Abstract
Women participated in Progressive causes in Britain but assumed neither the presence nor acquired the prominence of their American counterparts. One striking difference between them concerned settlement houses, inaugurated in Britain in 1884 and soon transplanted to the United States. British settlement houses never escaped their origins in a masculine milieu, which deprived women of what might have become a vital staging area for orchestrating reform, thus forcing them to establish separate organizations as an alternative. However important for numerous middle- and upper-class females, such associations lacked the influence to propel women—save for a handful—into strategic positions of national power. Accordingly, women’s contributions to Progressivism came primarily at the grassroots level, where they acted as investigators collecting social and economic data, organizers of meetings, and speakers at public gatherings. In essence, women performed as vital conduits of information as well as promoters of public interest and, most critically, political pressure. Except in the antisweating agitation, women’s national organizations seldom appeared in the forefront of public campaigns. Even in attacks on labor abuses, women in Britain differed sharply with those in the United States. No British women acquired the ferocious reputation of U.S. Progressive Florence Kelly, whom one associate rightly characterized as a “guerilla warrior” in a “wilderness of industrial wrongs.” Where scope permitted individual initiative, some women, however, adroitly forged an entirely new role for themselves—that of the muckraker.1 Never as conspicuous as their American counterparts, British muckrakers made up in print with passionate protest what they lacked in numbers, and in graphic personal testimony what they lacked in statistical exactitude.
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Notes
Louise C. Wade, “Florence Kelly,” in Notable American Women, 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, MA: Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. 1971), 2: 319.
Asa Briggs and Anne Macartney, Toynbee Hall: The First Hundred Years (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984);
Deborah E. B. Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University, 1994), 161, 168–69, 175;
Emily K. Abel, “Middle-Class Culture for the Urban Poor: The Educational Thought of Samuel Barnett,” Social Service Review 52 (1978): 598–603.
Edward G. Howarth and Mona Wilson, eds., West Ham: A Study in Social and Industrial Problems: Being the Report of the Outer London Inquiry Committee (London: J. M. Dent, 1907).
C. F. G. Masterman, From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants; by One of Them (reprint of 1902 edition; London: R. B. Johnson, 1980), 27, 30.
Seth David Koven, “Culture and Poverty: The London Settlement House Movement, 1870 to 1914” (PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1987), 375; Seth Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (London: Routledge, 1993), 126;
Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985), 215–16, 220–21, 230, 234, 243–44, 246, 343–44 (n. 15);
John Matthews and James Kimmis, “Development of the English Settlement Movement,” in Settlement, Social Change and Community Action: Good Neighbours, ed. Ruth Gilchrist and Tony Jeffs (London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2001), 56.
Richard Heathcote Heindel, The American Impact on Great Britain, 1898–1914: A Study of the United States in World History (reprint of 1940 edition; New York: Octagon Books, 1968), 343.
William Beveridge’s paper on “The Influence of University Settlements,” quoted in Briggs and Macartney, Toynbee Hall, 70. At the outset, Barnett subscribed to orthodox views of poverty as caused by the individual, but by the mid-1890s had altered his views, putting greater weight on impersonal socioeconomic forces. With this shift in attitude, he came to espouse the need for government intervention to reduce poverty, and see a new role for hall residents in investigating and measuring the extent of deprivation. See Emily K. Abel, “Toynbee Hall, 1884–1914,” Social Service Review 53 (1979): 608, 612, 622.
Llewellyn Smith and Vaughan Nash, The Story of the Dockers’ Strike Told by Two East Londoners (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889); Briggs and Macartney, ToynbeeHall, 45–47.
Richard L. McCormick, “Public Life in Industrial America, 1877–1917,” in The New American History, ed. Eric Foner (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 107. For a good, brief, scholarly overview, see Michael Rose, “The Secular Faith of the Social Settlements: ‘If Christ came to Chicago,’” in GoodNeighbours, 19–33.
Koven, “Culture and Poverty,” 528, 533–34, 548–50; Peter d’A. Jones, The Christian Socialist Revival, 1877–1914: Religion, Class, and Social Conscience in Late-Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), 334–35.
