by Koven, Seth
Through their work as housing reformers and rent collectors, friendly, school board and health visitors, settlement workers and members of religious sisterhoods, elite women saw themselves as altruistic social housekeepers who devoted themselves to bringing order and cleanliness to the lives of their poor sisters. Some of them believed that they had forged genuine friendships with their poor sisters—sharing in one another’s cares by mobilizing the bonds of womanhood to overcome the barriers of class distance.25 The well-to-do women who joined the Browning Settlement in south London asserted that they had created “a Christian sisterhood, with its weekday sacraments of maternity boxes, benevolent funds, and coal.” Their Pleasant Sunday Afternoons drew well over a thousand working women, which helped promote “an atmosphere of simple cordial sisterliness, obliterating distinctions of class and caste and drawing together all grades and types of women in a common bond of mutual help and sympathy.”26 E. Asten Pope, a longtime resident and clubleader at the settlement, recalled with humor and humility how two working-class women took her under their wing and taught her the rudiments of bread baking.
“I’ll come along and put you in t’way of it, Tuesday afternoon, two o’clock.” “How much flour shall I get,” I [Pope] asked. “Never you bother about flour nor nothing else; I’ll bring all as you’ll want. You’ve got a yeller mug, haven’t yer. Well, then, just go to t’stores and tell Jackson to give yer one of them yeller mugs at eight pence.”
Pope ended her story by comically portraying her own ineptness in burning her hand on the oven door. Her telling of the story emphasizes that all three women believed that Pope, as a woman, ought to know how to bake bread. While it underscores the reciprocal character of their relationships, Pope’s use of dialect reminds readers of the class differences dividing the women. Sisterhood is neither sameness nor equality. Just as Pope taught her working-class sisters how to save their pennies, they had skills to offer Pope. It is the poor women who share their hard-earned flour with Pope. The implicit message in Pope’s anecdote was that the home and its concerns provided the common ground upon which rich and poor women alike could construct their friendships.27
However, sisterhood was at best a fragile enterprise in a world in which one group of women was destined always to clean the dirt created by another. Even self-denying philanthropic spinsters in the slums, such as the sisters Muriel and Stella Wragge, hired local women to cook and scrub for them, whose labors they affectionately—and also guiltily—celebrated in their memoirs.28 A recent graduate in chemistry of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, Alice Lucy Hodson lived in a colony of educated single women in South London in the 1890s that employed several women to look after them. Desperate to sanitize her filthy surroundings, she mused that “it would be nice to walk about with a sponge, a can of water, and towel hung round the waist.” But she dismissed as “obviously impossible” her fantasy of becoming a maid of all work for her neighbors and confessed that “the only thing is to go dirty, and take the top layer off whenever you have a chance.” Confronted by the indescribable sight of a much-used sheet and blanket on an unmade bed in a tenement she was visiting, she had to check her desire to “send a charwoman to thoroughly clean up the house.”29 Hodson only partially understood the absurd inadequacy of such a solution, which violated the implicit political economy of dirt in women’s lives. Women’s relationship to the circulation and removal of dirt was fundamentally determined by class. It was the prerogative of elite women to define what dirt was—and was not—and to dictate how, where, and when their social inferiors should remove it.30 It would have been much more sensible for Hodson to find paid charring work for the impoverished tenement dwellers she had visited rather than wishing she could send a charwoman to clean up their filth.
Hodson was unsure how to make sense of her ambivalence about “going dirty” and the meanings of dirt itself. She could not square her desire to preserve her own bodily purity with the imminent threat of bodily pollution she both abhorred and found so compelling. “I cannot exaggerate the pleasures of bathing,” she admitted, after “tramping all day through London mud, in and out of dirty houses, after climbing dark and unspeakably dirty stairs, and shaking black and sticky little hands.” “The dirt is so trying,” she confessed in language that revealed an almost sexualized fear of invasion, “nothing is ever really clean, for dust, fog, and smuts are continually depositing themselves, not only on obvious and convenient places, but even the innermost recesses of your being.” The sheer physicality of Hodson’s description, her emphasis on actual dirt (“black and sticky hands,” “dust, fog, and smuts”) in inconvenient “places,” gives her phrase “the innermost recesses of [my] being” an unavoidably literal connotation. The most private but unnamable spaces of her body, not just her carpets and windows, have been soiled by her contact with the “indescribable” dirt produced by the private lives of the poor. Apparently, no amount of hot water can get her clean.
