The Women's History of the World
Page 21
Nor was this just a pale piece of theorizing. ‘Women, wake up!’ called de Gouges, ‘Recognize your rights!’ Scornfully, she exposed the blatant new oppressions brought in by the self-seeking revolutionary males: ‘Man, the slave, has multiplied his strength . . . Once free, he became unjust to his companion . . . What advantages have you [women] got from the Revolution? A more open contempt!’ With sarcastic reflections upon ‘our wise legislators’, de Gouges urged all women to ‘oppose the force of reason to man’s empty pretence of superiority’.
Reason, however, is a luxury revolution rarely affords. And however hollow, the superiority of man was no pretence. There was never any intention on the part of the revolutionaries to rectify the position of women, even to recognize their separate claims: ‘Now,’ declared Mirabeau in his famous salvo at the opening of hostilities, ‘we are beginning the history of man.’23 So it proved. Feminist issues had been raised only to be deliberately and systematically birth-strangled.
Who can tell what might have happened had any of these revolutionary feminists survived the apocalypse? But their sex, which disqualified them from full membership of their society, gave them no protection from being violently hurried out of it. Olympe de Gouges hastened her fate by courageously protesting at the death of Louis XVI, guillotined in January 1793. Manon Roland, victim of a show trial in which she was not allowed to speak in her own defence, faced her death with heroic strength and dignity: ‘You judge me worthy to share the fate of the great men you have assassinated,’ she told her judges. ‘I shall endeavour to carry to the scaffold the courage they displayed.’
Fierce revolutionaries though they were, de Gouges founding the notorious Club des Tricoteuses and Roland a disciple of Voltaire and Rousseau and passionate enemy of Marie Antoinette, both women allied themselves with the moderate Girondins when irreconcilable tensions split the French Revolutionary Assembly apart. With a prophetic irony, de Gouges had claimed in her Déclaration that women should have the right to stand for parliament ‘if they have the right to go to the scaffold’. This was the only true equality seen by the feminist pioneers of France in their foreshortened lives. For their opposition to Robespierre, the evil genius of the Jacobin extremists, both women mounted the guillotine in the same month of November 1793.
It is, however, a poignant fact of history that most of the women who fell victim to the Terror had taken part in no revolutionary activity. The life of the young Lucille Desmoulins was forfeit simply because she was the wife of a leading Girondin, despite her mother’s frenzied petitioning of Robespierre, who was godfather to Lucille’s baby son. More inexplicable still were the countless, nameless victims like the ‘twenty peasant girls from Poitou’, all brought to Paris to be guillotined together, for what offence is now lost. One of them had a baby at her breast as she mounted the scaffold, a common enough occurrence in these times that respected the sanctity of no human life; royal, common, male, female, old and young, all heads kissed in the basket, in the words of Danton’s last black joke.
The political women at least recognized the face of the enemy. The instinctive opposition to Robespierre that had brought de Gouges and Roland to their deaths was all too well founded. When universal manhood suffrage was introduced that year, women were specifically excluded. The most active of de Méricourt’s women’s clubs, the Revolutionary Republican Women, organized a petition to the convention to demand the enfranchisement of women, and found themselves disbanded. Robespierre and his Jacobins then set about driving women out of politics and back into their homes; the fateful November that ended the lives of de Gouges and Roland saw also the suppression of all the women’s political clubs. From this point onwards, women’s active participation in French political life was effectively guillotined too, and for many generations to come the freedom of that dawn when it was bliss to be alive and female was to be nothing but a fading memory. ‘O Liberty!’ as Manon Roland cried on the scaffold, ‘what crimes are committed in thy name!’ English-speakers miss the fine irony implicit in this invocation of the revolutionary slogan: for ‘Liberté’, immortalized by Delacroix as Marianne, is of course female: but somehow, on the way to ‘Egalité’, she lost out to the real boss of the trinity, the undying, unchanging ‘Fraternité’ of man.
