Essays on Woman's Work.

 By BESSIE RAYNER PARKES.

REVIEW.

The sex is to the front. The amount of attention that has been given during the last year or two to the rights and wrongs of woman is sufficient to give a character for gallantry to an entire century. In no other questions of social progress—in scarcely any other questions of scientific interest has the stride which the public mind has taken been more marked than in its speculations on the use and destiny of the feminine gender. In Victoria, indeed, the principles in discussion can hardly be said to have attracted attention. The philosophers of Victoria are at present too concerned with the fate of the boys to trouble themselves very much with inferior considerations. The philanthropy of Mr. Jenner has not yet reached to the girls, probably because the political economy of the Jenner school was not originally designed for the accommodation of so comparatively unimportant a producing interest. But in those less enlightened portions of the globe, which the Jennerian doctrines do not illumine, there is every prospect of the unprotected female's claims to protection receiving a tangible recognition. The old wall of partition that prejudice and social tradition had built up between the sexes, is gradually giving way before the advancing tide of new ideas and new theories on their relative interests and aspirations. A woman is no longer looked upon as a creature of another sphere from a man, to whom it would be a sin to attribute the same tastes and motives as a man, and who would be unsexed by the mere suspicion of taking a pleasure in man's pursuits. Women write books, women preach, women astronomise, women circumnavigate the globe, women practise physic, and how is it possible, in the presence of such evidence, to ignore her claims? If women themselves thus show that they can be useful as well as ornamental members of society— that they can combine the study of political economy with the most successful cultivation of domestic economy— that they can investigate the secrets of an eclipse as well as the laws of a plum-pudding—that human anatomy can be made as familiar to them as the anatomy of a leg of mutton— that they can, in fact, be politicians, naturalists, and doctors, without any prejudice to the popular view of their duties as housewives—if they demonstrate all this, how is it possible to deny that they have made out a case for themselves? Progress has given to an ordinary schoolgirl of the present day advantages which were out of the reach of philosophers two centuries ago. Newton himself might take a lesson in physics from a young lady in her teens. The mechanical achievements of the age, the rapidity of intercommunication, the rapid interchange of ideas which is a consequence of it, the diffusion of wealth, are all so many improvements in the educational machinery of the world, and woman has benefited by them as well as man. Voluntarily, or involuntarily, unconsciously or spontaneously, they have helped to elevate her mind above the narrow sphere to which she was formerly restricted.

To a certain extent the industrial advancement of women has endowed them with some claim to political influence. The lower classes especially have become independent factors in society, at the same time that they have been transformed into active industrial units. They spin, they print, they make nails, they even work in coal mines ; and with their absorption into the industrial vortex of labour, they exercise all the privileges of labour. They write letters to the newspapers, they discuss the responsibilities of property, they placard the walls, they even go "out on strike."

