Middle-class woman

“ The great industrial revolution, which began in the last century, and has progressed with such rapid strides, has had its special bearing on the position of women. The material improvements brought about by machinery and developing trade, have lifted the middle-class woman out of the purely domestic sphere by lessening her household duties, and so leaving her free for other occupations. She hasxii ceased to be a producer. But the working woman has been simply drawn more and more from family life, to be absorbed into the ranks of outside workers. ”

“ Would it be possible to find a clearer picture of what in those days we should perhaps call a 'lower middle class' woman than that of the Wyf of Bath? She is dressed in all the splendour that she can afford: she frankly loves fine dress. ”

“ The question arises as to whether a married woman has control of the wages which she may earn. In this respect the middle-class woman has the advantage of her higher sisters, for while a gentleman's wife will invariably turn over the proceeds of her work to her husband, the middle-class woman may or may not do so. Every act of a high-born woman is subject to far closer scrutiny than in the case of the middle-class woman, and, as she can never go to a shop to buy anything, she cannot well use her money. ”

“ She is, of course, the same sort of person as the society girl or the so-called middle-class girl, but her position at just this juncture is a more difficult one than that of any other young woman, for she is stepping out from the most old-fashioned type of family into the newest type of industry. This new social adjustment is just as inevitable as the economic adjustments that followed the industrial revolution.
The working girl is stepping out of the most intimate, the most mutually conscious type of family life that exists, that of humble people. ”

“ I am not a misanthrope or a woman hater, as you know, yet from what I gather I fear that, in the upper middle class at least, it is the women who are responsible for this increased formality that most men naturally would avoid. ”

“ The middle-class, being the brain as well as the backbone of England, is chiefly responsible for the maxim that woman’s place is the home; but the middle-class is also the great employer of labour, and it has found that female labour is cheaper than male, and has therefore concluded that woman’s proper place is the office or the workshop. ”

“ So working women came into the labor movement at a time when there was as yet no organized woman movement. Years before middle class women began to struggle for woman's right to a higher education, her right to learn and practice the liberal professions, her right to equality before the law and, finally, her right to political equality, working women were struggling for a living wage, a reasonable working day, and decent conditions of toil. ”

“ The woman who still “finds plenty to do at home,” and the woman who has become part of the industrial world represent two types of homes common in the middle class. There is still a third. It is the woman who lives in a modern apartment and can take full advantage of all the industrial changes that minimize her work. ”

“ Thousands upon thousands of women of the middle class are being utilized as slaves in the shops and in the markets, and are thereby withdrawn from all domestic functions, the training of children in particular. Finally, there is one occupation to be mentioned, in which young, especially pretty, girls are ever more in demand, to the great injury of their physical and moral development: it is the occupation in public resorts of all sorts as bar-maids, singers, dancers, etc., to attract men in quest of pleasure. ”

“ If the hostess had to take charge of the sleeping arrangements, she would be unable to preserve the seclusion which is the sole badge of her respectability. Of all these occupations of middle-class women, there are only two to which low-class women are not eligible, those of palace woman and tobacco-pouch maker.
While middle-class women are thoroughly respectable, at least in theory, the women of the low class are entirely outside the social pale. They have practically no rights, though they manage to hold their own with remarkable pertinacity. ”

“ The cost of efficiency is higher than the cost of living, a fact which is not sufficiently recognised by the middle class working woman or by her employers. The habits of domestic life which make it incumbent on women to make the best of a fixed income cling to them as wage-earners. ”

“ In every community women teachers receive a lower salary than men teachers. This may be explained by the following causes: Women have fewer needs and are, above all, more helpless; their earnings are in many cases only additional to the incomes of fathers or husbands, the main supporters of the families; the character of female labor is amateurish, temporary and accidental; there is an immense reserve force of female workers which increases their helplessness; there is much competition from middle class women in dressmaking, millinery, flower and paper goods manufactory, etc. ”

“ The life of the great middle class woman is the happiest of the lot. Not being ground by poverty nor bound by the laws of aristocratic society, she enjoys life. The blue blood deserves our greatest sympathy. She must never appear without duenna or escort. If she engage in any occupation whereby she earns money or is drawn from her seclusiveness, she immediately loses caste. An educated lady may do missionary work or perform in music for some funcion ”

“ In the middle class, the absence of gentle breeding and of the amenities of society is mainly attributable to the inferior position held by the women belonging to it, or rather the low standard at which they are rated. ”

“ she exclaimed, the innate respectability of the middle-class housewife rising impulsively to the surface through the acquired dilettantism of the 'light woman.'
People who enjoyed 'picking-up' things, who admired poetry, despised sordid calculations of profit and loss, and nourished ideals of honour and love, she placed in a class by themselves, superior to the rest of humanity. ”

“ The women seemed to belong almost exclusively to two sets—domestic servants and foolish people in smart society. The middle-class would have nothing to do with me, and I am not sure, although I always gave the best advice I could, that the middle-class was not right. ”

“ The position of women in the small section of the community known as the middle classes is there shown to be exceptional. The great majority of women belong to the working classes and spend their youth as wage-earners, in many cases under conditions injurious to mind and body, although the real work of their lives is eventually to be found in their own homes. With middle-class women the position is reversed. ”

“ The dangers to which we are exposed from our Women must now be manifest to the meanest capacity in Spaceland. If even the angle of a respectable Triangle in the middle class is not without its dangers; if to run against a Working Man involves a gash; if collision with an officer of the military class necessitates a serious wound; if a mere touch from the vertex of a Private Soldier brings with it danger of death;—what can it be to run against a Woman, except absolute and immediate destruction? ”

