Authors: Virginia Nicholson
appeared. For many thousands the name of the game was, simply, survival
– surviving fear and hate and poverty, hunger, cold, tedium and sexual
harassment. But what else could a Surplus Woman do?
Right up to the Second World War it seemed plain to many that marriage
was still a better option for a woman than trying to support herself. ‘The
average woman worker has a rotten hard life,’ wrote the scholar and political pundit Margaret Cole in , ‘and a pretty poor chance at the end of it of maintaining herself in her old age on anything like a decent scale. This is
the fact.’
Cole advised parents of single daughters to concentrate on finding husbands for them ‘while they are still of an age to get one easily’. If only it
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had been so easy. But Cole was right in assessing prospects in the majority
of women’s occupations as meagre.
There was shop work, often the only option for girls who, like Sue
Quinell, couldn’t afford secretarial training. Miss Quinell had dreamed of
a job as a shorthand typist, earning enough to rent her own flat. Instead she spent her working life living over the shop at the Bon Marcheín Gravesend; when after twenty-five years they made her redundant she was homeless
and penniless.
A issue of
Woman’s Weekly
ran a cheering article aimed at retail employees like her entitled ‘The Charm of the Shop Girl’. Its male author praised the taste, calm, dignity, good humour and civility of the shop girl, which he claimed to find inspiring. ‘I have heard of many of them who have made good matches, and thoroughly deservedly so; for a woman who
has the patience of a shop girl would make an excellent wife.’ This suscep—
tible gentleman probably thought that a girl with flat feet, varicose veins, anaemia and menstrual troubles would be delighted to trade her job standing all day behind the counter of a department store for seventy hours a week
slaving in the home. But probably the , women who worked in the
retail sector in Britain in , per cent of whom were single, didn’t
object to a bit of sentimental build-up.
Some of them looked on the work as more glamorous and genteel than
manual work. Miss Doris Warburton, who was born in and grew up
in a small village in Lancashire, saw her job in a Rochdale shoe shop as an
escape from the petty narrow-mindedness of village life. In Doris’s village
the local employer was the slipper factory, and every morning the slipper
workers got the early bus to work at eight o’clock. Doris left home for a
later bus at nine. But it was impossible to avoid the taunts of her neighbour, who was out with her broom on the pavement each morning as she passed and never failed to remind her that the factory girls felt looked down on
by the shop workers: ‘We’ll sweep the road for
the nine o’clock people
,’ she would sneer as Doris walked by. Despite her gradual promotion through sales lady to manageress in the Bacup branch of ‘K’ Shoes, and eventually
to running her own sweet shop, Doris Warburton failed to catch a man.
Perhaps her manners were too blunt. When she moved to the Bacup branch
two of her lady customers noticed the ring on her finger (which had
accidentally got turned round) and cross-questioned her:
‘You’re new aren’t you?’
So I said, ‘Yes. I’ve been sent on from Rochdale.’
‘Oh – are you divorced?’
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I said, ‘No.’
‘Are you a widow?’
I said, ‘No.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘look, my ring’s turned round,’ I said. ‘Look, my name is Miss Warburton. I’m here in Bacup now to manage this shop, I’m here to do just what I can for you to make you happy – I’ve never apologised for being Miss Warburton and I’m not going to start now.’
And they laughed. And I sold them a right damn good pair of ‘K’ shoes.
Shop work was certainly less abject than domestic service, but despite
contact with affluent consumers, conditions for shop assistants themselves
in the s hadn’t improved so very greatly since Gissing described Monica
Madden’s life in the s.
Marjorie Gardiner worked a mere sixty-hour week at a smart Brighton
milliner’s from to . The merchandise ranged from five-shilling
felts to ostentatious confections trimmed with mink, ermine tails and birds
of paradise. But there was no luxury for the girls who worked there. Rules
were strict, and they suffered. In theory they worked ten-or twelve-hour
days, but often it was more. The temperature inside the shop was kept
pitilessly low, the door being left open for customers all day long summer
and winter. Marjorie and all the other girls had terrible chilblains. Warming one’s perishing fingers on the one tiny radiator was not permitted, and at lunchtime the girls took it in turns to use the kitchen gas stove: ‘Hygiene
or no hygiene – we often used to put our feet in the oven to unfreeze
them!’ There were no tea or coffee breaks. Nine times out of ten, if you
nipped out to the back to grab a warming cup of tea in the kitchen, a
customer would demand attention and it would have to be abandoned.
‘Madam’, who ran the shop, and arrived in a chauffeur-driven car, was a
dragon who often dismissed girls on scanty pretexts when they displeased
her. ‘No wonder they sometimes ended up on the streets.’
Domestic servants and factory workers made up by far the largest proportion of women workers in the country. These soul-destroying and largely dead-end jobs had, like clerical and secretarial work, the Civil
Service and retail, only one escape route: marriage. If you didn’t find a
husband, growing old as a mill-worker could be unutterably hard. In ,
ageing spinsters surveyed in the factory town of Huddersfield were
found to be earning an average wage of £ s d. On this wage, nearly
half of them were helping to support elderly relatives. It was also found
that seventy of these women were physically infirm, that all of them were
regular attendants at their doctor’s, but that few were claiming more than
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a couple of days off per year for illness. They could not afford to.* Yet
sociologists looking at conditions for single women factory workers in the
interwar period were struck by the way their job was, as one described it,
‘the last anchor of life. If that is taken from them, nothing much remains.’
Many interviewees surveyed pointed at the war as having taken away their
chances. One woman born around the turn of the century was still bitterly
resentful: ‘About two million girls in this country have little chance of
marriage, so they should be given an equal status with men in everything.
Anyway, they will have to make a living of their own and the country may
as well face the problem squarely. I don’t know whether this country is fair to its womenfolk.’
