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Acknowledgments
This book attempts to give an overview of Herder’s philosophy. It is written out of a conviction that his philosophy is of great value, that it has had enormous influence, and that neither of these facts has yet been properly understood. It is also written out of a painful awareness that the very richness of Herder’s ideas and the very extent of their influence make it well nigh impossible for a book like this one to do more than scratch the surface. Still, it will try.
The first half of the book (the Introduction and the chapters on philosophy of language, hermeneutics, translation theory, and the birth of linguistics and anthropology) is largely a more concise and user-friendly reworking of material from two books that I published previously with Oxford University Press: After Herder: Philosophy of Language in the German Tradition (2010) and German Philosophy of Language: From Schlegel to Hegel and Beyond (2011). The second half of the book (the chapters on philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, philosophy of history, political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and intellectual influence) mostly consists of new material.
I have incurred many deep intellectual debts in connection with this project that I would like to acknowledge here. Some of these reach back to my undergraduate education at Oxford, where I learned much about German philosophy from the late Patrick Gardiner, Peter Hacker, Alan Ryan, the late Peter Strawson, Charles Taylor, and Ralph Walker. Other debts are to people from whom I learned as a graduate student at Princeton University: especially, the late Michael Frede, Raymond Geuss, Saul Kripke, and the late Richard Rorty. Yet other debts were incurred during twenty-eight years of full-time teaching at the University of Chicago. Some of these debts are to former colleagues there—including the late Arthur Adkins, Dan Brudney, the late Ted Cohen, Arnold Davidson, Dan Garber, Charles Larmore, Jonathan Lear, Brian Leiter, the late Leonard Linsky, Yitzhak Melamed, the late Ian Mueller, Martha Nussbaum, Bob Richards, Howard Stein, Lina Steiner, Josef Stern, the late George Stocking, and Bill Tait. Others are to former students—including Stephen Engstrom, Susan Hahn, Jim Kreines, Sheela Kumar, Alison Laywine, Alyssa Luboff, Stephen Menn, Nathana O’Brien, Gregg Osborne, Erich Reck, Tim Rosenkoetter, David Sussman, and Rachel Zuckert. I also owe a great debt of gratitude to colleagues in Germany with whom I have worked closely over the years in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Jena. These include Hans-Friedrich Fulda, Markus Gabriel, Wolfram Hogrebe, Guido Kreis, Rainer Schaefer, François Thomas, Klaus Vieweg, and Wolfgang Welsch. Other people who have contributed to the development of this project in various ways and whom I would like to thank include: Karl Ameriks, Andreas Arndt, Jeffrey Barash, Fred Beiser,
Christian Berner, Anne Birien, Paul Boghossian, Rich Booher, Bob Brandom, Horst Bredekamp, the late Rüdiger Bubner, Stefanie Buchenau, Nigel DeSouza, Manuel Dries, Thomas Erikson, Eckhart Förster, Kristin Gjesdal, Hanjo Glock, Marion Heinz, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, John Hyman, Michael Inwood, Mark Johnston, Vasso Kindi, John McDowell, Steffen Mehlich, Ernest Menze, Dalia Nassar, Robert Norton, Michael Rosen, Fred Rush, Richard Schacht, Hans Sluga, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Jürgen Trabant, Stelios Virvidakis, Anik Waldow, Michael Williams, Claudia Wirsing, Allen Wood, and John Zammito.
Among institutions, I owe large debts of thanks to the University of Chicago where I have taught for over thirty years (formerly full-time, now as a visitor); Bonn University, where I have worked full-time since 2013; and the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, whose generous award of an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship to me in 2013 has helped me to complete this project.
In addition, colleagues at the following institutions contributed to this project by inviting me to present parts of it as talks and giving me the benefit of their feedback: the Academy of the Sciences in Moscow, the APA Central Division, the APA Eastern Division, the Aristotle University in Salonica, the University of Athens, the BerlinBrandenburg Academy of the Sciences, the Bildakt-Kolleg of the Humboldt University, Bonn University, the University of Brussels, the University of California at Berkeley, Cambridge University, The University of Chicago, Columbia University, the University of Crete, Drew University, Eikones in Basel, the University of Georgia, Halle University, Harvard University, the Humanities Institute of Osaka, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Institut français in Bonn, the Internationale Hegel Gesellschaft, the Internationale Hegel Vereinigung, the International Society for Nietzsche Studies, Istanbul University, James Madison University, Jena University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Leuven, the Lomonossov University in Moscow, the University of London, McGill University, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, New York University, the Nietzsche Gesellschaft, the University of Notre Dame, Oslo University, Oxford University, the Paris Center of the University of Chicago, the University of Paris at Nanterre, the University of Patras, the Philosophy Department of the Humboldt University, the University of Poitiers, Princeton University, Renmin University in Beijing, Sydney University, Temple University, Toulouse University, Warsaw University, the University of Washington in Seattle, the University of Western Ontario, and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin.
I also owe a debt of thanks to the many presses and journals that have published work of mine that eventually developed into this book. They are too numerous to list here individually, but their names can be found in the notes and bibliography of this volume and in my previous publications on Herder.
I would also like to thank Oxford University Press and especially its Philosophy editor Peter Momtchiloff for suggesting this project to me in the first place and for helping me to bring it to completion. Peter’s encouragement and advice throughout the process were invaluable.
I would also like to thank two anonymous readers for the Press who contributed valuable encouragement and helpful suggestions as the project was approaching its final draft.
Last but not least I would also like to thank my family and loved ones for their love, support, and patience during the many years of work that it took to complete this project: my daughter Alya, my former wife Noha, my parents Michael and the late Kathleen Forster, and Paola Dobelli (who embodies the Herderian values of care for all humankind and compassion towards individuals as perfectly as anyone I know, and to whom this book is dedicated).
Editions
Two German editions of Herder’s works have been used in this volume:
Johann Gottfried Herder Sämtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan et al. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877–). Abbreviated as S followed by volume and page number, e.g. S5:261.
Johann Gottfried Herder Werke, ed. U. Gaier et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–). Abbreviated as G followed by volume and page number, e.g. G2:321.
In addition, the following two English translations are cited frequently:
Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. and tr. M.N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Abbreviated as HPW.
Selected Writings on Aesthetics, ed. and tr. G. Moore (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Abbreviated as SWA.
(Because I have worked from the German texts throughout, translations in the present book sometimes differ from those in these two volumes when they are cited, without specific notice being given.)
Introduction
This book is an exploration of the philosophy of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). The restriction of the book’s focus to Herder’s philosophy is non-trivial, since he was also active in several other fields, including literature and theology. The book focuses on topics rather than on texts—in part because Herder usually in a given text runs together treatments of many different topics belonging to several different disciplines, and in part because his treatment of a given philosophical topic is usually spread over a number of texts. Since Herder’s treatments of philosophical topics are extensive, uneven in quality, and sometimes inconsistent, the presentation of them given here is more selective and reconstructive than would be necessary for some other philosophers. In particular, certain strands of his thought that are not particularly original or promising are given rather short shrift. Discussion of the voluminous secondary literature on Herder is also kept to a minimum, partly because much of it is not especially good, partly because discussion of it would only be of interest to a few specialists.
Herder is a philosopher of the very first importance. This judgment largely turns on the intrinsic quality of his ideas, of which the present book will try to give an impression. In order to do so it will focus on the areas in which he made his greatest philosophical contributions: philosophy of language, hermeneutics, the theory of translation, the philosophical foundations of linguistics and anthropology, philosophy of mind, aesthetics, moral philosophy, philosophy of history, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion.
But another aspect of Herder’s great importance as a philosopher lies in his intellectual influence. This has been immense (far greater than is usually realized). For example, Hegel’s philosophy turns out to be largely an elaborate systematic development of Herder’s ideas (concerning language, the mind, history, and God). So too does Schleiermacher’s (concerning language, interpretation, translation, the mind, art, and God). Nietzsche is deeply influenced by Herder as well (concerning language, the mind, history, and moral values). So too is Dilthey (concerning history). Even John Stuart Mill has important debts to Herder (in his liberal political philosophy). And just beyond philosophy, Goethe was transformed from being merely a talented but rather conventional poet into the great artist and thinker he eventually became largely through the early and sustained impact on him of Herder’s ideas.
Indeed, Herder can claim to have supplied the philosophical foundations for whole disciplines that we now take for granted. For example, it was mainly Herder (not, as
has often been supposed, Hamann) who established certain fundamental ideas concerning a dependence of thought on language that underpin modern philosophy of language. It was Herder who, through those same ideas, through his recognition of deep variations in language and thought across historical periods and cultures, including deep variations in grammar, through his strictly empirical approach to the investigation of languages, and in other ways, inspired Friedrich Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt to found modern linguistics. It was Herder who developed the modern theory of interpretation, or “hermeneutics,” in ways that would subsequently be taken over by Schleiermacher and then by the latter’s pupil August Boeckh. It was Herder who, by doing so, made a crucial contribution to establishing the methodological foundations of nineteenth-century German classical scholarship (which rested on the Schleiermacher–Boeckh methodology), and hence of modern classical scholarship more generally. It was Herder who did more than anyone else to establish both the general conception and the interpretive methodology of our modern discipline of cultural anthropology. It was Herder who did more than anyone else to establish the general conception and the methodology of the modern discipline of comparative literature (largely via his influence on Goethe, August Wilhelm Schlegel, and Friedrich Christian Diez). It was Herder who made some of the most important contributions towards establishing modern art history. And finally, it was also Herder who made some of the most essential contributions to the progress of modern biblical scholarship. The present book will touch on all of these contributions and more.
Intellectual Life
It seems appropriate to begin this book with a brief overview of Herder’s life, especially his intellectual life. Who was Herder?