The reign of terror in France, like the armed conflict in the newly sovereign state of America, had a fixed historical term, and those fated to suffer under the juggernaut of such times could at least hope to survive the crisis and live on to witness the world of reparation and restoration. Far more terrible in its way was the cataclysm that almost without warning overwhelmed the old world, took no hostages and left no survivors – a genuine war of worlds, the Industrial Revolution. To the inhabitants of rural communities, many peaceably settled since Roman times, it was a catastrophe whose effects were immediate, spectacular and permanent:
England of the first part of the eighteenth century was virtually a medieval England, quiet, primeval and undisturbed by the roar of trade and commerce. Suddenly, almost like a thunderbolt from a clear sky, were ushered in the storm and stress of the Industrial Revolution.24
Twentieth-century historians, with the benefit of hindsight, have shown that the concatenation of forces uniting to produce the machine age had been stealthily building up for some time before-hand – the signs were there to be read. But for the unwitting conscripts in this conflict, there was little access to advance warning of contemporary social and economic trends, and no chance to take evasive action. Unlike other wars, this claimed as casualties not only the able-bodied male conscripts, but women and children too, the pitiful cannon-fodder whose recruitment remains an everlasting disgrace.
Iron, coal, steam – the new sources of power developed in the Britain of the eighteenth century revolutionized more than manufacturing technology. In an astonishingly short time their effect was to shatter the traditional structure of women’s lives by splitting apart what had previously been the one indivisible whole of husband, home and family. The work of the pre-industrial housewife combined all these elements without strain, and centred her strongly both in her own world and in the wider scheme of things as a person of some significance:
In their role as agriculturalists, women produced the bulk of the country’s food supply. The entire management of the dairy, including the milking of cows and the making of butter and cheese, was in women’s hands, and the women were also responsible for the growing of flax and hemp, for the milling of corn, for the care of the poultry, pigs, orchards and gardens.25
With the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy, from country to town, from home to factory, women lost the previous flexibility, status and control of their work. In its place they were granted the privilege of low-grade, exploited occupations, the double burden of waged and domestic labour, and the sole responsibility for child care that has weighed them down ever since. Each of the changes of the Industrial Revolution proved to have an adverse impact upon women’s lives; coming together, the result was devastating, in ways that could never have been foreseen.
At the simplest level, the shift from home to factory production had a number of damaging consequences for women workers. Among the first was the loss of any previous partnership status, when a wife was denied the opportunity to share her husband’s work. Before industrialization, women frequently worked alongside their menfolk, or in close harmony with them, reaping, gleaning, binding, threshing, digging; a central image of the Middle Ages, and a metaphor for the mutual interdependence of the well-balanced couple, was the husbandman ploughing the furrow while his wife follows behind sowing the seed. This primitive pastoral which had endured through so many thousands of years was one of the first casualties of the revolution in labour.
