226. Suzanne J. Stark, Female Tars: Women Aboard Ships in the Age of Sail (London: Pimlico, 1996). Jo Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches: Women Pirates across the Ages (1995; London: Pandora, 1996). See Vern L. Bullough, and Bonnie Bullough, Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1993), RudolfM. Dekker, and Lotte C. van de Pol, The Tradition of Female Transvestism in Early Modern Europe (London: Macmillan, 1989), Lynn Friedli, 'Women Who Dressed as Man', Trouble and Strife 6 (1985): 2529, and Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (New York: Routledge, 1992). See too Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry 1650-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989) and Julie Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids: Women Who Dressed as Men in the Pursuit of Lifo, Liberty and Happiness (London: Pandora, 1989). Hacker 644. See Hacker 645, 655. See Wheelwright 17-18. See Thomas W. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1990) 8, and Linda Grant De Pauw, Battle Cries and Lullabies: Women in War from Prehistory to the Present (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998) 109: 'a society in which biological sex would not predetermine gender identity ... '.

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the nineteenth century: sexual identity became a 'biological entity' determining destiny rather than 'a quality dictated more by society than biology' .12 Histories were then rewritten; the new army was to exclude women from many of the tasks they had previously performed. Wheelwright notes that, 'female soldiers and sailors were erased from the record or reduced to the occasional footnote. The female soldiers who were hailed as heroines ... became portrayed as amusing freaks ofnature.'l3 From antiquity up to the modem period, the presence of women in European armies is recognized by historians; they were 'not only normal... [but] vital', Hacker stresses. 14 If they fought as women, they were recognized as were their exploits. Several queens are to be found in the line from Boadicea 15 to Elizabeth I dressed as an amazon at Tilbury, not to mention Anglo-Saxon queens such as queen Philippa of Hainault who fought the Scots or Margaret of Anjou who fought in the War of the Roses. 16 During the Civil War, many are worth remembering, Lady Ann Cunningham, Anne Dymoke and Mary, Oliver Cromwell's daughter. Among those who supported Parliament, Brilliana Conway, Lady Harley, distinguished herself; such was also the case of Lady Arundel, along with seven other famous names, on the side of the royalists,l7 Just as these "'Great Heroick" ladies', 18 women of the people also illustrated themselves during the siege of Bristol, of Lyme or in the defence of the fortifications of the City. 19 Anonymous women no longer remembered by History shared in the great battles of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; some died at Waterloo, 20 others at sea during the Napoleonic wars. 21 The nature of the sources giving witness to the active presence of women is manifold. Primary sources include army 'orders and regulations, the reports of official committees, official publications, contemporary reports and journals, and document biographies' .22 For the army, camp reports at Blenheim (1704) include orders telling women to march behind the baggage train. 23 For the navy, musters do not mention the women who crop up in other documents such as the first regulations published by the Admiralty in 1731, saying that ' [A Captain] is not to carry any 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Wheelwright 15. Wheelwright, '"Amazons and Military Maids": An Examination of Female Military Heroines in British Literature and the Changing Construction of Gender', WSIT l 0.5 (1987): 489-490. Hacker 644. See Fraser, The Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot, 1988 (London: Arrow Books, 1999) 3-106. See David E. Jones, Women Warriors: A History (Washington: Brassey's, 1997) 51-79. Anne Howard, Lucy Apsley Hutchinson, Lady Mary Bankes, Charlotte Countess of Derby, Honora Marchioness of Winchester, Lady Blanche Arundel, the Countess of Portland and Lady Mary Winter. Fraser 204. See Fraser 204-207, 219-220. See Sergeant-Major Edward Cotton, A Voice from Waterloo (London, 1849) 55. See Evelyn Berckman, The Hidden Navy (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1973) 10. Williams x. See David Green, Blenheim (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974) 30. For Wellington's army a century later, see Michael Glover, Wellington's Army: In the Peninsula, 1808-1814 (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1977) 159-160.

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women to sea ... without orders from the Admiralty' .24 At the opposite extreme official permission was often granted to officers' wives. 25 The court martial of Lieutenant Berry charged with sodomy revealed the presence of Elizabeth Bowden, a witness on board (Annual Register [1807]: 496). 'During a period when the press gangs were very active and able-bodied seamen in short supply,' says Wheelwright, 'such accounts suggest that women's presence aboard may have been tolerated for expediency. '26 Other private documents are also meaningful: the account of a wreck (1637) mentions the presence of women on board; 27 Nelson's memorandum stresses that 'before he sailed he was resolved to rid his ship "of all the women, dogs, and pigeons"' .28 Iconography makes it possible to corroborate the presence of women in the army as well as their unchanging activities. 29 The same can be established for the navy. In the early nineteenth century a picture by Augustus Earle figuring a religious service on board a British frigate confirms what a chaplain observed in 1675. 30 Women are also portrayed in numerous bawdy scenes aboard ships in harbour. 31 Two other sources provide testimonies of relative reliability. First the more or less direct testimonies given by narratives written in the first or third person. Authentic diaries from soldiers such as that of Corporal William Todd are rare; it gives a glimpse of women in the British army on the continent during the Seven Years War when 1,666 women followed 16,500 men. 32 Also, on the margin of popular literature, narratives by cross-dressed women have survived such as those of Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, and Mary Ann Talbot. 33 Their genuineness and reliability are difficult to establish as their narratives are most often presented as autobiographies or as testimonials transmitted by printers; a very careful comparison between Snell's 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31 32 33

Regulations and Instructions Relating to His Majesty's Service at Sea ( 1731) 31 (art. 38); qtd. in Stark 51. See Michael Lewis, A Social History of the Navy, 1793-1815 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960) 284. Wheelwright, 'Tars, Tarts and Swashbucklers,' in Stanley, Bold in Her Breeches 193. See Phineas Pett, The Autobiography of Phineas Pett, ed. W. G. Perrin (London: Navy Records Society, 1918) 163. See Memoirs of Admiral the Right Honourable, the Earl of St. Vincent, ed. Jedidiah Stephens Tucker, 2 vols. (London, 1844) 2: 120. See Corelli Barnett, The First Churchill: Marlborough, Soldier and Statesman (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1974) 230-31, John Baskett and Dudley Snelgrave, comps., The Drawings of Thomas Rowlandson in the Paul Mellon Collection (New York: Brandywine, 1978) no. 282, 287, 290. See Peter K. Kemp, ed., History of the Royal Navy (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1969) 100. On Teonge on H.M.S. Assistance (1675), see Charles Napier Robinson, The British Tar in Fact and Fiction: The Poetry, Pathos, and Humour of the Sailor's Life (New York: Harper & Sons, 1909) 108-109. See Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200-1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1970) pis bet. 160 and 161, facing 209. See Colonel Daniel MacKinnon, The Origin and Services of the Coldstream Guards (London, 1833) I: 427 for Regimental Numbers 1 Jan 1763. Qtd. in Williams 7. Their war names respectively were Christian Ross, James Grey and John Taylor; see too the Americans Deborah Sampson and Mary Lacey.

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relation and military registers has been carried out by Stephens.34 A similar approach enabled Stark to expose the apocryphal nature of Talbot's narrative published in 1804, long deemed an historical source about female marines. 35 Eighteenth-century readers were fond of the genre which still retains a sociological value as concerns life in the army and, more indirectly, readers and their expectations. All these relations belong to popular literature, just as ballads sold on streets which are yet another source of indirect testimony; in great favour in the eighteenth century, they speak of female drummers, warriors and courageous young girls going off to war in search oflove or glory. Wheelwright asserts that 'more than 100 female warriors ... surfaced in more than l ,000 variations of Anglo-American ballads' .36 In the wake of Renaissance literature, more noble literature stages cross-dressed women in major roles according to the needs of the plot; after Cavendish, Dryden, Wycherley, and Shadwell, that trend continued on until after the Restoration with Farquhar for instance. 37 A century later, Jane Austen's Persuasion introduces the topic of women living on board (1.8). As is shown by the diversity of the sources, the status of all these women vary according to their activities, their conditions of life and their situations (accepted as wives, tolerated as whores or cross-dressed clandestines). Women were marginalized by regulations concerning marriage. As early as 1585 the Leicester code gave rules concerning the British army in the Netherlands, deploring the disorders resulting from the presence of women who were thus ousted except when they were lawful wives or women 'to tende [sic] the sick and to serve the launders' .38 After 1650, unable to forbid marriages, the army tried to limit if not control their numbers by recruiting single men (1689, 1697): 'a soldier had to get his officer's permission to marry'. 39 In 1663 private soldiers who got mamied were discharged. 40 On 1 June 1685 that practice was extended to the whole of the army and was enforced for two centuries. 41 It might also be noted that the pay of a soldier was far from enough to keep a wife and children. Yet the very rules that denied women a role also granted one to some: the abovementioned restrictions did not apply to officiers' wives who travelled at the expense of their husbands. Not until 1792 did the army officially recognize a limited number of wives (about six per company or per hundred men), 42 who formed 'the Army 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

Matthew Stephens, Hannah Snell: The Secret Life of a Female Marine, 1723-1792 (London: Ship Street Press, 1997). See Stark 107-110. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 8. Cavendish (Bell in Campo [1662]), Dryden (Marriage-a-la-Mode [1671]), Wycherley (The Plain Dealer [1676]), Shadwell (The Female Captain [1679]) and Farquhar (The Recruiting Officer [1679]). For the text of Leicester's code, see Charles G. Cruickshank, Elizabeth sArmy (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966) 298. Wheelwright, '"Amazons and Military Maids"', 493. Articles for His Majesty's Guards in 1663 in Colburn's United Services Magazine, Aug 1867 pt 2, 506-509; qtd. in Williams 4. See MacKinnon 2: 261. See Hacker 659.

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Women'; 43 in exchange, they had to perform domestic chores. Hence they drew rations and were integrated based on a system ofreciprocity. 44 An active participation in military life was expected of women that, Dugaw asserts, 'did not conform at all to our twentiethth-century demarcation between the civilian and the military, and between the domestic and the public spheres' .4 5 Here too, the army and the navy must be distinguished. In the army, female tasks were very close to those of civilian life: 'foraging for food, selling meats and wines, laundering, nursing or looting as well as working as prostitutes'; 46 sewing, washing, and mending clothes also enabled them to increase their husbands' pay. Most sutlers were soldiers' wives or widows. Davies, for instance, was in turn a housekeeper, a sutler, a prostitute, a nurse, a laundress, a cook and even ... a soldier. Other wives were nurses given that women were considered fit for that task as is emphasized by General Robert Venables who advocated their presence in the West Indies campaign of 1656. 47 When military hospitals were authorized by Parliament (1652), all the nurses were to be chosen among soldiers' widows; 48 and their work was to be paid. 49 In the navy too there were nurses in spite of a ban dating back to the early eighteenth century when 'their predilection for drink led to their replacement by male nurses for the next two hundred years.' 5° The place for women was in camp and in port but they were also found, willingly or not, on battlefields, even in the colonies, at the side of soldiers, exposed to the same dangers. In the navy, their responsibilities were important, equivalent to those on the front; some carried powder from magazines to guns, as asserted by John Nicol who served on the Goliath in Nelson's fleet, during the battle of the Nile (1798). 5 1 Others fought, even though it was 'tolerated but not officially recognized by the Admiralty'. 52 43 44 45 46 47

48 49 50 51 52

Williams 3. See E. W. Sheppard ed., Red Coat: An Anthology of the British Soldier during the Last Three Hundred Years (London: Batchworth, 1952) 48-49. Dugaw 127. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 17. See Charles H. Firth, Cromwell's Army: A History of the English Soldier during the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth and the Protectorate (London: Methuen, 1902) 264. That was general Braddock's opinion in 1755 in Northern America; see Walter Hart Blumenthal, Women Camp Followers of the American Revolution (1952; New York: Arno P, 1974) 22, 57-58 and Scott N. Hendrix, 'In the Army: Women, Camp Followers and Gender Roles in the British Army in the French and Indian Wars, 1755-1765,' A Soldier and a Woman 33. See Gregory Robinson, 'Wounded Sailors and Soldiers in London during the First Dutch War (1652-1654)', History Today 16 (1966): 38-44. See Paul E. Kopperman, 'Medical Services in the British Army, 1742-1783 ',Journal of the History ofMedicine and Allied Sciences 34 (1979): 436. Christopher Lloyd, The British Seaman, 1200-1860: A Social Survey (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1970) 246. John Nicol, The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner (Edinburgh: W. Blackwood, 1822) 193-94. Geoffrey Bennett, Nelson the Commander (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1972) 71; see too Elizabeth Ewing, Women in Uniform: Through the Ages (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1975) 32-34.