In Hodson’s prose, dirt marks the uncertain boundary between sisterly sympathy and class-based surveillance; it is deployed to fulfill the more general task of policing “the boundaries between ‘normal’ sexuality and ‘dirty sexuality,’ ‘normal’ work and ‘dirty’ work.”31 Hodson’s cleaning rituals, far from firming up boundaries and meanings, throw social and sexual categories into disarray. Was the dirtiness of the poor and their homes symptomatic of a moral indecency so fundamental to their nature that even the hottest bath could not cleanse them? Or was their dirt, like Hodson’s own, merely the unavoidable surface deposit of their contaminated environment, which concealed but could not diminish their innate goodness? Hodson’s account of her life and work in south London perceptively raised these questions, but she herself was incapable of fully answering them. She made no attempt to reconcile her belief that no decent adult could “get a place in such a mess” with her epiphany that universal humanity lay just “under the dirt” of slum children.32 Even as she sought to forge sisterly bonds with poor women and children, she could not free herself from a worldview shaped by her own lifelong dependence on the hard labor of domestic servants—a class of women and girls for whom deference and subordination were facts of life.
Nor should we castigate Hodson for being particularly obtuse or insensitive. In their work among the poor, well-to-do women often turned to the only model of cross-class relationship they knew firsthand: the intimate inequalities of their relationships with domestic servants. Several widely respected philanthropists such as Henrietta Barnett and Mrs. Nassau Senior, joint founders of the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (MABYS) sought to remake unruly street girls and fallen women into domestic servants and thereby solve two problems at once. They would befriend and rescue the young women and girls from their (supposedly) otherwise inevitable descent into prostitution while simultaneously satisfying the insatiable middle-class demand for reliable household staff. In MABYS’s vision of its mission, impoverished young women could save themselves from sexual degradation by forming friendships with philanthropic elite woman, subjecting themselves to the tutelage of mistresses, and devoting themselves to cleansing the domestic dirt of bourgeois households. The leaders of MABYS and many societies established to rescue “fallen” women believed that they could transform their clients from sources of sexual dirtiness to footsoldiers in the battle to order bourgeois homes.33 It was no accident that benevolent agencies such as the Magdalen Asylums and Barnardo’s Villages for Girls regularly trained many of their female charges to work in laundries. MABYS’s optimistic leaders contended not only that inequalities between servants and their mistresses were perfectly compatible with sisterly love and affection, but also that servant girls “want to feel somebody above, yet with them.” “It is wholesomely humbling to wonder how, amongst such dirt and din, outward and inward, these [servant] girls have grown up as tolerably pure as they have,” proclaimed a lady worker for MABYS.34
At least some poor women found ways to manipulate elite women’s preoccupat
ion with dirt to extract the resources they needed to survive. In this, as in so many other matters, the district nurse Martha Jane Loane listened carefully to the poor women, men, and children she visited and recorded their thoughts.35 One of Loane’s Cockney informants and clients, Mrs. Stevens, was a mother of six and was married to an enfeebled husband who was often out of work. Charity was a business and job for Mrs. Stevens as much as it was for the lady visitors and settlement house workers who inspected her home. Stevens explained to Loane that she always kept an untidy house to ensure the flow of charity. She never put up curtains and she let strips of paper hang off the walls. Before a charity visitor arrived, she dumped coal and rags in the corner and dropped stale cabbage leaves to create a fetid atmosphere. No one, she averred, ever bothered to ask about her family’s earnings. The spectacle of her family’s poverty spoke for itself. In a poignant and stunning moment of revelation, Stevens elucidated the tragic-comic consequences of elite (mis)representations of poverty: “[R]ich people all think if you’re too dirty to touch with a forty-foot pole you must be poor, and there’s no end to what they’ll give you, but if you’re clean and decent—no matter what it costs you—you’re lucky people who don’t want nothing from nobody. The poor is to them what a theatre is to me,—if they haven’t made my blood run cold, and if I haven’t used up my hankicher, I don’t feel I’ve had my money’s worth.”36
