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Late Victorians 1890-1899
Although most working women were traditionally employed in either domestic
service or industry, shops, offices and the new telephone exchanges increasingly
offered cleaner conditions and more money. Between 1880 and 1896, real wages
rose by nearly 45% while the birth rate fell. The result was that British
workers, for the first time ever, had money in their pockets and some leisure
time in which to spend it.
Most took their first holidays, and they chose the seaside, causing a boom time
for landladies from Blackpool to Brighton. To the late Victorian, the seaside
really meant a town, the pier, Punch and Judy, and some cockles and Whelks. Day
trips were often organised by the factories and mills, so as a result the
coastal towns nearest the industrial areas did the best business.
The middle classes had their own amusements. Week-ending in country cottages
became popular, while for the less well off, cycling, rambling and photography
were new pastimes. The bicycle first caught on as an inexpensive means of
transport. Sensible and comfortable clothing was soon designed with cycling in
mind, and the 1890s Demoiselle (young woman) was quick to discover that it
afforded her almost limitless access to the outside world without the company of
that social feature, the chaperone.
The railway, and in London the new Underground system, had a further advantage
in that it allowed the middle classes to commute into the city. New suburban
housing, mostly for lease or rent, was put up in various fashions by a hoard of
speculative builders. The lower middle class easily found employment in the
service sector - particularly in retailing, within the new chains of food shops
and large department stores like John Lewis in London’s Oxford Circus.
For the middle class woman, working outside the home was still unthinkable and
so filled her time in several ways, charity being one and the church another.
But it was the arts, particularly music, where many women gained a sense of
accomplishment. Since compulsory elementary schooling was well established and,
from 1891, free, most women were quite well educated. Some pioneers braved
criticism to attend lectures at university. By the late 1870s women’s colleges
had actually been established at Oxford, Cambridge and London, but the strange
thing was that although they attended lectures and took exams, the women
studying there were barred from holding a degree. The professions, too, were out
of bounds, and the highest level of paid work to which any woman could aspire
was the upper reaches of nursing. Many women at this time decided the next
logical step was to get the vote.