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At least one woman participated in the battle of Trafalgar and in 1847 claimed the General Service Medal. Though Queen Victoria agreed, the Admiralty refused, fearing to create a dangerous precedent, 53 with the implicit recognition of women's efficiency in battle. If, in practice, their role was very useful, officially it was little admitted; the name 'campfollower' was a 'pejorative label' 54 designating their place behind the baggage train. Those women aroused an ambivalent attitude in the army, stresses Trustram; even if they were deemed useful, they were often despised and perceived as a threat to discipline and moral order. As Hacker puts it: 'Whatever their motives, the work women did was crucial to the political economy of early modem armies.' 55 Across the Atlantic, their role was recognized with the Act of Congress of March 16, 1802. 56 As noted, depending on the circumstances, their work could be paid or not; however, in the army as in the navy, their conditions of life were very harsh in time of war as in time of peace: meagre rations, an itinerant life, military discipline, widowhood. Davies's relation constitutes a deterrent picture of army life. As is recalled by the historian Treadwell, the army was not a place for a 'reputable woman in view of the danger of confusion with the more numerous camp followers, whose ill repute was apt to attach itself to any female employee';57 as to single women, sometimes widows, they were often considered as prostitutes. In the 1860s the Contagious Diseases Acts equated camp followers with whores aiming to control those diseases and thereby safeguard the soldiers' health; as a result, women, if not officially admitted, were deemed more harmful than useless. In reality the occasional presence of prostitutes was tolerated as a necessary evil since marriage was discouraged, but commanders regularly ordered that they be expelled from camps under pain of penalties and/or punishments. Lest the seaman desert, shore leaves were rarely granted; therefore, to avoid mutinies, prostitutes were allowed on board; this practice is illustrated in a picture by W. Elms ('Exporting Cattle, Not Insurable') and corroborated by a pamphlet anonymously published in 1821, although in fact written by admiral Hawker, depicting a scene of debauchery on the lower deck of a ship after the Napoleonic Wars involving '500 men and probably 300 or 400 women•.58 Enlisting in male apparel was a widespread means for women to evade the law. To remedy licentiousness in the army Charles I issued a proclamation in July 1643 concerning women counterfeiting their sex: transvestites were threatened with severe punishment. 59 Cross-dressed women are another category of women present in the army this time as clandestines. 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Jane Townshend; see Lewis 283. Trustram 12. Hacker 664. See Blumenthal 22, 57-58. Mattie E. Treadwell, The Women s Army Corps (Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1954) 4. Edward Hawker, Statement Respecting the Prevalence of Certain Immoral Practices in His Majestys Navy (1821) 5; qtd. in Stark 7-8. 'Let no woman presume to Counterfeit Her Sex by wearing mans apparell under pain of the Severest punishment which Law and our displeasure shall inflict' (13 July 1643) (BL Harleian MSS, 66804, fo. 75/6).

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By defmition it is difficult to know their number, all the more so as some women adopted soldiers' attire as a simple commodity. Dekker and Van de Pol, who found 199 'women living as men' between 1550 and 1839 in the Netherlands, 60 traced 'fifty authentic cases of female transvestism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Great Britain'. 61 One can only identify those who were detected when they were wounded or after their death or in case of pregnancy (in which case they had already been detected-and this is the case most widely conjured up in ballads and chapbooks), or if involved in legal proceedings when they would reveal their identity so as not to be imprisoned (Annual Register [1761 ]: 170) or whipped for desertion (Annual Register [1769]: 148 and [1771]: 71). Many cases are reported in newspapers without comment (Gentleman's Journal [13 April1692]: 22 and Annual Register [1782]: 221). In the navy they were as members of the crew, according to records on women seamen between 1550 and 1830. Once detected, they fell back into minor roles linked to their sex; such was the case of Davies who was allowed to remain in the army from 1705 to 1712 as a soldier's wife. Several individual cases are remembered. In the army, Davies fought under several names and her identity was only revealed when she was wounded in 1705; she was granted a pension and ended her days as an out-patient of the Royal Chelsea Hospital. Phoebe Hessel served in the infantry during the War of Austrian Succession and was wounded at the battle of Fontenoy (1745). 62 During the same battle the Scot Mary Ralphson won renown. 63 Her fellow countrywoman Flora Macdonald helped Bonnie Prince Charlie flee to France in 1745.64 After sixteen years as a private soldier, Mary Dixon was one of the numerous women who died at Waterloo. 65 Hannah Snell was far more famous given the success she met with in the two versions of her life;66 she was the only other woman to get a pension and be admitted at the Royal Chelsea Hospital. A volunteer, she looked for her husband, was sent to Carlisle, was in India in November 1747 and is said to have taken part in the siege ofPondicherry.67 Back in June 1750, she appeared on the London stage, then fell into oblivion and died in Bedlam. Many other cross-dressed women fought in the Napoleonic wars (William Brown, Tom Bowling, Anne Johnson, Hanah Witney, Ann Mills). 68 In the navy one of the earliest examples is that of Anne 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

Peter Burke, 'Foreword', xi, in Dekker and van de Pol. Dekker and van de Pol 1. See Gentleman's Magazine (December 1817): 550 and The Soldier's Companion, or, Martial Recorder I (1824): 21. See Jones 75. See Jones 76. See Jones 77. See Dugaw, 'Women and Popular Culture: Gender, Cultural Dynamics, and Popular Prints', Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800, ed. Vivien Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000) 278-279. On Snell's two narratives, see Leduc, 'L'Aventure du travestissement: Hannah Snell (1723-1792), femme soldat', L 'Aventure en Grande-Bretagne au XVIII• siecle, ed. PaulGabriel Bouce (to be published). See Jones 76-77 and Stark 85-88.

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Chamberlyne, a gentlewoman who joined her brother's ship in 1690.69 In the early 1700s, Anne Keith [Lady Methven] served on a battleship for several years before fighting to defend her husband's estate at the head of sixty knights.7° Managing to hide one's identity required physical strength to counter suspicion when 'involved with frontline infantry warfare and hand-to-hand combat' 71 or fulfilling the usual tasks of a seaman; such physical strength was not very surprising in the lowest social classes where women had to be healthy and vigorous to face a harsh existence with very little cultivated delicacy. Davies's autobiography confirms that she was used to accomplishing all sorts of manly employments such as handling a 'rake, flail, or pitchfork', and riding horses 'barebacked' .n So as to be taken for men, cross-dressed women often said they were very young to account for their want of a 'rough beard' _73 Many must have imitated Davies who merely cut her hair and had 'the precaution to quilt the Waistcoat, to preserve [her] Breasts from hurt which were not large enough to betray [her] Sex .... ' 74 Snell's explanation is identical in accounting for the way she managed to conceal her female body when she was whipped twice.7 5 How could they hide female physiological signs on a ship? Most women soldiers' narratives remain discreet as concerns the stratagems used to avoid being betrayed by intimate problems such as urination and menstruation. The minutes of the trial of the German Catharina Lincken provide the most detailed information; she used 'a leather-covered hom through which she urinated and [which she kept] fastened against her nude body. ' 76 Given the very bad hygiene conditions and numerous illnesses, menstrual periods could pass for the manifestation of venereal disease, when psychological constraints and a bad diet did not result in amenorrhea. Among women wounded on the battlefield, many showed exceptional courage lest their sex be revealed. That is the case of Snell who managed to conceal twelve wounds.7 7 Her legs were taken care of but, she says, she herself extracted a bullet planted in her groin. 78 Such exploits led to 'a legend' of 'exceptional heroism' Wheelwright says, 79 so that those women easily entered popular literature. 69 70 71 72

73

74 75 76 77 78 79

See Stark 83-84. See Robert Scot Fittis, Heroines ofScotland (London: Alexander Gardener, 1889) 278-289. Jones 77. Christian Davies, The Life and Adventures of Mrs Christian Davies Commonly Called Mother Ross (London, 1740), Women Adventurers: The Lives of Madame Velazquez, Hannah Snell, Mary Anne Talbot and Mrs Christian Davies, ed. Menie Muriel Dowie (London, 1893) 204. Hannah Snell, The Female Soldier; or, The Surprising Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell, 1750, ed. Dugaw, The Augustan Reprint Society, no. 257 (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1989) 19 [vide infra: short version] and in the British Library (Microfilm shelfmark: Mic.B.896/4056) 95 [vide infra: long version]. Davies 221. Short version 10, 17, 34; long version 65, 141-41. Brigitte Eriksson, 'A Lesbian Execution in Germany, 1721: The Trial Records', Journal of Homosexuality 6 (1980-81): 33. Short version 15; long version 58. Short version 16; long version 59. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 89.

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What could motivate women to join the army or the navy? A distinction straight away appears between cross-dressed women and the others. Unlike men, women were never enlisted against their will or forced on board by press gangs; economic hardships could however be as pressing for them as for men. Thousands of women preferred to accompany their husbands rather than fall into poverty or crime. 80 Their husbands' pay at least enabled them to survive. The historian Roy Palmer suggests that women may have preferred camp life to the destitution and hunger which threatened them in the countryside or in town slums. 81 The economic incentive seems to have been far more powerful than the appeal of a new type of life or of apparent freedom. Among women who disguised themselves as soldiers, the wish to fight and live a military life does not seem to have been the main incentive either. 82 Those who were actually attracted by a soldier's life or by a longing for adventure corresponded to what Grant DePauw refers to as 'mere curiosities'. 83 Here too self-preservation (economic difficulties or the lack of safety) prevailed. A widow, deprived of resources or family, could take her husband's identity and enlist, as was the case of Anne Dymoke/John Evison in 1657. 84 In a similar way, the transcript of the 1720 trial before the High Court of Admiralty in Jamaica of the pirates Anne Bonny and Mary Read tells that the latter was brought up as a boy and was obliged, to survive, to join the army; taken prisoner by pirates, 85 she then enlisted 'with an outfit of privateers ... cruising against the Spaniards' and met Bonny. 86 In the nineteenth century, women seamen, says Wheelwright, 'often cited economic needs as their primary motive for signing aboard ... ' .87 As to autobiographical narratives and ballads, they hinge, beyond patriotism, on a recurring element: to follow or look for one's husband or one's lover, a motive that is attested in newspapers (Annual Register [1769]: 148 and [1771]: 71). No prefeminist claim has as yet been traced. Quite ironically, European military science in the early modem period is tied to women since the one long authoritative work was written in 1410 by the frrst woman to earn her living writing, that is Livre des fais d'armes et de chevalerie by Christine de Pizan. Commissioned by John the Fearless, the duke of Burgundy, it

80 81 82 83 84 85

86 87

Patricia Branca, 'Women at Work: Beasts of Burden', Women in Europe since 1750 (New York: StMartin's P, 1978) 17-23. See Roy Palmer, The Rambling Soldier: Military Life through Soldiers' Songs and Writings (New York: Penguin, 1977) 156. See Trustram 13. DePauw, 'Commentary', Military History of the American Revolution, ed. Stanley J. Underal (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, 1976) 175. See Fraser 225, 528. See Wheelwright, 'Tars, Tarts and Swashbucklers', 181; the first relation of the trial (A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates) was published in 1724 by Charles Johnson. Its later attribution to Defoe was denied by Peter N. Furbank and W. R. Owens in The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1988) I 02. Wheelwright, 'Tars, Tarts and Swashbucklers', 186; see too Stanley, 'Criminals, Communards or Crumpet?', Bold in Her Breeches 147. Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 14.

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was ordered to instruct the dauphin, Louis, the duke of Guyenne, his son-in-law. Caxton's English translation was published in 1489. In 1445, that book was to complement a compilation of narratives and treatises in French, offered by John Talbot to Margaret of Anjou for her marriage to Henry VI of England. 88 As is stressed by Verrier in an article on sixteenth-century Italy: The notion of women's military aptitude and/or instruction is certainly more interesting in its implications than in its possible realization. Such a notion threatens the old Aristotelian distribution of tasks and spaces between the sexes. The warrior-woman represents a formidable challenge since she trespasses on a territory nature and culture seem to have assigned to men. 89 [ ... ] The issue of female military instruction, far from being marginal, is at the confluence of some major interrogations in Renaissance society and culture. 90

Verrier adds: As the art of warfare in the age of humanism modifies the relative importance of physical and intellectual abilities in favour of the latter, it makes the identification of female weapons with modem weapons possible ... The incompatibility between women and war becomes less obvious in proportion as physical force loses ground before intellectual force ... In politics as in the science of war sinew becomes irrelevant; 'the strength and skill of Reason' now serve to govern States and to lead armies, 91 as Pierre LeMoyne wrote in La Gal/erie des femmes fortes (1647).

Verrier concludes: 'Women's supposed lack of military capacities seems then to be neither a physiological reality nor even a universal socio-cultural norm' ,92 since travel literature mentions armed women in the New World. These arguments are not foreign to those developed by 'Sophia' in her pamphlet Woman Not Inferior to Man, encapsulating all the prefeminist claims voiced in the first half of the eighteenth century; the fmal chapter before her conclusion is entitled 'Whether Women Are Naturally Qualified for Military Offices, or Not.' The order of her different chapters mirrors the hierarchy of her preoccupations: women's presence in the military comes last. 'Sophia' underlines the relative uselessness of physical strength in the command of an army; moreover she states, women can be educated as men so as to become fearless. There follows a list of women, praising

88 89

90 91 92

Michel-Andre Bossy, 'Arms and the Bride: Christine de Pizan's Military Treatise as a Wedding Gift for Margaret of Anjou', Christine de Pizan and the Categories of Difference, ed. Marilyn Desmond (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998) 236-56. Frederique Verrier, 'Considerations sur !'aptitude feminine aux armes et sur !'instruction guerriere dans Ia trattatistica italienne philogyne du XVI• siecle', L 'Education des femmes en Europe et en Amerique du Nord, de Ia Renaissance a 1848: Realites et representations, ed. Leduc (Paris: L'Harmattan, 'Des idees et des femmes', 1997) 55. Verrier 66. Verrier 59, 61. Verrier 61.