Vicinus, Independent Women, 215. Women’s settlement houses devoted much attention to promoting moral uplift and social control. See Catriona M. Parratt, “Making Leisure Work: Women’s Rational Recreation in Late Victorian and Edwardian England,” Journal of Sport History 26 (1999): 475, 477, 485.
Koven, “Borderlands,” 110–16. This interpretation is placed in a broad comparative context by Seth Koven and Sonya Mitchell, “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 94 (1990): 1076–1108. Jane Lewis offered a different perspective but acknowledged Ward’s pragmatism, flexibility, and willingness to work across political lines, traits that defined numerous Progressives. Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 218–19. Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform, ch. 8, discusses the architectural ideas influencing the building of Passmore Edwards Settlement.
Theda Skocpol and Gretchen Ritter, “Gender and the Origins of Modern Social Policies in Britain and the United States,” in Britain and America: Studies in Comparative History 1760–1970, ed. David Englander (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press in Association with the Open University, 1997), 279–82;
Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar, “The Social Survey in Historical Perspective,” in The Social Survey in Historical Perspective, 1880–1940, ed. Martin Bulmer, Kevin Bales, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 36–37.
Robert C. Reinders, “Toynbee Hall and the American Settlement Movement,” Social Service Review 56 (1982): 46–7.
Picht, Toynbee Hall, 99–101. Outside London, settlement houses have not attracted much scholarly interest, save for those in Birmingham and Manchester. See Jon Glasby, Poverty and Opportunity: 100 Years of the Birmingham Settlement (Studley: Brewin, 1999);
Mary D. Stocks, Fifty Years in Every Street: The Story of the Manchester University Settlement, 2nd. ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956).
Eleanor J. Stebner, “The Settlement House Movement,” in Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America, ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 3: 1067–68;
Richard Allen, “The Social Gospel and the Reform Tradition in Canada, 1890–1928,” Canadian Historical Review 49 (1968): 386–87.
T. Kretschmer-Doringer, “History of the Vienna Settlements,” in Hundred Yearsof Settlements and Neighbourhood Centres in North America and Europe, ed. H. Nijenhuis (Utrecht: GAMA, 1987), 75–89; Christian Johnson, “Strength in Community: Historical Development of Settlements Internationally,” in GoodNeighbours, 69–91.
Manako Ogawa, “‘Hull House’ in Downtown Tokyo: The Transplantation of a Settlement House from the United States into Japan and the North American Missionary Women, 1919–45,” Journal of World History 15 (2004): 359–87.
Kathryn Kish Sklar, “Hull House in the 1890s: A Community of Women Reformers,” Signs 10 (1985): 658–77.
Bulmer, Bales and Kish Skar, “Social Survey,” 37; Maud F. Davies, Life in an English Village: An Economic and Historical Survey of the Parish of Corsley in Wiltshire (London: R. F. Unwin, 1909);
Maud Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1913);
Lady Bell, At the Works: A Study of a Manufacturing Town (London: Edward Arnold, 1907);
C. B. Hawkins, Norwich: A Social Study (London: P. L. Warner, 1910);
C. Violet Butler, Social Conditions in Oxford (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1912);
Edith F. Hogg, “The Fur-Pullers of South London,” Nineteenth Century 42 (1897): 734–43.
Jones, Christian Socialist Revival, 4, 9, 17, 48–57, 281, 327, 330, 334–40, 363, 366–67, 418–20, 437–38, 446–48, 450, 455, 458; David M. Thompson, “The Emergence of the Nonconformist Social Gospel in England,” in Protestant Evangelicalism: Britain, Ireland, Germany and America, c. 1750–c. 1950: Essays in Honour of W.R. Ward, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 257;
Jean Gaffin and David Thoms, Caring and Sharing: The Centenary History of the Co-operative Women’s Guild (Manchester: Co-operative Union, 1983), 26–27, 42, 54, 59–60. Sophie Sanger, who helped organize the 1906 Anti-Sweating Exhibition, also embraced Christian Socialism.
See Norbert C. Soldon, Women in British Trade Unions, 1874–1976 (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1978), 64.
Ellen F. Mappen, new introduction to Married Women’s Work: Being the Report of an Enquiry Undertaken by the Women’s Industrial Council, ed. Clementina Black (reprint of 1915 edition; London: Virago, 1983), iii–vii.
