It will perhaps come as little real surprise that the desire to control women occurred at times of panic and low financial confidence. It ought also to be recalled that there was a sense of impending change and disturbance in the air, and that the first intimations of revolution in France and America threatened the very existence of the state polity or “Old Corruption.” Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was itself an aspect of that fervour, which may explain why females were never more derided than in the latter decades of the eighteenth century. It was another method of urban control.
The women of nineteenth-century London were also marginalised and restricted. They were given roles, in other words, to which they were forced to adapt. The culture of the period is permeated by images of saint and sinner, angel and whore, pure and fallen, but this is only one aspect of a fixed network of expression. Fictional representations, for example, often concentrate upon the innocent fragility of milkmaids or flower-sellers treading the hard streets of the city; yet the obsessive interest in innocence, particularly in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, was based upon the understanding that it would be destroyed. When the narrator of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock meets the prepubescent girl, Little Nell, wandering through the streets of London he is filled with anxieties “of all possible harm that might happen to the child.” No Londoner reading this, in 1841, would have the least possible doubt that the most likely harm was that of being literally forced “upon the streets.” The trade in child prostitution was thriving. The city of that period had nurtured, if not created, that trade; we might say that it prospered upon it. So all the tears at the death of Little Nell, and all the pity and sympathy at the spectacle of transient innocence, were instigated by a context and by a city which the Victorians themselves created. They wept over young women who were being betrayed by the great metropolis, so in this depiction of innocence there is also a kind of necessary cruelty or hardness. Innocence has to be destroyed if the city itself is to survive and prosper.
London was the arena for “the battle of life” or “the struggle for life,” to use two characteristic Victorian expressions, and its women were not soldiers. That is why the role generally imposed upon the middle-class and non-working woman was that of the angel of the hearth, a domestic deity whose role as wife and mother was pre-eminent and inevitable. She tended her husband when he returned home from the battlefield, and protected her children from the depredations of the city. The London house became a zone of privacy and segregation. In Victorian homes the exterior world seems literally to be kept at bay by a whole artillery of protective forces; it was screened by thick curtains and by lace inner curtains, muffled by patterned wallpaper, held off by settees and ottomans and whatnots, mocked by wax fruit and wax candles, the metaphorical and literal darkness of London banished by lamps and chandeliers. This was the home of the feminine principle.
Those who were not protected from the life of the nineteenth-century city were obliged to work very hard in order to survive. They became part of the “sweating” industries, where “sweating” means long days and nights of sewing and stitching in overcrowded attics or small rooms. Many were confined within the drudgery of domestic service, while other categories of employment were cooking and laundering. Some could not withstand the pressures upon them. In the 1884 list of the inmates of Bethlem Hospital for the mad are listed thirty-three servants, seven needlewomen, four milliners and sixty “wives, widows and daughters of tradesmen.”
There were other forms of escape. The women of what the Victorians called “the lower classes” were reported to “drink to excess more than men. They take to it largely to carry them through their work … The women are worse than the men, but their drinking is largely due to their slavery at the wash tub.” Alcohol was the curse of working women precisely because they were consigned to a life of unremitting labour. If the “soakers” smelled of gin or of beer, it was also the smell of the city.
Verlaine wrote of the behaviour of certain girls, perhaps prostitutes, that “you can’t imagine what charm there is in the little phrase ‘old cunt’ addressed every evening to old gentlemen.” Swearing and blasphemy were everywhere apparent but, in a thoroughly pagan city, what else was to be expected? Close observers of the streets, such as Charles Dickens and Arthur Morrison, also noticed the propensity of poor women for violent argument and assault. The photographs of females in late nineteenth-century London show them staring suspiciously at the camera. One of the most familiar and suggestive of these images, particularly at the turn of the century, is that of the flower-seller. Instead of the painterly image of innocence and fresh-faced exuberance, no longer to be found on the streets, the photographs show glum and elderly women, each wearing a straw hat or a man’s cap, transfixed by a hat-pin, together with a shawl and an apron. They congregated around the fountain of Eros, in Piccadilly Circus, with their baskets of violets and carnations spread around them. They were always known as “flower-girls,” never “women,” and in that linguistic transference there is contained a great deal of London lore. One observer of the city regarded them as “Cockney vestal virgins,” although virgins they probably were not. These female emblems of London, as they soon became, were grouped around the statue of desire; yet they themselves were old and withered. They sold flowers, images of perishable beauty, when they themselves had dropped into the sere leaf of age. This contrast of youth and desire with age and poverty, at the very heart of the city, is a potent reminder of the wastefulness and weariness of urban life. They continued at their post until the early 1940s, before disappearing in one of London’s great silent transitions.
Throughout the early decades of the twentieth century the prevailing image of women is still one of work and labour. For every description of glamorous and affluent society women, there are others of the hotel restaurant “slavey,” of the shop assistant, of the typing pool. There is a sequence, in a film entitled Every Day Except Christmas, of a real character known as “Old Alice,” the last of the women porters in Covent Garden Market, pushing a barrow of flowers; the film was made in 1957, which suggests the longevity of certain trades.
Some female occupations were quite new, however, and the period of both world wars fundamentally changed the nature of labour. When the young men were despatched to the trenches and battlefields of the First World War, women were for the first time accepted within previously male reserves. They began to do “war work” in heavy industry, particularly in munitions and in engineering. The number of women employed at Woolwich Arsenal rose from 125 to 28,000, while the old workhouse at Willesden was used as lodgings for the women working at factories in Park Royal. There were female bus-and tube-drivers, with a steady admission of women into clerical or commercial work. Although women were not continually employed in the heavier industries after the First World War, their counterparts in office life remained. This was complemented by another great transition. By the end of the First World War the number of women in their once traditional occupations, dress-making and domestic service, had dropped quickly and significantly. Instead women found work in banking and commerce, local government and retailing, shops and businesses, public administration and the civil service.