He was born in Mohrungen in East Prussia in 1744. His father was a schoolteacher. His family was caring but poor and deeply religious (Lutheran). He was by nature a bookish loner. Among the negative features of his early life in Mohrungen was the heavy hand of Prussian military conscription that lay over the area. Among the positive features were the natural surroundings, in which he spent much of his free time. In 1761 a local pastor with intellectual aspirations, Sebastian Friedrich Trescho, offered him lodging in return for services as an amanuensis, which allowed him access to Trescho’s library. Then in 1762 a generous Russian military surgeon who was passing through the town was sufficiently impressed by Herder’s abilities to offer to take him to Königsberg in East Prussia and pay for his education there, an offer that he accepted.
In 1762 he enrolled at the University of Königsberg, where he studied with Kant, who accorded him special privileges, such as a waiver of fees, because of his unusual intellectual abilities. At this period he also began a lifelong friendship with the irrationalist religious philosopher Hamann, who taught him English and inspired him with a love of languages and literature, including Shakespeare.
In 1764 he left Königsberg to take up a schoolteaching position in the Baltic town of Riga, a republic within the Russian Empire. Initially employed there as a schoolteacher, following his ordination in the Lutheran church in 1767 he also became a pastor. While in Riga he wrote the important, though fragmentary, programmatic essay How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People [henceforth: How Philosophy Can Become] (1765). He also published his first major work, the Fragments on Recent German Literature [henceforth: Fragments] (1767–8)—a sort of selective commentary on a recently defunct literary journal titled Letters concerning the Most Recent Literature that had been edited and written by some of the leading thinkers of the period (including Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn) in which he discussed aspects of the history of literature, tried to spur the improvement of German literature, and dealt with issues in the philosophy of language and the theory of translation. He subsequently went on to publish three parts of an important work on literature and general aesthetics, the Critical Forests (1769) (an important fourth and final part that was written at the same time was not published until the middle of the nineteenth century). In this work he responded to the aesthetic theories of Lessing, Winckelmann, and less well-known contemporaries, developed his own aesthetic theory, introduced a number of important ideas concerning the interpretation of art and literature, and (in the fourth part) formulated an important theory of perception. In 1769 he resigned his position in Riga and travelled—initially by sea to France. During his travels he wrote an ambitious and passionate Journal of My Travels in the Year 1769 [henceforth: Travel Journal], which among other things offers further fascinating insights into his general philosophical program. While in France he met several leading figures of the Enlightenment, including d’Alembert and Diderot. From France he proceeded to Holland, and then eventually to Strasbourg, where in 1770 he met the young Goethe (fact being stranger than fiction, in an inn called Zum Geist [lit. To the Mind]!). He immediately had a powerful impact on Goethe—an impact that was sustained and deepened as their relationship continued during the several decades that followed. In 1771 he won a prize from the Berlin Academy for his best-known work in the philosophy of language, the Treatise on the Origin of Language [henceforth: Treatise] (published in 1772).
From 1771–6 he served as court preacher to the ruling house in Bückeburg, where the cold militarism of the count who ruled the town, together with severe cultural isolation, made him miserable (he wrote to the poet Gleim in 1772 that his existence there was “a living death”).1 Mitigating this situation a little, in 1773 he married his sweetheart Karoline Flachsland in Darmstadt, with whom he would stay happily married until his death and who would bear him several children. During his period in Bückeburg he published a number of important works, including a seminal essay on
1 Johann Gottfried Herder Briefe, ed. W. Dobbek and G. Arnold (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1977), 2:198.
the nature of tragedy, Shakespeare (1773), which appeared in a volume called On German Character and Art to which Goethe and Justus Möser also contributed; and his first, and arguably greatest, work on the philosophy of history, This Too a Philosophy of History for the Formation of Humanity [henceforth: This Too] (1774). He also published an interesting but much more questionable work on the Old Testament titled Oldest Document of the Human Species (1774–6) in which he temporarily shifted away from his usually enlightened stance on religion towards a sort of religious irrationalism more in the spirit of his friend Hamann.
After receiving an offer of a chair in theology at Göttingen University in 1775, which turned sour when questions were raised about his orthodoxy and he refused to cooperate by answering them, in 1776, thanks to the influence of Goethe (who had gone to Weimar the year before to serve in its government), he was appointed General Superintendent of the Lutheran clergy in Weimar, a post that combined both religious and educational functions and which he kept for the rest of his life. During this period he published an important essay in the philosophy of mind, On the Cognition and Sensation of the Human Soul [henceforth: On the Cognition and Sensation] (1778); an important translation of, and commentary on, the Song of Solomon from the Old Testament, Songs of Love (1778); a very influential collection of translations of poetry from around the world (including ancient Greece and Rome, Germany, England, Spain, Scotland, Italy, Scandinavia, the Baltic countries, and the Slavic countries) that emphasized simple folk poetry, Popular Songs [Volkslieder] (1778–9); a seminal work on the interpretation of the Old Testament, On the Spirit of Hebrew Poetry (1782–3); his important and well-known later work on the philosophy of history, Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Humanity [henceforth: Ideas] (1784–91) (which his former teacher Kant reviewed condescendingly, thereby provoking a feud between them); an important essay on the philosophy of religion, written in connection with the Pantheism Controversy that had broken out in 1785 between Jacobi and Mendelssohn concerning Spinozism, and conceived in the spirit of Spinoza’s monism, God: Some Conversations (1787); a work written in response to the French Revolution (which Herder welcomed), and largely concerned with aspects of political philosophy, the Letters for the Advancement of Humanity [henceforth: Letters] (1793–7); a series of Christian Writings (1794–8) that dealt with the interpretation of the New Testament; and two works written in sharp opposition to Kant’s critical philosophy, A Metacritique on the Critique of Pure Reason [henceforth: Metacritique] (1799) (directed against the theoretical philosophy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) and the Calligone (1800) (directed against the aesthetics of Kant’s Critique of Judgment).
In addition to the intellectual feud with his former teacher Kant just alluded to, these last years of Herder’s life also brought him many further difficulties and disappointments. His work was subjected to censorship (he had to rewrite the political chapter of the Ideas no fewer than four times before it could pass the censor, who in this case was none other than Goethe). He began to fall out with Goethe in 1793 for reasons that were partly political (their opposite attitudes to the French Revolution), partly aesthetic
(their opposite views concerning classicism and l’art pour l’art), partly moral (Goethe’s lifestyle and poetry, such as his erotic Roman Elegies), and partly more personal— which eventually led to their complete rupture in 1795. In addition, he suffered from social isolation (largely due to his radical political sympathies), overwork, ill health, and financial difficulties. He died in 1803 (a year before his former teacher Kant).
Besides the works mentioned above, Herder also wrote many others over the course of his career (the standard edition of his works, edited by Bernhard Suphan, contains 33 volumes). His earlier works are often his most brilliant. He himself wrote (in On the Cognition and Sensation) that “the first uninhibited work of an author is . . . usually his best; his bloom is unfolding, his soul still dawn.”2 Whether or not that is generally true, it does arguably apply to Herder himself. However, his later works contain many riches as well.
Philosophical Style
Before we consider the substance of Herder’s philosophy, it is appropriate to say something about his philosophical style—by which I mean not only his general way of writing philosophy but also his general way of doing it. This task is especially worth undertaking because his philosophical style can easily be misunderstood, thereby becoming an obstacle to the comprehension of his positions.
In certain ways Herder’s philosophical texts are easier to read than others from the same period. For example, he avoids technical jargon, writes in a manner that is lively and rich in examples rather than dry and abstract, and has no large, complex system for the reader to keep track of. But his texts also have certain stylistic peculiarities that can easily impede a proper appreciation of his thought. So it is important to be alerted to these.
Some of these peculiarities concern his writing in a narrow sense. To begin with, this often seems grammatically undisciplined and emotional—full of discontinued sentences, ungrammaticalities, emphases,3 rhetorical questions, exclamation marks, and so on—in ways that might perhaps be expected in casual speech but not in philosophical texts.
This is quite intentional. Indeed, Herder sometimes deliberately “roughed up” material in this direction between drafts (compare, for example, the 1775 and 1778 drafts of On the Cognition and Sensation).
When writing in this way he is in fact often using rhetorical figures that can easily look like mere carelessness to an untutored eye but which receive high literary sanction from classical sources and are being employed by him artfully. Examples of this are anacoluthon (the deliberate failure to continue a grammatical construction that
2 HPW, p. 219 = G4:367; cf. S8:451–2.
3 In the translations from Herder contained in this volume, all emphases that are not explicitly identified as additions by the translator are Herder’s own. His emphases have occasionally been omitted, though.
has been begun by switching to another), aposiopeisis (breaking off a sentence and leaving the reader to complete it in thought), zeugma (the use with two or more substantives of a verb or adjective that strictly speaking only applies to one of them), hypallage (the agreement of an adjective with another word than the one that it is really meant to qualify), chiasmus (reversing the initial order in a comparison), hendiadys (the use of a singular verb with a plural noun when this really only refers to one thing), oxymoron (a seeming contradiction, usually masking a deeper consistency), anadiplosis (doubling a word or phrase), brachylogy (“shortening”), and hysteron proteron (“later earlier”). Similarly, he often deliberately forms lists and combines verbal moods and tenses in a variety of irregular ways in order to avoid monotony.
