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Unit 24: Harriet Martineau-On Women...

outside the home for their own subsistence, unfortunately for wages that would not allow them Notes
any type of retirement. How many women are we talking about? Using census figures and other
data, Harriet Martineau comes to a conclusion towards the end of her article that I find astonishing:
Out of six millions of women above twenty years of age, in Great Britian, exclusive of Ireland, and
of course of the Colonies, no less than half are industrial in their mode of life. More than a third,
more than two millions, are independent in their industry, are self-supporting, like men.”
Apparently English men and women of the time were also astonished, following court cases that
resulted from a new limited ability for women to obtain divorces that had only been in effect in
England following the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857.
The proceedings in the new Divorce Court, and in matrimonial cases before the police-magistrates,
have caused a wide-spread astonishment at the amount of female industry they have disclosed.
Almost every aggrieved wife who has sought protection, has proved that she has supported her
household, and has acquired property by her effective exertions.
Toward the beginning of the article, Harriet Martineau makes it clear that for working women,
“their work should be paid for by its quality, and its place in the market, irrespective of the status
of the worker.” She then methodically analyzes industry by industry, examining the work that
women do in that industry, indicating its difficulty, and at times (when she has the data available)
showing a wide discrepancy in wages between male and female workers.
The professional dairy woman ... has been about the cows since she was tall enough to learn to
milk, and her days are so filled up, that it is all she can do to keep her clothes in decent order. She
drops asleep over the last stage of her work; and grows up ignorant of all other knowledge, and
unskilled in all other arts. Such work as this ought at least to be paid as well as the equivalent
work of men; indeed, in the dairy farms of the West of England the same labour of milking the
kine is now very generally performed by men, and the Dorset milkmaid, tripping along with her
pail, is, we fear, becoming a myth. But even in Cheshire the dairymaids receive, it appears, only
from 8l. to 10l. a-year, with board and lodging. The superintendent of a large dairy is a salaried
personage of some dignity, with two rooms, partial or entire diet, coal and candle, and wherewithal
to keep a servant — 50l. a year or more. But of the 64,000 dairy women of Great Britain, scarcely
any can secure a provision for the time when they can no longer lean over the cheese tub, or churn,
or carry heavy weights. For anyone who believes that “equal pay for equal work” was a concept
developed by feminists in the 1970s, Harriet Martineau’s article reveals just how long this concept
was successfully resisted and suppressed. Low-paid work takes an enormous toll on the women,
and Martineau finds that maids of all work are particularly susceptible to medical and financial
problems:
The physician says that, on the female side of lunatic asylums, the largest class, but one, of the
insane are maids of all work (the other being governesses). The causes are obvious enough: want
of sufficient sleep from late and early hour, unremitting fatigue and hurry, and, even more than
these, anxiety about the future from the smallness of the wages.... Too often we find that the most
imbecile old nurses, the most infirm old charwomen, are the wrecks and ruins of the rosy cooks
and tidy housemaids of the last generation. This ought not to be.
“Female Industry” was published without a byline (as many articles of that era were published),
and the anonymous author of the article at times speaks from a male perspective — perhaps to
sound a little more objective about the subject. (At one point the article even mentions “a letter
from Harriet Martineau”!) Yet, the article does not look disapprovingly on working women.
Martineau clearly feels that female industry is inevitable with the rise of the middle class. She
seems to enjoy seeing women work outside the home, and argues that they be allowed to engage
even in those occupations jealously guarded by the men. From our youth up, some of us have
known how certain of the wisest and most appreciated of physicians have insisted that the health

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