Robert H. Wiebe, “The Progressive Years, 1900–17,” in The Reinterpretation ofAmerican History and Culture, ed. William H. Cartwright and Richard L. Watson, Jr. (Washington, DC: National Council for the Social Studies, 1973), 435; Mappen, “New Introduction,” iii–vii.
Deborah McDonald, Clara Collet, 1860–1948: An Educated Working Woman (London: Woburn Press, 2004), 98–99.
Gertrude Tuckwell, Constance Smith: A Short Memoir (London: Duckworth, 1931), 9–11, 14–16; Minute Book, February 8 and June 27, 1911, 46, 54, MS 4032, Christian Social Union, Lambeth Palace Library.
Ellen Mappen, Helping Women at Work: The Women’s Industrial Council, 1889–1914 (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 19.
Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Crusaders for American Liberalism, 1939; revised edition, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 61, 77–78.
Peter Keating, introduction to Into Unknown England, 1866–1913: Selections from Social Explorers, ed. Peter Keating (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 13–14, 19–20.
Rosemary Chadwick, “Higgs [née Kingsland], Mary Ann (1854–1937),” OxfordDictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004; online ed.; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/38523, accessed 4 Dec. 2007).
See for example, T. Sparrow, “In a Woman’s Doss-House,” New Review 11 (1894): 176–85.
Mary Higgs, The Tramp Ward (Manchester: John Heywood, 1904).
Mary Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss (London: P. S. King & Son, 1906), 290–93;
Mary Higgs and Edward E. Hayward, Where Shall She Live?: The Homelessness of the Woman Worker (London: P.S. King & Son, 1910), 115–16.
William H. Hunt, Labour Colonies: What are They?: What can They do? (London: n.p., 1900–1910?); Higgs, Glimpses into the Abyss, ix, 58–64, 71–73, 86, 301; Higgs, Tramp Ward, 20; Report of the Scottish Christian Social Union Commission to Germany, re. Elberfeld System and Labour Colonies (n.p.: n.p., 1905);
Michael J. Moore, “Social Work and Social Welfare: The Organization of Philanthropic Resources in Britain, 1900–14,” Journal of British Studies 16 (1977): 90–91.
J. H. Stallard, The Female Casual and Her Lodging, with a Complete Scheme for the Regulation of Workhouse Infirmaries (London: Saunders, Otley, 1866), 6–58;
James Greenwood, A Night in a Workhouse, Reprinted from the “Pall Mall Gazette” (London: Office of the Pall Mall Gazette, 1866);
C. W. Craven, A Night in the Workhouse, Cliffe Castle [and Other Sketches and Poems], etc. (Keighley: n.p., 1887);
Rachel Vorspan, “Vagrancy and the New Poor Law in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England,” English Historical Review 92 (1977): 66–67.
For this reason, it would be too much to claim, as did later one of her admirers, that the drafters of the 1906 Vagrancy Report had reached their conclusions based on her views of labour colonies. Even the 1905 Unemployed Workmen Act underlined the popularity of labor colonies as a provider of work for the unemployed by suggesting that public funds subsidize them. See Hugh Martin, preface to My Brother the Tramp: Studies in the Problem of Vagrancy, by Mary Higgs (London: Student Christian Movement, 1914), iv; Hunt, Labour Colonies, 3; Vorspan, “Vagrancy,” 75.; John Brown, “Charles Booth and Labour Colonies,” Economic History Review 21 (1968): 355–58.
Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Report of the Departmental Committee on Vagrancy, with Regard to Labour Colonies, 103 (1906), Cmd. 2852 and Cmd. 2892. Another muckraker, George Z. Edwards, likewise cited the example of Germany’s approach as a model for Britain; George Z. Edwards, A Vicar as Vagrant (London: King & Son, 1910), 30.
Mark Pottle, “Malvery, Olive Christian (1876/7–1914),” Oxford Dictionary ofNational Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004); online ed., May, 2007, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/41107, accessed 3 Dec. 2007;
Judith R. Walkowitz, “The Indian Woman, the Flower Girl, and the Jew: Photojournalism in Edwardian London,” Victorian Studies 42 (1998–99): 3–9.