According to Stevens, the poor were sometimes willing accomplices in satisfying lady slum explorers’ self-defeating preconceptions about how poor people ought to look and the public’s appetite for witnessing spectacles of poverty and philanthropic benevolence.37 We must assume that Loane, as the middle-class woman writer who attributed these words to Stevens and chose to include them in her book, was herself sympathetic to Stevens’s critique. Ironically, poor women unwilling to abet middle-class preconceptions about their dirtiness sometimes paid dearly for their display of virtuous cleanliness. Lucy Rebecca Payne Williamson’s son, “Father Joe” Williamson recalled that his mother often starved herself rather than allow either her home or her children’s bodies and clothes to be dirty. As a consequence, when press magnate Alfred Harmsworth donated hundreds of pairs of shoes for distribution among children in the Williamson’s neighborhood, “no Williamson child got a pair.” “Our clothes were patched and repaired,” Joe bitterly observed, “but we were not poor because we were clean!”38
Other laboring women directly challenged—rather than opportunistically manipulating as Mrs. Stevens did—the political economy of “dirt” underpinning the social welfare initiatives of elite women. One such woman was Mrs. H., a charwoman from Poplar and the friend of the Anglican social worker Maude Royden. Few well-to-do women achieved Royden’s depth of understanding of the intertwined and often antagonistic politics of dirt and cross-class sisterhood. Royden was at the forefront of many of the most progressive movements of her day including feminism, socialism, peace activism, and the campaign to expand women’s sacramental functions within the Church of England. In her unpublished memoir, Bid Me Discourse, Royden remembered one afternoon when she and Mrs. H. left Poplar to visit the Baby Week Exhibition in Central London. “We were gazing at an exhibit of two rooms,” she recalled.
One was clean and tidy, the other dirty and in disorder. The first was a model of the sort of room in which babies could be reared, and the other a model of one in which they could not. Some “ladies,” who were looking on, discussed the exhibits in words which suggested that all working people’s rooms were piggeries. Mrs. H., filled with indignation, began to argue with them. They, cowardly, took to flight. Mrs. H., in ringing tones then hurled after them this unforgettable reply: “an ’ow clean would you be if I didn’t clean yer?”
The shared domestic concerns of mothercraft and cleanliness, upon which the ideology of cross-class sisterhood theoretically rested, exposed rather than helped to resolve the fundamental conflicts separating rich and poor women from one another.39 With the sort of humility that characterized Royden’s ministry to the poor, she pondered the lesson that Mrs. H. had taught her and hence also made explicit why she chose to include this vignette in her own memoir. “Never since then have I been able to look with any complacency at my own (moderately) clean hands without reflecting on Mrs. H’s toilworn and misshapen ones—worn with the toil which I was able to pass on to her because I was a little richer.”40
Royden’s politics are literally written on and express themselves through the body. She can only grasp the full meaning of her “moderately clean hands” in relation to Mrs. H’s disfigured hands. The purity of the upper-class lady’s body depends upon the dirtiness of the laboring female body—a relationship predicated on gender, class, and sexual hierarchies that Royden rejected. For Royden, true sisterhood entailed much more than sympathy and benevolence. It required an acknowledgement of the injustices of the distribution of wealth and power between rich and poor, men and women.