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the courage or even the intrepidity of some of them, ranging from the Amazons to Boadicea and Joan of Arc. After such an eloquent defence of the equality of male and female warlike capacities, her chapter ends on this note: 'With regard however to warlike employments, it seems to be a disposition of Providence that custom has exempted us from them ... it is but fit that the Men shou'd be exposed to the dangers and hardships of war, while we remain in safety at home. •93 The only justification given for such a sexist disparity is Providence. Does [Sophia] think that women are rightly kept apart from military affairs or that they would be able to be officers but not soldiers? The answer seems to be in the clause: 'while we remain in safety at home'. Her prefeminism seems very limited when compared with the claims expressed in Italian Renaissance treatises. Yet there were women who demanded for the opportunity to fight. The example given by the aristocrats who fought during the Civil War94 probably encouraged Margaret Cavendish to demand for women a greater role in the workings of society. In Bell in Campo (1662), her most famous play, Lady Victoria, the general's wife, is elected 'female general' 95 at the head of an army of 5,000 to 6,000 women who refuse to stay in the garrison town; she exhorts them to fight to equal men.96 They train, help the defeated army and overcome the enemy, all of which leads men to recognize them as equals. 97 If they were educated as men, the heroine says, women would be 'as good Souldiers and Privy Counsellers, Rulers and Commanders, Navigators and Architectors ... as Men are' .98 Some of her heroines play masculine roles and dispel objections to a government by women. 99 Thus the playwright brings her demonstration to completion. Women of the people who took part in the Civil War claimed the right to do battle; 100 some were probably prone to fighting such as Read or Snell, who was inclined to a military career by her background and her 'martial Disposition' appearing when she was a child.1°I If in a patriarchal society, women soldiers arouse curiosity or embody the potential subversion of gender boundaries, female cross-dressing is not a marginal problem. Women warriors and seamen are not 'textual anomal[ies]': '[they

[Sophia], Woman Not Inferior to Man; or, A Short and Modest Vindication of the Natural Rights of the FAIR-SEX to a Perfect Equality of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men, 1739 (London: Bentham P, 1975) 55-56. 94 Countess of Derby, Lady Brilliana Harley. 95 Cavendish, Bell in Campo, Playes Written by the Thrice Noble, Illustrious and Excellent Princess, the Lady Marchioness ofNewcastle (London, 1662) 'Generaless' (Pl.2.9.589, 3.11.590), 'lnstructeress' and 'Commanderess' (P1.2.9.589). 96 Cavendish P2.1.3.609. 97 Cavendish, 'Female Army' (Pl.3.15.595) are also called 'the Heroickesses' (Pl.2.9.589) and the 'Amazonian Army' (Pl.3.15.595). 98 Cavendish Pl.2.9.588. 99 Lady Contemplation, Lady Sanspareille (Youths Glory) and Lady Orphant (Loves Adventures). 100 See Philip Ziegler, Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London: Collins, 1965) 114 for the women of Neath in 1803. 101 Long version 63; see too 'this martial Spirit' ( 17). 93

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represent] one subcategory of the early modem era's larger preoccupation with the figure of a woman in male attire,' which Dugaw calls '[the] genotype HieMulier' 102 referring to a controversy that took place in the 1620s when three pamphlets formulated the debate on question of woman in terms of dress 103 and saw in cross-dressing a source of instability. That genotype clarifies the woman question, transvestism (not linked to sexual perversion) and the codes of sexual differentiation, that underlies the question of women soldiers who are a popular version of Hie-Mulier. 104 As such they embody a reality belonging to a larger philosophical debate where some crucial features of their genotype need be taken into account, such as sexual identity and its link to virtue and heroic conduct. However that may be, their claim is contrary to the secondary role and to the submissive status imposed on women by society. Nevertheless the question of women belonging to the army was settled by a political struggle. The posthumous fame of women warriors resurfaced in the 1870s; in the nineteenth century, collections of their narratives were reprinted and some passages cut to obey Victorian morals. This climaxed in the 1890s, probably due to a rising feminism and the development of the suffragette movement that reactivated interest in women soldiers. lOS Thus they are mentioned in the suffagette Ellen Clayton's history of the Amazons, Female Warriors, where she recalls that women have always been involved in military conflicts, that they could fight, and should therefore be granted the right to take part in political life. Two centuries earlier Cavendish's works vindicated the same claim but for aristocrats only. After Wheelwright, it might be tempting to read cross-dressing as the will to defy notions connected with gender. Are these women the predecessors of feminists? The stories of their lives and the way they were represented raise questions which must be understood in their historical context. In transvestism Wheelwright sees 'a process of imitation' more than the nascent claim to male privileges for all women. I 06 By the way the small number of women soldiers did not threaten the established order, which their relations confirm, they 'appear largely unconcerned about 102 Dugaw, Warrior Women 163. 103 Voir Hie Mulier; or, The Man-Woman: Being a Medicine to Cure a Coltish Disease of the Staggers in the Masculine-Feminines of Our Times, Expressed in a Brief Declamation: Non Omnes Possumus Omnes (1620); Haec Vir; or, The Womanish Man ( 1620) and Mulled Sack; or, The Apology ofHie Mulier to the Late Declamation against Her (1620). 104 See Dugaw, Warrior Women 171: 'The Female Warrior of balladry, then, is a lower-class permutation of the viraginous Hie-Mulier ... ' 105 See Eccentric Biography; or, Memoirs of Remarkable Female Characters (1804), English Eccentrics and Eccentricities (1875), Female Warriors (1879), EighteenthCentury Waifs (1887), Women Adventurers (1893) ... Davies's and Snell's stories can be found in The Wonderful and Scientific Museum ( 1804); Dickens tells Snell's story in an article devoted to 'British Amazons' in the periodical All the Year Round (1872). I 06 Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 11.

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changing the society that produced the inequity which they felt most keenly in their own lives' .1°7 If there was a tentative of self-liberation, it was only a limited one, 108 directed toward their usual domestic constraints without making any explicitly prefeminist claim. In the nineteenth century, as the army is reorganized without the presence of women and as supply services are militarized with the increase in the scale of warfare, changing the relationship between the military and the civilian, British industrialization opens up new jobs for lower class women. Yet, in the late nineteenth century, there were still women among camp followers, in India for instance.109 What was for women a means of leading a different life or the beginning of a social protest against feminine roles became, in the nineteenth century, the symbol of unbearable sexual disorder. Popular taste and imagination shifted and fictional representations reflected it; 110 female soldiers no longer were the subject of ballads, information being conveyed from then on by newspapers. These courageous pioneers were followed by other women, most often issued from the upper classes, wanting to play a role in the army quite different from that played by their predecessors. Florence Nightingale, famous in the Crimean War, epitomizes this new category of women. She was deemed 'acceptable' because she did not try 'to transcend the limitations of her sex' .1 11 Her imitator, Flora Sandes (1876-1955), was in Serbia between September and the end of 1914, in February 1915 and again in late 1915 when she abandoned her Red Cross armband and joined the Serbian army. Back in Britain after 1945, she wrote: 'I wonder whether it was really myself, or only something I dreamed ... I return to the prosaic drawingroom and the realisation that I am a "lady" now and not "a soldier and a man"' .1 12

107 108 109 110 111 112

Wheelwright, Amazons and Military Maids 12. See Stanley, 'The Women among the Boys', Bold in Her Breeches 41. See Hacker 667. See Dugaw, Warrior Women 64. Francis Gribble, Women in War (London: Sampson, Low and Co, 1916) 322. Qtd. in George Forty, and Anne Forty, Women War Heroines (London: Arms and Armour P, 1997) 128.

Chapter 7

Hospital Nurses in Eighteenth-Century Britain: Service without Responsibility Jacques Carre

Although nursing history has considerably developed in the past few decades, the condition of British nurses in the eighteenth century has remained little studied. General accounts of the history of nursing tend to start from the early Victorian age, after a cursory and often derogatory look at Georgian hospital nursing. 1 Until recently pre-Victorian nurses were often described almost in the terms used by Florence Nightingale when she referred to workhouse nurses: 'those who were too old, too weak, too drunken, too dirty, too stolid, or too bad to do anything else.'2 It seems now likely that Nightingale overemphasized the contrast between old-style nurses and her ideal nurse in order to attract an entirely different social category of applicants to the job. What I intend to do in this chapter is to contribute to eliminate the simplistic stereotype of the pre-Nightinghale British nurse by a study of their working and living conditions in the Georgian 'infirmaries' between approximately 1730 and 1830. What is clear is that the perceived status of hospital nurses in the eighteenth century was akin to that of domestic servants. They were indeed ostensibly employed to clean the beds and the wards, feed the patients and hand out medicines, under the general supervision of a matron. The domestic life of the Georgian hospitals, as several historians have noted, was organized like that of any school, college, or indeed country-house, with a hierarchy of 'servants' (the name was sometimes used instead of 'nurses') and a set of rules. But as we shall see it would be wrong to consider that domestic servants and hospital nurses were perfectly interchangeable. I intend to show, for example, that there were specific tasks that were more or less explicitly required of nurses in addition to menial work, such as those that pertained to the behaviour and morality of the patients. One difficulty is the classic scarcity of sources concerning ordinary working people. Georgian nurses were often illiterate and have left no record of their working lives. Of course one can consult the printed infirmary rules describing the daily 'duties' of nurses, although they were very standardized and repetitive. There are also the numerous surviving hospital account-books mentioning the quarterly salaries of nurses and matrons (see appendix). There are also, more rarely, the useful

2

See for example Brian Abel-Smith, A History of the Nursing Profession (London: Heinemann, 1960). 'A Letter to Sir Thomas Watson Bart' (1867), quoted by Abel-Smith, 5.

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registers in which the 'Visitors' designated by the board of directors recorded their (often critical) impressions of daily life in the infirmaries. There are occasional glimpses in travel accounts and private correspondences, but these scattered references are extremely difficult to collect in any systematic way. As for evidence from the medical professions, it is only from the late eighteenth century that it emerges from occasional essays and articles, but they once again reflect the elites' point of view on the subject. The starting-point of any study of nurses must be the particular constraints of hospital life. In the eighteenth century British hospitals knew a remarkable development, and by the 1770s, in most cities from Exeter to Aberdeen there could be found a new voluntary hospital or 'infirmary' .3 What was really new about them was first that they were under the control of the urban elites that financed them through yearly subscribtions; and secondly that they were exclusively devoted to caring for the sick, unlike many continental establishments that also accommodated indigents. 4 This meant that although the nurses were under the direct supervision of the matron, they were in fact ultimately submitted to two authorities rather than one: firstly that of the subscribers, represented by the weekly board, and secondly that of the physician and surgeon who visited the wards several times a week. At the same time, nurses were confronted with patients of their own social class, since infirmaries admitted mostly shopkeepers, labourers, servants, as well any poor wage-earner, all being duly recommended by a subscriber. They were therefore in an uncomfortable position, having to obey those above them as well as to make socially humble patients accept the infirmary rules and regime. I propose to show that hospital authorities made nurses conform to the same system of obligations and control as the patients themselves. The minute codification of their duties aimed at ensuring their own obedience of their 'betters' as well as that of patients. I will first examine the function of the hierarchy among nurses, which seems to have resulted in controlling their initiative and autonomy within the institution and in firmly prevention any promotion. Then I will study the daily routine of nurses, their insertion in a pseudo-domestic sphere that was akin to but also distinct from domestic life. In fact the infirmary regime, involving both charitable and medical requirements, made demands on the nurses that went far beyond servicing a household. Indeed I will attempt to show that infirmaries made them play a part in the moralization of masses which was one of the ambitions of the Georgian charitable movement. At the same time a medically faultless service was required of nurses, in spite of their total lack of training. The heavy and contradictory demands made on nurses put them in a difficult, almost untenable situation, which however continued throughout our period.

3 4

For a brief account of the rise of infirmaries, see J. Woodward, To Do the Sick No Harm (London: Routledge, 1974). A good example for comparing hospitals in Protestant countries is the Hopital General at Geneva, which took in both medical cases and paupers, and employed lay nurses. See the recent detailed study by Micheline Louis-Courvoisier, Soigner et consoler: Ia vie quotidienne dans un h6pital a lafin de !'Ancien Regime (Geneve 1750-1820) (Geneve: Georg Editeur, 2000).

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The nursing hierarchy There was no single type of nurse in Georgian hospitals. One has to take into account the previous existence and continuing operation of' sisters' in the few older hospitals, as well as the multiplication of sub-categories of nurses in the new infirmaries. In the seventeenth century nurses were still designated as 'sisters' in the two larger medieval hospitals of London, St Bart's and StThomas's. This word reminds one of the pre-Reformation connection between the Church and hospital charity. The term survived the Reformation in those institutions, and was even adopted as late as 1720 when Guy's Hospital was opened. The 'sisters' of these three London hospitals were in charge of a ward and supervised its day nurses, its night-watches and other 'helpers'. The sisters, however, were not mere supervisors, but still had tasks very similar to those of nurses in other infirmaries, as we can see from mid-century rules at St. Thomas's. 5 Yet from later similar documents it is possible to trace an increased share of organizational rather than domestic work in the sisters' duties. But of course the endowed London hospitals had considerable resources, as compared with the new subscription infirmaries, and could probably afford to employ supervisory staff better than others. The sisters' superior status is reflected in their salaries: throughout the century they earned about half as much as the nurses of the newer infirmaries, as is clear from the hospitals' account-books. When in 1752 the authorities at St. Thomas's wanted to change their name to that of'nurse' (and to downgrade nurses as 'helpers') there was successful resistance of the sisters. Gradually their social origin too seems to have become higher than that of nurses. In 1772 at Guy's nine sisters out of twelve were able to sign their names, against four nurses out of eight. 6 According to G. Yeo, London, most hospital sisters in the early nineteenth century had had some education and rarely came from the ranks of nurses.? In the newer 'infirmaries', the name 'sisters' was not used but only the word 'nurses'. It is only from the early eighteenth century that this word was used in the context of hospitals. Before that we read of 'assistant sisters' and 'helpers' in the archives of London hospitals. The older appellations, more clearly than the new one, point to the humble status of these women who were clearly perceived as domestic servants throughout the Georgian period. Indeed, in the printed rules of infirmaries, the specification of their duties was often to be found under the heading 'Servants'. These duties were largely related to the cleaning of the beds and wards, and to the handing out of medicines and the feeding and general comfort of patients. Every nurse at St. Thomas's was thus expected to do the following tasks in 1752: V. She is to make all the beds on one Side of the Ward, and to scour and make clean the Beds and Floors of the whole Ward, with the Tables and Forms, the Passage and Stairs,

5 6 7

Broadsheet c.1752, St Thomas's Hospital Records, London Metropolitan Archives, Hl/ST/A25. Receipts for Payments 1772, Guy's Hospital Records, London Metropolitan Archives, H9/GY/D23/4. Geoffrey Yeo, Nursing At Barts (London: St Bartholomew and Princess Alexandra and Newham College of Nursing and Midwifery, 1995).

