The education and employment of women / by Josephine E. Butler.

  • Butler, Josephine Elizabeth Grey, 1828-1906.
Date:
1868
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The education and employment of women / by Josephine E. Butler. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    ness, but by their low pay. One newspaper still scoffs at the desire of women to be self-supporting: but starvation is a sufficient answer to sneers. As a favourable symptom of the last fewr years, I may add that 1822 women are returned as employed by the Post-office. 218 women are returned as telegraph-clerks. It is instructive to note the -way in which the salary of these women telegraph-clerks has fallen. When the telegraph companies were first formed, the pay of a female clerk was eight shillings a week, to be increased by a shilling yearly, until it reached fourteen shillings a week. So great, however, has been the competition of women for these situa- tions, that the pay has been reduced to five shillings a -week, a sum on which a woman can scarcely live unassisted. In France the women telegraph-clerks have met with a worse fate. The government took the management of the telegraphs, and dismissed the women, because they had no votes to bestow on the government candidates. The exclusion of women from the suffrage has been called a harmless injustice ; but there is no injustice which is not liable to become an injury. At present the principal employments open to women are teaching, domestic service, and sewing. I come to consider the remuneration of the highest profession open to women. In 1801 there were 80,017 female teachers in England, of whom the majority were governesses in private families. It is difficult to ascertain the average salary of governesses, because the Governesses’ Institutions in London and Manchester, which are the chief sources of information on the subject, refuse to register the applications of governesses who accept salaries of less than £25 a year. The number of this lowest class may be guessed from the fact that for a situation as nursery gover- ness, with a salary of .£29 a year, advertised in a newspaper, there were five hundred applicants ; as I have already stated, three hundred applied for a similar place with no salary at all. To return to the higher class. The register of the last six