More importantly, he has several serious reasons for writing in an undisciplinedlooking and emotional way that is more reminiscent of casual speech than of conventional academic prose. First, he hopes that this will make his writing more broadly accessible and interesting to people—which is a decidedly non-trivial goal for him, since he believes it to be an essential part of philosophy’s vocation to have a broad social impact (see in this connection both the title and the content of How Philosophy Can Become More Universal and Useful for the Benefit of the People).4 Second, he believes that speech is not only historically earlier, but also more expressively fundamental and powerful, than writing (a position that he articulates most fully in the Ideas), and he therefore wants to make his writing as much like speech as possible.5 Third, it is one of his central theses in the philosophy of mind that thought neither is nor should be separate from volition, or affect, that types of thinking that aspire to exclude affect are inherently distorting and inferior; in his view, standard academic writing has this vice, whereas spontaneous speech, and writing that imitates it, avoid it.6 Fourth, he is opposed to any lexical or grammatical straightjacketing of language, any slavish obedience to dictionaries and grammar books.7 In his view, such straightjacketing is inimical, not only to linguistic creativity and inventiveness, but also (much worse), since thought is essentially dependent on and limited in its scope by language, thereby to creativity and inventiveness in thought itself.8 Fifth, moreover it often serves a dubious socio-political function, in that it both results from and supports a broader submissiveness towards authority.9
4 For a discussion of this advantage, see S18:389. 5 See e.g. Letters, G7:19.
6 See in this connection On the Cognition and Sensation
7 The closest Herder ever comes to approving of this is his proposal Idea for the First Patriotic Institute for the Collective Mind of Germany (1787), which does envisage institutional improvement of the way the German language is used (G9/2:565ff., cf. 707ff., 723ff.). However, even this seeming exception proves the rule: the envisaged academy “will take the greatest care to avoid despotic laws concerning language; but all the more strive by means of observations, suggestions, and critical rules to gradually provide our language with the beautiful sure-footedness that in comparison with other languages she still so sorely lacks” (G9/2:572).
8 Concerning this position, see e.g. Travel Journal, S4:451–2.
9 See e.g. Letters, in HPW, p. 378 = G7:337: “And the language of Germans should pull the victory car of others like a conquered prisoner, and in the process still give itself airs in its clumsy empire- and court-style? Throw it away, this oppressive finery, you matron squeezed in contrary to your will, and be what you can be and formerly were: a language of reason, of force and truth.”
Another peculiarity of Herder’s philosophical texts that may initially pose an obstacle to understanding them concerns not so much their writing style as their philosophical style, in particular their unsystematic nature. This is again quite deliberate. For Herder is skeptical about the value of systematicity in philosophy (an attitude that had recently emerged in France with thinkers such as Condillac and d’Alembert as well).10 Thus he already writes in about 1767:
It lies in the weakness of human nature to always want to set up a system; perhaps it also lies in the weakness of human nature never to be able to set one up. He who shows this latter weakness is more useful than the person who sets up three systems.11
He continues to make such statements against systematicity throughout his career, for example in On the Cognition and Sensation, the Letters concerning the Study of Theology [henceforth: Theological Letters] (1780–1), and the Ideas 12 And his hostility to systematicity is also reflected in many of his titles: Fragments [on Recent German Literature], Ideas [for the Philosophy of History of Humanity], Scattered Leaves, and so on. Herder is especially hostile to the ambitious type of systematicity that had already been aspired to in the tradition of Spinoza, Wolff, and Kant and which would soon be aspired to again in the tradition of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel: roughly, the ideal of a comprehensive philosophical theory whose parts exhibit some sort of strict overall pattern of derivation. This type of systematicity was already very familiar to the young Herder from Spinoza and Wolff, in whom it had taken the more specific form of a series of logical deductions from a set of fundamental principles (Spinoza) or a single fundamental principle (Wolff).
Herder has compelling reasons for this hostility. First, he is very skeptical that such systematic designs can really be made to work, as opposed to merely creating the illusion that they do so (see e.g. On the Cognition and Sensation). Second, he believes that such system-building leads to a premature closure of inquiry, and especially to a disregarding or distortion of new empirical evidence. For example, he writes in the Theological Letters (1780–1):
Premature impudent system-addiction entirely damages true science. As soon as the youth’s limbs and lineaments are developed, he no longer grows. As long as science is dispersed in aphorisms and observations it can grow; fenced and enclosed round by method, it can perhaps be elucidated, polished, made comfortable for use, but it no longer gains in content.13
Scrutiny of the systems of Spinoza, Wolff, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others amply bears out both of these concerns.
10 See Condillac, Traité des systèmes (1749); d’Alembert, Discours préliminaire (1751).
12 See e.g. a draft of the Ideas, S13:207: “I discount those authors who here and there tore a rag from an often uncertain, misunderstood story, to decorate their system, the pet child of their own minds, with it and to say all the more happily: ‘behold there a picture of humankind.’ Their way shall not be mine, for I have no system to decorate.”
13 G9/1:490.
Herder’s well-grounded hostility to this type of systematicity helped to establish an important counter-tradition in German philosophy that subsequently included, among others, Friedrich Schlegel, Nietzsche, the later Wittgenstein, and Adorno. Nietzsche would memorably sum up the spirit of this counter-tradition in the aphorism: “The will to a system is a lack of integrity.”14
On the other hand, Herder is in favor of “systematicity” in a more modest sense. For he accepts the ideal of a theory that is self-consistent and supported by good arguments.15 His commitment to such an ideal marks an important methodological contrast with Hamann, whom he in particular already criticized for failing to give arguments in an essay from 1765.16 Admittedly, Herder by no means always succeeds in achieving this ideal.17 Interpreting him in a fruitful way consequently requires more selectivity, reconstruction, and philosophical judgment than is the case with some other philosophers.18 But his failure to do so is often more apparent than real.
Let us consider this situation in a little more detail. Concerning first consistency, Herder sometimes explicitly commits himself to an ideal of consistency, for example in the Metacritique 19 It must be conceded that he does not always live up to this ideal. For example, in This Too he holds that different peoples’ moral values are fundamentally discrepant and incommensurable, then in the Ideas he argues that all peoples at least share the fundamental moral value of “humanity,” then finally in the Letters he goes back and forth between those two incompatible positions. However, in many cases in which he initially seems to be guilty of inconsistency he is really not. For (to begin with the more obvious sort of case) he is often developing philosophical dialogues between two or more opposing viewpoints, in which cases it would clearly be a mistake to accuse him of inconsistency in any usual or pejorative sense of the term (see e.g. God: Some Conversations and Letters). And (to turn to a less obvious sort of case) in many other instances he is in effect still working in this dialogue-mode, only without bothering to distribute the competing positions between different interlocutors explicitly, and so is again really innocent of inconsistency (good examples of this occur in How Philosophy Can Become and This Too).
14 F. Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. W. Kaufmann (London: Penguin, 1976), p. 470.
15 This may help to explain why he occasionally expresses a more positive attitude towards systematicity— for example, in This Too and at God: Some Conversations, G4:683.
16 G1:38–9.
17 In this connection Charles Taylor has commented wisely that “deeply innovative thinkers don’t have to be rigorous to be the originators of important ideas” (“The Importance of Herder,” in Isaiah Berlin: A Celebration, ed. E. and A. Margalit [Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991], p. 40). Incidentally, the converse is true as well: thinkers can be extremely rigorous without originating any important ideas. (Note for analytic philosophers.)
18 It is all too easy to simply present everything that Herder says on a topic—and thereby leave him looking like a sort of inconsistent, or at best only superficially consistent, eclectic. It is also easy to be selective but in a way that reflects poor philosophical judgment, for example by portraying him as fundamentally committed to Christian religion, metaphysics, a priori inquiry, and universalism—and thereby again leave him looking both unoriginal and mediocre. A recent handbook on Herder manages to combine both of these vices.
19 S21:297.
Moreover, he has serious motives for using this method of (implicit) dialogue. First (and most obviously), when he is dealing with religiously or politically delicate matters, using dialogues permits him to communicate his views without quite stating them as his own and therefore without inviting trouble from the authorities (this applies to God: Some Conversations and the Letters, for example).20 But he also has some less obvious, philosophically deeper motives. Thus, second, he takes over from the precritical Kant an idea (ultimately inspired by ancient skepticism) that the best way for a philosopher to pursue the truth is by setting contrary views on a subject into opposition with each other in order to advance towards, and hopefully attain, the truth through their mutual testing and modification. (Kant recommended the use of such a “zetetic” approach, as he called it following the ancient Pyrrhonists, in his Notice concerning the Structure of Lectures in the Winter Semester 1765–1766 and then implemented it in Dreams of a Spirit Seer, Illustrated Through Dreams of Metaphysics [1766]. Herder already read the latter work before its publication, and in a review he wrote of it in 1766 remarks on its use of the method in question.21) Furthermore, third, Herder also develops a more original variant of that idea on a socio-historical plane: analogously, given the deeply fallible nature of human cognition, truth is an elusive commodity, and consequently the only way for humankind as a whole to attain it is through an ongoing contest between opposing positions on issues, in the course of which the best ones will eventually win out. (This idea is prominent in Dissertation on the Reciprocal Influence of Government and the Sciences [1780] and in the Letters. It anticipates, and indirectly helped to inspire, a similar thesis of John Stuart Mill’s in On Liberty.) This yields a further motive for the dialogue-method, even where it does not lead Herder himself to any definite conclusion, in effect warranting the rhetorical question, “And what does it matter to the cause of humankind and its discovery of the truth whether those various opposing positions are advanced by different people or by the same person?”
This explanation of many of Herder’s inconsistencies as merely apparent also helps to diminish his culpability for the real inconsistencies that remain: these are to a considerable extent merely cases in which an intrinsically defensible and valuable method has got out of control.
Somewhat similarly, concerning arguments: Herder not only complained about Hamann’s failure to give arguments,22 but also himself often lived up to the ideal of
20 Herder describes and thereby reveals this sort of motive in the course of discussing other authors in God: Some Conversations: “In such dangerous matters [as philosophy of religion] a disputing dialectician like Bayle or an ornamenting poet like Voltaire has much advantage over the serious philosopher who sets forth his propositions directly. The former always remain safer because they can say, ‘I only disputed, only ornamented’; and yet they only have an all the more universal effect in this pleasant, ever changing garb” (G4:685–6). Cf. E. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung (Vienna: Europa, 1968), pp. 170, 190–5, who makes the similar, though not identical, point that Herder’s inconsistencies often arise due to a conflict between his intellectual views and his religious/political circumstances. Adler’s point is no doubt also true to some extent.