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The Invisible Woman and Garrets; to assist her, she may take such Patients as the Sister shall think fit and able to help her. VI. She must keep clean scoured the Cans for Beer, the Broth Pails, Pans, Platter and Plates, &c. foul'd at Dinner. 8

The rules also clearly specified what should be their relation to the various other persons working in the infirmary. One reads for example in the rules for Nottingham Infirmary in 1781 : II. The Nurses and Servants shall obey the House Apothecary as their Master, and the Matron as their Mistress, and shall behave with Tenderness to the Patients, and with Civility and Respect to Strangers. ' 9

This rule suggests how delicate the nurses' position must have been. They were daily confronted with three different sets of people with sometimes contradictory demands, and were constantly between the hammer and the anvil. First they had a 'master' (here, the apothecary) and a 'mistress' (always the matron), as in a private house. But here master and mistress had different preoccupations, the first being concerned with treatment, the second with order, and the demands of medical science and of domestic management did not necessarily follow the same logic. The kind of obedience required was not the same: the apothecary wanted intelligent nurses able to administer prescriptions faithfully, while the matron wanted hard-working persons liable to keep the wards clean and orderly. These were very different kinds of responsibilities, which they must have found it hard to cope with. The second group, that of patients, was no easier to deal with. Again, nurses must have been tom between the demands of simple humanity (what the rules call 'tenderness') and the medical men's orders which may have required what sometimes seemed to be inhumane treatment. The third group, that of 'strangers', was expected to be treated with 'civility'. But we must remember that there were two very different kinds of visitors in hospitals: first, the official 'visitors' apppointed by the weekly board of directors, and belonging to the middle or upper classes. Here marks of deference were expected. And secondly, there were the relatives or friends of the patients, who were socially close to nurses, and often tried to circumvent hospital rules concerning food, drink, tobacco, money, etc. by persuasion or bribery. Here nurses were again in the difficult position of having to enforce rules of which they did not necessarily approve. As we shall suggest later, a task of social control was in fact foisted onto nurses who were not prepared for it socially and culturally. For all these varied, sometimes contradictory tasks, hospital nurses were paid at the same rate as domestic servants of inferior rank, i.e. between £5 and £8 per year, at least in the county infirmaries and in the smaller London ones. A comparative

8 9

Broadsheet c. 1752, St Thomas's Hospital Records, London Metropolitan Archives, H1/ST/A25. Statutes and Rules for the Government of the General Hospital near Nottingham Open to the Sick and Lame Poor, ofAny County (Nottingham, 1781) 27.

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table at the end of this chapter provides more detailed information, enhancing in particular the higher wages offered in the older London hospitals. At StThomas's, for example, nurses earned between £16 and £30 a year in 1731. However we have to consider that these salaries (generally paid every quarter) were only a small part of the nurses' payment, as they were provided with bed and board all the year round as well. It was required of all nurses to be resident in the hospital, and applicants had to be single or widowed. Night-watches (or 'watches', 'watchers, or 'night nurses') were a second category of the hospital staff that was in charge of patients. Their task was to make rounds of the wards every hour during the night, to hand out medicines at the appointed hour, and occasionally to call the matron or apothecary in case of emergency. They were generally older women on the verge of poverty, living in their own homes, and happy to supplement their scanty incomes with the modest wages offered by hospitals. By 1744 the London Hospital paid its night-watches £5 a year (against £7 to nurses). In a few cases, however, night-watches were younger women who might hope to be promoted to the rank of day nurses. This was the case in London at the Westminster Infirmary in the 1740s, as the rules suggest: That for the future all day nurses shall be chosen out of the night nurses Provided they are duly qualified for their encouragement in discharge of their duty. 10

At the top of the hierarchy of female employees was the matron (or, very rarely, 'head nurse'). She was in charge of generally supervising the domestic management of the infirmary, organizing the nurses and night-watches' work, looking after the linen and the ward furniture. She also selected (and could suggest the firing of) the servants and the nurses, dealt with any confict between them, and liaised with the board of directors. In most cases the social origins of matrons were higher than those of nurses and even of the London 'sisters'. They were always elderly women, sometimes the widows of craftsmen, surgeons, or the daughters of clergymen. They were expected to be present in the infirmary night and day, and to live alone, except when they were married to a man working in the infirmary. This seems to have happened quite often in London, as we can gather from such examples: about 1750 the matron at StThomas's was Mrs Anne Pearce, the apothecary's wife. At the Foundling the matron, Mrs Tomkyns, was probably the spouse of the surgeon of the same name. The position of matron implied a certain social prestige, as the first historian of St Thomas's Hospital, Benjamin Golding, noted in 1819: [The Matron] is the superior female of the establishment; she superintends those departments which could not be so well regulated by a person of the other sex. To her belongs the direction of all the female domestics; she engages them for the service of the charity, and dismisses them, according to her pleasure. She presides over their morals and

10

'Resolutions Orders &c. of the Westminstr: Hospital so far as they relate to the Constitution or present Practice thereof extracted from the minute books and digested as near as may be under proper heads', Westminster Hospital Records, 18th manuscript book, 23 October 1741, London Metropolitan Archives, H02 WH A 01 64.

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good behaviour, and sees that they execute the several duties of their stations with propriety. This gives her considerable weight in the domestic ceconomy of the establishment, and renders the appointment which she fills one of great respectability. II

As a consequence, the matron's salary was much higher than the nurses, although there were wide discrepancies between the endowed London hospitals and the provincial infirmaries. Guy's offered £50 a year to its matron as early as 1725, while Westminster, a subscription infirmary, gave only £12 in 1732. The London gave 17 guineas in 1744 and the Foundling £25 in 1759. As late as 1782 Salisbury offered only £15, and Canterbury 15 guineas in 1793. At St Bart's in London, by contrast an already lavish salary of £80 in 1771 rose to £200 in 1803. Of course the responsibilities must have been greater in this large establishment, especially in terms of administration. Thus Mrs Susannah Robinson, matron at St Bart's in 1771, reminded the board of directors that she supervised the work of more than one hundred persons (sisters, nurses and night-watches) and spent most of her time trying to look after her staff. 12 Golding's reference to her control of 'good behaviour' also reminds us of the continuing insistence of charitable hospital authorities on raising the moral tone of patients. This could not be effected by the matron alone, and required the participation of nurses. Thus, as we are going to show, the nurses' duties far exceeded those of domestic servants. Cleaners or carers?

As we have already noted, nurses were often seen as just another sort of domestic servant. Yet we shall argue that although some of their work was undoubtedly of the menial sort, they had in fact a more demanding life than ordinary servants, in so far as a complete dedication to their work was expected of them. This conception of their job must be related to the medieval sisters' religious perception of their task. But it may also be related to the eighteenth-century emphasis on feminine 'nature'. The perfect domestication of nurses was first ensured by the obligation of full-time residence. They were employed on condition that they had no family 'burden'. We read for example in the rules of the Westminster Infirmary in 1759: The Nurses are to be unmarried, without the Burthen of Children, free from any Distemper and under the Age of Forty-five at her admission. 13

In some cases nurses were practically cut off from the outside world. Even visits were regulated, as we discover in the rules of 1781 at the British Lying-in Hospital in II 12 13

Benjamin Golding, Historical Account of the Origin, Progress, and Present State of St. Thomas s Hospital, Southwark (London, 1819) 204. Yeo 13. 'Resolutions Orders &c. of the Westminstr: Hospital so far as they relate to the Constitution or present Practice thereof extracted from the minute books and digested as near as may be under proper heads', Westminster Hospital Records, 18th manuscript book, 4 May 1759, London Metropolitan Archives, H02 WH A 01 64.

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London:

That the Nurses be not permitted to have Visitors come after them to stay above an Hour at a Time; and that such Visitors be not permitted with them in any other Part ofthe House but the Hall or the Kitchen; and that no Visitor be treated with the Hospital Provisions, or any Linen washed in the House, but what belongs to the Officers, Servants, or Patients in the Hospital. That no Persons, who have been Patients in the Hospital, be permitted to visit the Nurses; and that the Porter do not presume to call any of the Nurses from their Wards to speak to such Persons.I4

To take up a job as a nurse meant giving up any kind of private life, in order to concentrate on the smooth running of the establishment. We can identify three major constraints in nurses' daily routine: they are related to the use oftime, of space, and the nature of patient care. Nursing work in hospitals was submitted to a time-discipline that was fairly unusual in pre-industrial Britain. The rules of the London Hospital in 1759 give a fair idea of it: III. They shall clean their Wards, Pewter, and Utensils, every Day by Seven in the Morning, from the First Day of March to the First Day of October, and before Nine from the First of October to the First of March. IV. They shall enter upon the Care of the Patients every Morning at Six in Summer and Seven in Winter, sup at Ten, and be in Bed by Eleven every Night. 15

As for the use of space, it was also rigidly defmed, especially as many of the new infirmaries were opened in purpose-built edifices 16 . Nurses were required to stay in or close to their allotted ward. Often they had to sleep in a cubicle in a comer of the ward itself. In some cases, they became so closely identified with 'their' ward that its name was given to them. Thus there was a succession of 'Sister Lukes' at St Bart's, whose identity remained in the background. The nursing of patients was an even more difficult task, in so far as they did not really have the means of performing what was required of them. Apart from the standardized recommendations on the necessary 'tenderness towards the patients', it was clear that they were essentially required to obey the physicians' and doctors' prescriptions. Yet some experienced nurses took upon themselves to disregard some or all of these prescriptions, probably judging them inappropriate. Thus in 1749 the matron at Worcester overstepped her prerogatives to such an extent that she was eventually fired: It appearing to this committee that Mrs White the Matron did presume to countermand the Orders and prescriptions of all the Physicians, it is therefore Orderd that she be 14

15 16

The Laws, Orders, and Regulations, of the British Lying-In Hospital, for the Reception of Lying-In Married Women (London, 1781) 34. Charter and By Laws of the London Hospital (1759), London Hospital Archives

LH/A/112, p. 22.

For a comprehensive account of Georgian hospital architecture, see Christine Stevenson's Medicine and Magnificence (London & New Haven: Yale U.P., 2000).

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discharged from her Office on the 5th day of November next, her years service ending at that time. 17 At the other extreme, some nurses signalled themselves by their frequent absence from their wards (and even, at the London Hospital, by their visits to local taverns). Such failings were also followed by punishment and, if repeated, by dismissal. One such incident comes out vividly from Dr Blizard's outraged comment in the Visiting book at the London Hospital in 1786: W. Blizard was at the Hospital the 14 ofNovr., at 112 past Six in the Evening and went into Richmond Ward, where he had a Patient in a very dangerous Condition requiring constant Attention, & on whose account the most particular Directions were given in the Morning-Notwithstanding these urgent Considerations, contrary to the Rules of the Hospital & to every Idea of what ought to be the Conduct of Nurses &c at an Hospital, the Nurse was out, and had been away the whole Afternoon; and the Watcher came in on the instant of his going into the Ward. The poor Fellow his Patt had not had anything given to him for a considerable Time: His Life depends on the Attention of Nurse &c-The Watcher seemed to be drunk to add to the Evil. 18

It is clear from this quotation that there was considerable discrepancy between doctors' and nurses' notions of 'what ought to be the conduct of nurses &c. at an hospital'. While the nurses could understand the logic of domestic order, they were too ignorant to understand the logic of medical treatment. They could hardly feel responsible for the health of patients, in so far as they were treated like mere domestic servants, and left in ignorance. The notion that they might receive some form of medical education or training was not even envisaged before the early nineteenth century, and then with considerable misgivings. The sheer ignorance of nurses must have made their position difficult, and could lead to different attitudes: while some blindly obeyed the apothecary's orders, others felt they knew better, and tampered with the prescriptions. In other words they were given a task for which they were not fit. We have here the central paradox of the job of hospital nurse, which must have made life difficult for the more devoted nurses.

Agents of moral order? Another non-domestic task which hospital nurses were more or less explicitly expected to perform was equally problematic to them: the religious and moral edification of patients. It is well-known that one of the aims of the charitable movement of the early eighteenth century was to moralize the very poor who, at least in towns, were suspected of being increasingly irreligious and immoral. It was

17 18

Worcester Infirmary, 'Order Book A' (12 April 1749), Worcester Record Office, 010: 6 BA 516111. London Hospital Archives, LH/A/16/3, 'Visiting Book' (November 1786). Underlining by Dr Blizard.

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felt that a stay at the infirmary was the ideal time for such moral rearmament. This was for Rev Alured Clarke one ofthe capital advantages of the new infirmaries, as he explained to the subscribers at Winchester in 1737: The most certain method of recovering Men from their evil Courses, is to remove them out of the way of bad examples for so long a time as is necessary to beget contrary habits. And it may be reasonably presumed that great numbers of the Poor will be insensibly reclaimed by the exact regularity of Manners, which is maintained in an Hospital as well as by the frequency of such Reflections as are naturally suggested in the House of Mouming. 19

This argument about the moral benefits of hospital treatment was often repeated by clergymen and even medical men throughout the eighteenth century. 20 It is not clear who, in Clarke's opinion, was suppposed to enforce this 'exact regularity of manners'. But as clergymen did not make daily visits to the wards, we can only assume that the matron and the nurses themselves were to be the principal agents of religious and moral rearmament. As soon as the new infirmaries multiplied, from the 1730s, the Church of England assisted them through public events such as anniversary sermons given in order to attract new subscriptions. And although infirmaries were lay institutions, religion was present in their daily routine in many ways. Often one could read sentences from Scripture on printed notices stuck to the walls in the wards. 21 The reading of daily prayers was recommended by the rules, either by patients or nurses able to read. The larger hospitals had a chaplain whose assiduity in visiting the sick was variable. Services were often held twice a week in the infirmaries (although they were rarely provided with a proper chapel). In some hospitals, the visitors kept an eye on the number of patients who attended them. Thus at the London Hospital in 1775 they deplored that too many were absent: The No of Patients is 202, of whom only 56 were reported to be able, tho' 'tis hoped that none of them are unwilling, to attend Divine Service in the Chapel, as their most important Duty & interest require.22

One imagines that nurses would not be too willing to extract patients out of their beds, if they were unwilling, or if it required too much exertion on their part. Again the nurses would not feel responsible for the religious welfare of patients since this was not their primary duty.

