Contemporary scholarship still has a tendency to view female work in industry not as a sizable contribution to economic history but as a social problem. The female worker has not been considered an independent economically active person, but a victim of a defective system. By recreating women of the past into victims, whether of the capitalist system or patriarchal society, we take away their agency. We refuse to allow them to be thinking persons who made rational choices. In doing so, historians play into the hands of the male view of the past. If working women were just victims, they can be relegated to a corner of social history.

Once upon a time, before manufacturing in Europe became history, the author of this book had the opportunity to visit a veneer factory. We were taken through various rooms, ending up in one with only female workers. The noise was incredible. The women cleaned out branches and replaced them with plugs. Two women opposite one another banged away with mallets at sheets of veneer spat out by a machine. We were told that only women could do such work fast enough and without hitting each-others’ hands.

The Finnish factory inspector tells us in her report form 1904 how skill and specialisation was not outside the female scope, when an effort was made to replace women in the factories dealing with small items of wood, the male workers were found to be far less effective. On the other hand, the inspector acknowledges the problem of female mobility in certain industries, resulting in lower earnings, because of employment history. In this connection, she points out that the reason for women leaving was the option of earning more in the summer loading and unloading ships.1 The key piece of information here is that women looked for opportunities to earn and if staying in the factory did not provide chances of advancement, you could just as well look for employment where more money was offered. As female earnings were low, short-term solutions became more likely. Slim chances of advancement also promoted less interest in unionisation. On the other hand, we have evidence that women were not lethargically hanging on to any job but actively looking for opportunities and better pay.

What women wanted

During the first week of July, 1900, the First General Meeting of the Unions of Working Women was held in Helsinki. Representatives of 21 women's unions met in the premises of The Worker's Organisation of Helsinki, where the women's section had set up a coffee breakfast for the delegates at 8.00 in the morning. The meeting started at 9.30 in the festival hall, which was, the minutes tell us, decorated with flowers, garlands, birch leaves and banners for the occasion.

The agenda for the three day meeting had 12 points for discussion:

• • How to increase unionisation among women

• • The creation of central organisation of female unions

• • How to achieve a working day of no more than 10 hours for women

• • How to achieve a legal minimum hourly wage for women

• • How to spread information about the need for female suffrage

• • How to achieve unified rules about apprenticeship for women in all sectors

• • The necessity of petitioning the government for a female industrial inspector

• • What could be done about protecting the freedom of organisation and access to information for women in domestic service?

• • How should women work to promote proletarian ideological development?

• • How to get a ban on piece work

• • The importance of starting a fund for economic protection during strikes and lockouts

• • The possibility of starting a newspaper for working women

In the discussion, one of the delegates stated:

The meeting highlighted a number of problems, some serious, in the inspection system. It was said that, even in large factories, there seemed to be information in advance about the arrival of the inspector.

Debates about women and the position of authority

When the question of appointing female inspectors arose it raised a number of objections.

The chief inspector of factories said (1879) ‘I doubt very much whether the office of factory inspector is suitable for women …’ The problem was not only ‘the general and multifarious duties of an inspector of factories would really be incompatible with the gentle and home-loving character of a woman’ but the fact that ‘Factory inspecting requires activity and acumen and the stern authority of a man to enforce obedience to his interrogatories … and a female inspector having to submit herself in the witness-box to the cross-examination of an astute attorney …’1 The profession was visualized as giving orders in the factory and disputing with lawyers in court with a good portion of confrontation, therefore, a male prerogative.

The problem was seen to be part of differences in approach to problems by men and women. For example, the 1833 Factory Inquiry in Britain revealed that, while male mule spinners regularly hit their adolescent and child assistants with a strap to keep them working, the female mule spinners gave them food, or pennies to promote results. The strong arm wielding the strap was one of the reasons for male preference by manufacturers. Similarly this was viewed as a reason why female foremen should not be appointed.

The strong-arm tactics still flourished in the 1890s. Adelaide Anderson gave an example of the deplorable level male foremen could sink to when exercising discipline: In 1895, a textile factory foreman turned a fire hose on a group of girls as a measure of discipline, chasing them into a vestibule, after which they had to walk home (in March) dripping with cold dirty water. Forty girls were subjected to this treatment. After examining the girls, the inspector made a complaint, but had no power to demand punishment of the foreman, apart from getting an apology, nothing could be done. She saw this as an example of the restricted powers awarded inspectors in the early days and the structural problems of female workplaces employing male foremen, who could resort to abusive methods and violence to preserve their authority.