Olive Christian Malvery, The Soul Market, with which is included “The Heart of Things” (London: Hutchinson, 1907), 234;
Olive Christian Malvery, A Year and a Day (London: Hutchinson, 1912), 83.
Olive Christian Malvery, Baby Toilers (London: Hutchinson, 1907), 69–78.
John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1815 to the Present Day (reprint of 1966 edition; London: Methuen & Co., 1985), 262–63.
Ibid., 3. The actual role of Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle (1905), in influencing Roosevelt and the passage of the Federal Meat Inspection Act (1906) has been challenged by revisionist historians in the United States. See Joseph Buenker, “Upton Sinclair’s Bad Aim,” in Encyclopedia of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. John D. Buenker and Joseph Buenker (Armonk, New York: Armonk, 2005), 2: 665.
Priscilla E. Moulder, “Women and the Sweating System,” Westminster Review 162 (1904): 91–95.
Hogg, “Fur-Pullers,” 734, 738–739, 741; also see W. H. Wilkins, The BitterCry of the Voteless Toilers, with Special Reference to the Seamstresses of East London (London?: Women’s Emancipation Union, 1893), 14–15; Malvery, Baby Toilers, ix, xv, 68–69, 98; Malvery, Soul Market, 186, 188;
George R. Sims, How the Poor Live and Horrible London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1889), 108.
Hogg, “Fur-Pullers,” 742–43; F. E. Barger, “Fur Sewing,” in Sweated Industries: Being a Handbook of the Daily News Exhibition, ed. Richard Mudie-Smith (London: Bradbury, Agnew, 1906), 63.
Bernard Gainer, The Alien Invasion: The Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (New York: Crane, Russak, 1972), 110;
James A. Schmiechen, Sweated Industries andSweated Labor: The London Clothing Trades, 1860–1914 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 2–3, 89, 94–95, 174.
Diane Elizabeth Kirkby, “Alice Henry: The National Women’s Trade Union League of America and Progressive Labor Reform, 1906–25” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1982), 36–41, 58 (n. 71), 139; Mrs. W. P. Reeves, “Colonial Developments in Factory Legislation,” in The Casefor the Factory Acts, 2nd ed., ed. Mrs. Sidney [Beatrice] Webb (London: Grant Richards, 1902), 169–91;
William Pember Reeves, State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand (London: G. Richards, 1902);
James Holt, “Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand, 1894–1901,” New Zealand Journal of History 14 (1980): 179.
James Holt, “The Political Origins of Compulsory Arbitration in New Zealand, ” New Zealand Journal of History 10 (1976): 106;
Peter Coleman, Progressivism and the World of Reform: New Zealand and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987), 109–10.
Clementina Black, Sweated Industry and the Minimum Wage, with an Introduction by A.G. Gardiner (London: Duckworth, 1907), 125–26, 143, 149–52, 221, 226–27, 231–39, 246–47, 251, 257, 264–65;
H. V. Emy, Liberals, Radicals and Social Politics, 1892–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 132–33; Schmiechen, Sweated Industries, 163–64;
James Samuelson, The Lament of the Sweated (London: P. S. King, 1908), 65–68.
Edward Cadbury, M. Cecile Matheson, and George Shann, Women’s Work and Wages: A Phase of Life in an Industrial City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), 13, 286, 295–300;
Constance Smith, “The Minimum Wage,” in Woman in Industry from Seven Points of View, ed. Gertrude M. Tuckwell, Constance Smith, Mary R. Macarthur, May Tennant, Nettie Adler, Adelaide M. Anderson, and Clementina Black (London: Duckworth, 1908), 42–57;
G. R. Askwith, “Sweated Industries,” Fortnightly Review 90 (1908): 223.
Tuckwell, Smith, 20–24; John Rickard, “The Anti-Sweating Movement in Britain and Victoria: The Politics of Empire and Social Reform,” Historical Studies 18 (1979): 590, 594;
Christine Collette, For Labour and for Women: The Women’s Labour League, 1906–18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 118;
Mrs. W. P. Reeves, “Colonial Developments in Factory Legislation,” in The Case for the Factory Acts, 2nd ed., ed. Mrs. Sidney Webb (London: Grant Richards, 1902), 169–91.