19 20

21 22

'An Account of the Establishment of the County-Hospital at Winchester', (1737) in Woodward 152. See for example W. Blizard, Suggestions for the Improvement of Hospitals, and other Charitable Institutions (London, 1796) 34: 'And, rightly conducted, they mend the morals, as well as restore the health and preserve the lives, of the objects for whose sake they were founded.' For example at Exeter and Winchester, probably at Dr Clarke's request. London Hospital Archives, LH/A/16/2, 'Visiting Book' (29 June 1775).

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On the chapter of morality, mles were more explicit. Nurses were asked to be living examples of virtue and pmdence. Golding thus mentions one of the mles at St Thomas's in 1819: You shall at all times be so circumspect in your general conduct, that it may be a profitable example to the patients committed to your care; and if you shall discover any thing done by any officer or servant in this house, or any other person, that shall cause disorder, or be the occasion of slander thereto, you shall then declare the same to the Treasurer, and no further meddle therein. 23

Beside being a pattern of good behaviour, matron and nurses were required by the rules of most hospitals to exercise some control over the behaviour of patients. The separation of sexes was of course to be absolute, no male patients being allowed into the women's wards, and vice-versa. Also nurses had specific instructions on the chapter of gambling, which was explicitly forbidden. For example the sisters at St Thomas were asked to obey the following rule: II. That they be careful there be no playing at Cards, Dice, or any other Games in this House, to give Notice to the Treasurer or Steward, if any offend therein. 24

The control of spirits drinking was another task allotted to nurses. Only those spirits such as port which were felt to have some curative effect and were prescribed by the physicians were authorized. Still it is clear from visitors' books that much smuggling of spirits went on in infirmaries, as many nurses actually condoned drinking. On this chapter, which really belongs to the study of popular culture, we have to face the difficult question of assessing what appeared as legitimate or not to nurses. As we have mentioned earlier, nurses basically belonged to the same social milieu as their patients, probably best described as the labouring classes. Hospital authorities were quite conscious of this, and wished to avoid all possible forms of connivence between nurses and patients. The drafting and publicization of specific rules for nurses, for servants and for patients was partly aimed at preventing it. Nurses were required to keep their distance, not to accept or ask any favour whatsoever from patients. Rules forbade any exchange of money, any purchase of goods for patients, any witnessing of a will, during or after a patient's stay at hospital. For example we can read in the London Hospital rules for 1759: IX. Neither Nurses nor Watches shall receive any Present, Acknowledgement, or Gratuity, either in Money, Treats, or any Thing whatsoever, from any of the Patients or their Friends, either during their being under the Care of the Charity, or after their Discharge.2 5

23 24 25

B. Golding, 1819. Broadsheet c.1752, St Thomas's Hospital Records, London Metropolitan Archives, Hl/ST/A 25. Charter and By Laws of the London Hospital (1759), London Hospital Archives, LH/NJ/2: 17.

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In spite of the rules, it is clear from the allusions to nurses in visitors' books that nurses' infringements on the rules were not rare, although only the more serious ones were recorded in detail. These official visitors, appointed by the board of directors, and changing every week, toured the wards two or three times a week (sometimes carrying a white wand to identity them). Nurses and matrons were required to leave the room, so that patients might be questioned more freely on the management of the infirmary and the attitude of the staff. 26 In case of serious trouble visitors could report to the board of directors, that would then cross-examine matron, nurses and patients. On can easily realize how difficult must have been the situation of nurses in such cases. It is likely that even when they were wrongly charged with misdemeanour, it must have been difficult for them to persuade the directors they had behaved properly. The patients, who, we must remember, were always recommended by one subscriber, must have been listened to more benevolently than the nurses. Although information is too scarce for any safe generalization, it seems that the outcome of serious conflicts was more likely to be the dismissal of the nurse rather than that of the patient. This short survey of the condition of eighteenth-century British nurses has enhanced the not often recognized differences between hospital nurses and ordinary domestic servants. The specific context of the charitable and medicalized infirmary submitted them to contradictory pressures. The economic limitations as well as the social conservatism of these voluntary institutions tended to keep the level of qualification of nurses very low. On the other hand nurses were required to be both medically efficient and morally outstanding. This was clearly too much to ask, in so far as they were not motivated either by any recognized professional status, or by any attractive wage-level. Only the matrons of the larger hospitals, who seemed to have enjoyed some social consideration as well as better salaries, could really feel responsible for the physical and moral welfare of the patients. The uneasy position of hospital nurses, however, continued throughout the Georgian age and beyond, and may have accounted for their high turnover. Only the conjunction of the demand for better qualified nurses by part of the medical profession and the offer of dedicated work by middle-class single women in the Victorian age could begin to alter the conditions of recruitment of nurses.

26

A list of standard questions was often provided to visitors in the printed rules.

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APPENDIX WOMEN'S ANNUAL WAGES IN GEORGIAN HOSPITALS (Sources: Hospital records) Hospital

Date

Matron

Westminster

1724

£9

Guy's

1725

£50

StThomas

1731

Assistant matron

Sister

Day Nurse

Night Nurse

£6 £25

£16

£25-40

£16-20

Westminster

1732

£12+1gn

London Hospital

1744

15gns

Foundling

1759

£25

Plymouth

1763

£25

London Hospital

1768

£20

Oxford

1770

Bartholomew

1771

£80+20

British Lying-in

1781

£25+15

Salisbury

1782

£15+5

£5+1

Plymouth

1787

25gns

£9

Guy's

1787

£6+5s. £7

£5

8gns

6gns

£20

£5 £15

£25

£10

Westminster Lying-in

1793

£25

10gns+2

Canterbury

1793

15gns+5

5gns+2

Foundling

1796

£42

St. Thomas

1800

Bartholomew

1803

Westminster Lying-in

1804

Bartholomew

1821

StThomas

1837

£200

£5-£8 £32-45

£20-22

£16+fees

£10+fees 15gns

£105+105

£36-70

£18

£37-50

£25-27

Chapter 8

Claiming their Place in the Corporate Community: Women's Identity in Eighteenth-Century Towns Deborah Simonton

She gae'd as fait as a new Prin, And kept her Housie snod and been; Her Peuther glanc'd upo' your Een Like Siller Plate; She was a donsie Wife and clean, Without Debate. It did ane good to see her Stools,

Her Boord, Fire-side, and facing Tools; Rax, Chandlers, Tangs, and Fire-Schools, Basket wi' Bread. Poor Facers now may chew Pea-hools, Since Lucky's dead. She n' er gae in a Law in fa use, Nor Stoups a Froth aboon the Hause, Nor kept dow'd Tip within her Waw's, But reaming Swats; She never ran sour Jute, because It gee's the Batts. The Writer Lads fow well may mind her, Furthy was she, her Luck design'd her Their common Mither, sure nane kinder Ever brake Bread; She has na left her Make behind her, But now she's dead. (Elegy on Lucky Wood in the Cannon gate, May 1717 by Allan Ramsay I)

Lucky Wood kept an alehouse in the Cannongate in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, where she was much respected for her hospitality, honesty and the neatness both of Alexander Manson Kinghorn and Alexander Law eds, Poems by Allan Ramsay and Robert Ferguson (Edinburgh, Scottish Academic Press, 1985), 1012. As this poem is written in vernacular Scots, a 'translation' is provided:

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her person and her Inn. In this extract from the poem, Elegy on Lucky Wood in the Cannongate, May 1717, by Allan Ramsay, we get a fme picture of an honest aleseller. Natalie Davis has argued that independent female traders could gain and maintain a sense of craft and status through the esteem in which they were held by husbands, kin, neighbours, clients, and other women in the trade. Credit for their work and ability remained largely within 'their street, their commerage, their tavern, their kin-unpublished and unsung' .2 I have been exploring ideas of status and standing in the European working community, and the ways in which status itself is a gendered concept. I am interested in how women created an identity within a culture and community, how they fit in the economy and society, how much agency and independence they had. Numerous women ran their own businesses, both single and married, working independently or in female partnerships. This chapter will examine the issue of the independent woman and her creation of identity in the corporate society of eighteenth-century urban Europe. It is set against the backdrop of the growth in commercial activity and consumer trades which characterized the period. Many towns and cities of eighteenth-century Europe experienced significant, often rapid, growth. At the same time towns were at the centre of commercial developments which meant that more goods and services were available to support the urban community. The middle-classes were developing an identity and an awareness of their position, and the commercial middling orders asserted themselves in this situation both economically and politically. The same commercial tendencies which enriched the middle orders have been credited with a perceived tendency to more frequently identify the women of these families with the home and domestic pursuits. Ideological trends underpinned such redefmitions of woman's place. However, large numbers of women maintained a role in commercial activities as proprietors working independently or in partnership with both other women and with husbands or sons. But even as the concept of worker was being less frequently attached to females, numerous women made their way in the corporate community of eighteenth-century Europe, claiming a place and establishing an identity in that community. Though the urban economy could be a minefield with the risk of destitution leading to prostitution amongst other dangers, it also represented opportunity for married and unmarried women. Although precarious, furnished rooms, lodginghouses, and networks of women, not to mention shops and taverns with prepared food meant that women could live alone and survive. The notion that women's work was

2

She dressed as neat as a new pin./And kept her house tidy and wealthy;/Her pewter struck your eyes/Like silver plate;/She was a trim wife and clean/Without debate.//It did one good to see her stools,/Her board, fireside, and facing tools,/Hooks, candles, tongs, and fire shovels/Baskets with bread./Poor locals now may chew pea-pods,/Since Lucky's dead.//She never gave a crooked bill,/Nor gave her clients extra ale,/Nor kept cheap booze within her walls,/But the finest beer;/She never sold sour liquor, because/It gave folk the colic .... //The Poet lads may well remember her/Forward was she, but Lucky made her/Their common mother, sure none kinder/That ever broke bread;/She hasn't left her match behind her,/But now she's dead. Natalie Zemon Davis, 'Women in the Crafts', in Barbara Hanawalt ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe ( 1986) 183-184.

Claiming Their Place in The Corporate Community

103

necessarily home-based undervalues the extent to which they operated outside the household, and in the cities, the extent to which commerce was their milieu. Their role in trading networks was important as was their financial role in keeping household and workshop accounts, and in managing the sale of workshop products. Similarly, the proportion of single and widowed women trading, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently, has to be reckoned with. Significantly, towns were 'multi-layered'. This is not only about what we might call social class, but about the ways people fit into the structures of the town. In a fairly brief search of three groups of Aberdeen records: the Council, Baillie and Guild Registers, the Apprenticeship Registers, and the Aberdeen Journal (now Aberdeen Press and Journal) begun in 1747, I have found a wide range of women who can be mapped onto the physical, economic and social landscape of Aberdeen and its environs. It is certainly not true that women are missing from the record-it's what you can make of it that is the issue. Representative List of Women found in the Aberdeen Journal Thieves Prostitutes Tenants School teachers Sewing School Mistresses Milliners Pub landladies Witnesses Ladies Bountiful Wives Author Bakers Merchants High Constable of Scotland and Chief of the family Hay

Servants Child Murderers Suicides Property owners Music School teacher Housekeepers of Institutions Shopkeepers Rioters Widows Mothers Vintners Staymaker Mistresses taking apprentices Printers, including Printer of the Aberdeen Journal

It can be argued that the status which attaches to work roles is an essentially male concept, particularly in a corporate community where craft status was closely linked to political power and standing. Towns tended to be built on a foundation of corporatism and eighteenth-century society stressed corporate identity and organization. Guilds derived their character and influence from their roles as organizers of the town economy, and they deliberately kept organizations incompatible with guild organization outside the town. 3 Women in Kingston-upon Thames who operated in regulated trades such as chandlery were required to take tolerations to be allowed to trade, in the same way as men who had not served an apprenticeship. Apprenticeship offers an example of how the system operated. Indentures usually refer to the 'mysteries' and 'practices' of trades, not to skills. The language 3

Mack Walker, German Home Towns, Community, State and General Estate (1971) 98.

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The Invisible Woman

of apprenticeship suggests that training meant passing on the practices and behavioural patterns expected of one who carried out the trade. In other words, the training had less to do with expertise and rather more to do with the status carried by the trade. Within this construction were the seeds of a regulated method of social advancement. In an age which made fine social distinctions between artisan and labourer, between master and journeyman, access to apprenticeship, particularly in a 'good' trade was seen as enhancing a child's opportunities. 4 During apprenticeship, according to Defoe, children were to be instructed 'in such things as may qualify them best to enter upon the world, and act for themselves when they are so enter' d'. 5 Thus the system specifically served as an initiation to the heavy responsibility of citizenship and adulthood. Within the corporate community, apprenticeship for boys frequently led to becoming a freeman with civic rights and responsibilities. Thus throughout Europe, guild members appear on town councils, and the system 'with all its ways penetrated [ ... ] political institutions through and through'. 6 This was the case in eighteenthcentury Aberdeen where the link between burgesses and the 'Companies' is clear in the records: the Dean of Guild, Merchant-councillors and Trades-councillors were elected City positions. 7 The Provost, Dean of Guild and Magistrates were recruited exclusively from the merchant elite, a group of about 27 men. The only way to enter the Guildry Court was to be worth £150 of free stock and produce a certificate signed by two creditable Burgesses. 8 The main town records indicate the vast range of their influence and authority in the Corporation, covering poverty, trade, shipping, appeals to Parliament, providing teachers for the town-you name it, they did it. Not the picture of non-intervention we might have expected. Thus corporate identity had a number of important implications for control of community and maintenance of custom. Corporate regulation helped protect trades, maintain quality and regulate the workplace and through it the community. While female guilds existed, mainly in continental Europe, and women gained admission to some male guilds, they were essentially masculine organizations that paralleled the male life cycle. Their structure and rules reflected male rites of passage. And girls had far less chance of a formal apprenticeship. Political power was not available to females in the same way as it was for males, even when they had served apprenticeships or became established in business. The effect was to link economic, social and political roles in explicit and implicit ways which had important ramifications for rank and status. But they also had particular meaning for women's role in urban society. So, how did women create an identity in this community which was largely based on male success and male polity? We can argue

4 5 6 7 8

See John Rule, Experience ofLabour in Eighteenth-Century England (1981) 33. A useful discussion of social distinctions in London trades is in Dorothy George, London Lifo in the Eighteenth Century (1925; 1979) 159-166. Daniel Defoe, The Complete English Tradesman (1726) I, 6. Walker, German Home Towns 100. Aberdeen Journal, 3 October 1758. Tom Devine, 'Social Composition ofthe Merchant Class', in George Gordon and Brian Dicks, eds, Scottish Urban History (1983) 99-100.

