Married women's work : being the report of an enquiry undertaken by the Women's industrial council (incorporated) / edited by Clementina Black.

Date:
1915
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Married women's work : being the report of an enquiry undertaken by the Women's industrial council (incorporated) / edited by Clementina Black. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    The poor buy their coal by the half hundredweight, or less, their tea by the ounce, or sometimes by the halfpenny- worth ; they are cut off by their poverty from the best cooking, which always means the use of slow and pro- Jonged heat ; in their abodes every defect of spending power has to be made good by the toil of the woman’s muscles. Nothing could be more uneconomical, more, in the true sense of the word, uncivilised. Of course, it is true that the middle-class are still walking in the same uneconomical and uncivilised path and getting very little return in comfort for an exorbitant expenditure, but they, after all, have at least the money to spend, while the poor woman pays with her person. Of the methods by which the burden of unscientific households can be lifted off, it is not my province to speak here, although in theory at least the task is easy enough ; but I should be unfair to my readers if I failed to indicate my own opinion that the wage-earning wife needs to be relieved not of the work which she frequently does well, but of that which she invariably, and indeed perforce does either ill or at quite disproportionate cost to herself. In saying this I would not be understood to imply that working women are, in general, incompetent in domestic matters. On the contrary, my impression is that con- sidering how very inadequate are the appliances at their command, they do much better than could reasonably be expected.1. Out of their minute weekly income, the larger part has necessarily to be spent upon food, and insanitary sink, its pots and pans, brooms and brushes, and he would feel that after all the world had not in every direction moved with such huge strides while he was asleep.’—The Housewife as Bursar, by MABEL ATKINSON. *A pamphlet by Miss Anna Martin, The Married Working Woman, sold at twopence by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, contains the notes of a first-hand observer upon this point and should be studied by any person interested in the lives of wage-earning families.
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