Complaints about the female workers’ lack of domestic skills and wastefulness – their tendency to buy everything they needed, their inability to cook, sew, and keep a clean home forcing their husbands to retreat to the ‘gin shop,’ their lack of maternal affection – were a staple of reformers’ reports from the 1840s to the turn of the century.6 Typically, a Children Employment Commission complained in 1867 that: “Being employed from eight in the morning till five in the evening they [i.e. the married women] return home tired and wearied, and unwilling to make any further exertion to render the cottage comfortable,” thus “when the husband returns, he finds everything uncomfortable, the cottage dirty, no meal prepared, the children tiresome and quarrelsome, the wife slatternly and cross, and his home so unpleasant to him that he not rarely betakes himself to the public house and becomes a drunkard.”7
Even Karl Marx remarked that ‘factory girls’ had no domestic skills and applied their earnings to purchasing provisions once produced at home, concluding that the shutting down of the cotton mills, caused by the American Civil War, had at least one beneficiary effect: for the women now: “had sufficient leisure to give their infants the breast instead of poisoning them with Godfrey’s Cordial (an opiate). They also had the time to learn to cook. Unfortunately the acquisition of this art occurred at a time when they had nothing to cook. This crisis was also utilized to teach sewing to the daughters of the workers in sewing schools.” “An American revolution (Marx concluded) and a universal crisis were needed in order that working girls who spin for the whole world might learn to sew!8
Added to the concern for the crisis of domesticity that women’s employment produced was the fear of women’s usurpation of male prerogatives, which was believed to undermine the stability of the family and trigger social unrest. “Female workers” – a proponent of restricted hours for working women warned, during the parliamentary debates that in 1847 led to the Ten Hours Act – “not only perform the labour but occupy the places of men; they are forming various clubs and associations and gradually acquiring all those privileges that are held to be the proper portion of the male sex.”9 A broken family, it was assumed, would make for an unstable country. Neglected husbands would leave the home, spend their free time in public houses, beer/ 6
Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mother in Victorian Industry. Especially Chapter VI, “The married operative as a home-maker.” 7 Ibid. See also Seccombe, op. cit. pp. 119-120. 8 Capital, Vol. 1: pp. 517-8 footnote. 9 Judy Lown, Women and Industrialization (1990), p.181.