Claiming Their Place in The Corporate Community

105

that for many women like men, economic role and social role were closely linked, either as a way of creating a position in the corporate community, or as a way of creating an 'independent' identity for themselves. Women were rarely given, or gained, an identity in the words of trade law and thus were rarely able to claim rights of their own. Where they did obtain their own corporate identity, as in Paris or Rouen, their corporations enjoyed privileges which were comparable to those of male masters. Female guilds were limited to a small number of largely 'feminine' trades, and the women were relatively prosperous minor entrepreneurs, and in Paris, virtually all worked without male support in the trade. 9 Economic partnerships of husband and wife dominated in urban areas. Marriage also frequently went with the trade-indeed one author has suggested that wedlock was often the point of conception for potential commercial activity. 1 Complex networks of family connections also fostered business, and many brides had gained experience in a trade or business before marriage, entering the marital partnership with skills and experience. For example, in the French book-trade several husbands and wives were charged jointly by police for their trading activities. Wives appear regularly with husbands in legal documents such as apprenticeship indentures, often when a girl was involved. Almost all legal documents consulted by Abensour for Paris and the Ile-de-France were signed by merchants and countersigned by their wives. Port books of late seventeenth-century Scotland also contain a sprinkling of wives signing for consignments instead of their husbands.ll A wife's role in a business partnership depended on her abilities. For example, a woman who could not read could hardly act as a proofreader. Nevertheless, coding of tasks as 'skilled' or as men's work, such as pulling the press, could keep women from undertaking them. Within the patriarchal household and workshop, the principle of male head of household and control of the workshop fundamentally underpinned the premise that men's work was high status, and female work was supplementary and supportive. Throughout much of Europe, law merged a married woman's legal identity with her husband's, and as a feme coverte, she could be restrained from independent trading. Thus most women found access to business through husbands and fathers, and even that could be constrained by custom. In many respects the master's wife was the most important figure in the shop, 'when necessary giving orders to the workers in the workshops, filling in for husbands in their absence, and taking care ofthe accounting side ofthe business'. 12 Such was Madame Tribout who kept accounts for the family lace-making enterprise in Valenciennes between 1748 and 1775, or women handling sales in the boutiques

°

9 10 11

12

Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages (1989) 66. Alistair J. Mann, 'Embroidery to Enterprise: the Role of Women in the Book Trade of Early Modern Scotland', in Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen Meikle, Women in Scotland, c.1100-c.1750 (1999) 139. Geraldine Sheridan, 'Women in the Booktrade in Eighteenth-Century France', British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 15: 1, (1992) 53-55; Leon Abensour, La Femme et le Feminisme en France avant la Revolution (1923) 168, 200-204; Rab Houston, 'Women in the Economy and Society of Scotland', in R. A. Houston and I. A. Whyte, eds, Scottish Society, 1500-1800 (1989) 122. James McMillan, France and Women, 1789-1914, Gender Politics and Society (2000) 70.

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The Invisible Woman

of Lyon. In France, 'working behind the counter of the bookshop was clearly the woman's accepted place', despite virtual 'official' exclusion from the printing trade. Pinchbeck saw such a woman as so well acquainted with her husband's business as to be 'mistress of the managing part of it' .13 Guild regulations often recognized her contribution by specifying that masters had to be married. Robert Campbell, in his guide for parents, draws an uncomplimentary picture, but one which indicates her potential power in the workshop: If Domestic Harmony is not to be met with in the Family, the Youth has but a poor Chance of prospering; & if the Woman rules her husband, it is generally remarked, the Master is incapable to teach his Apprentice; ... the Boy lives a tiresome Life and must have the patience of Job to be capable to spin out seven Years under the Dominion of a Female Tyrant. 14

Note the tension between a feminine 'ideal' and the potentially strong woman. The position of such a woman was 'utterly ambiguous', but it had the effect of making her a more important person with her wide range of duties and responsibilities. She worked in close parallel with her husband, had a powerful influence over day-to-day matters and exercised considerable authority over workers. The character of her work could mean she was present in the shop more than he was. Indeed, her prominence and power also was her vulnerability, since it rested on convention and marriage, and exposed her to grievance, as implied in the passage above. 15 Through marriage most women gained strength, position and status. Eighteenthcentury Europe was a patriarchal society in which men held overt political power and in which law and custom recognized the subordination of women to men. Society expected the male to be the authority in the family. Of course, most women are not all women, and a substantial population of single and widowed females worked in their own right. With average marriage ages in the mid-twenties and a high level of 'never married' women, there were many single women. In northern Europe, between 10 and 14 per cent of women remained unmarried at the end of the century. Eleven per cent was a nominal European norm for the proportion of widows in the female population, while estimates suggest that women headed between 9 and 14 per cent of households. 16 This is an important reminder that not all households were the typical family. 13

14 15 16

William Reddy, The Rise ofMarket Culture, the Textile Trade and French Society, 17501900 ( 1984) 22; Wendy Gibson, Women in Seventeenth-Century France ( 1989) 105; Sheridan, 'Women in the Booktrade in Eighteenth-Century France', 51-65; Hannah Barker, 'Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution: Female Involvement in the English Printing Trades, c.1700-1840', in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus, eds, Gender in Eighteenth-Century England, Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (1997) 88-100; Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 17501850 (1930) 282. Robert Campbell, The London Tradesman (1747) 22-23. Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives: Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-Century Paris (1993) 114-115. E. A Wrigley and R. S Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541-1871. A Reconstruction (1981) 263; Olwen Hufton, 'Women Without Men: Widows and

Claiming Their Place in The Corporate Community

107

A woman might be a single independent worker for a part of her life, while an independent artisan might be married but operating her own trade. In both cases, her independent identity has tended to be subsumed within the idea of a family economy, obscuring her activities. In this way the concept of family economy, often seen as enhancing women's position, ignored the contribution of a significant number of women, but also eliminated agency in determining their own life style. Their decision-making process comprised complex considerations which included emotional and moral values as well as economic considerations. To argue that these women sought independence, or that they were forced into it only through instrumental concerns, is oversimplification. A woman might be a single independent worker for a part of her life, while an independent artisan might be married but operating her own trade. However, many 'women alone' were at a specific life cycle stage, a stage that may have lasted most of their lives, but for many covering the years between childhood and marriage; others as widows. Steady employment in domestic industries sometimes allowed women to create independent living arrangements, although earnings were usually so low that this was difficult. They frequently operated independently in spinning, lace-making and similar trades because of weak regulation, because they were identified as women's crafts or because level of demand permitted them access to trade. Clusters of women in separate households allowed production to be divided and they could gain some control over markets and income. So could women working directly for a merchant. Wages were dependent on economic conditions, but the existence of numerous merchants in an area competing for women's labour was to their advantage. In Rouen, with a short supply of yarn, there were so many dealers that workers had a choice of offers or could look for an improved rate at the weekly market. Reddy quotes such an example: If she has enough money to pay for three pounds of raw cotton, she buys no more. She works with this small amount, and works with care. When the cotton is spun she sells it that much more advantageously as her work is perfect. From the proceeds, she subtracts enough for her subsistence, and if her small capital has now increased, she buys a larger amount of raw materiaJ.l7

Such practices led to a royal injunction against unauthorized peddlers in Aprill752, leading to a spinners' protest. Not only were they operating in their own right, they were prepared to assert their right to do so on terms that benefited them.

17

Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century', Journal of Family History, 9 (1984) 357; Richard Wall, 'Woman Alone in English Society', Annates de Demographie Historique (1981) 303-307; Gay Gullickson, 'Love and Power in the Proto-industrial Family', in Maxine Berg, ed., Markets and Manufactures in Early Industrial Europe (1991) 216 and 'The Sexual Division of Labor in Cottage Industry and Agriculture in the Pays de Caux 1750-1850', French Historical Studies, 12 (1981) 187; Robert W. Malcolmson, Life and Labour in England, 1700-1800 (1981) 176. Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture, 24-27, 31; see also Gullickson, 'Love and Power in the Proto-industrial Family', 212.

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The Invisible Woman

Such households were common in north-west Ireland where the premium on female labour for spinning linen enhanced their position. In the Pays de Caux, some single and widowed women supported themselves by spinning; in the lace-making districts of Le Puy marchandes could make comfortable profits employing four or five servantes or their own daughters. In Colyton, the structure of poor-relief encouraged poor women to live together as spinners, backed up by relief and charity when times were especially hard. This supports Gullickson's view that spinning wages were not high enough to encourage women to establish independent households, but were high enough to permit it. On balance, in domestic industries, income did not necessarily provide the incentive for women to establish separate households, but women-only households were a strategy for coping with economic necessity.l 8 Many became involved through marriage, worked in partnership with husbands and continued the business after his death. In Aberdeen, a number of women advertised that they were continuing husbands' businesses, often in what would have been considered non-female trades. In 1755 and 1757, Christian Aberdein advertised that she would continue her staymaker husband's business, and in 1764 Margaret Craig gave notice that she would carry on her merchant husband's trade: Advertisement placed by Margaret Craig Margaret Craig, Relict of the deceast John McKenzie Merchant in Aberdeen, having purchased of his Executors, the whole Stock of Goods on hand at the Time of his Death; she carries on the Trade, as formerly at her shop in the narrow Wynd of Aberdeen, and hopes those who favoured Mr. McKenzie with their Custom, will be so kind as continue the same with her, and they may depend on being well and readily served. N .B. There is at said Shop, several Articles of Goods fit for Chapmen, which will be sold low for ready Money. +Commissions from the Country carefully obeyed.l9

In placing this advert, Margaret Craig gave us several clues. She purchased the stock, implying that she did not inherit it, and by doing so, the executors could pay off any debts McKenzie might have had. 20 She could have started with a clean 18

19 20

Reddy, The Rise of Market Culture, 31-33; Gullickson, 'Love and Power in the Protoindustrial Family', 212,215 and 'The Sexual Division of Labor', 187; Olwen Hufton, 'Women and the Family Economy of Eighteenth-Century France', French Historical Studies, 9 (1975) 14-15; Ian Whyte, 'Protoindustrialisation in Scotland', in Pat Hudson, ed., Regions and Industries: A Perspective on the Industrial Revolution in Britain (1989) 240; Brenda Collins, 'Sewing Outwork in Ulster', in Berg, ed., Markets and Manufacture (1982) 133; Pam Sharpe, 'Literally Spinsters: A New Interpretation of the Local Economy and Demography in Colyton in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Economic History Review, 46, 1 (1991) 58-60. Aberdeen Journal, 11 June 1764. For Christian Aberdein see Aberdeen Journal, 24 June 1755 and 26April1757. In general, on marriage, Scots women kept their own names. However, see the exceptions discussed below.

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financial slate. However, her note suggests that she needed ready money. The other clue, in common with many of the records, is that she claimed her place as a business woman. She said that business 'will be carried on as formerly' and suggested goodwill amongst her husband's customers. She also said that 'they may depend on being well and readily served' and that she would 'carefully obey' commissions from the country. As the main trading centre for the region, the hinterland was important. She was literally setting out her stall as a competent and reliable business woman. The wording is also typical of adverts placed by men, and it is significant that she used the same language to establish her place in the commercial community. She was not using a 'feminine' discourse, nor was she trading on femininity. She certainly was not unique in this. For three weeks in August 1764, Mrs Kennedy of Montrose announced that she intended to continue the Ship's Tavern, 'where travellers and others may depend on the best Usage and Proper Accommodation' .2 1 Over the next few years adverts regularly appeared for roups [auctions] held there, until her death in July 1767. A similar case can be made for Mrs Forbes, Vintner, of Peterhead, who also appeared regularly during the last half century. Keeping inns and alehouses was considered a very proper and suitable business for women, and provided a good opportunity to make a living. Thus Mrs Warrand of Forres moved from the edge of town to the centre, and laid claim to the prestige of the location, the previous possessor, and the elegance with which she had fitted out the premises. She also traded on her previous connections and 'the discretion and civility which has all along been the characteristic of her House.' Advertisement placed by Mrs Warrand That Mrs WARRAND, vintner in Forres, has removed from the west end of said town, to the large tenement in the middle of it, lately possessed by the laird of Macleod (now the sign of the British arms) and has neatly fitted it up in a most commodious and elegant manner, as an inn and tavern, proper to receive and entertain company of all ranks. Mrs Warrand returns her most grateful acknowledgements for former favours, and hopes to merit continuance of them, by that discretion and civility which she flatters herself, has all along, with universal suffrage, been the characteristick of her house. 22

The New Inn in Aberdeen was held by Mrs Robertson in 1758, when adverts appeared for roups [auctions] held there, often under her name. At the same time, John McGhie ran a coffee-house in the town, and then in June of 1763 he announced a move to the New Inn. He conducted the usual business of an inn, including providing a venue for recruitment officers for the army. But his reputation was a bit more chequered than the women described, when in September 1765 he appealed against sentence on a complaint for his lack of hospitality in not receiving strangers to lodge, although he had accommodation for them. The complaint was upheld and

21 22

Aberdeen Journal, 6, 13, 20 August 1764. Aberdeen Journal, 1 August 1758.

