The intention of your being taught needle-work; knitting and such-like, is not on account of the intrinsic value of all you can do with your hands, which is trifling, but to enable you to judge more perfectly of that kind of work, and to direct the execution of it in others. Another principal end is to enable you to fill up, in some tolerably agreeable way, some of the many solitary hours you must necessarily spend at home.
Gregory, ‘A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters’, 1809, p.59
The leisure rendered by the wife…is not a simple manifestation of idleness or indolence. It almost invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social amenities, which prove on analysis to serve little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not and need not occupy herself with anything that is gainful or of substantial use…the taste to which these effects of household adornment and tidyness appeal is a taste which has been formed under the guidance of a canon of propriety that demands just these evidences of wasted effort…
Thorstein Veblen, ‘The Theory of the Leisure Class’, 1899, pp. 81—2
More than half the housewives of Great Britain also work outside their homes. Some are professional women, who spend most of their earnings on home help, a car, superannuation and tax; for example, the married headmistress of a fair-sized school earns £1,900 p.a., of which she pays £1,010 in tax, a further £110 superannuation, £200 for domestic help, £300 for her car, and £75 for extras like clothing and books, so that her net income is £205. A woman doctor found that her domestic help took home more money than she did. These women are treated very badly by the Inland Revenue officials, who refuse to discuss their husbands’ tax returns with them.9 If the country cannot afford to tax married women as independent individuals, it is also true that the country cannot afford the wastage of professional female labour. The greatest number of female professionals are teachers, and yet only one-third of them are still at work six years after their expensive state-paid training. The women doctors whose husbands cannot afford to subsidize their continued work cannot be spared.
The professional women who struggle to continue in their vocation after marriage are a tiny minority; most of the working wives of Britain would sneer at their assumption that home help is necessary to their continued contribution to their profession, although obviously a teacher or a doctor cannot afford the inefficiency that fatigue would entail. Lower pay for female industrial workers might even be justified in a perverted sense if we reflect that more than half the female workers are working harder outside their employment than they are in it. For many women, sitting down to a machine, be it a typewriter or a power sewing machine, is a rest after the unremitting employment of all their physical strength and energy in service of a young family. The lunch-hour of a secretary who has to do the shopping and bill-paying for her family is the most strenuous part of her day. In July 1969 working wives marched on Epping Town Hall in protest against the increase of day nursery fees from £2 10s. to £6 or £7, because this meant that many trained nurses and teachers would no longer find it practicable to continue working. The teachers’ strike of 1970 revealed that the indispensable function of teachers was baby-sitting for working mothers. Many working wives depend upon the labour of an unpaid relation to get to work at all. Many others pride themselves on the way they manage to run a home and hold their own in a job at the same time, accepting the patronizing title of ‘working wonders’ in a kind of unofficial Stakhanovism.10 Some of the experience I have had first-hand of working wives has been dispiriting in the utmost. I once taught in a school where most of the teachers were married and staff-room conversation was strictly limited to the success or failure of their contraceptive methods, the expedients they adopted to keep home and children on an even keel, and their keen desire to give it all up as soon as their husbands were senior enough in their firms to afford idle wives. In another setting, I saw a working wife toiling as PA to a television director break down in the middle of taping simply because she was taxed beyond her strength.
The ancillary aspect of women’s work is almost universal; in the home she must make her husband’s lot easier and build up his confidence as breadwinner, and this is an aspect of the secondariness of female work outside the home which has not been evaluated. It is assumed that wives earn less than their husbands, and pity is evinced for men whose wives are more successful than they are. Even at work women must serve men; one reason why the PA broke down was that her boss was demanding and bullying and she was too anxious not to make any mistakes. The most overt kind of handmaidenship is practised by secretaries, part of whose function is to protect their bosses’ egos, and even to cover their mistakes. The Alfred Marks secretarial bureau found that 80 per cent of secretaries earning more than £1,000 a year were prepared to run errands, 74 per cent were willing to do the shopping for their bosses and their wives, and 73 per cent were not averse to lying to protect him from trouble with his boss.11 An answer to this article in the Sunday Times included instructions to the girl-in-a-million, the perfect private secretary; in reverse order of importance:
1. Always use a deodorant—you are not the girl in a thousand who doesn’t need one.
2. Learn how to make good tea and coffee.
3. Don’t give mother/boyfriend/husband/auntie the office phone number.
4. Use the powder room for applying lipstick, eyelashes, varnishing finger nails or changing stockings.
5. Do not put bad news on top of the incoming letters.
6. Always look beautiful but not provocative.12
A secretary is a boss’s status symbol, like his wife: the more her duties are limited to his requirements the more her value. A switchboard/secretary/receptionist is a utility model: the private secretary is custom-built racing style. A glance at the appointment columns of a daily newspaper will provide an insight into the qualities of a perfect business acolyte: a secretary must be attractive, ‘good organizer with calm temperament’, lively, intelligent, tactful, ‘efficient, well-groomed’, bright; the tone of such soliciting may reach unbelievable depths:
No not nit but intelligent, efficient, possibly even pretty secretary for managing director.
I am leaving for Mauritius to join my fiancée. My boss, chairman of a small Mayfair consultancy group, mourns my departure. Do you think you could make the sort of personal secretary he would appreciate? Company secretary bitterly regrets having allowed his bird to fly high. Please will somebody prove she is not irreplaceable?13
In almost every case the age is indicated, and the conflict between desire for an attractive woman and an efficient one sometimes produces interesting results. Nobody however ever wants a mature woman as secretary, for the filial relationship must be kept up. Thirty seems to be about the ceiling. If a private secretary wishes to become indispensable to her boss she must voluntarily increase her humility and servitude.
A good secretary is devoted to the single aim of furthering her boss’s interests in every way she can…She is loyal, obedient, conscientious…she supports all his actions, never discusses with him other staff, and always backs him up in her relations with clients…
She must further ‘apply subtle flattery’ and never ‘know better’. Her aim is to become ‘a graceful and necessary piece of office furniture’.14 Why should a woman serve a man so faithfully for a menial’s wage and be actually increasing his earning power and cloaking his mistakes? Seeing as she must know his business pretty well, why should she not aspire to his job? Why should instructions not tell her how to flatter her boss’s boss, and subtly undermine her boss, so that clients hope fervently that they might have to deal with her and not with him? The answer lies in the freemasonry of men: a girl who revealed the fact that her boss was an incompetent ninny would probably be sooner sacked than he was, and yet, given enormous guile and day-to-day treachery (although no more than is required to support him mendaciously) she might actually get the reward that she deserves. It is tempting to ponder just how many firms are act
ually run by secretaries. A nationwide strike of secretaries could have interesting results. At the lower levels of secretarial work an interesting phenomenon reveals that female liberation is carving out its own course. On 15 June 1969 Mr Harold Quitman, chairman of the City Affairs Committee, wrote to The Times complaining that there was ‘an undoubted shortage of trained secretarial staff willing to fill permanent office vacancies’ while agencies ‘can offer temporary staff at a moment’s notice’. Poor Mr Quitman.15 It stands to reason after all that if a woman can expect no promotion, she has no incentive to immure herself permanently in any one firm. Much better to sample here and there, trying and tantalizing new bosses who have no opportunity to tyrannize over their fly-by-night aides. Priscilla Clemenson described her own system to Petticoat.