Accidents Austria

It was quite common for people to catch their finger in the paper machine. When you looked carefully you could find that many people were one finger short, Hermann had lost one, Norbert, Franzi and Edi the whole hand. If you were not able to perform your duties you would be placed somewhere else … Usually you would not get fired and it would go to the factory board. That is what we had the unions for, to protect people.

(Kopl, Regina and Leopold Redl, Das Totale Ensemble, Ein Führer duch die Industriekultur In südlicher Wiener Becken (Wien, 1989), p. 72)

Factory regulations in selected countries

Britain

• 1844: The Factory Act applied to textile factories. Women and young persons (13–18 years old) were allowed to work a maximum of 12 hrs/day, children under 13 a maximum of 6.5 hrs/ day, no children under 8 could be employed.

• 1847: Women and children (13–18 years old) were allowed to work a maximum of 10 hrs/day or 58 hrs/week (the shift system remained).

• 1850: Women and children (13–18) were only allowed to work between 6 am and 6 pm or 7 am and 7 am in textile factories, working time was increased to 10.5 hrs/day.

• 1866: Municipal authorities were required to appoint sanitary inspectors.

• 1871: The Civil Service reforms stipulated that positions were to be open to those who passed public examinations, from this point, a person was not to acquire a post through privilege and connections.

• 1874: Factory Act stipulated a minimum age of 10 years for employment in textile factories.

• 1878: Factory and Workshops Act specified the following:

Don't they want to be protected?

Factory and workshop owners, factory law and abidance

The intrusion of factory inspectors onto the premises of businesses in Britain was often not welcomed. Even before the advent of women on the scene, there are examples of local authorities forming a protective shield around a businessman against representatives of the central administration.

On 1 May 1885, Thomas Clarke, miller of Earsham, physically attacked inspector Hudson in the yard of his mill and on the road. The local magistrates held that the assaults were justified and did not issue any fine for assault. The excuse was that the inspector had not shown his credentials. As the miller appeared after the inspection had commenced and immediately proceeded with the attack, the producing of certificates had proved fairly difficult.

90 per cent of the 300 female students in the ‘high school for young ladies’ came from lower middle-class families. The fathers were craftsmen or kept small shops. They did not want their children to participate in state-run education. Their idea was that attending ‘a higher school’ was better. The question of what occupation their daughter should aim for did not arise. Generally the children of workers did neither attend the higher school for ladies nor the secondary schools preparing for the Gymnasium (and the baccalaureate). Our school was the exception … I used to read in the morning before school about the debates in parliament and the regional assembly on issues related to women's education. My mother thought I was mad.

(Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), p. 115)

We understood that we lived in a time of change, that we as female students were creating a new type of woman with independence and freedom but that we still were stuck in the old family structures. When we came home it was necessary to take on the role of ‘daughter of the house’. Instead of spending time with our books and seminar papers in the holidays we had to help with the housework from morning to night, we were there to serve other family members. When I once tried to get out of these duties my brother said with friendly superiority, ‘Learning to serve makes a good wife’, and gave me his clothes for ironing.

(Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), p. 122)

When you look back did you always want to be a teacher or would you have liked to do something else?

I would have liked to study law.

Why did you not ask your father if that would be possible?

He would never have paid for that. He went to his brother who was the one who made decisions in the family and said ‘Can you imagine, she wants to go into higher education and university!’

Research on the subject of women and work has for decades underlined that women were underpaid in relation to men, and that women not only had tasks with less respect but were also forced to labour under inhuman conditions, particularly in factories. This might inspire the question, if factory work was so horrible for women (unlike for men?) why did women enter the factories?

In retrospect there is never a shortage of good ideas and suggestions about what would have been a sensible choice, and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries supplied their fair share of social reformers and people with views about how the working classes should live and the need to get women out of the factories.

