Shopgirls (8 page)

The following year the National Health Society held a lecture on ‘London Shopwomen’, highlighting ‘the standing evil’ and the many other strains of shopwork. Dr Edis was the main speaker and he quoted from a revealing letter written to him by a shop assistant who said she had ‘stood until 1 p.m. without food’, having missed breakfast in her lodgings. She and her fellow shopgirls had just twenty minutes for midday dinner and had to return to their duties as soon as the bell rang, ‘whether we have finished or not’, or face a ‘fine of one shilling’. Supper was available ‘from seven till seven thirty, and after that time, although detained in business, none was given us unless we had a written order from one of the firm, and if kept in to mark off goods, none was given us till we had finished, which was often as late as nine thirty’. Apart from mealtimes, shop staff were not allowed to sit down: ‘Seats are not provided here, and if found sitting we should be fined and eventually dismissed.’
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Sir John Lubbock was among those who followed this debate keenly. Edis’s evidence confirmed Lubbock’s long-held belief that women needed to be protected from physical strain, and he may also have been influenced by his physician brother. Lubbock would eventually champion the wonderfully named Seats for Shop Workers Act in 1899. This required shop-owners to ensure that ‘in all rooms of a shop … the employer carrying on business in such premises shall provide seats behind the counter … in the proportion of not less than one seat to every three female assistants’.
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Dr Edis’s rallying cry was also taken up by other activists, including barrister Thomas Sutherst, working his way up to become chair of the reformist Shop Hours League. His book,
Death and Disease Behind the Counter
, was alarmist in tone but gave shopgirls a chance to tell their story, or at least one element of it. Kate M., an eighteen-year-old draper’s assistant in south London, told a plaintive personal tale:

I was quite well when I went into the business but after being behind the counter six months I began to feel the effects of the standing. I’ve been constantly unwell since. The long standing causes the most painful feelings in the feet, legs and back, and for the want of fresh air and outdoor exercise, an almost constant headache. Towards the end of the day the whole body aches, and a wretched low spiritedness accompanies it.
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And the problems she experienced wouldn’t simply be remedied by being granted an occasional chance to sit down. Kate reported that she had heard all her workmates, ‘six females and two males’, aged from fourteen to eighteen, ‘complain of the pains I have described as feeling myself’. She believed herself to be ‘suffering from weak action of the heart, and often have fainting fits, especially when the shop is stuffy and no air about’. The experiences of 25-year-old Emily P., however, showed that shopwork could, in some cases, be life-threatening. She worked in drapery in Deptford and on London’s Old Kent Road and her hours were brutal. Her shift began at 8 a.m. and ended at 10 p.m. in the week and midnight on Saturdays. Her breaks lasted just fifteen or twenty minutes and were cut even shorter as she was ‘often called forward from a meal to the shop to attend to customers’. Meals were left ‘half consumed’ and then the food ‘is either cold or we get no more’. Exercise and fresh air were rare. Emily couldn’t ‘get out for a walk except on Sunday, as no respectable girl cares to go out between ten and eleven at night’. She reported that ‘when apprenticed to the drapery, my health was good, but it is gradually failing and the doctor says I am in a consumption’. As a result, she said she was ‘obliged to leave at the end of the month’.
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Sutherst did not record what became of Emily after she left her drapery job with little prospect of a full recovery.

