Nice for Them as Likes It

Victorian Working Women, by Michael Hiley. David R. Godine, 142 pp., $17.50.

By the time Arthur J. Munby was born in 1828, the Industrial Revolution had been changing the face of England for almost 70 years, one of the major changes being a new availability of jobs for women—jobs that were outside their traditional sphere of home and farm. In 1842, when Munby was 14 years old, The First Report of the Children’s Employment Commission, on Mines was published. It was this report which first shocked the Victorian sensibilities of the English by describing the cruel labor, the indecencies (the wearing of trousers and the like), and the abhorrent conditions of woman and girl mine workers, and which led, in that same year, to the prohibition of woman workers underground. It may have been this widely publicized report that first kindled Munby’s interest in the large class of women who worked long and strenuous hours to earn a living.

But Munby was not interested in playing the part of the horrified Victorian reformer, nor did he feel that hard labor was a degradation to womankind. On the contrary, he came to believe that the sturdy women he eventually studied actually benefitted from the exercise of physical labor, and relished the independence their wages gave them. As one of the women he studied told him, the work the reformers thought not nice enough for ladies was “nice for them as likes it.”

Over 30 years’ time, Munby interviewed, befriended, photographed, and drew portraits of these women at their work. His nearly obsessive diaries, which amounted to millions of words and hundreds of illustrations in the Munby documents at Trinity College, have been excerpted by Michael Hiley, who added his own scholarly and fascinating comments, in order to give us a visual and verbal picture of a different kind of Victorian woman: a vigorous and hardworking person with a clear, honest face and calloused hands.

One of Munby’s first research projects was to interview women who had worked in the mines before the ban. They almost unanimously responded that they wouldn’t mind working below ground again. One, who had been a subject of the 1842 report, said, “The work was hard, but not too hard for me. I did not dislike it, and if I was not married,-

I’d like to work in the [mine] pit again. I’d like it better than anything else — yes, much better.

Why, then, one might ask, were the mines closed to women, if neither at the request, nor according to the liking, of the women themselves? There are many answers, most of which fall under the label fear. “The battle to secure jobs for the mass of ordinary women was fought against male opposition,” Munby wrote, “the men trying to keep women out of their trades, often fearing that women would provide a source of cheap labour to compete with their own.” Others feared that women who worked in unsuitable jobs and wore men’s clothes would become “callous” and “unsexed”; and that “unsexed” women would become too independent, would consider themselves equal to men, and would be unfit for motherhood, so that the very foundations of society would be undermined.

Munby fought this nonsense in speeches, letters to newspapers and societies, and books. And so did other writers of the period. Hiley cites the following from Women and Work, written in 1857 by Barbara Leigh Smith, who argued “that for a woman to work was not to deny her essential femininity.”

Work—not drudgery, but work — is the great beautifier. Activity of brain, heart, and limb gives health and beauty, and makes women fit to be the mothers of children. A listless, idle, empty-brained, empty-hearted, ugly woman has no right to bear children.

To think that a woman is more feminine because she is frivolous, ignorant, weak, and sickly, is absurd; the larger-natured a woman is, the more decidedly feminine she will be; the stronger she is, the more strongly feminine. You do not call a lioness unfeminine, though she is different in size and strength from the domestic cat or mouse.

In fact, it was the very laws that tried to define what work was “suitable” for women that sometimes “unsexed” them. Munby found many instances of women who pretended to be men in order to live the lives they wished. One woman told him in 1866 that she was going to try to get a job playing piano at Weston’s Music Hall “as a man.” “Why not as a woman? ‘Oh, the pay, Sir! Besides, a woman wants references and all that, and as for accounts, she can’t get them to do; but when I go as a lad, they just tell me to sit down and do ‘em.” On this subject, Munby added, “there are scores of women in recent years who have taken to men’s work and men’s clothing, as bricklayers, grooms, navvies, and what not, in order to obtain that fair wage and that freedom of labour to which they know themselves entitled, (See Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, co-authors of the recent Pulitzer Prize runner-up, The Madwoman in the Attic. What nineteenth century woman writers were doing, says Gilbert in a recent San Francisco Examiner interview, was “coming to terms with what it means to be a woman, especially a Victorian woman of a certain class.” In their images of confinement, claustrophobia and madness, these writers show what the lack of outlets for intellectual and physical energy did to the victims of society’s “idealized” image of women as passive and helpless.) It is no wonder then that Munby was so obsessed with the contrast between the “skilled exponents of fineladyism” and the handsome and very capable working women he talked to though the ‘women’s rights’ folks do not seem to know as much.”

Moreover, the tone of “inevitable and eternal” truth in which the Victorian reformers issued their pronouncements about the inherently fragile nature of womankind only served to cloud the historical facts. It wasn’t until the Industrial Revolution began in 1760 that there were enough men who made enough money even to consider keeping their wives “where they belonged” — that is, at home and idle. In fact, the ideal woman of the Victorian middle-class was not even allowed her traditional role as home-maker; a retinue of servants performed all her work for her, while she was left to amuse herself at teas, operas, dinners, and balls. The woman such idleness produced was exemplified by an 1876 George du Maurier Punch cartoon depicting a swooning woman and her concerned husband and bearing the following caption: Edith. “Oh Dear! I am so tired!” Loving Husband. “What has fatigued you, my pippetywippety poppet?” Edith. “Oh! I have had to hold up my parasol all the time I was in the carriage!”

It is enervating to do nothing, which is why the most intelligent among the Victorian female middle-class were very nearly driven mad by their imposed passivity.

in the streets and fought for in Parliament.

As for Michael Hiley’s choice of photographs, engravings, and drawings, they and their captions alone are worth the price of the book. Most of them were taken in studios, where the subjects would come “in their dirt”— i.e. in their working clothes —only if Munby promised them a proper portrait in their Sunday best the following week. Because of the limitations of the camera at that time, and because the photographic style of the day was stiff and lifeless, most of Munby’s portraits are of straight-backed, unsmiling women in dirty and practical clothes, often accompanied by their work implements. But there are a few pictures — like the later snapshot of four Manchester working girls who are laughing, heads back, eyes shut—that begin to suggest the friendship Munby must have shared with women and girls all over England.

Hiley himself does not speak out for the rights of working women. Rather, he allows Munby and the faces and stories of the woman workers to do that for themselves. And Munby does a particularly admirable job of fighting the type of bureaucratic meddling—is there another kind?—that destroys one’s options for one’s own good. As he put it in a letter to a local newspaper:

It appears to be thought right in England that a Parliament consisting of men only, should have the power of turning several thousand women out of work and wage without their leave and against their will. That is what is meant by liberty. Let those who desire this... ponder this one principle: That men have just as much right, and no more, to interfere with the honest labour of women as women have to interfere with the honest labour of men.

Victoria Varga is an able bodied woman who enjoys manual labor, but works instead as managing editor of LR.