21 S1:130. Cf. Herder’s defense of scholastic disputation in the Ideas, G6:885–6.
22 G1:38.
providing them quite impressively. For example in the Fragments and the Treatise he argues convincingly that a variety of different sorts of empirical evidence all converge on the hypothesis that language is human in origin, and he complements this case with equally cogent arguments against the contrary hypothesis that its origin is divine. And concerning his key thesis in the philosophy of language that thought is essentially dependent on and bounded by language, he not only argues for this on empirical grounds, such as that children always acquire the two in step with each other, but also seeks, and I think ultimately finds, a good conceptual argument for it.
The appearance that Herder neglects to give arguments is often merely an illusion that results from the fact that he as a matter of principle declines to give arguments of certain sorts. For example, he has a strong commitment to empiricism and against apriorism in philosophy, which (while it does not exclude a priori, in particular conceptual, arguments altogether, as we just saw) usually leads him to avoid giving familiar sorts of a priori arguments in philosophy. And he also has a strong commitment to sentimentalism in ethics, which leads him to refrain from offering familiar sorts of cognitivist arguments in ethics.
General Program in Philosophy
The extent of Hamann’s influence on Herder’s thought has sometimes been greatly exaggerated by the secondary literature (e.g. by Isaiah Berlin).23 But Kant’s influence was early, fundamental, and enduring.24
However, the Kant who influenced Herder in this way was not the Kant of the three Critiques (against whom Herder later engaged in the—rather unpleasant, distracting, and ineffectual—public polemics of the Metacritique and the Calligone), but the pre-critical Kant of the early and mid-1760s.25 Some of Kant’s key positions in the 1760s (sharply contrasting with the ones that he would adopt later during the critical period) were: a Pyrrhonist-influenced skepticism about metaphysics; a form of empiricism; and a Hume-influenced sentimentalism in ethics.26 Herder took over these positions from Kant in the 1760s and retained them throughout his career.
23 Cf. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung, pp. 63–7.
24 Concerning the relationship between the young Herder and the pre-critical Kant, cf. J. Zammito, Kant, Herder, and the Birth of Modern Anthropology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2001). There has been a rather heated debate in the secondary literature about whether Herder should be seen as an “irrationalist” or as part of the “Enlightenment” (in the Anglophone world, Isaiah Berlin is the leading proponent of the former view, Robert Norton of the latter). Such a distinction seems to me too blunt a conceptual tool, and Herder’s position too variegated and changing, for this debate to be very helpful in the end. But insofar as it is a legitimate one, my remarks here concerning Herder’s greater indebtedness to Kant than to Hamann imply that he is more an Enlightener than an irrationalist.
25 Cf. Adler, Herder und die deutsche Aufklärung, pp. 56–9.
26 For some further discussion of these positions, especially Kant’s early Pyrrhonist-influenced skepticism about metaphysics, see M.N. Forster, Kant and Skepticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
It should not be assumed that this debt to the early Kant is a debt to a philosophically inferior Kant, though; a good case could be made for the very opposite.
Herder’s 1765 essay How Philosophy Can Become is a key text for understanding both this debt to Kant and the general orientation of his philosophy as a whole.27 The essay was written under the strong influence of Kant, especially, it seems, Kant’s Dreams of a Spirit Seer (1766), which Kant already sent to Herder prior to its publication (“a sheet at a time,” as Herder reports).28
Herder’s essay answers a prize question that had been set by a society in Berne, Switzerland: “How can the truths of philosophy become more universal and useful for the benefit of the people?” This question was conceived in the spirit of the “popular philosophy [Popularphilosophie]” that was competing with dry, scholastic schoolphilosophy in the German-speaking world at the time. Kant himself tended to identify with Popularphilosophie at this period, and Herder’s decision to answer this prize question shows that he did so as well. However, in Herder’s case, unlike Kant’s, the identification would last a lifetime. Philosophy should become relevant and useful for the people as a whole—this is a fundamental ideal of Herder’s philosophy.
Largely in the service of this ideal, Herder’s essay argues in favor of two sharp turns in philosophy, turns which would again remain fundamental to his position throughout the rest of his career. Let us therefore consider them here (doing so with an eye to certain ways in which he elaborates them in later texts).
The first of these turns consists in a rejection of traditional metaphysics, especially of its concern with the supersensible, and closely follows an argument that Kant had developed in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Herder’s case is roughly as follows: (1) Traditional metaphysics, by undertaking to transcend experience (or strictly speaking, a little more broadly, “healthy understanding,” which includes, in addition to experience, or empirical knowledge, also ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics), succumbs to the weakness that it generates contradictory claims that are supportable by equally convincing arguments, and hence to the Pyrrhonian skeptical problem of an equal plausibility on both sides of issues requiring a suspension of judgment about them (“I am writing for Pyrrhonists,” Herder tells us).29 This had also been Kant’s most fundamental objection to traditional metaphysics concerning the supersensible in Dreams of a Spirit Seer. Another sort of objection that Kant had developed there had assumed an empiricist theory of concepts and argued that the terms that supersensible metaphysics uses lack the basis in experience that is required for meaningfulness, and are therefore meaningless. Herder implies this sort of objection as well.30 Herder also
27 Another relatively early programmatic text that is illuminating for the general orientation of his philosophy (though less so for his debt to Kant) is his Travel Journal from 1769. This text in particular includes certain topics that are more or less absent from How Philosophy Can Become, such as political philosophy and philosophy of history.
28 Herder Briefe, 2:259.
29 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 3–4, 8, 16 = G1:104–5, 110, 118–20.
30 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 17 = G1:120–1. Herder’s own (quasi-)empiricist theory of concepts, already reflected in his Essay on Being (1763–4), will be examined in Chapter 1. After How
goes on to elaborate this point in an interesting way that goes beyond Kant, however: the illusion of meaningfulness that is involved here largely arises because of the role of language, which all-too-readily spins on, creating illusions of meaning, even after the empirical conditions of meaningfulness have been left behind.31
(2) Traditional metaphysics concerning the supersensible is not only, for these reasons, useless; it is also harmful. This is because it distracts its adherents from other matters that should be their focus: nature and human society.32
(3) By contrast, experience (or again strictly speaking, a little more broadly, “healthy understanding,” which also includes ordinary morality, intuitive logic, and mathematics) is innocent of these problems.33 So philosophy should be based on, and kept continuous with, this.34
Herder’s second sharp turn in philosophy concerns ethics. Here again he is indebted to the pre-critical Kant, but he also goes somewhat further beyond him than in the case of metaphysics. Herder’s basic claims are as follows: (1) Morality more fundamentally consists in sentiments than in cognitions.35 This position is continuous with Kant’s in
Philosophy Can Become, Herder continues to deploy such a theory of concepts against metaphysics in the Fragments, HPW, pp. 48–9 = G1:556–8; On the Cognition and Sensation; and the Metacritique.
31 See esp. Fragments, HPW, p. 49 = G1:557–8: we need “a negative philosophy [which asks] how far human nature should really ascend in its ideas since it cannot ascend higher, and to what extent one should express and explain oneself since one cannot express and explain oneself any further. How much one would be able to sweep away here which we say without in the process thinking anything . . . , which we want to say without being able to think it! A man who thought this negative philosophy into existence would stand at the sphere of human cognition as though on a globe, and if he could not raise his head above these limits and look around into open air, at least he would dare to thrust forth his hand and would cry, ‘Here is emptiness and nothing!’ . . . If I am not mistaken, in that case ideas would creep away out of our whole metaphysics, from ontology to natural theology, to which merely the words have given admission and a false citizenship” (cf. Travel Journal, S4:372). Although this line of argument is not really anticipated by Kant, it does have precedents in British Empiricism—especially in Bacon and Locke.
32 See How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 16–18 = G1:118–21.
33 It is no doubt clear enough how relying on experience can avoid certain of the problems just mentioned: those arising from concept-empiricism and the danger of a distraction from nature and society. But what about the Pyrrhonian problem of an equal plausibility on both sides of issues, or more generally the problem of the epistemic fallibility of judgments? Herder here follows the pre-critical Kant in supposing that such problems do not really arise in the case of empirical judgments. However, much of the skeptical tradition, from the ancient Pyrrhonists themselves to Descartes in the First Meditation, took a contrary view. Does Herder have anything to say in response to it? He does imply answers at various points—for example, in the Essay on Being (1763–4) that the more purely empirical a concept/phenomenon is, the extreme case of this being the concept/phenomenon of being, the more certainly it can be known, and in other places that God ensures that our experience broadly conforms to reality. But these answers are not very compelling. There is therefore something of a gap in Herder’s theory here. However, even if he did not himself fill it, it may well be fillable, and his methodological empiricism therefore justifiable.
34 Despite officially adopting this position, Herder himself during the 1760s and 1770s sometimes engaged in metaphysics and then later on pursued such a project more publicly and ambitiously in God: Some Conversations (1787). His way of justifying this, at least in God: Some Conversations, was essentially to base the metaphysics in question on experience (this is one of his most striking points of disagreement with Spinoza in the work). Such a project again has a pre-critical Kantian background, since this had basically been Kant’s own approach to metaphysics during the early 1760s.