Working-class women and families of the past were painfully aware of their need to eat, and the differences in male and female earnings were not restricted to factory employment. Whatever work a woman chose to do, she would earn less than a man. Today we talk about equal pay, which even though guaranteed by law, is not actually a reality in Western countries. In the past, women had to take reality into consideration and deal with whatever choices were available. In such a situation the factory might not have been the worst option. Middle-class social reformers considered domestic service as a suitable job for young women: it was safe and in a family, under control of ‘respectable people’ and girls would acquire domestic skills that would be useful when they married and became wives and mothers. In actual fact, the work was badly paid, had terrible hours, no freedom and privacy, no job security and in case of pregnancy, resulted in loss both of employment and home. While farm work was also badly paid, the social distance between employer and employee could be a lot closer. In addition, in many parts of Europe, rural society handled the question of pregnancy more smoothly; there were even regions, most prominently in German-speaking parts of Europe and Iceland, where mothers could keep their children with them when employed as live-in farm workers.

My father would in the evenings read for my mother the book by Bebel, ‘The woman in Socialism’. She could not read it herself as she was busy darning socks and mending clothes.

At the Conference of the amalgamated unions of France (CGT) 10–14 September 1900 the following statements were made:

• • A woman's place is at home where she should occupy herself with the wellbeing of her husband and children. Female work is against nature.

• • Female work is contrary to health and hygiene and causes degeneration.

• • Female work is against morals and breeds promiscuity and prostitution.

• • As women are paid less female work undermines men and the proletarian fight against capitalism.

• • Female work is not emancipating but makes women slaves to the employer on top of family duties.

• • When the proletarians have achieved the victory over the capitalists women will not need to work outside the home anymore.

And finally:

• • All workers agree that the introduction of women into industry has been bad for the working class in the moral as well as the physical and economic sense. While it is not within our power, today, to change the situation, our goal is at least to ameliorate the bad effects of female industrial work.

When discussing the position of women in the workplace in the late nineteenth century and the ideological background against which they had to operate, it is of some importance to analyse the stance taken by the unions and the socialist movement.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the new wave of feminist research made serious challenges regarding existing views of the past. One of the debates focused on the absence of interest in the life and condition of women. The issue was raised that scholars who had challenged paradigms on political grounds and demanded the right of the working class to enter into history, themselves made unfounded claims of what women had wanted. Such claims were on the one hand linked to their own prejudices, on the other hand to those of working-class men of past centuries

Women in the Workforce

I never cared for school I’d rather work than go to school. They used to take us during school vacation if we were fourteen or fifteen. Then at sixteen you’d start steady work. We all expected to work in the mill … My parents did not believe in education.

(Tamara Hareven and Randolph Langenbach, Amoskeag: Life and Work in an American Factory City in New England (London, 1979), p. 181)

My mother was hostile to ‘modern regulations’ of which compulsory education was one. She thought it unreasonable that other people should have the right to tell parents what to do with their children. On this point my father agreed … three years of school was enough according to my parents and what you had not learnt by the age of ten, you would never learn they repeated … I was not always able to go to school, I had to earn and every school day I missed was a workday with income. In the end my mother was sentenced to 24 days of incarceration because of my absences from school. One day two policemen came and took her to serve her sentence as she had not come of her own accord. This my mother never forgot, how a hardworking woman and good mother could be treated like that. I was so ashamed that I did not dare go out in the street.

(Adelheid Popp in Karin Roi Frey, Wenn alle Stricke reissen, dann wird sie noch einmal Lehrerin, Lehrerinnen in biographischen Zeugnissen (Bochum, 2001), pp. 111–12)

In 1896, more than 60,000 children between the ages of 11 and 14 worked in factories; in 1901 there were still more than 40,000 in this age group, including so-called half-timers. Source: p.p. 1902 XII, pp. 36–43.

Trust and mistrust

Complaints received, complaints resolved

Although there had been activity among working women and female unions to achieve the employment of female inspectors, there was not an immediate coming together when the female inspectors commenced their work. There were even instances when the women sided with employers, regarding the inspectors as their enemies. During the early years, in 1896, there was even an example of a woman in Leeds (Annie Michell) taking Adelaide Anderson to court for physical assault, claiming that the Inspector had grabbed and shaken her when she did not answer questions. The outcome was in favour of the Inspector, as the court could clearly see that the small and timid Inspector was unlikely to form a physical threat to a woman the size of her accuser. The case brought bad publicity, however. Adelaide Anderson assessed the situation in the early years as one where the women had become so used to being ignored and misused that they had slid into lethargy, expecting no improvement. Her view was that only through activity and publicising that activity could the inspectors convince the female workers that the situation could change.