Reformers like Sutherst and Edis succeeded in their efforts to keep political attention focused on shopgirls. In 1886, Sir John Lubbock proposed a further reform of shop hours, more than a decade after his first attempt. The Liberal government of the day, led by the ageing William Gladstone, appointed a select committee to examine the case again. The committee explored every element of shopwork, from working hours to wages to the class of assistants generally employed. They summoned expert witnesses, among them Sutherst and William Abbot MD, honorary physician to the Early Closing Association. Now, the medical case turned increasingly on the issue of shopgirls as future mothers. The committee was keen to know whether their work might ‘injuriously affect them as childbearing women in after years’. There was no doubt in Dr Abbot’s mind that it ‘would do so’ because ‘according to all scientific facts, it leads to pelvic diseases and would affect them in after years when they became mothers’. The committee probed further. Would he ‘in general way say that a domestic servant would be more likely to be a bearer of healthy children than a girl who stood in a shop for fifteen hours a day’? Dr Abbot was ‘certain’ that she would, because she ‘has more frequent change of position, and a greater variety of occupation’. So, it was official. Unreformed shopwork was bad for young women and even threatened to undermine the British birth rate. Worse still, it followed that lower-class servants were now threatening to outbreed more respectable shopgirls – an idea guaranteed to strike fear into a generation still grappling with Darwin’s terrifying idea that only the fittest of species would survive. The committee concluded that ‘apart from the immediate injury to the person concerned’ this was ‘a very serious matter in the interests of a nation as a whole’. Dr Abbot again agreed. Shopwork was no less than a question of ‘the physical condition of the future race’.
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The problem with these highly emotive arguments was that they were wheeled out whenever Victorian women made social progress of any kind. While the Society for the Promotion of Women’s Employment was lobbying for the opening up of more trades to women and the changing of conditions to counter any resultant hardships, many other Victorian reformers were just as highly exercised about the damage that work – of all kinds – might do to women, rolling this out as another reason why they shouldn’t be working at all. They had very mixed motives. Some wanted to establish and defend the rights of
all
workers. Others wanted to protect the pay and status of skilled male workers against the influx of ‘unskilled’ labour into all kinds of trades. For some, this meant excluding those unskilled workers altogether, especially cheaper female ones. There is more than a hint that this is what was going on when some campaigners insisted that shopwork was ‘especially’ harmful to young women’s health.

As a consequence, men like Dr Edis, Dr Abbot, Thomas Sutherst and even Sir John Lubbock sometimes sounded all too similar to those who called for the exclusion of women from everything from factory work and farm work to politics and the professions. The ‘problem’ in each case was generally linked to women’s apparently troublesome bodies. Earlier in the century naysayers had argued that women shouldn’t be allowed to work in textile mills because their long hair would get caught in the machinery or that women were a hazard to others because, if they were breast-feeding, fellow workers might slip on errant breast milk. Outside the workplace, men with doctorates had warned that if women were admitted to universities they would be much weakened by the sudden rush of blood to their poor over-stimulated brains. Viewed in this light, arguments that shopgirls – rather than shopboys – should beware the pelvic perils of too much standing took on a dangerous logic. And after Darwin’s evolutionary bombshell, motherhood assumed a whole new meaning. Many saw that well-bred women now had a duty not just to their husbands but also to their country to produce fit and healthy offspring. These new eugenic arguments became even more powerful when added to older economic ones that warned of dire consequences likely to follow if women were allowed to undercut male wages and dilute traditional male skills.

Yet powerful as these emotive arguments were, the parliamentary committee considering Lubbock’s legislation was not minded, in the end, to restrict women shopworkers’ hours. The 1886 Shop Hours Act was duly passed but it only protected children and apprentices, not adult women. And after all the debate, it decreed that young shopworkers aged between thirteen and eighteen could still work for a staggering seventy-four hours a week. Even then, sharp-minded employers found ways to push the legislation to its limits. Shortly after it came into force, sixteen-year-old Lizzie Cox accepted a two-year apprenticeship at F. Cape & Co. She was to learn ‘the whole trade of Retail Drapery’, to ‘serve diligently and well’, to be housed at Cape and to be paid nothing for her efforts. Cape was sticking to the letter of the law: Lizzie’s one-page, handwritten indenture document shows that she had signed up for a seventy-hour week: ‘her hours of business will be 9 o’clock a.m. to 8 o’clock p.m. and Saturday 9 a.m. to 9.50 p.m.’ with ‘any time lost by absency to be made up at the end of the apprenticeship’.
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The spirit of the Shop Hours Act was arguably undermined by the apprenticeship system, which was still in force in many shops, including Cape; this meant that teenage recruits like Lizzie worked their long but legal hours for no pay at all.