The politics of dirt propelled Royden, Lester, and like-minded women toward socialist feminism and ultimately to a broadly global sense of social justice. Gandhi’s articles in his paper Young India helped Lester see that the “same principles we nobodies had been trying to live out” in England were of a piece with much broader struggles for justice “on a world stage.” One of London’s most visible pacifist critics of the First World War, Lester ultimately allied herself personally and politically with Gandhi and his nonviolent campaign for Indian independence. Lester followed in the footsteps of generations of women reformers such as Edith Langridge, the charismatic founder of the Oxford Mission Sisterhood of the Epiphany in India, who began their careers working in the slums of London within communities of educated women but ultimately extended their work to far flung sites of empire.41 Lester relinquished control over the day-to-day operations of Kingsley Hall, the social welfare center that she and her sister Doris had founded, to travel to India where she met and worked with Gandhi. It was to Kingsley Hall in Bow that Gandhi retreated during his famous visit to England in 1930 on behalf of Indian independence. As Lester, widely called England’s Jane Addams by the press in the United States, toured the world from the 1930s onwards bringing her message of reconciliation of races, classes and nations, she remained clear that “the farther I traveled, the more devoted I became to the East End [of London].”42
The radicalism of women like Royden, Lester, and their circle (including such notable feminists as Charlotte Despard43) grew out of their ability to connect the grimy particularities of laboring women’s daily struggles with the systemic economic and social forces lying outside the control of individual women.44 Nowhere is this more apparent than in Anna Martin’s brilliant observations about poor women’s battles with dirt, which she derived from her analysis of the intermeshing of their class and gender subordination to men.45 Martin and her devoted friend and collaborator, Laura Robinson, moved from the large girls’ school they headed in Capetown, South Africa, to the dockside neighborhoods of south London in 1898 to live together and work with the Women’s Branch of the Wesleyan Methodist Bermondsey Settlement House.46 Martin, like Alice Hodson, was struck by the unmade beds she frequently encountered during her visits to the homes of poor women. But where Hodson saw indecency, Martin recognized resourcefulness and logic. “The homemakers of the mean streets are not to be judged by middle-class standards,” she explained. “Take, for instance, the question of order and cleanliness. Not to have beds made till 8 o’clock in the evening would reasonably be considered to show bad management in the case of a rich woman; to have them made earlier would sometimes show lack of organising power in the case of a poor one.”47
Laboring women’s double responsibilities as wage earners and as unpaid housekeepers forced them to leave their homes too early in the morning to do cleaning much before 8 at night, long after lady visitors like Hodson would have come to criticize their untidy houses. Martin believed that the only just solution was to mandate across all industries a “living or minimum wage” and
allow laboring women to choose for themselves whether they worked both inside and outside the home.48 Other female social workers in the 1890s and early 1900s, including the socialist Margaret McMillan, demanded state-funded welfare programs and policies, such as medical inspection and services for poor schoolchildren.49
It would be a mistake, however, to suggest that female social workers’ and reformers’ encounters with dirt inevitably led them toward socialist and radical feminist critiques of economic and gender injustices. Prominent women social reformers such as Octavia Hill and Helen Bosanquet remained staunchly hostile to any expansion in the state’s provision of goods and services for poor children which, they believed, would undercut parental responsibility.50 For Hill, the dirty homes of the poor emphatically did not demonstrate the structural defects of capitalism that required the intervention of the state. Rather, the negligence of slum landlords and their unchristian refusal to recognize their social obligations exacerbated working-class women’s feckless mismanagement of their households to produce hotbeds of immorality. Hill’s solutions reflected her deeply held individualistic assumptions about dirt and sisterhood. First, she sought to convince landlords that a fair rate of return on their investment was compatible with the provision of decent housing for the poor. Second, she looked to armies of lady rent collectors, who combed womanly tact with rigorous training in the principles of scientific charity and home economics, to guide their poor sisters to use their resources more efficiently.
Not surprisingly, laboring women resented the intrusive authority female social workers had over their lives. Carolyn Steedman, in her biography/autobiography, Landscape for a Good Woman, captured the ambivalent meanings that such encounters, with their long history in Victorian and Edwardian London, continued to bear in her mother’s and her own life in the mid-twentieth century. As a “dumpy retreating health visitor” left their bare apartment in 1951, Steedman and her mother were left to reckon with the visitor’s harsh judgment that their “house isn’t fit for a baby.” The shame of that moment burned itself into Steedman’s consciousness and continued to divide her from the bourgeois women whose world she now inhabits: “I read a woman’s book, meet such a woman at a party (a woman now, like me) and think quite deliberately as we talk: we are divided: a hundred years ago I’d have been cleaning your shoes. I know this and you don’t.”51