It is the consequences of this remarkable change in the life and functions of women that Miss Parkes treats of in her thoughtful and suggestive book of essays. Some of those consequences, she maintains, must be bad. The social change must be productive of a great moral change. Woman, by her withdrawal from the field of domestic labour, and her intrusion into the world of manufactures, must become more or less a competitive animal, and must be exposed to all the trials and disadvantages of competition. She must, in fact, come within the operation of the ordinary laws of political economy, and the distinction which was hitherto made in her favour by the common consent of the other sex, must gradually be lost sight of. Descending to the ordinary level of labour, and participating in its earnings, she must take her share of its ordinary vicissitudes. Consenting or forced to provide for herself by her own skill and industry, her fellow-labourers will naturally leave her to her own devices. The economic consequence of this revolution in her fate, Miss Parkes foresees, must be attended with inconvenience, if not with positive distress. Applying the principle of supply and demand to her speculations, she apprehends for the woman who thus usurps the business of the man, want of employment. The market for labour, in her opinion, has been overstocked. Science is continually decreasing the demand of labour. The contrivances of science, the increase of mechanical aids, threaten to supersede the use of the hand. We use steam ranges in our kitchens, we convey water by pipes to the tops of our houses, we dispense with the use of coal in our grates by the introduction of gas—in fact, owing to the inventive tendencies of the age, we are in danger of dispensing with everything that requires household labour. By this means a quantity of labour is liberated and set adrift on the world, which cannot get employment. This is Miss Parkes's complaint, but, though reasonable, there is nothing new in it. The same grievance was advanced as an argument against the introduction of the steam-engine in all its applications; and the same answer may be replied to it. If one field of employment is narrowed, another will be opened up. The increase of the producing power means the increase of production, and the increase of production is tantamount to the increase of the national capital, or, in other words, of the wage fund of the nation. No doubt women must suffer as well as men by being thrown out of employment, but to women, as to men, there are the same means of redress open, the same chances of escape— emigration, or the transfer of their skill to another sphere of labour. It is the feminine middle classes that Miss Parkes is of opinion suffer most by the change that has come over society— the class from which society obtains its intellectual labourers, the governesses, the tradeswomen—what we may designate the professional bread-winners. Her observations on this score teach her that the fate of " educated destitution" is the problem which society has to solve. Her chapters on this part of her subject are interesting, though she cannot be said to supply any remedy for the evils she points out. One of the chief causes of the phenomenon she deplores, "the forlorn young woman of intellect," she traces back to the vicious construction of the families from which this class is principally recruited. Daughters, as compared with sons, labour under a political as well as social disability. Fathers make no provision for them. They give them no capital and no profession, but if they are attractive, they look to marriage to compensate them for their neglect of their pecuniary interests. In spite of statistics and blue books, and the scathing evidence of the social evil, they cling to the laissez-faire system, and bring them up with the conviction that an education in the globes and a tolerable proficiency in calisthenics are enough to secure them against the accidents of life. Though their own experience proves to them that women's ideas and women's functions have considerably changed, that in the course of civilization, women have been uplifted by the labours of men into a sphere where considerable cultivation and a total abnegation of household work have become a custom and an article of faith, parents make no corresponding provision for their children of occupation in the higher and more intellectual fields of work. It is against this cruel policy that the protest of Mrs Parkes is aimed. Unless some wise and active measures are taken to change the current of prejudice in this particular, the mischief to society she predicts will be enormous. Nothing short of redistributing the labour of women, of re-organising their duties, of bringing them up to a knowledge of their responsibilities, of making them " professional," in some form or other, will to her mind satisfy the exigencies of the age and woman's own interests :—

"And so I believe that, though the opening of new parts to educated women will be a very great economical benefit, I see plainly that we have great moral interests also at stake, which require to be jealously guarded, that we may not look to the political economy of the question only, but must take anxious care to build up the new theory in connexion with the old reverence for all that makes a woman estimable; in gaining somewhat, we must not lose more. Therefore let us call on Englishwomen of social station to impart to this movement just that element of moral repute which it will eminently require to insure it from failure; let them weigh well the precious material out of which working women are to be made, and not leave the introduction of educated girls into business to the chances of the business world alone. Almost everything depends on the moral tone communicated from the headquarters of each sphere of employment. Just as in the beginning of this century fiction was redeemed from its coarseness and absurdity by Sir Walter Scott and Miss Edgeworth, and a small contemporaneous knot of writers ; so the professions, art, and literature receive in every age the powerful stamp of a few leading minds. On the ten or twenty women in England who, during the next dozen years, may rise into eminence in any new sphere for their sex, will depend an incalculable amount of good or evil to our whole class of youthful educated workers. If such twenty maintain their position in all that is 'fair and lovely and of good report,' and if they be well supported by those of their own sex whose names are an assured guarantee to the whole kingdom ; if ladies who are exempt from the necessity of working will associate on terms of equality with ladies who are not, just as a baronet and a barrister are now for all conventional purposes of equal rank, then we shall see this 'new theory,' as its opposers like to call it, carried triumphantly over every rock and shoal. It will become a respectable and desirable thing for a woman to practise a profession or business, just as it has already become a respectable and a desirable thing for a woman to become a good poet, novelist, or artist,"

Argus (Melbourne, Vic. : 1848 - 1957), Monday 9 October 1865, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-page210444