35 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 13 = G1:115–16. Cf. This Too, HPW, pp. 278–80 = G4:18–19. In This Too Herder usually uses the term Neigungen in this connection; later, in the Letters, 10th Collection he usually uses the term Gesinnungen
Dreams of a Spirit Seer, where it is indebted to British moral philosophy, especially Hume.36 Neither Kant nor Herder explicitly gives much argument for it. However, Hume had already done so, in particular developing the powerful (though not uncontested) argument that the fact that moral judgment is intrinsically motivating, together with the fact that cognition or reason itself is motivationally inert and only the sentiments or passions have the ability to motivate (that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions”), shows that moral judgment is based not on cognition but on the sentiments. And that Herder has something very much like this argument in mind can be seen from certain passages in This Too. 37 In the same work he also develops a second line of argument in support of sentimentalism and against cognitivism, namely that the various moral outlooks that have arisen over the course of history can in each case be quite adequately explained in terms of social functions that they serve, without any recourse to moral facts in addition. This second line of argument makes Herder’s version of sentimentalism more sophisticated than Hume’s. So does a further distinctive feature of his version of it: in works such as the Critical Forests and On the Cognition and Sensation he acknowledges that cognition plays an important role in morality as well. For instance, in the Critical Forests, he rejects crude forms of sentimentalism that deny this (as Hume’s arguably did),38 instead holding that moral sentiments—like other human sentiments—essentially involve conceptualization, judgment, and rational inference.39
(2) Cognitivist theories of morality—as espoused at this period by Rationalists such as Wolff and his followers, but also by many other philosophers before and since (for example, Plato and the critical Kant)—are therefore based on a mistake, and are in consequence useless as means of moral enlightenment or improvement.40
(3) But (and here Herder’s theory goes well beyond the pre-critical Kant’s), still worse than that, they are actually harmful to morality. Why so? According to Herder, this is because they weaken the moral sentiments on which morality really rests.41 In This Too and On the Cognition and Sensation he goes on to identify a number of more specific ways in which they do so: First, abstract theorizing weakens the sentiments generally, and hence moral sentiments in particular.42 Second, the cognitivists’ theories—for example, Plato’s theory that moral insight is a matter of knowing an otherworldly form and then comparing people and their actions with it, Wolff’s theory that it is a matter of
36 Herder’s debt for this moral sentimentalism to the pre-critical Kant and thereby to Hume can be seen especially clearly from his detailed notes on Kant’s practical philosophy from 1762–4.
37 See esp. HPW, p. 320 = G4:65: “The philosophy of our century is supposed to cultivate [bilden]—what else would that mean than awakening or strengthening the inclinations [Neigungen] through which mankind is made happy—and what a gulf for this to happen! Ideas actually only produce ideas . . . ”
38 Critical Forests, S4:5, 13–15, 35–6.
39 Critical Forests, S4:5, 35–6. Cf. On the Cognition and Sensation
40 See e.g. How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 12–14 = G1:115–17. Cf. This Too, esp. HPW, pp. 320–4 = G4:65–9.
41 See e.g. How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, p. 14 = G1:116–17. Cf. This Too
42 See On the Cognition and Sensation and This Too. This is perhaps the least compelling of Herder’s points.
a theoretical insight concerning perfection, or (later on) the critical Kant’s theory that it is a matter of discerning a sort of self-contradiction in maxims under the hypothesis of their universalization—turn out to be so strikingly implausible that they bring morality itself into disrepute, people reacting to them roughly along the lines, “If this is the best that even the experts can say in explanation and justification of morality, then morality must certainly be a sham, so I may as well ignore it and do as I please.”43 Third, such theories distract people from recognizing, and then working to reinforce, the real foundations of morality: not an imaginary theoretical insight of some sort, but a set of causal mechanisms that inculcate and support the moral sentiments.44
(4) Accordingly, more constructively, Herder himself instead turns to discovering and promoting just such a set of causal mechanisms. In How Philosophy Can Become he mainly emphasizes certain forms of education45 and an emotive type of preaching.46 These are both activities that he later went on to theorize about at greater length—for example, education in his Travel Journal (1769) and preaching in the Theological Letters (1780–1), especially Letter 38—and which he would also spend a lifetime practicing. But these are only two parts of a considerably broader theory and practice of moral pedagogy, or cultivating the moral sentiments, that he eventually developed over the course of his career, in what became one of his most central, distinctive, and consuming projects. The additional causal mechanisms that he identified and actively supported included the influence of morally exemplary individuals (or role models), the law, and literature (together with the other arts). His development of this whole theory and practice of moral pedagogy was lifelong and tireless. (We shall consider it in some more detail later.)
In sum, Herder’s basic approach to philosophy has deep roots in one that his teacher, the pre-critical Kant, had developed in the mid-1760s. But, unlike Kant himself, Herder always remained fundamentally faithful to it.
Herder also incurred several further important debts to the pre-critical Kant that would endure a lifetime, two of which are especially worth mentioning here. In his Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755) Kant had argued against Newton, who had held that while the laws of physics could explain the running of the solar system, its origin could only be explained in terms of a divine act of creation, that in fact not only its running but also its origin could be adequately explained in terms of the laws of physics; but Kant had also argued that the fact that the laws of physics held true at all itself required further explanation, and that God was indeed needed in order to explain this fact. Herder—who later praised Kant’s book explicitly near the beginning of the Ideas47—was deeply influenced by it from an early period, especially by its
43 See e.g. On the Cognition and Sensation
44 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 13–14, 26 = G1:115–17, 130. Cf. This Too.
45 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 23–8 = G1:127–32.
46 How Philosophy Can Become, HPW, pp. 14, 26 = G1:116–17, 130.
47 Ideas, G6:21–2: Herder cites the book and says that it is “a text that has remained less well known than its content deserves.” Cf. God: Some Conversations, G4:733–8.
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But although a man may foolishly vote for a woman to be placed on the School Board or Board of Guardians merely because she is a woman, without knowing anything about her, I am not afraid that he will ever give her a well-paid post in his own business unless she is fit for it. Women who give their services for nothing are rarely told the truth; it will be a good thing for them when they receive, instead of flattery and thanks, criticism and payment.
I can only touch on one point more. I may be told that the effect of encouraging all girls, who display strength of character or intellectual power above the average, to make themselves pecuniarily independent, and to devote their energies to some special and definite occupation which will call forth their powers, will be to make them too absorbed or unwilling to enter upon marriage, and that the next generation must suffer from the strongest and most intellectual women holding aloof from wifehood and motherhood. Others, on the other hand, may say that their work will suffer, because the expectation of marriage will hinder them from doing their best. The latter objection will not, I think, be supported by those who are acquainted with the work of women graduates. There is much truth in the former one. Women who have been trained for a special work, and who like their work, either do not marry at all or marry comparatively late in life, and it may at first sight seem injurious to the race that this should be so. But I think this is a mistake. The men and women of the most marked individuality do not make the best husbands and wives, especially if they marry before they have become aware of their own character Although a theory prevails to the contrary, I believe that women come to intellectual maturity later than men. They have a magnificent power of self-deception, of persuading themselves that they think and believe the things which those they care for think and believe—they are so little encouraged to think for themselves that many a woman, married when but a girl, has later on discovered that she has a character of her own, hitherto unrevealed to herself and unsuspected by her husband. Marriage, as George Eliot has said, must be a relation of sympathy or of conquest. But such women, if sympathy has not really existed between them and their husbands, are never conquered; they may be slaves or rebels, but never loyal subjects; and history is full of
records of the disastrous early marriages of clever women. On the other hand, Hannah More, Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, Joanna Baillie, Caroline Herschell, Harriet Martineau, all women of brilliant intellect, have left their mark on history as good and happy women; and we can all of us give a long list of such bright and contented lives from the unmarried women of our own acquaintance who have found their vocation. If they have missed the best in life, they have always been true to themselves. The economic independence of women is as necessary to men’s happiness as to women’s. Their true interests can never be opposed or antagonistic, however much those of an individual man and woman may be. There is no hardship to women in working for a living; the hardship lies in not getting a living when they work for it. And the great temptation from which all women should most earnestly strive to be freed is that which presents itself to so many at one time or another—the temptation to accept marriage as a means of livelihood and an escape from poverty. And if men would escape the degradation of being accepted by a woman in such a spirit, they should be anxious to do all in their power to make women free, to remove all obstructions raised by prejudice; and when a woman can do anything worth doing, “to give her of the fruit of her hands and to let her own works praise her in the gates.”
PROSPECTS OF MARRIAGE FOR WOMEN.
April, 1892.
A century has passed since Mary Wollstonecraft published her “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” and Maria Edgeworth, with greater tact and knowledge of the world, pleaded for the higher education of women in her “Letters to Literary Ladies.” Whatever views we may hold as to the change, there can be no doubt that the modes of thought and of life of women in all classes have altered considerably, for good or for evil, in the last hundred years. It is, however, possible to exaggerate the change, and to be mistaken both as to its causes and its resulting tendencies; and now that there are signs of a new departure, it may be as well to take stock and consider how we stand at present.
First and foremost the question presents itself, How do women stand now with regard to that all-absorbing occupation obtained through marriage? Their position in industry is so vitally affected by their attitude towards marriage, and by the attitude of those around them, they are so constantly called upon to balance an industrial gain with social loss, that before all things it is necessary to see on what the expectation of marriage is grounded and the effect produced by it on efficiency and wages. After marriage we should estimate not so much the effect of marriage on industrial position, but rather the effect of industry on domestic life.
In calculating the possibilities of marriage on a statistical basis, the method is frequently adopted of subtracting all the widows from the population and pointing out that in the remainder (the widowers not being subtracted) there is a slight surplus of men; the moral is drawn that every woman can get married if she will only make herself agreeable, and not be too particular Putting aside the practical objection that all men are not able to support a wife, and the sentimental one that numerical equality does not guarantee mutual attraction, this method of calculation ignores several important facts. One of these is the preference that men feel for women younger than themselves as wives and that women feel for men older than themselves as husbands. Granted an equal number of males and females between the ages of eighteen and thirty, we have not therefore in English society an equal number of marriageable men and women. Wherever rather late marriage is the rule with men—that is, wherever there is a high standard of comfort—the disproportion is correspondingly great. In a district where boy-and-girl marriages are very common, everybody can be married and be more or less miserable ever after; but in the upper middle class equality in numbers at certain ages implies a surplus of marriageable women over marriageable men. Nor do equal numbers at the same age imply equal numbers in the same locality Women’s work and men’s work cannot always be found in equal proportions in the same district; and class habits may affect the stream of migration differently The daughters of workingmen go out to service or emigrate, while the daughters of well-to-do people stay at home; while, on the other hand, the percentage of sons of professional men who go to the colonies or to India is probably much greater than the percentage of sons of working-men. There is a probability, therefore, that the sexes will be distributed unequally in different districts and also in different classes of society.