Mrs. M. E. MacDonald, “A Bill for the Better Regulation of Home Industries,” in Sweated Industries, 26–27; J. Ramsay MacDonald, “Sweating—Its Cause and Cure,” Independent Review 2 (1904): 80–81.
Ellen F. Mappen, “Strategists for Change: Social Feminist Approaches to the Problems of Women’s Work,” in Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England, 1800–1918, ed. Angela V. John (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 241–7, 252; Schmiechen, Sweated Industries, 163.
Pember Reeves, State Experiments; Elizabeth Leigh Hutchins, Labour Laws for Women in Australia and New Zealand (London: Women’s Industrial Council, 1906);
Elizabeth Leigh Hutchins, Labour Laws for Women in France (London: Women’s Industrial Council, 1907);
Alice Salomon, Labour Laws for Women in Germany (London: Women’s Industrial Council: 1907).
One historian recently imputes the exhibition with causing “a fundamental break in laissez faire attitudes towards state intervention in the legal control of low pay.” She allots no role whatever to Progressivism—coalition building, foreign experiences, lobbying efforts of women’s organizations, and muckraking literature, all warrant little or no attention. See Sheila Blackburn, “‘To be Poor and to be Honest… is the Hardest Struggle of All’: Sweated Needlewomen and Campaigns for Protective Legislation, 1840–1914,” in Famine and Fashion: Needlewomen in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Beth Harris (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 243–57.
Annual Report, 4, 6, Box 5, Christian Social Union, Oxford University Branch, Pusey House Library, Oxford University; John Rickard, “The Anti-Sweating Movement in Britain and Victoria: The Politics of Empire and Social Reform,” Historical Studies 18 (1979): 586–87, 592; Jones, Christian SocialistRevival, 184–85;
Sheila Blackburn, “‘The Harm that the Sweater does Lives after Him’: The Webbs, the Responsible Employer, and the Minimum Wage Campaign, 1880–1914,” Historical Studies in Industrial Relations 10 (2000): 24–27;
Patricia E. Malcolmson, English Laundresses: A Social History, 1850–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 97; Malvery, Baby Toilers, 35; Daily News, May 4, 1906; Reynolds’ Illustrated News, December 16, 1934; “Reminiscences,” Reel 17, Gertrude Tuckwell Papers, Trade Union Congress Library; Morning Post, October 27, 1906.
Great Britain, Parliamentary Papers, Report to the Secretary of State on Wages Boards and Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Acts of Australia and New Zealand, 71 (1908), 76.
Robin Miller Jacoby, The British and American Women’s Trade Union Leagues, 1890–1925: A Case Study of Feminism and Class (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1994), 89–90, 95, 119.
Shelton Stromquist, “The Crucible of Class: Cleveland Politics and the Origins of Municipal Reform in the Progressive Era,” Journal of Urban History 23 (1997): 192–220;
Steven J. Diner, “Linking Politics and People: The Historiography of the Progressive Era,” OAH Magazine 13 (1999): 5.
Sheila Blackburn, “Working-Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-Sweating Legislation, 1880–1930,” International Reviewof Social History 33 (1988): 62–65. They also sought to inculcate moral uplift and social control. See Parratt, “Women’s Rational Recreation,” 474.
When the act was extended, some 3 million workers acquired coverage by 1920. See Jane Lewis and Sonya O. Rose, “‘Let England Blush’: Protective Labor Legislation, 1820–1914,” in Protecting Women: Labor Legislation in Europe, the United States, and Australia, 1880–1920, ed. Ulla Wikander, Alice Kessler-Harris and Jane Lewis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 115.
Ibid. Even in the industries subjected to mandated minimum wages, loopholes gave employers considerable scope for evasion. See Sheila Blackburn, “Ideology and Social Policy: The Origins of the Trade Boards Act,” Historical Journal 34 (1991): 57–60. For an unconvincing Marxist interpretation, see Jenny Morris, Women Workers and the Sweated Trades: The Origins of Minimum Wage Legislation (Aldershot, Hampshire: Gower, 1986), 218–28.
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Gutzke, D.W. (2008). Britain’s “Social Housekeepers”. In: Gutzke, D.W. (eds) Britain and Transnational Progressivism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230614970_7
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