Researchers looking at the plight of domestic servants found worse
hardship: writing in , the sociologist Joan Beauchamp described them
angrily as ‘the Cinderellas of the labour market . . . obliged to slave from dawn till dark for a miserable pittance’. Her statistics showed over .
million indoor domestic servants working in Britain in . Among these
Beauchamp picked out a daily maid (live-out) being paid seven shillings a
week; more typically, she gives the instance of fourteen shillings paid to a resident servant, expected to do all the work of a small house, including washing and ironing, from . in the morning till nine at night. At the
top of the scale, wages rose to as much as £ a year for cooks, housekeepers and parlourmaids.
For unemployed or lower-paid single women the world could be a very
hostile place. The war had left them particularly vulnerable. Investigating the housing problem of this particular class in , the sociologist Rosamund Tweedy found instances of fear, loneliness, hunger, squalor, debt and prejudice. Tweedy’s findings were published by the Over Thirty Association in a campaigning pamphlet; its accusing title employing a biblical quotation:
Consider Her Palaces
. One typical case interviewed was an Irishwoman, a fifty-seven-year-old skilled tailoress who had been made redundant by modern technologies after twenty-seven years in the same job:
I havna’ a job and I havna’ a reference. A’ve kept masel’ since I was twelve years of age an’ always paid ma way, but now the work’s not regular for my eyes are bad, and I canna see the black stuff. If I had a room about s. I could manage, but I’m that afraid o’ bugs, I’d drown masel’ sooner nor go in the slums.
* The Health Insurance Act provided contributors with money when they fell ill; however, on reduced wages such as this, and with dependants to look after, the sums remained inadequate.
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Women were not supposed to spend a lifetime in employment; they were
supposed to get married. The state had no safety net for people like her,
ageing and poor.
Another respondent described her ‘home’ in Norwood:
I want a room nearer into Central London as fares run into such a lot of money.
We lodge in a workman’s cottage in Norwood, very old, no bath or other
conveniences. There are bugs in the house. We pay /- for the room and share the bed, but while my friend, Miss X, is out of work, she only charges us /-. The landlady feeds us for /- a week each, but mostly it is not fit to eat.
Masquerading as a potential landlady interested in letting unfurnished rooms as a business proposition, Rosamund Tweedy went spying on a number of houses in north London inhabited by waitresses, shop assistants and other
lower-paid workers. She was appalled by what she saw: ‘A twelve and
sixpenny camp bed, a flock mattress with hardly any coverings, a bare floor, the food exposed to dust in an upturned orange box, hardly any crockery, the washing-up bowl under the bed, towels and washing on lines; that is
what lay concealed behind many of those Yale locks.’ Palatial indeed. Such
was ‘the price of freedom’. Tweedy called upon society to shoulder the
burden of help for the single, lower-paid woman worker. Surplus to
requirements, dependent upon the whims of landladies (who frequently
favoured male tenants – ‘I’d rather have a man any day, they’re less trouble and have more money . . .’) and the vagaries of rents, these women ‘must choose between hunger and squalor, and, in fact, often must suffer both’.
No wonder, if it came to a choice between bug-infested palaces and
commercial palaces, business girls like Evelyn Symonds and Doreen Potts
felt lucky to be in the commercial ones, soulless and robotic as they may have been. In a world of political and economic uncertainty, they clung gratefully to their precarious independence, their latch-keys, their ‘thirty-bob a week, and never enough to eat . . .’
Miss All-Alone in the classroom
Unvarnished, colourless, dull brown lives in dull brown rooms. But there
was a rosier picture for single working women. A commonly-held view
was that marriage consisted of a life of drudgery and privations, while
remaining single pushed one up the economic ladder. Post-war, there was
even – despite the competition with men for jobs – a perception that single
girls were becoming scarily independent and brazen. ‘Dressy Mill Girls.
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Saturday Afternoon House Parties. Money to Burn. Chocolates, Cinema
and the Hesitation Waltz . . .’ carped one disapproving headline. This was
certainly Puritanism carried to extremes.
It took frugal economies for a clever girl to work her way into the trades
or professions and get her own flat, but it could be done. ‘Miss All-Alone’, interviewed by a reporter from the
Westminster Gazette
in , found she could just afford a top-floor studio in St John’s Wood. She was busy picking up second-hand items to furnish it – ‘great fun, building up a flat bit by bit . . .’ – and with the help of a woman friend who was an electrical
engineer had entirely rewired it, installing light, heating and a geyser: ‘Yes, it was a bit of a job running the leads up all those stairs . . .’ Was she lonely?
‘Not a bit of it. There’s a gramophone . . . Friends come in. We just take
this out of the way, and this, and dance to it on the stained floor. I have
friends coming to dinner tonight . . .’
Beyond that, the evidence of women like Miss Symonds and Miss Potts
points to feelings of pride and autonomy in their jobs; in their late nineties neither of these ladies seems to have felt crushed or unfulfilled. Their memories were full of the good times, the dancing years, of getting a
one-and-sixpenny to see Ivor Novello in a show, of sallying out to Kensington Gardens on a Sunday, going to watch Gary Cooper in the talkies, or curling up with a good adventure story: simple, satisfying pleasures. And,
at the last, until Evelyn couldn’t walk any more, a maisonette in Walton-on—
Thames – ‘That’s where my heart is still.’
Where circumstances allowed, making a living could be better than just
survival. Education was the key; Mary Gulland’s father made sure that she
was well taught, and during the war she had reason to feel grateful to him,
as it gradually dawned on her and her fellow pupils that there would be
nobody for them to marry:
Every morning in school we had read out to us the list of those who had disappeared, as they did through the war. We had the spirits of the young, at the same time, we did have this awful feeling of all our boy friends disappearing . . .