The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎28r] (60/244)

1892 PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE 545
School, and the minimum age at which fall time may be worked
should be gradually raised. By 1905 no one under sixteen should be
working for an employer more than five hours a day, and all half-timers
should be attending afternoon school. The dock labourers' wives,
having learnt to be useful at home, would appreciate how much is lost
by going out to work. Their withdrawal from the labour market and
the increased efficiency of their children, brought about by better
home management and education, would both tend to raise wages,
provided that a trade union existed to secure that the workers should
keep the result of their increased efficiency. Bad cooking, dirty
habits, overcrowding, and empty-headedness are the sources of the
drunkenness, inefficiency, immorality, and brutality which obstruct
progress among so many of the poor, and philanthropic efforts can
be better employed in this direction than in any other.
During the last four years, the trade-union movement, for which
Mrs. Paterson worked so unwearyingly and with such dishearteningly
small success, has made considerable progress in East London amongst
this group. The principal results to be expected from trade-unionism
amongst these workers are not sufficiently obvious for large numbers
to be attracted by them. But even a small union can be most useful
in guarding against reductions and in bringing public opinion to bear
upon employers who allow their foremen to exercise tyranny and
make unfair exactions from their workpeople. The usefulness of a
trade-union must be estimated in many cases by what it prevents
from happening rather than by any positive advantage that it can be
proved to have secured.
From the second group of working women are drawn our better-
paid factory An East India Company trading post. girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large
number of our dressmakers and milliners, shop-assistants, barmaids,
clerks, and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dress
makers, shop-assistants and clerks are, however, drawn from the lower
middle class, and a few from the professional class. Although this
second group is the largest group in London, and probably in England,
it is the one about which we have least general information. They
have hardly been made the subject of industrial inquiry, do not
regard themselves as persons to be pitied, and work in comparatively
small detachments. They are nevertheless of more industrial impor
tance than the working women of the first group. Their work is
skilled and requires an apprenticeship. They are in the majority of
eases brought into direct contact with the consumer, and education,
good manners, personal appearance and tact, all raise their market
value. In this second group would be included the majority of the
Lancashire and Yorkshire weavers by anyone competent to deal with
England as a whole, and what applies to the group in London would
not apply to this section of it, who occupy a unique position. The
extent to which women compete with men is very much exaggerated.