Another was the control women had enjoyed as the head of their own home units of production, along with the often considerable sums of money they could generate. The pre-industrial housewife made little or no distinction between domestic or commercial activities; she
brewed, baked, wove, collected eggs or raised pigs, and whatever she had left over from her own household requirements she would sell. The harder she worked, and the more successful her sidelines, the more money she made. As with the shared outdoor work of the agricultural calendar, the division of labour was reciprocal, and there was no concept of the only or principal male breadwinner supporting his wife and children – all were productive, the wife doubly so. As a waged labourer, by contrast, a woman was on a fixed weekly sum, fixed moreover at a rate often lower than that of children, let alone that of men, for reasons which were crystal clear to the boss-persons:
The low price of female labour makes it the most profitable as well as the most agreeable occupation for a female to superintend her own domestic establishment, and her low wages do not tempt her to abandon the care of her own children [i.e. because she cannot be tempted to what she cannot afford, a nurse or mother-substitute] . . . Mr E., a manufacturer, employs females exclusively . . . [with] a decided preference to married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support; they are attentive, docile, more so than unmarried females, and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life.26
As this shows, the factory system both reduced and dehumanized its operatives, regarding them ‘in no other light than as tools let out to hire’. It also from the first created a hierarchy even of the exploited, for women were universally worked harder than their male fellow-sufferers and paid less, employers everywhere agreeing that women were ‘more easily induced to undergo severe bodily fatigue than men’, hence a better investment for ‘the master’, as ‘a more obedient servant to himself, and an equally efficient slave to his machinery’ – ‘cruelty!’ wrote one reformer passionately, ‘though it may be voluntary, for God help them, the hands dare not refuse.’27
So women, previously autonomous, now economically crippled, were forced into dependence on men, which in turn reinforced and indeed recreated for the modern world fresh notions of women’s natural inferiority. Female subordination to males also took a new turn with the relocation of women’s work from home to factories; subjection to the power of males was one thing when the patriarch was your own husband or father, and quite another under industrial organization, when the authority of the absent owner was vested in and expressed through the daily tyranny of a brutal and bullying overseer, as in this report on the first factories in America, deploring the use of ‘the cow-hide, or well-seasoned strap of American manufacture’:
We could show many females who have had corporeal punishment inflicted on them; one girl, 11 years of age, who had her leg broken with a billet of wood; another who had a board split over her head by a heartless monster in the shape of an overseer of a cotton-mill . . . foreign overseers are frequently placed over American women and children, and we are sorry to add that sometimes foreigners in this country have employed American overseers to carry into effect their tyrannical rule in these mills.28
For the women catapulted out of their home-based working lives into a factory routine, the harsh discipline was only one of a number of shocks. First came the hours of unremitting labour: a working day of 5 A.M. to 8 P.M. was common, and at peak times work would begin at 3 A.M. continuing till 10 P.M., without any extra pay. The hours themselves would not have been so different from the workload of a home-based woman. But the forced pace of the labour, with the inability to break off, to rest or to vary the work in any way, made it a mental as well as a physical torment.
And even the humblest homes compared favourably with factories where the heat of the machines kept the temperature at a constant eighty to eighty-four degrees; where the workers were not allowed to break off to have a drink, even the rainwater being locked up to prevent any such temptation; and where all doors and windows were kept locked, on pain of a fine of one shilling for anyone trying to open them. (This, interestingly enough, was exactly the same as that imposed for any homosexual activity in the factory lavatory: ‘Any two spinners found together in the necessary, each man . . . 1s. [shilling].’) A contemporary eye (or rather nose) witness reported the effect of these working conditions on the victims of them:
. . . not a breath of sweet air . . . the abominable and pernicious stink of the gas to assist in the murderous effects of the heat . . . noxious effluvia, mixed with the steam . . . the dust, and what is called cotton-flyings, or fuz, which the unfortunate creatures have to inhale . . .29
Not surprisingly, all industrial workers were very prone to lung diseases, usually grouped together as ‘consumption’. But the nature of the disease or damage related very specifically to the trade: culters and grinders suffered from ‘embarrassment of breathing’, coughing, vomiting dust and mucus, ‘night sweats, diarrhoea, extreme emaciation, together with all the symptoms of pulmonary consumption’. This last was always in wait to get a grip on an enfeebled frame; it was a particular enemy of lace-workers, who from infancy had to wear stout wooden billets inside their stays to prevent their backs from giving out during the long hours of stooping over their work. This deformed the sternum, ribs and chest cavity, rendering the young women especially vulnerable to all respiratory diseases, but above all the ‘wasting away’ of consumption.