1881.—Number of Females to every 100 Males in
Kensington. Hackney. Islington. L . St Pancras. Shoreditch. Bethnal Green. Whitechapel.
[1] I have made no attempt to estimate the error introduced into the Census by falsehood
Taking the Census returns for 1881, and comparing England and Wales with London, we find that, whereas in the former there were 105 females to 100 males, in the latter there were 112 females to 100 males. Here at once we have a marked local difference, and if we take special districts of London and compare them with each other we shall find a greater disparity
According to Mr Charles Booth’s classification in “Labour and Life,”[2] Kensington has 30·4 per cent. of middle and upper class people (classes G. and H.), Hackney 24·2, Islington 20·9, London 17·8, Pancras 15·2. The percentage of these classes in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, and Whitechapel is too small to be taken into account, but Shoreditch has 59·8 per cent. “in comfort,” while Bethnal Green has 55·4. The order of these districts is, therefore, exactly the same whether we arrange them according to preponderance of females over males, or according to well-being. Whitechapel is set apart from the rest, most probably by the peculiar effects of the Jewish immigration. Putting aside for the moment the question whether the preponderance is entirely due to the servant class, there can be little doubt that it is connected with the servant-keeping classes. Between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five the merely migrant portion of the community seem to have disappeared, large numbers of shop-assistants, domestic servants, etc., having married and settled down amongst their own class. Between these ages but a small percentage of unmarried people marry; they are, or should be, in the prime of life, and for several reasons it is a period to notice, especially in estimating the proportion of men or women who remain unmarried.
[2] For brevity I use the letters assigned by Mr. Booth to the various classes, with the signification he has attached to them, viz : Poor
A. The lowest class of occasional labourers, loafers and semi-criminals.
B Casual earnings
C Intermittent earnings
D Small regular earnings
In Comfort
E. Regular standard earnings.
F Higher-class labour
G Lower middle class
H Upper middle class, etc
It is difficult to decide whether we should compare the number of unmarried women with the number of married women only, or with the number of married women and widows. If our object is to find the percentage of women who marry, widows should be included with married women; if we wish to estimate the number of women who may have to support themselves, a large number of widows should be added to the number of spinsters. Except for the age period from 35 to 45, widows are not considered here at all.[3]
[3] No allowance has been made for false returns as to civil condition Men in the wealthier districts who return themselves as single, although supporting women in another class, should be regarded as married; but the women themselves for the present purpose are rightly treated as married or widowed in accordance with their Census returns
1881.—Unmarried Women to 100 Married Women.
England & Wales Kensington. Hackney. Islington. L . St. Pancras. Shoreditch. Bethnal Green.
In this table, which deals with women only, Whitechapel would take its right place between St. Pancras and Shoreditch, as in Mr Booth’s classification, indicating that the abnormal figures in the other table are due to a preponderance of male immigrants over female immigrants of a race which prevents inter-marriage with the English population. England and Wales takes its place, so far as the ratio at the age of 35 to 45 is concerned, after St. Pancras, from which the inference may be drawn that London either possesses a larger percentage of the servant-keeping classes, or that these classes employ more servants than is the case in England and Wales. Both the tables show that we are right in selecting the age-period 35-45, when men and women have left off marrying, and have not begun dying, for special study in connection with industry or marriage.
In all England and Wales, then, the proportion of women who may be expected to remain unmarried is, roughly speaking, one in six; in London it is one in five. The important question arises, Are these chances equally distributed? On the face of it, it would seem not; but people readily point out that the greater ratio of middle-aged spinsters in Kensington, Hackney, and Islington, as compared with Shoreditch or Bethnal Green, is easily explained by the number of servants who naturally, if unmarried at this age, congregate in the richer districts, but would, if distributed among the working-class districts, make the ratios fairly equal. The explanation sounds so plausible, that, were it not that experience has convinced me that in the educated middle class there is a surplus of women over men above the average, I should have accepted it without further inquiry. But by a study of the Census for 1861 (in many respects an ideal one so far as the tabulation of facts is concerned) and of the unpublished official returns of 1881 for Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Hackney, and Kensington, I find that, supposing all the middle-aged indoor domestic servants to be single, they nevertheless are not more than one-third
Whitechapel.
of the single women in each district. Of the outdoor domestic servants, such as charwomen, the percentage under 25 years of age is so very small that it may fairly be assumed that the great majority are married women or widows, and that the exceptions to this rule will be balanced by the exceptions to the rule that the middle-aged indoor domestic servants are single women. Shoreditch and Bethnal Green (with almost exactly equal populations) give us together a ratio of 11·6 unmarried women between 35 and 45 to 100 married women at that age as the normal for a working-class district without any upper middle class. Kensington (including Paddington), with a population of 270,000, contains 70 per cent. of working-class inhabitants; the surplus women, whether servants or otherwise, are to be found in the houses of the 30 per cent. of middle and upper-class inhabitants. Roughly speaking, then, to every 70 working-class married women in Kensington we may assign 8 unmarried women, and to the remaining 30 married women between 35 and 45 years of age we must assign 54 unmarried women. To every 76 workingclass married women in Hackney we may assign 9 unmarried women at this age-period, leaving 18 unmarried women to the remaining 24 married women. One-third of these being domestic servants, if we subtract them, we have left in Kensington in Classes G and H 36 unmarried women to 30 married women, and in Hackney 12 unmarried women to 24 married women. It follows, therefore, that in Kensington, excluding domestic servants, more than 50 per cent. of the women between 35 and 45 in the servant-keeping classes are unmarried, while in Hackney about 33 per cent. of the same class are unmarried.
The servant-keeping classes, as I have described the groups that Mr Booth has called Classes G and H, include everyone with an income of £150 a year and upwards, and, were statistics available, it might perhaps be shown that the unmarried women are, to a large extent, the daughters of clerks and professional men. The tradesman class do not find it nearly so difficult to provide for their sons and set them up in business as is the case in the salaried class; and it is an advantage from an industrial point of view for tradesmen to have wives who can help them in various ways. Emigration is probably more frequent in the salaried class; and where the sons are obliged to emigrate, it frequently happens that the daughters have to work for their living. In this class I believe the inequality of the sexes is greatest, and the probability of marriage least. In this class, therefore, the importance of an industrial training which shall enable women to earn a competency through all the active years of their life, which shall enable them to remain efficient workers and to provide for old age, is greater than in any other
As my object is not to point out how marriageable women may get married, but to show that a considerable number of women must remain unmarried, a table showing the inequality of numbers of the unmarried of both sexes in different districts in London is given. The districts are arranged in the order of poverty as calculated in 1889; the figures are from the Census of 1881.
Unmarried Women 35-45 to every 100 Unmarried Men 35-45.
[4] The common lodging-houses in St Giles’, the Woolwich Arsenal, the Inns of Court and hotels in the Strand, and the Knightsbridge Barracks in St George’s, Hanover Square, may help to explain these exceptions to the rule
As only one-third of these unmarried women are domestic servants, even if we suppose that all the unmarried men belong to Classes G and H, there are obviously not enough men for all the women to be able to marry Such being the case, we can afford to dispense with mutual recrimination. The women who find it less dishonouring to enter the labour market than an overstocked marriage market are taking the more womanly course in putting aside all thought of marriage. The men who remain unmarried are perhaps in the position of Captain Macheath, overwhelmed by an embarras de richesses, and should be forgiven if they fear to make a choice of one which may seem to cast disparagement on so many others of equal merit.
These statistics have been called startling and alarming. They may be startling to men, but can hardly be so to women of the upper class, and I fail to see why they should alarm anyone. If all these spinsters had to be shut up in convents the outlook would be gloomy But as things are, if only we can secure good pay and decent conditions of life, the lot of all women may be immensely improved by this compact band of single women. It would be difficult to overrate the industrial effect of a number of well-instructed, healthy-minded, vigorous permanent spinsters. A man’s work is not interrupted but rather intensified by marriage; but in the case of women, not only is the wages question very much affected by the expectation of marriage, but much organised effort on their part, whether for improvement of wages or for provision against sickness and old age, must be wasted unless there be a considerable number of single women to give continuity to the management of their associations. Mr. Llewellyn Smith has pointed out that, as mobility of labour increases, actual movement may, other things remaining the same, diminish; and so also I should be inclined to say that it is not marriage that is such a disturbing element in the women’s wages question so much as the expectation of or desire for marriage. In the middle classes, where it is impossible to earn a sufficient income without a long training and years of practical apprenticeship, nothing is so injurious to women’s industrial position as this ungrounded expectation of marriage, which prevents them from making themselves efficient when young, and makes them disappointed, weary, and old when their mental and physical powers should be in their prime.
With this profession of faith in the absolute necessity for the existence of single women I pass on to a brief review of the position of working women, considered in three groups, taking first of all those who belong to the classes whom Mr. Booth describes as “poor.” ClassesA, B, C, and D, who are 30·7 per cent. of the population of London; then the well-to-do artisans in Classes E and F, who are 51·5 per cent., and lastly the so-called middle and upper classes, who are 17·8 per cent., of London, and should therefore be designated the upper classes.
From the first of these groups are drawn the lower grades of factory girls in East London, who form the majority of match-girls, rope-makers, jam and sweetstuff-makers, and a considerable proportion of the box, brush, and cigar-makers, as well as of the less skilled tailoresses. The children when they leave school do not all go to work at once, but relieve their mothers or elder sisters of the charge of the ubiquitous baby, enabling the former nurse to go to the factory. They stagger about with their charges, or plant them securely on the coldest stone step they can find, and discuss with each other or with nursing mothers in their narrow street the births, deaths, marriages, misfortunes, and peculiarities of their neighbours. Their families live in one or, at most, two rooms, and their knowledge of life is such as to render Bowdlerised versions of our authors quite unnecessary Sometimes the children take “a little place” as servant-girl, going home at night, but eventually, and generally before they are fifteen, they find their way to the factory. By the time they are one-and-twenty at least a quarter of them have babies of their own to look after; during the next five years the rest, with but few exceptions, get married or enter into some less binding union. To show that I do not exaggerate the proportion of girl marriages in this class, I give a table of the number of girls married under 21 years of age in every 100 marriages that took place in the seven years from 1878 to 1884. The percentage has been calculated for each year, and the mean of the percentage is given.
