Women and work
Some of the standard images of Victorian women are the 'angel in the house' of Coventry Patmore's poem, the factory girl, and the domestic servant (and possibly Florence Nightingale's nurses). In fact, more women worked in the various dressmaking trades than in factories, and until the end of the nineteenth century the numbers of women in paid work was declining. Women in Victorian art are usually portrayed as wives subordinate to their husbands and rarely in paid employment. This owed a great deal to ideology but was also based in fact. With the advance of industrialisation and the shift to heavy industry, the incomes of most families were restricted to those of the male breadwinner - a circumstance that owes as much to trade union pressure as to middle-class ideology. A great deal of casual female labour went unrecorded in the censuses but even allowing for this, probably no more than ten per cent of married women were in paid employment. The great majority of women who worked full-time were young and/or single.Domestic service
Domestic service was the main source of female employment. The census of 1851 listed 751, 541 indoor female domestic servants out of a population of 27 million. The peak year was 1871 when almost five million women in England and Wales were recorded as being in domestic service (46.4 per cent of occupied women). Only between five or ten per cent would have worked in great houses - the majority worked in relatively modest houses with two servants or less. In 1901 one in three girls between the ages of 15 and 20 was in domestic service. Both then and in 1851, 28 percent of the total female service force was aged less than 20. Over all, about one in three adult women would have at some period of their lives have worked in domestic service.In most cases [the home] could not have lasted a single day without paid servants.’ (Asa Briggs, Victorian Things, 1988)The hearth was the centre of the Victorian home and it depended to an exceptional degree on the duties of domestic servants, who fetched the coals in scuttles from the cellar, cleaned the grates and surroundings, did the blackleading, laid the fires, burnished the fire irons and polished the fenders.
The servants’ working day began early, by candlelight, and often ended late. There were no legislative controls on their hours or their working conditions. The larger the household the more specialised the services. Servants had to be strong. They moved coal, water, furniture, and children (there were no perambulators before 1900).
Mrs Carlyle and her servants
Employing servants could be a stressful experience for a middle-class woman without a great deal of money and little experience of employing domestics. This is something Isabella Beeton realised, when she laid down detailed directions for servants' duties and wages. It was not always clear where the power lay in the relationship.One of the best descriptions of the difficulties of the mistress of servants is found in the letters of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Their house at 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea, was a meeting-point for the Victorian intelligentsia, but Jane found that running it from day to day while catering for the whims of a husband widely believed to be a genius could be a trial. Of course we only hear her side of the story. She was a demanding mistress of parsimonious habits.
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| The Carlyles at home, 1857 Public domain |
Hannah Cullwick: servant and wife
This is a remarkable and totally exceptional story. The barrister Arthur Munby took a series of photographs of of the domestic servant Hannah Cullwick, whom he met in 1854 and married in 1873. You can read about his extraordinary relationship with Hannah here. His revealing photographs are held by Trinity College, Cambridge, which also holds Hannah Cullwick's diary, which she wrote under his direction. This means that her diary, fascinating as it is, cannot be taken as an unproblematic account of a servant's life. In particular, her descriptions of her hard physical labour may be accurate, but were also written to titillate. |
| Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909) Servant and barrister's wife Public Domai |
Conclusion
- Victorian domestic life would not have been possible without the labour of servants, A family did not have to be affluent to employ a servant.
- With the trend to heavy industry, fewer women were employed in factories and more went into domestic service.
- The majority of servants were young unmarried women, working in in small households.