“ Why, in the name of all prosperity, should every class but the lowest in such a society hang overburdened with Dead Sea fruit of odd women, unmarried, unmarriageable women, called old maids? Why is it that every tradesman, every school-master, every bank-manager, and every clergyman produces one, two, three or more old maids? Do the middle-classes, particularly the lower middle-classes, give birth to more girls than boys? Or do the lower middle-class men assiduously climb up or down, in marriage, thus leaving their true partners stranded? ”

“ In all directions women of the middle class were beginning to assert their right to develop their own faculties and to employ their own powers according to their own ideas of what was right and fitting, and not according to those of the dominant sex. ”

“ These same economic forces are making it possible for many middle class workers to better their financial and social condition but they threaten the masses with poverty or the necessity of the wives entering the industrial field with their husbands. They have also made possible a widening leisure on the part of many women whose husbands are successful business men. Never in history were there so many idle women.
Only the rich and the poor who are adjusted to economic conditions can afford to marry. The one class has no fear for the future, the other class has no hope. ”

“ Then, when we speak of the drudgery of the women, we must note the equal division of labour; there is no class of women privileged to sit still while others work. Every squaw makes the clothing, mats, moccasins, and boils the kettle for her own family. Compare her life with the refined leisure of an elegant woman in the higher classes of our society, and it is wretched and abject ”

“ It is only beginning to treat any men as citizens, except the rich and a favored portion of the middle class. Can we wonder that it has not yet done as much for women? As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis ”

“ Neither the heiress nor the factory-girl has anything to gain by waiting: the heiress already has economic security and the factory-girl never will have it, for she and her husband—if she marries in her own class—will always be pretty much at the mercy of conditions in the labour-market. It should also be remarked that among the great middle class the standard of education for both sexes, but more particularly for women, is higher than among the very rich and the [Pg 75] very poor; and this tends to advance the average age for marriage. ”

“ I wish the people of a higher and a lower class, and Americans and other foreigners, could be made to understand how much domestic business is actually transacted by middle-class women in England. I do not like the discredit of the popular notion, that our English girls are too genteel to understand how to cook, and to do shopping, and manage the house. Whether the business is properly done or not, women should insist on its being regarded as a duty, that there may be the better chance for its being done. ”

“ These women, if he will pardon the contradiction, are not the "representative middle class of the American stage." They are the scullery-maid class, for they are on the lowest rung of the professional ladder and few ever ascend from that lowest rung. ”

“ A few instances may go a long way in giving strangers an impression that our middle-class ladies do not condescend to domestic employments. I would fain hope that a few scattered cases have passed for more than they were worth, or I must think less well than I wish to do, of the cultivation of whole classes of my countrywomen. ”

“ There are many middle-class women who give their families untiring service, and an increasing number who, either from choice or necessity, engage in gainful occupations outside their homes. Of this country’s eight and one half million women breadwinners, two million are married; and it may be assumed that a fair percentage of these are of the middle class. The great majority, however, are of the labouring class; and upon these, economic injustice weighs most heavily. It is these women who bear most children ”

“ Who are free from bondage to others, and slavery to time and circumstance, but those who cannot earn their own subsistence?
Among the causes for gratitude, that woman now has, not the least is the circumstance that new avenues for female industry are constantly opening in this age. To some one at least of these, should every young lady direct her attention. No one should be entirely unskilled as a teacher, a housewife, and above all, in the use of the needle.
But let it not be imagined that I advocate the education of females for any one station or class of circumstances. ”

“ It is an economic question with them, and they are evidently willing to [Pg 109] fight for this privilege just as the men were at the time of ‘Chartism.’ Ideas of sex propriety have been cast aside, and the working women are standing as a class, who appreciate their economic relation to society without any regard for the prevalent conception of a ‘woman’s sphere’ which long ago became a myth to them. ”

“ But after all that may be said on this subject, we fail to reach one class in the community who have spare time, spare energies, abundance of power for work. I mean young ladies of wealth and rank. The world shows a degree of toleration now toward any young woman who from necessity has engaged in any industrial avocation to which women have not heretofore applied themselves. But there is no such toleration for the rich. ”

“ It is so no longer and it never was so, in the sense that middle-class women wished to secure something for themselves from which working women should be excluded; the very reverse was and is true, for, in demanding the franchise for all women on the same terms as men, privileged women are deliberately asking to be allowed to abandon some of their privileges. ”

“ I have seen women who evidently belonged to the upper ranks of the middle class—women dressed in silk, with gold ornaments, and a following servant—who were accompanied by a poor baby of two or three years of age, so dirty, so squalid and neglected, that any one unacquainted with the country would have supposed it to be the child of a beggar. ”

“ As a matter of fact, many of these unfortunate girls have one fixed idea, to be looked upon as respectable middle-class women, who lead humdrum lives of faithfulness to their husbands; women who would make excellent mothers, keepers of household accounts, and menders of household linen. ”

“ Not one of such women has been driven afield by indisputable genius. Any work they have done would have been better done by some unprotected, experienced woman already in the fields they have invaded. And the indifference of this class to the money value of their labor has made it difficult for the women working because they must work or starve, to get a fair price for their work. It is the baldest effrontery for this class of rich discontents to affect sympathy with Woman’s Progress. Nothing can excuse their intrusion into the labor market but unquestioned genius and super-excellence of work ”