Margaret Bondfield had eagerly taken up her own apprenticeship at Mrs White’s in order to be independent; she had seized the chance to earn her own living. Money bought independence. So, even when disillusionment set in, when Margaret experienced first-hand the unhygienic conditions, endless hours and strict hierarchies in the stores and at her lodgings, she stuck with it. For shopwork held the promise of good pay. Broadly speaking, shopgirls’ wages, at least at the upper end of the trade, compared quite favourably to women’s wages in general – even after compulsory deductions for bed, board, work clothing and any fines were taken into account. According to a 1898
Dictionary of Employments Open to Women
, female shop assistants could expect to earn £10 to £60 per year depending on their experience – a very wide pay range, equating to between approximately £4,000 and £22,000 in today’s earnings. In the same era, a kitchen maid could expect to earn £24 per year, and a lady’s maid £32. At the lower end of the female wage scale, those in tailoring and other sweated (or sweatshop) trades took home as little as five shillings a week or less than £20 per year, from which they had to pay for lodging and sometimes buy their own work materials. At the upper end, women in leading textile mills could earn up to nineteen shillings and sixpence per week, or just over £50 per year.

Among shopworkers of different grades, there were significant pay differences between the ‘ordinary assistants’ and the ‘charge hands’, who were responsible for groups of junior workers. Wages in London and leading provincial stores were much higher than in rural areas. Margaret Bondfield started on £15 a year and saw this rise over the years to £25, which included ‘free’ board and lodging worth around £20. The problem, however, was that few women – in any line of work – were ever paid what was considered ‘a living wage’. At the time, living wages were for male breadwinners with mouths to feed. They were certainly not for young single women without family responsibilities or for older married women with husbands to support them. This logic, such as it was, was seriously undermined by two vital facts. First, husbands couldn’t always find work or at least enough of the kind of work that would enable them to feed every member of their family. Second, there were at least two million ‘surplus’ women ‘earning their own bread’ in the late nineteenth century, some with families, as Harriet Martineau and the Langham Ladies had pointed out.

Low pay had other consequences. For one thing, it compromised shopgirls’ all-important quest for respectability. A collection of essays,
Social Twitters
, put it this way: ‘the pretty little milliner, with the bright hair and dove-coloured eyes, who shows off the Reubens hat to such perfection, cannot out of her salary afford pleasant airy lodgings or many home comforts’. Shopgirls like her and so many others were no princesses. After her ‘hard day’s work was over, she had to take off the fine clothes belonging to her employers, put on her own shabby ones and, like Cinderella, return tired and worn to a home in which neither peace nor pleasure is to be found’.
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Of course, not all shopgirls were content to spend what little leisure time they had stuck in their lodgings. But their options were limited, as explained rather balefully by Miss Corus, a ‘young shopwoman in the Kingsland Road’, in a letter to the journal
Social Notes
in 1878. She wrote in response to an earlier piece that had inquired, ‘What do the young men and women do when the shop is shut?’ Miss Corus said she was ‘earnestly desirous of spending my leisure time both healthfully and improvingly’ but surely spoke for many when she asked, ‘But how am I to do so? Where am I to go? What am I to do? Where is there any place of easy access suited to my needs?’ It was easier for young men. They could go to music halls or, if more serious minded, to evening classes. Miss Corus put it plainly: these pursuits were ‘no use to us girls’ because ‘to walk there and back would consume all our time; to ride, we have no money’. The end result of this predicament was, in her view, that ‘too many of us thoughtlessly engage ourselves to young men we do not respect, just to have someone to take us out, there being, as far as we know, no respectable place that we can go to alone!’
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However heartfelt, Miss Corus’s dilemma could not compare to the situation faced by some others. For the story of Victorian shopgirls is inseparable from the story of Victorian sex work. Prostitution was one of the few female professions that could pay extremely well. It took many forms and, as with other kinds of work, had a distinct hierarchy defined by price, predilection and location. Male customers were certainly not short of choice. Those wanting to spend more could head for high-end arcades. London’s Burlington Arcade was one of the first and most famous. Modelled on Parisian
galeries
, this covered passage of forty-seven luxury shops was built in 1819 by city landowner Lord Cavendish, who wanted it to offer ‘gratification for the public’ as well as ‘employment for industrious females’.
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The arcade was designed to draw in monied women customers who, as they browsed the glorious array of fabrics, jewels, millinery and confectionery, would be kept safe by liveried beadles guarding each entrance. Together with other Regency arcades around the country like the St James in Bristol and the Argyle in Glasgow, the Burlington was creating a new kind of female shopping experience. But it was an experience that carried a particular kind of scandal.