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he was fmed and had to pay costs. 23 When he died, and Mrs McGhie took over the business, it was regularly described in the Aberdeen Journal, as 'Mrs McGhie's House'. This was a well-established concern, as she not only hosted auctions, and conducted the normal activities of an inn, but sold tickets for Assemblies. It is clear that the property was associated with the Masons and the Masonic lodge formed part of the tenement. These activities continued unabated under her management, and indeed it appears to have been an even more active place of commerce during her sole tenure. In fact, on 24 May 1773, four separate adverts appeared for events at her House. In this respect she had gained and retained an identity with a portion of the community, the House was identified as hers, and clearly it was a very active business. The centrality and importance of her venue suggests a standing in the community. The adverts appear to have been placed by the persons in charge of the roups, which suggests they were responsible for deciding where to hold them. They were frequently advocates in the town, often using the same inn over a period of time, suggesting a recognition of a competent business partnership with the women concemed. 24 A number of women acquired some sort of name for themselves through 'official appointment'. Patronage played an important role in the corporate community, and commerce differed little from politics in this respect. Places were obtained through an informal but powerful network of clientage, connection and recommendation. 25 Retaining such appointments within the family were also important to the families involved, as witnessed by two cases from Aberdeen. In 1705 Margaret Cuthbert was admitted as 'Printer to the Town' by the Council as successor to her husband. Later that year their daughter, Margaret Forbes and her husband James Nicoll, a Merchant Burgess, were admitted to the position in the place of her mother, who had also died. 26 In 1764 Susan Traill, widow of Nicholl's successor and her son, James Chalmers, gained the position. 27 All three women were probably active partners and gained the position to some extent on their own merit. The announcement of the partnership of Traill and her son tends to confirm this. 28 The Aberdeen Journal stated that Chalmers intended to carry on the business in 'conjunction with his mother' and clearly referred to the joint venture, writing 'their employers' and 'they intend to stand candidates, at the next general election, for the place of printer to the county'. The tone is of a joint operation, and suggests that Susan had worked with her husband. At the least, her son was trading on that fact, at best he would rely on her as an active partner. This is consistent with women in the French and English booktrades studied by Sheridan and Barker, where wives and widows had a working

23 24 25 26 27 28

Aberdeen Journal, 23 September 1765. Aberdeen Journal, 17 October 1758, December 1758, 30 January, 4 July, 15 August, 21 November 1763, 13 June and 31 December 1764, 5 April, 24 May, 28 June 1773. Devine, 'Social Composition of the Merchant Class', 103. Mann says that Cuthbert ran the business until 1710 when her daughter and husband were ready to take over, 'Embroidery to Enterprise', 139. Council, Baillie and Guild Registers, City of Aberdeen Archives, the Town House, LVIII, 3, 215; LX, 428; LXIII, 20. Aberdeen Journal, 15 October 1764.

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involvement. 29 The appointment clearly represented publicly recognised standing, having been granted by an elite group of men, who ran the city from a position of wealth, power and prestige. This was no mean position to grant to a woman. Alistair Mann argues that the book-trade was more open to women in Scotland than England, mainly because there was no equivalent to the Stationers' Company of London to restrict entry, and that there was a small band of skilled book women with the requisite management and technical abilities. Most were associated by marriage to the trade, but continued for some time as proprietors in their own right as widows, Agnes Campbell (in business 1676 to 1716, 40 years) was one such. Hers is the story of a vigorous and determined business woman. She utilized legal process to protect her patents and restrict the trade of others, mixed in legal circles, renting property to lawyers. She was the wealthiest Scottish bookseller in the early modem period, though her husband left her in debt to the tune of nearly £8000. She was the largest printer in Edinburgh of her time with a trading area far beyond the town. She succeeded to and retained the appointment as King's printer in Scotland, and after a long battle became printer to the Church in 1712.30 Her appointments, and those of Forbes and Traill, clearly represented publicly recognized standing, having been granted by an elite group of men, who ran their cities from a position of wealth, power and prestige. This was no mean position to grant to a woman. Women trading on their own behalf appear regularly in archival materials. The Aberdeen baker, Margaret Morice was one of these. She styled herself Margaret Morice & Co. until 1794 when she reverted briefly to her own name of Kennedy. Notably she retained the name Morice under which she and her husband had built an identity with the business. Since Scottish women usually traded under their own name, Morice appears to have deliberately utilized the company name, and was concerned to hold on to the prestige and commercial identity associated with her 'business' name. 31 Morice was always described as 'baker in Aberdeen' and the apprenticeship registers did not name a male partner. Indeed her husband John appears to have died, probably in about 1780, perhaps earlier, because he never appears in the records as having taken any apprentices. Indeed, I suspect she had no son in the trade and may have needed to take apprentices to assist with the work. Whilst John was alive the partnership may have coped admirably, but as Campbell wrote, referring to the fact that bakers' apprentices were usually a little older than average, 'the great Burthens they are obliged to carry out in serving their Customers requires more strength than is normally to be met with in younger Years' .32 From apprenticeship records, we can draw some idea of her standing in the community. 33 She appears to have operated on her own for about 20 years, and if 29 30 31 32 33

Sheridan, 'Women in the Booktrade in Eighteenth-Century France', 51-65; Barker, 'Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution', 88-100. Mann, 'Embroidery to Enterprise', 142-145. On Mary Say, see Barker, 'Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution', 91-92. Campbell, The London Tradesman, 276. John Morice appeared as a deponent against adulteration of meal in August 1763, but no other mention of him has yet been found, Aberdeen Journal, 22 August 1763. Enactment Books. 5. Register of Indentures, 1622-1878, City of Aberdeen Archives, the Town House, 164-219.

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apprentices served their full term, she had up to 4 apprentices at any one time, the relatively large number giving some indication of the size of the operation. The premium paid to her compares well with the average paid for boys apprenticed to male bakers in Aberdeen, Essex, Birmingham and Staffordshire (£ 11 ). The term of apprenticeship is also comparable. 34 The fact that William Low paid no premium and his sons' terms were shorter suggests professional courtesy, since he was described as a baker and a merchant (and probably the founder of the William Low's grocery stores in Scotland). 35 The regularity of her taking apprentices tends to suggest an orderly, well-run business, and parents must have felt happy about placing their children with her; the fathers and cautioners were all of middling status. The premiums and number fall off a little towards the end of the record, and it is probable that she was elderly by this time, perhaps with a smaller business. It is also possible that William Low put his sons with her as a favour-notably it is only in these two indentures that she uses her own name, and does not refer to the company. Bakers themselves were not necessarily esteemed, because of suspicions that they gave short measure, and because of the hold they had on the community due to the necessity of bread. Thus towns, as was the case in Aberdeen, regulated the meal supplies and monitored the activities of bakers vigilantly. This does not diminish her position within the trade, nor her role as a business woman of some repute. Mantuamakers made clothes for all classes, while milliners catered for prosperous customers, providing hats, caps and accessories. Both trades, but especially the milliner benefited from the growth in luxury trades and the demand for decoration and changing fashions. Indeed, they were often at the forefront of setting fashion. Millinery was recommended to girls of good family, as 'a most genteel Business for Young Maidens that are proficient at their needle' .36 They paid high premiums of £25 to £75 for training. It was skilled and a good business enterprise for an able well-capitalized employer, attracting those with capital and some social standing. Contemporaries thought women could begin business with capital ranging from £100-£1000, presumably because of the luxury stock they carried. At the same time, parents were warned that in spite of 'vast profits' made by mistresses, they 'yet give but poor, mean Wages to every Person they employ under them'. Mantuamakers also paid poorly. The variation in premiums of £2 to £31, illustrates the range within the trade. Three milliners appeared in adverts in the Aberdeen Journal, Misses Ramsay and McKenzie who worked in a partnership upstairs from Miss Forbes, also a milliner. The adverts indicate the range of goods and the influence of luxury and fashion:

34 35 36

Deborah Simonton, 'The Education and Training of Eighteenth-Century English Girls, with special reference to the working classes', PhD Thesis, University of Essex, 1988, 341, 352; see also Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914 (1996) 117. Enactment Books, 5. Register of Indentures, 1622-1878,211, 219. A General Description of the Trades, Digested in Alphabetical Order (1747) 149.

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Advertisement of Ramsay and McKenzie Misses RAMSAY and McKENZIE, In the first Floor above Miss Forbes's, Milliner in the Nethergate, Aberdeen, fronting the Well, Sell at the most reasonable Rates the following Articles, viz. Sampler Gauzes and English Worsteds of all Kinds. Balladine Silks of all Kinds.-Fluss, Scarf and Tram ditto--Tassles for Beds and Window-Curtains, and Fringes of all Kinds.--Gold and Silver Garters and Hatbands, and Worsted ditto.--Giass-Strings for Coaches and Chaises.-Hecking ofBeds.-Fringes and Tassles for Saddles, and Mortcloth Fringes and Frogs.-Shoulder Knots of different kinds.-Watch-Strings, and Jump Straps,Garland Trimmings.-Masons Aprons and Sashes, &c. &c. They also perform Mantua-making in all its Branches, and Grave Cloaths, &c. Those who are pleased to favour them with their Orders and Employment, may depend on being served with the utmost Punctuality. Commissions from the Country will be carefully obeyed. 37

Three firms of mantuamakers and milliners, all run by women, took apprentices in Colchester, Essex, between 1750 and 1800 (see Appendix 2). 38 Mary Gibbon took apprentices from 1753 to 1761, one of whom was Elizabeth Reeves. From 1761, Lucia Reeve took apprentices, at times with Hannah and later Sarah Reeve, sometimes styled Lucia Reeves & Co, and fmally Clara Reeve & Co in 1775. 39 Ann and Hannah Prior began taking registered apprentices in 1786. These businesses demonstrated a regular pattern of apprenticing new girls, keeping at least two on the premises. They appear conscientiously run, successful enough to be employing at least two women and two apprentices. There was also continuity from one firm to another. These cases also emphasize the overwhelming female character of the trades, certainly by mid century and after. Campbell called millinery 'no Male Trade' and commented that 'the Fair Sex ... are generally bound to this Business', while the mantuamaker was 'Sister to the Taylor' .40 In Geneva between 1741-51, 50 of206licensed enterprises belonged to women, including 21 female partnerships, and a further 26 partnerships of men and women. 41 In Edinburgh, at least 140 single women managed a concern, often in female partnerships.42 Ramsay and McKenzie, in Aberdeen, worked in partnership, and in a sort of cluster with Forbes. The Gibbons, Priors and Reeves, described 37 38 39

40 41 42

Aberdeen Journal, 22 June 1767 and 25 January 1773. Simonton, 'Education and Training', 353-355. Notably she may have been the author of a frequently quoted tract on female education and of a number of gothic novels. Clara Reeve, Plans ofEducation, with remarks on the system of other writers (1792); also The Old English Baron (1777), several other novels, poetry, and a memoir of Walter Scott, published between 1769 and 1799. Simonton, 'Education and Training', 353-355; Campbell, The London Tradesman, 206, 208, 227, 336. E. Monter, 'Women in Calvinist Geneva, 1500-1800', Signs, 6 (1980) 201. Elizabeth C. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh (1996) 184-194.

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above, similarly show the significance of partnerships to women in running a business. Many partnerships thrived. No doubt mutual dependence and reliance on the business, for subsistence helped to cement them over time. The arrangement halved the cost of rent, servants and other outlays connected with setting up and managing a concern. Relatives especially lived together and shared expenses. For example, in the ninety-one partnerships Sanderson identified, the majority were sisters or other relatives. Similarly, Sharpe's study of Hester Pinney demonstrates the role of family networks, especially sisters. Not all partnerships were formally drawn up, but the recurrence of de facto associations in such numbers suggests that many women saw them as an aid in the world of survival. The Colchester and Aberdeen firms also show the existence of networks of women in the same or related trades, where girls of the same family were apprenticed, or where an apprentice reappeared in her own shop. Only once was Christopher Gibbon mentioned, and though the indenture implied that he shared the trade, he did not appear again. Similarly, Phoebe Moreton, a milliner from Wolverhampton, was frequently identified as the wife of John, but only once did he share the indenture. Indeed, given the gendered association of the female milliner to the male tailor, these men may have been tailors. The records suggest that these women operated independently or in a roughly equal partnership with the men concerned. What this data does not tell us, of course, is why and how they were in these positions, how permanent they were, and especially how they felt about it. However, we have glimpses. Cissy Murray, after marrying, looked back on her partnership with Janet Muschet, shopkeeper in Edinburgh: 'I am sartin never was 2 more happy than we were, and tho I have reason to be thankful for the way I now am yet I never think on the years we spent thegether but with regrate.' 43 It is certain that some women strove for and valued independence. Ann Buchanan, from a landed family, wrote to Janet Muschet in 1758 asking to go into partnership in millinery with her and her cousin Cicely (Cissy, above). Her letter reveals her view of the potential of the arrangement: Dear Jannie, I am glad business is going on well with you [ ... ] my most sincere thanks for your ready Agreeing in taking me in partners with you and your beloved Spouse [Cicely Murray]; Oh how happy will I be with you both[ ... ] Mama and Grandpapa is very well pleased with the proposal and is willing to give as much credit as needed;[ ... ] they were told att home that it was Lady Polmaise that first made the proposal of taking me in with you; So in case they be writing any thing of it to Cicy Dont say Anything that it was myself, I long for the time when I shall be with you.44

The fact that she suggested joining the partnership was itself an indication of her intentions. She later objected to Janet Muschet treating her like a servant, and her

43 44

Quoted in Sanderson (Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh 107). Murray of Polmaise Muniments (Central Region Archives): GD 189/2/344 (former SRO reference). Op. cit., 95. Murray ofPolmaise Muniments: GD 189/2/340 (former SRO reference).