Long-term industrial damage like this, which rendered young women ‘old, decrepit, deformed, and past labour at forty’, was only one of the hazards which factory women had to face. Injury was a frequent occurrence in the early factories, and women were more vulnerable than men by virtue of their flowing garments, skirts, petticoats, pinafores and long hair. Factory records abound in cases of female workers like ‘Mary Richards, made a cripple’ through being ‘lapped up by the strap underneath the drawing frame’ of a power loom.30 With all this, however, factory work was still preferred to what was undoubtedly the most dangerous and degraded form of labour exacted from the women of the time: coal mining. To unprepared observers, the spectacle of the pit-women in action was like a scene from hell itself: ‘Chained, belted, harnessed, like dogs in a go-cart – black, saturated with wet, and more than half naked – crawling upon their hands and feet, and dragging heavy loads behind them – they present an appearance indescribably disgusting and unnatural!’ reported one horrified gentleman.
Mining women, of course, had no time or occasion to worry about their appearance. The work was so cruelly hard that it was not unknown for a girl to fall into a dead faint from exhaustion as soon as she climbed into the basket to be drawn up to the surface at the end of her shift; when this happened, she usually pitched out of the shallow wicker container and down the shaft to her death. Other fatalities were caused by the weight of the trucks the women had to pull – at twelve and a half hundredweight, a runaway wagon easily crushed or mangled its ‘drawer’. Even normal conditions of working were horrifyingly severe: the youngest girls had to crawl through passages as low as 16 to 18 inches, while grown women were expected to navigate tunnels no higher than 30 inches. In a 14-hour day, they would crawl for anything between 10 and 20 miles, with no opportunity at any point to stand up or straighten their limbs. In the winter, said Fanny Drake, a Yorkshire pit-woman, she worked for six months up to her calves in water; this took the skin off her feet ‘just as if they were scalded’. Betty Harris of Little Bolton in the neighbouring county of Lancashire found that her troubles came more from the girdle and chain by which she pulled her truck along, for it cut and blistered her sides ‘till I have had the skin off me’; but the only time it really bothered her was ‘when I was in the family way’.31
Betty was thirty-seven when she made this statement. Work like this could only get harder as women grew older, especially if they had a number of pregnancies, for with ‘the great sore labour’, reported a Scots pit-woman Isabel Hogg, ‘false births [miscarriages] are frequent, and very dangerous.’ Isabel Wilson of the East Lothian colliery miscarried five times and delivered her last baby on the Saturday morning after she had just completed her Friday night shift. Another coal-wife, Betty Wa
rdle, did not manage to follow Isabel’s fine timing; her baby was born down the pit, and she had to bring it up the shaft wrapped in her skirt; she said the ‘belt and chain’ brought her labour on.
And still these women laboured. In mines without lifting gear, women carried the coal to the surface on their backs. ‘I make 40 to 50 journeys [to the surface] a day,’ said Scotswoman Mary Duncan, ‘and can carry 2 cwt as my burthen. Some females carry 2½ to 3 cwt, but it is overstraining.’ In this way, each individual woman would bring up between one and a half and two tons of coal in the course of a day’s work, for which the wage was often no more than 8d. Small wonder then that the Scots civil engineer Robert Bald recorded seeing the women coming up from the pit ‘weep most bitterly’ from the strain of their labour, and one ‘married woman . . . groaning under an excessive weight of coals, trembling in every nerve and almost unable to keep her knees from sinking under her’ who spoke for all when she said, in a voice that haunted him thereafter, ‘O Sir, this is sore, sore work. I wish to God the first woman who tried to bear coals had broken her back, and none would have tried it again.’32
Any consideration of the lives of the female labourers of the Industrial Revolution bears out to its fullest the savage attack of Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle in the seventeenth century: ‘Women live like bats or owls, labour like beasts and die like worms.’ Yet even with appalling work, snuffed-out hopes and truncated lives, these women had more to suffer still. Themselves often enough exploited child slaves – little girls began down the mines, opening doors for the coal waggons to pass, as young as five, ‘invariably set to work at an earlier age than boys . . . from a notion very generally entertained among the parents, that girls are more acute and capable to making themselves useful at an earlier age than boys’33 – they had no alternative but to see their own children ruined in their turn. What this meant for both mother and child can be seen in this examination of a seventeen-year-old textile worker who had been labouring for ten years in a factory in the North of England.