She works about seven or eight months a year in about twenty or thirty different jobs. She saves and plans during those months, then as soon as she is ready she packs her bags and is off, for Scandinavia if she’s sailing, Switzerland if she’s skiing…
‘When I’m on the move, I’m a different person,’ she explains. ‘I’m so much more interesting and more interested in other people…’16
The success of agencies in deploying temporary labour can be assessed from the proliferation of them. Any girl bored with her job is assailed by repeated blandishments in the Tube on her way home, persuading her that she can command better money and have time off as well if she would only walk out of her typing pool and dare the harum-scarum world of the temp. In retaliation, prospective employers are forced to wheedle and coax with promise of young staff, pleasant offices, glamorous siting, the opportunity to meet interesting people, as well as a judicious mixture of flattery. Today’s anarchistic young women seem to remain unmoved. Mr Quitman and his cronies cannot claim that they have not asked for it, but they will persist in explaining their present difficulties by the flightiness of the young female population, instead of seeing what they offer is no deal. In desperation, employers are said to be turning to married women, whose home commitments will hopefully make them more reliable. At least they won’t be rushing off to ski and sail. But they will have their hearts and minds at home. One way or another, women will win this struggle. There are retrograde steps: women in America are reported to be manipulating their menfolk by pussy-power, which is wheedling and caressing, instead of challenging. The covert caresses of secretaries are already squalid enough; the temps seem to have discovered an altogether more impressive and dignified method of bargaining. If a boss wants his temp to stay, he’ll just have to find the incentive. One day, nothing short of his job is going to suffice. The effect of the know-how of girls who have experienced different kinds of office organization ought to be exploited by industry, but probably meanness and prejudice, and male incapacity to take criticism, will ensure that this never happens. Unfortunately the opportunities enjoyed by the London stenographer do not extend to provincial centres, where secretarial staff are immobilized and poorly paid, and live ‘at home’.
The most depressing phenomenon in the pattern of women’s work is the plight of the nurses. Nursing began when Florence Nightingale deployed the idle daughters of the Victorian middle class in a work of mercy which kept their hands from mischief, in the way that rich women still work for the Red Cross and Oxfam and what have you. The failure of this industry to evolve means that, today, 640,000 women are working for a travesty of a living wage, doing a vital work which requires skill, initiative and ‘dedication’. Nursing and teaching have long been the most popular female professions, indeed, one might almost say the only female professions, but while the applicants for teacher training have more than doubled in ten years, trainee nursing has only attracted a further six thousand, an increase of a quarter. Meanwhile patient throughput has doubled in twenty years, and the cases retained in hospital are graver, seeing as the policy of home nursing is gaining hold. A trainee nurse earns £390 in her first year (£240 after deductions), a second-year nurse £450, a third-year nurse £480. Psychiatric nurses earn £100 more in each year. When nurses received a rise of £30 a year, hospital residence fees were immediately increased so that the rise was instantly nullified. Ward Sister Elsa Farrier put the case to The Times in May 1969, after the Orpington Hospital nurses had held a public meeting to warn the community they served that they could not continue in this way: ‘We are not talking to patients as we should. We haven’t the time to talk to relatives when they are worried. We have little time to be humane or kind.’17
The much vaunted emotional satisfactions of nursing have fallen foul of cuts in staffing. Nurses find that they have to do unskilled jobs like floor-scrubbing, because even domestic staff will not consent to be bullied the way they, the professionals, allow themselves to be. Meanwhile, sophisticated methods of treatment require better educational preparation from nurses: the dangers of drug prophylaxis mean that a tired nurse can find herself a murderess. In fact, only one out of three nurses has more than three O-levels, the same proportion have less than two, which is considered the lowest admissible level, because they have passed the General Nursing Council Test. One-third of trainee nurses drop out during their training, and the impression is that the wastage is not regretted because they form a valuable supply of cheap labour. When a nurse does complete her training there is no appreciable change in her condition: she wears a different colour belt and carries on. Nurses are, moreover, cloistered and disciplined in archaic uniforms on duty, and by prying and prurient regulations off duty. They tolerate the most arrantly maternal behaviour from matrons, who often