Girls Married under 21 years of age in every 100 Marriages 1878-1884.
As girl marriages are more common among the poorer half of East London, and as, unfortunately, in a large number of cases, the legal ceremony only takes place, if it takes place at all, in time to legitimise the offspring of the union, it is obvious that girl marriage is extremely common in the class of which I am speaking. When the husband earns regular wages, even though they may be small, the wife does not as a rule go to the factory, nor even take work out to do at home, for the first few years of her married life. But many factory girls return to work the day after they are married, and those who leave it for several years often return as soon as one of the children is old enough to leave school. Married labour is, of course, irregular labour, and many employers discourage it as much as possible. But it is most to be deprecated on account of the effect on the children. It is unfortunate that the Census returns, as at present tabulated, give us no means of estimating the extent of the evil. We do not need to know whether men engaged in different occupations are married or single; but there is no fact of more importance with regard to female labour, and the value of such a return would more than balance the expense. The factories where the work cannot be given out (as is the case in match, jam, and cigar factories) contain the largest percentage of married women; and if called upon to choose the less of two evils, married labour in the factory and home work, I should unhesitatingly decide in favour of home work, which, if well organised, need not even be an evil.
The great need of this class is training for domestic life—by which I do not mean domestic service. Herein lies the only effective cure for the industrial and social miseries of the poor The children are overworked, or else allowed to spend their time in a most dangerous idleness. That men should ask for an Eight Hours Bill when little girls of thirteen or fourteen may be found in our factories working ten hours seems unwise, if not selfish. Ten hours in a factory is not so wearing to a child as eight hours in school would be, but it is far too long. It makes education impossible, and leaves no room for surprise that married women in the poorest classes sink into a condition hardly above animalism. The two things which struck me most in East London were the amount of wasted intelligence and talent among the girls and the wretchedness of the married women. A secondary education in cooking, cleaning, baby management, laws of health, and English literature, should follow that of the Board School, and the minimum age at which full 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 morning or 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 girls, our tailoresses, domestic servants, and a large number of our dressmakers and milliners, shopassistants, barmaids, clerks, and elementary teachers. A considerable number of dressmakers, 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 importance than the working women of the first group. Their work is skilled and requires an apprenticeship. They are in the majority of cases 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. Of the three million and a half women and girls who were returned as occupied in industry in 1881 in England and Wales, over one-third were domestic indoor servants, 358,000 were dressmakers, milliners, or stay-makers; midwifery and subordinate medical service, charing, washing and bathing service, hospitals and institutions, shirt-making and sewing employed another 400,000. The textile trades employed altogether only 590,624 women and girls, and of these over 300,000 were in the cotton trade. Their aggregation in large factories and in special localities has attracted to them an undue amount of attention, and the history of industry in Lancashire is often given as the history of industry in England, whereas no other county is less typical.
In London in 1881 the number of women and girls occupied in industry was 593,226. Of these, more than 40 per cent. were indoor domestic servants, more than 12 per cent. were engaged in charing, washing and bathing service and hospital and institution service, 16 per cent. in dressmaking, millinery, stay-making, shirt-making and needlework; and of the remaining miscellaneous trades a large proportion are purely women’s trades; even in those where men are employed women and girls are rarely to be found doing the same work as men. Of domestic servants and charwomen there is no need to speak here. Of the laundresses a considerable proportion belong to the first group already discussed, but the ironers generally belong to the second group. An inquiry into their position with regard to wages, hours and sanitary conditions of work is about to be made, and the proposal to bring them under the Factory Acts cannot be considered until the results have been given us. Of the wages and hours of work of dressmakers and shop-assistants surprisingly little information is at present available. But one fact is too common to be denied: these girls accept wages which would not be enough to support them if they had not friends to help them; and they endure hard work, long hours, and close rooms because they believe that they are only filling up a brief interval before marriage. The better off their parents may be, the less heed do they give to securing anything but pocket-money wages. These girls are constantly coming in contact with the rich, and have ever before their eyes the luxury and comfort of those who have money without working for it. They are taught to think much about dress and personal appearance, and are exposed to temptations never offered to the less attractive factory girls. They have naturally a higher standard of living, their parents cannot be relied upon to help them after the first few years, and, failing marriage, the future looks intensely dreary to them. There would be little harm in the high standard of comfort of single men in the middle and upper classes which makes them regard marriage as involving self-denial, if working
women all along the line were also earning enough to make them regard it in the same light. In a class more than any other liable to receive proposals of a dishonouring union, which may free them from badly paid drudgery, the greatest effort should be made to secure good wages. Combination is nowhere so much needed, and perhaps is nowhere so unpopular And yet the difficulties of foreign competition which make attempts to raise wages among factory girls so unsafe, and which make it most undesirable for outsiders, ignorant of trade circumstances, to spread the “doctrine of divine discontent,” are entirely absent here; skilled hands are not so plentiful that they could easily be replaced, and the girls, if assisted by their friends, could well afford to bide their time quietly at home until they had secured good terms.
There is no hard-and-fast line separating any group of workers from another If social distinctions divide population into horizontal sections, industry cuts through these sections vertically. Class G., or the lower middle class, enter the upper branches of the industries to which I have referred. The girls here do not enter the factories or become domestic servants to any extent worth considering. They form the majority of the shop-assistants in the West End and the richer suburbs, and more than any other class supply the elementary schools with teachers. It is as teachers, and also as Civil Service clerks, that they join the upper middle class, including under that term the professional, manufacturing, and trading classes. In treating of this third group of working women I shall confine myself entirely to the position of women in class H., partly because my experience as a high-school teacher has brought me into special relations with girls and women of that class who have to earn their living, and partly because their unconscious even more than conscious influence on the habits and ideals of the girls in the lower middle class is very great.
In every class but class H. the girls can, if they choose, enter industries conducted by employers with a view to profit. In the section of the factory class where the girls are obliged to be self-supporting there is a point below which wages cannot fall for any considerable period; there is a point above which it would not pay the employers to employ them. The standard of living is, unfortunately, a very low one, and the wages are low; but single women in this class can support themselves so long as they are in work. In the second group there is again a maximum height to which wages might be pushed by combination; so long as it is profitable to employ them they will be employed, however high the wages demanded may be. But the minimum wage is not equivalent to the cost of living, but is rather determined by the cost of living minus the cost of house-room and part of the cost of food. In class H. women are not employed to produce commodities which have a definite market value, and have therefore no means of measuring their utility by market price. They nearly all perform services for persons who pay them out of fixed 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 education partly given them by the parents of the assistant mistresses and governesses whom they employ As a proof of this, I give a few particulars about the salaries and cost of living of the only section of educated working women in which some kind of order reigns—assistant 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 attainment 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 school-girls, that they must eventually earn their own living if they do not wish to spend their youth in maintaining a shabby appearance 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 expectations of a legacy They are women whose standard is high enough for them to be able to spend £200 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 assistant mistresses in high schools. The critics of the report believe that the poorest paid teachers did not give in returns, and that the report gave too favourable an impression of the state of affairs. The number who gave information was 278. The return for the hours of work did not include the time spent in preparation of lessons and study, both of course absolutely necessary for a good teacher.
Summing up the results, we may say that, of the teachers who joined their present school more than two years ago, one-fourth are at present receiving an average salary of £82 for an average week’s work (the average including very large variations) of thirty-two hours; half (25 per cent. of whom possess University degrees) are receiving an average salary of £118 for a week’s work of about thirty-five hours; and one-fourth (50 per cent. of whom are University graduates) are receiving an average salary of £160 in exchange for a week’s work of thirty-six to thirty-seven hours. These results do not appear unsatisfactory, but it must be remembered that under the phrase more than two years is covered a length of service extending in one case to as many as seventeen years, and of which the average must be taken as very nearly six. Many also of these teachers have had considerable experience in other schools before entering the ones in which they are at present engaged The condition of the teaching profession as a career for educated women may be summed up according to these averages, by saying that a teacher of average qualifications, who a few years ago obtained a footing in a high-class school, and has continued working in the same school for six years, at the end of this time is hypothetically earning a salary of £118 a year by thirty-five hours’ work a week for thirty-nine weeks in the year, or slightly over 1s. 8d. an hour A result obtained from so many averages is, of course, entirely valueless as a guidance to any individual teacher, but affords a certain index to the pecuniary position of the profession as a whole.
The prospects of the assistant mistress as she approaches middle age may be judged from the particulars of twenty-four instances in which a change of work had been attended by a fall of income.
Three of these changes may be at once struck out as changes from the post of private governess, and three others do not lend themselves to easy comparison, because of great differences in the hours of work. Of the remaining eighteen teachers, five have now attained a higher salary than that formerly paid them, four have exactly regained their old income, while nine are still in receipt of a lower salary than that paid them at their last school. These figures point to a precariousness in the position of teachers which has to be seriously taken into account in estimating the prospects of the profession.
But there are many people who, like a certain clergyman’s wife, think that girls are getting “uppish nowadays” when they hear that after three years at Girton and two years’ experience in
teaching, an assistant mistress refuses less than £120 a year. There are thousands of mothers like one who wanted a lady graduate as daily governess for her boys “quite regardless of expense,” and who was even willing to pay £30 a year! Wealthy residents of Notting Hill and Kensington send their children to high schools whose managers dare not ask more than a maximum fee of £15 a year. For their enlightenment I give the tables of cost of living compiled by Mr Alfred Pollard with the aid of experts. Arithmeticians may amuse themselves with calculating in how many years a teacher, twenty-six years of age, with a salary of £120, may, by saving £16 a year, secure an annuity of £70 a year; and may then attack the more interesting problem of the probabilities of any school retaining her in its employment for that length of time.