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tone clearly indicated that she saw herself as setting up in business with a partner on an equal basis. While the expectations of the two cousins were different-Cicely needed a subsistence while Ann was secure in a landed family-they both used the partnership for their own ends, and valued the experience. Yet around this obvious female activity in commerce there was developing a discourse which was clearly antipathetic to women as business women. Some of it, like the descriptions of women and women's commercial activities in Campbell's London Tradesman, were overtly misogynist. This is not the place to analyse specific texts, but clearly there was a juxtaposition of the public and private with a sexual connotation labelling every woman who was in business. As Campbell wrote: The vast Resort of young Beaus and Rakes to Milliners' Shops exposes young creatures to many Temptations, and insensibly debauches their morals before they are capable of vice ... Nine out of ten young creatures that are obligated to serve in these Shops are ruined and undone.45

He warned that pay was frequently so low as to make prostitution the alternative. Certainly women in seasonal urban trades were vulnerable since they were subject to periods of slack employment and low wages. But the issue here is the extension of the idea that women who had something to sell would also be prepared to sell themselves. Moralists long propounded a connection between prostitution and commerce, and the compromised position of women with something to sell. Critics mixed sexual and commercial language-Campbell using intercourse for business, for example-accusing milliners and other tradeswomen of seducing customers into buying. James Grantham Turner argues that there is a link between perception and reality in that 'Shop assistants were regarded as fair game by cruising male customers' .46 He says of Campbell, 'Here the serious conduct book merges and colludes with the scandalous pamphlet, both forms of a male discourse enforcing the sexual interpretation of luxury and its "new exchange'". 47 Kowaleski-Wallace also argues that the process at work in the eighteenth century was writing business as a male concern, as a masculine process entailing supreme self-mastery. It was decisively reconstructing the world of business and business practice as a masculine realm, where men, disciplined in habit, passionless in affect, controlled the flow of commerce.48 Looking back at some of the adverts placed by women conducting business in Aberdeen, I argued that the language was not a feminine discourse, but akin to that of men, claiming their place in the world of business. To do so, they used the same language as men, and portrayed their realm of business in the same terms. It may have been necessary to disassociate themselves from the feminine, in fact. 45 46 47 48

Campbell, The London Tradesman, 208. James Grantham Turner, "'News from the New Exchange". Commodity, erotic Fancy, and the Female Entrepreneur', in Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, eds., The Consumption of Culture 1600-1800, Image, Object, Text (1995) 427. Ibid., 428. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping, and Business in the Eighteenth Century (1997) 82, 87, 112.

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Within this context, female reputation was an important commodity. Polly Morris, working on defamation cases in Bristol, suggested that 'whore' was a metaphor for the loss of femininity that accompanied women's exercise of authority over men. The focus on female adultery and marital relations in defamation cases carried with it comment on a husband's inability to control his wife. The most common case was male defamation of a married female, and involved the power relations between men and women. It was the women whose lives most closely approximated those of their men and were furthest from the purely domestic role who found themselves in court defending their reputations. Thus defamation cases say far more about the contested areas than the separate spheres of men and women, more about conflicts over power than sexual division of labour.49 The position of women in the corporate community held a number of tensions and always at risk was their 'good name'. Women of property with a good family name could be protected by their inherent position and by their association with the men of the family. But women of the middling orders could be caught both by their position in a growing and surging commercial world and by their sex. They were rarely perceived as 'independent' and married women and widows often relied on their marital association, however obliquely, to bolster their claims in the corporate world. Single women were even more vulnerable. Women in commerce not only had to obtain credit, but to stay in credit, they had to retain their reputation as someone who could be trusted and whose character was seen to be above reproach. 50 Reputation is both a private and a public attribute. It is effectively a political commodity, which is not only worth owning and demonstrating, but worth protecting and publicizing. Women who operated in the corporate world had to establish, maintain and use their reputation to gain and stay in business. They required both personal and financial credit. In the cases I have discussed, women gained an identity in the community by utilizing the language of the corporate world, and by claiming a place in that world. They built reputations which they could then use and protect to maintain a place in the community. They also used family connections, networks and patronage to further their standing. In this I would agree with Natalie Davis that through the esteem in which independent female traders could build up, women could gain and maintain a name in the corporate community.

49

50

Polly Morris, 'Defamation and Female Sexual Reputation', seminar presentation, University of Essex, 27 June 1983. See the critique ofthese sources in Rab Houston and Richard Smith, 'A New Approach to Family History?' History Workshop Journal 14 (Autumn 1982), 126. Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-Century Edinburgh, 22.

Chapter 9

Women Barred from Masonic 'Work': A British Phenomenon Cecile Revauger

Discussing women and freemasonry, work and freemasonry, let alone women's work in freemasonry in eighteenth-century England may appear as a real challenge. What is indeed meant by masonic work? Is it not preposterous to deal with women in the lodges, places which have always been male strongholds? Indeed the very phrase 'masonic work' is somewhat puzzling. Yet freemasons constantly use this metaphor to refer to what takes place within the lodge. Freemasonry is referred to as 'the Craft', which suggests working skills. The lodge is said to be 'at work'. Although the concept should be taken in the figurative sense, and involves a symbolic dimension, the notion of work was occasionally understood in the literal sense. Historians of freemasonry tend to make a distinction between 'operative' and 'speculative' freemasonry, i.e. the lodges in existence in the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the modem lodges, those which appeared after the creation of the Grand Lodge of England in 1717. Yet how far speculative freemasonry is the heir of operative freemasonry is still a controversial issue among historians. What is at stake is the exact link between the lodges composed of masons by trade, the seventeenth-century guilds, the builders of cathedrals on the one hand and on the other hand the lodges which emerged in the eighteenth century, and which essentially attracted aristocrats who were not particularly familiar with rough stone. It would be tedious to discuss the ins and outs of the debate. It may be contended however that there was real continuity between the lodges erected by the Scots in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, contrary to what happened in England at the same time. The distinction between 'operative' and 'speculative' freemasonry happens to be relevant for the issue at stake here, namely the admission of women within the lodges. Not until the birth of speculative freemasonry, i.e. modem freemasonry, were women explicitly banned from the lodges. Anderson irrevocably excluded women from masonic work in 1723, in the third article of his Constitutions: The Persons admitted members of a Lodge must be good and true Men, free-born, and of mature and discreet Age, no Bondmen, no Women, no immoral or scandalous Men, but of good Report. 1

Anderson, Constitutions, ed. Daniel Ligou (Paris: Lauzeray International, 1978) 180.

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Far from denying such a sexist assertion, the United Grand Lodge of England has subsequently considered this as a 'landmark', which means that the Grand Lodge still regards the non admission of women as a matter of principle, as a criterion for the official recognition of all the other Grand Lodges throughout the world. 2 With the exception of Mrs Aldworth, an Irish lady who became quite famous as a result, and an exception which confirms the rule, no woman has ever been allowed to work side by side with the British freemasons. Yet there appeared at the same period, in France and several other European countries, 'lodges of adoption', which, although in a specific way, made women feel welcome. Nothing similar took place in Britain before the end of the nineteenth century and yet British women were still considered as profane, uninitiated outsiders, no matter how much they helped their dear husbands with their masonic work. Producing a satisfactory answer to the reason for the ban on women's admission in the lodges is not easy. Should one look for internal or external factors, in other words, does such a ban stem from the ritual itself or from the social context? Listening to the arguments developed for or against the admission of women on the two sides of the Channel, exploring the role assigned to British women by the masons, and fmally making a comparative study with France may prove fruitful and provide a few clues. The arguments developed, or hushed, for or against the admission of women

The masons who were most determined to exclude women from their work have used roughly the same language on both sides of the Channel. Two kinds of arguments were developed. The first type involves the traditional secret which masons pledged themselves to keep. The lodges being secret societies, or at least societies retaining a certain number of secrets, they could not possibly accept women as it was a well-known fact that women were naturally indiscreet and could by no means be entrusted with any secret. As the story goes, an Irish lady, Mrs Elizabeth Saint-Leger Aldworth was caught eavesdropping near the library of the castle where the 'brethren' of the lodge of Cork were holding their meeting, some time in the years 1710-1711. The gentlemen reluctantly decided to initiate her to the secrets of masonry, in order to avoid a worse evil, to make sure that she would not chat indiscriminately. 3 The masons saw to it that such an unfortunate incident should never happen again and should not create a precedent. Yet the initiation of Mrs Aldworth was never denied 2

3

The United Grand Lodge of England claims to be the 'Mother Grand Lodge', the first Grand Lodge erected in the world, as the Grand Lodge of England was founded in 1717. Therefore it entitles itself to examine the regularity of each Grand Lodge in the world. Only one Grand Lodge is officially recognized in each country by the United Grand Lodge of England. The French Grand-Orient for instance is considered as 'clandestine' because two 'landmarks' are not respected, the obligation to believe in 'the Grand Architect of the Universe' and the impossibility to initiate women. Although the GrandOrient does not initiate women, it accepts women visitors. Daniel Ligou, Dictionnaire de la Franc-Ma9onnerie (Paris: P.U.F., 1974, rpt 1987) 25-26.

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and even seems to have been officialized by a dedication made by Fifield D' Assigny in an official masonic document in 1744. 4 In a way the Aldworth episode reinforced the case against the inititation of women, since masons took this as a perfect counter-example of the behaviour to be adopted. The author of an article published in The Plain Dealer, who claims to be a mason about to give up masonry, presents his readers with a sophism when he suggests that lodges would take few risks by initiating women given the state of decrepitude the lodges have reached and since the secrets have not been kept well at all anyway: And I have heard it asked, why don't we admit women, as well as tailors, into our lodges? I profess I have met with as sufficient heads among the Fair Sex, as I have found in the Brotherhood: and I have some reasons to fear, that our secrets are in danger of being exposed. 5

The anonymous author of Franc-Mac;on dans Ia Republique, ou reflexions apologiques sur les persecutions des Francs-mac;ons written in 1746 claims that the masons in Vienna were persecuted due to the indiscretion of a few ladies from the Court, who acted purely out of spite after being refused admittance in the lodges, and who then urged the Austrian queen to take steps against the masons. John Entick and Scott reprinted this anonymous work in The Pocket Companion and History of Freemasonry, in 1754 and 1759. 6 This tends to confirm that the argument focusing on female indiscretion was a favourite one on both sides of the Channel. Freemasons being so fond of symbolism, one might have expected to find some example of an important professional secret violated in the lodges of yore, some hint to the ban on the admission of women in the prestigious building of cathedrals, or several references to operative masonry and the sundry guilds and masons companies. Yet there was absolutely no matter there which could in the least justify the misogyny of modem freemasons, far from it. The Old Charges, i.e. the old regulations of the operative lodges, neither mention any restriction concerning women, nor recommend their admission. On the contrary a manuscript dating back to 1693 and bearing the signatures of several officers of the lodge ofYork stipulates: The one of the Elders taking the Book and that he or she that is to be made a mason shall lay their hands thereon and the Charge shall be given.?

Not surprisingly, the use of the feminine pronoun has been questioned and it has even been argued that it was a mere spelling mistake. However Cyril Batham quotes 4 5 6 7

Hugan claims to have found a dedication made by Fifield d'Assigny to four hundred Irish masons including Mrs Aldworth, in Memorials of the Masonic Union [1813] (London, 1874). Anonymous article published in The Plain Dealer, 14 Sept 1724, printed for 1. Roberts, in Warwick Lane (British Library.) See Gisele et Yves Hivert-Messeca, Comment Ia Franc-Mar;onnerie vint aux femmes, Deux siecles defranc-mar;onnerie d'adoptionfeminine et mixte en France, 1740-1940 (Paris: Dervy, 1997) 24; and Scott's Pocket Companion (London, 1759) 271. Hivert-Messeca, 448.

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The Invisible Woman

another instance of female presence among the ancestors of the modem masons, the case of an old guild presided by a woman. 8 Besides, Andree Buisine consulted the minutes of the London Worshipful Company of Masons and discovered that Mary Banister was accepted by the company as an apprentice on February 12th, 1714. 9 These three examples clearly point at the fact that the eighteenth-century freemasons could on no account whatsoever refer to the history of guilds and operative masons, whose heirs they yet claimed to be, to justify the exclusion of women. We can thus reach the conclusion that women were considered as capable of keeping professional secrets, the secrets of a trade, but not the symbolical secrets of the modem lodges, which were far less essential. .. As John Locke might have said: 'Even if this were its whole secret, namely that it has no secret, yet it is no small feat to keep that a secret ... ' I o The second argument put forward to ban women from the lodges is twofold. It deals with the sexual attraction (although understatments were generally preferred) which women could exert on the brethren however dedicated to their work, and therefore the ill reputation which could ensue for freemasonry as a whole. Besides, some eighteenth-century masons seemed intent to curb the attacks against the Craft, coming essentially from Catholic writers. 11 Freemasonry was even called the 'Mother of Harlots' by the anonymous author of Freemasonry, The Highway to Hell, published in 1768. Yet the antimasonic writings of the time also used the opposite argument, namely that masons could have the time of their lives in the lodges because they could hide away from their wives who were excluded from their supposedly working activities. The author of The Highway to Hell adds that the masons neglect their homes and thus carelessly leave their wives to themselves. Another Catholic writer, John Robison, who attacked English and Scottish freemasonry in a very violent way, and like Barruel claimed the French Revolution was a masonic plot, stigmatized the frivolity of masons. In a rather amusing passage for modem readers, he described the contents of a strange strong box detained by the Illuminati, a Bavarian sect which he rather hastily associated to the freemasons: Several receipts for procuring abortion. A composition which blinds or kills when spurted in the face. A sheet, containing a receipt for sympathetic ink-tea for procuring abortion, a receipt ad excitendum furorem uterinum .. . 12

8 9 10 11 12

Cyril. N. Batham, 'La Compagnie des Ma