treat them without respect and demand absolute obedience. The excuse for all this is the patient, but it is the patient who suffers at the hands of tired, resentful, and harried nurses. All the ludicrousness of the situation burst upon the British public in May 1969, when Sister Veal’s United Nurses Association took to the streets, but even then Matron’s iron hand was shown when nurses were ordered not to march in their uniforms, and they obeyed. Sister Veal has since been reviled in the gutter press for being a private nurse and advertising for patients, but she is doing no more than any one with skill and initiative is entitled to do. In fact Sister Veal can command only three hundred supporters: the usual argument, that she is damaging the public image of the profession, seems to dissuade most nurses from agitating. Trained nurses do not constitute a cohesive group: as a profession they are divided into health visitors, theatre sisters, psychiatric nurses, ward sisters, district nurses, matrons, state enrolled nurses. Not all of them belong to the Royal College of Nursing. On the Whitley Council, which negotiates pay and conditions, twelve separate organizations represent nurses; while in May 1969 the Whitley Council was awarding nurses £48 p.a. for their meals, in place of the iniquitous pay-as-you-eat scheme (it was immediately taxed), a mere twelve hundred hospital electricians did not scruple to strike for an extra shilling an hour, to bring them into line with outside labour. The point is clear. That nurses can be victimized by the essentialness of their work into accepting a shameful remuneration is an indictment of our society which is daring them to abandon the sick and dying, knowing that they will not do it. Must they wait until the sick and dying strike for them? It seems that the plight of academics will wait for attention until students support them in a strike and refuse to be qualified. Perhaps patients ought to refuse to recover? In each case the state exploits the recipients of nurses’ and teachers’ services in order to oppress the nurses and teachers. New strategies must be devised. The recently awarded increase of twenty-six per cent sounds handsome until we consider what it is twenty-six per cent of: we have yet to see how the nurses will be forced to pay for their rise.
Nurses are skilled menials, and as such they fall into line with the dominant pattern of female employment. Salesgirls or ‘vendeuses’, waitresses, cleaners, packers, tea ladies, fill out the picture. The job of char is so tied to the female image that an amusing case was recorded in Vienna where one Alois Valkan, who needed to work for money to supplement his pension, ha
d to disguise himself as a woman to find work as a char. Eventually he was arrested when he went to a ladies’ lavatory when he wasn’t disguised and was questioned by the police called to investigate thefts from the cloakroom.18 Even in the trades dominated by women, the important posts are held by men; whoever heard of a head waitress or a maîtresse d’hôtel? Cutters and designers in the clothing industry are most often male. The women’s branches of the armed forces are not soldiers in their own right, but clerical assistants and other kinds of handmaidens to the males. Even air hostesses, among the most envied of female employees, are no more than glorified waitresses, and often presided over by a steward. The most shocking cases of the exploitation of females for cheap labour are the outworkers, who were the subject of a News of the World scandal. Ostensibly such women must be registered with local authorities, but in practice the News of the World found this regulation was not observed, as the Prices and Incomes Board discovered when it conducted a survey. Of the sixty unions who covered industries likely to employ outworkers, only one had any regulations relating to them. Superfoam Ltd of Skegness farmed out aprons to be machined at 5d. each. Brock’s fireworks paid housewives one shilling a gross for rolling and gluing cardboard cases. Women who made sponge bags at 11s. a gross had the satisfaction of seeing them retail in shops for 2s. 6d. each. To make the point clearer, Conway Stewart farmed out ballpoint pens which had to be assembled by putting in the refill, screwing a cap on, fitting the clip cap at the other end and packing in packets of six, for 8d. or 9d. (depending on the pen) a gross, to spastic centres, mental homes, prisons, detention centres and approved schools as well as housewives. Mrs Pollard who can assemble a gross of plastic boats in five hours for eight shillings, answered the News of the World reporter innocently: ‘I regard it as a hobby to fill in my spare time…I like doing it.’ The women doing this work, who are also skilled in machining in many cases, do not cost their employers anything in lighting, heating or safety precautions, and can demand no indemnifications or overtime, and their number is unknown. In the clothing trade alone, it is believed that at least fifteen thousand women are so employed. The manufacturers justify their methods by pointing to competition from Japan and Hong Kong: an outworker is an Angle-Saxon coolie.19
The Female Eunuch Page 13