Cost of Living.
Board and lodging during term, say 40 weeks
Half-rent during holiday
Railway and other expenses for six weeks of holiday with friends
Six weeks of holidays at own expense
Petty cash for omnibuses, amusements, presents, charities, etc etc
It will be observed that these teachers are even here supposed to have friends who will put up with them for six weeks. And attention may be especially called to the magnificent sum that can be set apart for educational books and lectures. Frivolous books, such as the works of Walter Scott, Thackeray, George Eliot, George Meredith, Browning, R. L. Stevenson, must be presented by friends or borrowed in all their grime and dirt from a free library.
If this is the position of a favoured thousand, the position of the rest may be inferred. Of the whole number, however, a considerable proportion are teachers in elementary schools, and do not come from Class H. I have no means of separating the two. Imagination may be stimulated by perusing the employment columns of such a paper as The Lady, where advertisements appear for governesses at unconscionably low salaries, reaching occasionally to almost a minus quantity when some more than ordinarily audacious matron offers a comfortable home to a governess in return for the education of her children and twelve shillings a week.
Are girls worth educating? Apparently not, as their parents do not think them worth paying for The expectation that marriage will in a few years after a girl leaves school solve all difficulties and provide for her is at the root of all the confusion. Fathers who know they can make no provision for their daughters make no attempt to train them for really lucrative employment, because they think the money will be thrown away if their daughters marry; they let them work full time for half or less than half the cost of living, out of a mistaken kindness, of which employers get all the benefit. The girls in many cases accept low salaries under the same impression, in others because they are not strong enough to hold out where so many are willing to undersell them. Those who only take up employment as a stopgap until marriage never become really efficient, and when later on they find that there is no prospect of release, they become positively
inefficient. Those who have faced facts from the first can throw their whole heart into their work, but they are heavily handicapped in their efforts towards progress by the bad pay which is the result of the thoughtlessness and folly of those around them. If only the relatives of these girls could realise that at least one-half of them will never be married, and that of the others many will not marry for several years after leaving school, that there is no means of predicting which of them will be married, and that any of them may have to support, not only themselves all their lives, but a nurse as well in old age, the tangle would soon be unravelled. Two things only I would venture to suggest: one, that instead of supplementing salaries and so lowering them, parents should help their daughters to hold out for salaries sufficient to support them, should assist them in making themselves more efficient, and should help them to make provision for themselves in later life, instead of making self-support impossible; the other, that manufacturers and business men should train their daughters as they train their sons. The better organisation of labour should open a wide field for women, if they will only consent to go through the routine drudgery and hardship that men have to undergo. An educated girl who goes from the high school to the technological college will find full scope for any talents she may possess. As designer, chemist, or foreign correspondent in her father’s factory she could be more helpful and trustworthy than anyone not so closely interested in his success. As forewoman in any factory, if she understood her work, she would be far superior to the uneducated man or woman, and some of the worst abuses in our factory system would be swept away
If anyone objects that women who are intensely interested in work which also enables them to be self-supporting are less attractive than they would otherwise be, I can make no reply except that to expect a hundred women to devote their energies to attracting fifty men seems slightly ridiculous. If the counter-argument be put forward that women, able to support themselves in comfort, and happy in their work, will disdain marriage, then those who take this view are maintaining, not only that it is not true that Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart; ’Tis woman’s whole existence. but also that marriage has naturally very much less attraction for women than for men.
THE EXPENDITURE OF MIDDLE CLASS WORKING WOMEN.
December, 1898.
In making an appeal to middle class working women to keep and utilise their accounts of expenditure, some little explanation is necessary of the ends to be furthered by such tedious labour. For the keeping of such accounts is to most people a weariness and a vexation. One friend of mine declines to make the attempt because it makes her miserable to have the smallness of her income and the gloominess of the future brought before her mind with such regularity. Another after six months’ trial has suffered a relapse because keeping the account spoilt all the pleasure of spending. Many are afraid that moralists will denounce their expenditure as misdirected and extravagant, and, although living within their income, prefer to remain uncertain as to the amount they spend on what others may regard as mere vanities.
There are two questions which every woman who may have to be self-supporting should ask herself:—
(1) Is the salary which I am efficient enough to earn sufficient to maintain that efficiency for a considerable number of years?
(2) In middle age, when I may be entirely dependent on my own exertions, shall I be more, or shall I be less, competent to earn a salary sufficient to maintain the standard of living to which I have been accustomed?
The cost of efficiency is higher than the cost of living, a fact which is not sufficiently recognised by the middle class working woman or by her employers. The habits of domestic life which make it incumbent on women to make the best of a fixed income cling to them as wage-earners. They do not sufficiently realise that the drain on their vitality, effected by their daily routine of continuous and often
monotonous exertion, must be met by fresh streams of energy which can only be produced under present conditions by deliberate search for recreation and by a greater expenditure of money than a purely domestic life demands.
Some curious results of the movement in favour of securing economic independence for women may be observed at the present time. The theory has of course in many cases been reduced in its application to an absurdity. Parents who thirty years ago would have expected all their daughters to stay at home until they were married, now with equal unwisdom wish them to pass from the school to the office, regardless of their natural bent, and as careless of their future prospects as before. Girls fitted by Nature for a home life, and for nothing else, lose their brightness and vitality in sedentary drudgery, losing at the same time all prospect of an escape from it.
So also from a system under which the womenkind were expected to devote their evenings entirely to smoothing away the wrinkles and dispelling the bad tempers of their fathers and brothers after their harassing day’s work, we have suddenly passed to one under which all the daughters may come home equally cross and equally tired, with no hope that others will do their repairs for them, whether of temper or of clothes.
But there are well-to-do families where the competent mother has no desire to hand over her duties to her daughters, and where their happiness is still the chief consideration. Here girls are allowed to earn—not their living—but an income by which they may relieve their parents of some of their cost of living and at the same time live at a greater cost. From both a social and an economic point of view there is much to be said for this plan, provided both parents and daughters realise that the latter have not, under this system, achieved economic independence, or the power to be economically independent. The girl who earns £100 a year by her work and receives another £100 a year in one form or another from her father is in all probability underselling no one; and indeed, in the consciousness that she is only being paid half her cost of living, may even, by her liberal views of what is a good salary, be inciting her less luxurious colleagues to raise their standard of living and
remuneration. But if her work is not of a kind that gives training and power to pass on to higher paid posts, the woman worker in middle life will be in almost as unhappy a position if obliged to be selfsupporting as the helpless women who thirty years ago used to advertise for posts as companions or governesses, stating as their only recommendation that they had never expected to have to perform the duties of either situation.
Women never will and never can become highly efficient and continue so for any long period on the salaries which they at present receive, or even on the salaries with which, as a rule, they would be contented if they could get them. Vitality and freshness of mind, when youth is gone, cannot be maintained within the four walls of the class room or office, on incomes too small to admit of varied social intercourse, or of practical beneficence. Without the latter power the middle-aged unmarried woman can feel that she has small claim to live, and, in such a case, if her daily work does not in itself call for its exercise, she has little desire to.
What is our standard of living, then? and how much more will it cost us to maintain that standard when the whole effort to maintain it falls upon ourselves? To answer these questions we must have definite accounts of expenditure.
The samples that I have to give are all more or less imperfect as regards their form of presentation. The teaching profession is the one from which naturally it will be easiest to obtain returns. Recruited as it is from every rank of life except the aristocracy, and charged with the training for every rank of life—except, again, the aristocracy, who owe little of their education to their governesses—it should present to us through its accounts a corresponding variety of standard of living. It should do so; but I venture to predict that it will not.
My first three budgets were given to me several years ago. They give the expenditure of three assistant mistresses teaching in high schools and boarding during term time in private houses. No. 1 gives the expenditure for one year; No. 2 the expenditure for two successive years; No. 3 the average expenditure for six years. Side
by side with them I place the budget for one year of another high school mistress (No. 4) living in lodgings—which I give afterwards in greater detail.
T I.
Accounts of Expenditure of three High School Mistresses boarding in Private Houses, and of one High School Mistress in Furnished Lodgings.
A S
[5] Included in “Miscellaneous ”
These tables are not so readily comparable as they should be for scientific exactness. The items included under “Travelling” and “Holidays” need to be enumerated. Under the latter head, for instance, are board and lodging included and are railway fares subtracted and placed under “Travelling”? As a fact No. 1 and No. 2 include under “Board and Lodging” only the cost incurred during the school terms; under the head of “Travelling” is only counted the cost of going to school from home and their daily travelling expenses during the school term. The money put down under “Holidays” includes their expenses for the part of their holidays during which they were not at home. The same is, I believe, true in the case of No. 3, but I do not know for what length of time any of them were subsidised by this free board and lodging at home.
On the other hand, No. 4’s accounts are so summarised that the cost of “Holidays” disappears altogether, being broken up into its constituents of board, lodging, travelling fares and amusements. The confusion in this case is remedied in the following detailed table supplied by No. 4.
T II.
Accounts of Expenditure of a High School Mistress (No. 4) in Furnished Lodgings.
A S
During School Year (39 weeks). During Holidays (13 weeks).
during year.
The social outlook of a working woman is very largely determined by the amount she can afford to spend on dress, and her view of life is perhaps most clearly indicated in the consideration of this item of expenditure. And no accounts of expenditure are of much value without some accompanying expression of the spender’s contentment or dissatisfaction with the results of her expenditure. In reply to my question on the subject of dress, No. 2 informs me that £16 a year was quite enough for her dress:—
“My dresses were always made by a dressmaker, not at home; as we lived in a country town, her charges for making were inexpensive as such things go; I don’t think that with linings and small etceteras (not of course trimmings) they ever exceeded 15s. I cannot say that I was well dressed, but I don’t think that I was exactly badly dressed. I
