The Nineteenth Century , No 182, Apr 1892 [‎29v] (63/244)

51:8 THE NINETEENTH April
income, and make no pecuniary profit by employing them. And there
is no rate at which we can say that the supply of these services will
cease ; for the desire to be usefully employed is so strong in educated
women, and their opportunities of being profitably employed (in the
economic sense of the word profitable) are so few, that they will give
their services for a year to people as well off as themselves in return
for a sum of money barely sufficient to take them abroad for a month
or to keep them supplied with gloves, lace, hats, and other necessary
trifles. Chaos reigns supreme. And while in this class it seems to
be considered ignoble to stipulate for good pay, strangely enough it
is not considered disgraceful to withhold it. Teachers are constantly
exhorted to teach for love of their work, but no appeal is made to
parents to pay remunerative fees because they love their children to
be taught.
The children of the upper and middle classes have their educa
tion partly given them by the parents of the assistant mistresses and
governesses whom they employ. As a proof of this, I give a few par
ticulars about the salaries and cost of living of the only section of
educated working women in which some kind of order reigns, assist
ant mistresses in public and proprietary schools giving a secondary
education. In these schools, of which a considerable number are under
the management of the Girls' Public Day Schools Company and the
Church Schools Company, while others are endowed schools or local
proprietary schools, some University certificate of intellectual attain
ment is almost invariably demanded, and a University degree is more
frequently required than in private schools or from private governesses.
These assistant mistresses have nearly all clearly recognised, even when
mere schoolgirls, that they must eventually earn their own living if
they do not wish to spend their youth in maintaining a shabby ap
pearance of gentility. They regard marriage as a possible, but not
very probable, termination of their working career; but for all practical
purposes relegate the thought to the unfrequented corners of their
minds, along with apprehensions of sickness or old age and expecta
tions of a legacy. They are women whose standard is high enough
for them to be able to spend 2001. a year usefully without any sinful
waste. In the majority of cases they are devoted to their profession
for the first few years at least; and they only weary of it when they
feel that they are beginning to lose some of their youthful vitality,
and have no means of refreshing mind and body by social intercourse
and invigorating travel, while at the same time the fear of sickness
and poverty is beginning to press on them. There are not 1,500 of
them in all England, and their position is better than that of any
considerable section of the 120,000 women teachers entered in the
Census of 1881. The particulars that I give are from the report of a
committee formed in 1889 to collect statistics as to the salaries paid to