As conversations regarding problems were unlikely in the presence of the employer or the foreman, confidential visits in women's homes would create better chances of communication.

It would seem that Anderson was right. When the newspapers reported on prosecutions, as the appearance of the ‘Lady Inspectors’ in court was a novelty, the notion that change was possible did penetrate the awareness of at least some women. There was an increase in the number of complaints by female workers, or their families, received by the female inspectors, doubling in 1896 (to 381) in comparison with the previous year. With an increasing number of complaints also came an increasing number of prosecutions.

The creation of posts fixed to a specific locality cut down on time used for travel and increased the opportunities of contact with the women in the workplaces and outside. In 1913, the women's branch of the inspectorate visited nearly 7000 factories and 4000 workshops, investigated 700 accidents, conducted 373 prosecutions and received 2014 complaints.

Report in the local newspaper Silkeborg Dagblad, 6 June 1910:

Betzy Kjelsberg and contact with workers

Betzy Kjelsberg often gave talks at unions and worker's clubs. This was a way of establishing contacts with those best aware of existing problems. After the intervention to incorporate advice from workers in connection with the installation of new paper machines, her reputation as genuinely interested increased. After having approached the health authorities and local inspectors with no result, the workers association representing loggers turned to Kjelsberg. While she was aware that this was not part of the remit of a factory inspector, she still decided to make a visit.

She personally turned to one of the company directors and wrote to the overseer and begged them to remedy the worst problems instantly and later deal with the others. She was soon told by the workers that many of the problems had been rectified and received a heartfelt thank you for her visit (Magnhild Folkvord, Betzy Kjelsberg: feminist og brubyggjar (Oslo, 2016), pp. 126–7).

In face of considerable opposition and claims that the economy was going to be ruined, Britain introduced the first workplace regulations in 1833 and 1844, followed by France in 1841. It soon became apparent, however, that legislation without control had little impact on the work of children and a system of factory inspection was set up in these countries within a year of the new legislation. The early inspection system left much to be desired: initially, four factory inspectors were deemed sufficient for the whole of Britain. Furthermore, some of the early inspectors were not particularly active, some had tendencies to bond with the factory owners because of recruitment, salaries or ideology.

In 1874, a state-funded system with 15 inspectors overseeing a regional inspectorate was introduced in France and by 1891 no less than 73 departmental inspectors had been engaged. The department of Seine saw the engagement of women in the inspections of schools and welfare institutions already in 1878 and from 1892 the state also appointed women for inspecting factories employing women and children.

Safety and hygiene problems were also raised outside Britain and France during the second half of the nineteenth century by doctors, philanthropists and factory workers. Regulations about accident funds financed not only by workers but also factory owners raised more awareness in relation to dangerous machinery. The state and local governments, which had little desire to take on the economic responsibility for individuals loosing health and limbs in the factories, saw the benefits of an inspection system eliminating obvious dangers. As a result, many countries in Europe and members of the British Commonwealth introduced workplace legislation and inspection by the 1880s.

Feminism, social reform and the discussion about female factory inspectors

The late nineteenth century was the time of the rising specialist. Traditional notions were looked down upon; the urban landscape was transformed not only by the tramway and streetlights but also by piped water, the water closet and the creation of milk and meat inspection offices. Old superstition was to be replaced by new rationality, embodied in the knowledge of technology, chemistry and medicine.

The Right for Women to Vote in National Elections

In the late nineteenth century, women had made considerable progress into the educational system. From societies with little or no formal education for women in the early 1800s, schools, exams and even universities had opened their doors for girls. In some cases, the origins of the development can be found in the Enlightenment, in other cases, political, economic or other local issues contributed to the increased inclusion of women in educational efforts. In large parts of Europe, however, the activity of the nineteenth-century women's movements focused on female access to education and the right to use accrued knowledge by taking office within wider society. The education system, healthcare and social care were logical extensions of the female sphere. The civil service, however, a logical enough route for educated women, was for a long time closed, until new innovations created activities deemed suitable for women. Female entry into social welfare activities related to women and children also found support in many quarters.

While the increase in access to education followed similar patterns of development, one should not ignore the influence of the higher degree of involvement by the state or local administration in continental and Northern Europe in comparison with the private nature of education in Britain and the USA.

The early steps for including girls into the education system in post-revolutionary France had their roots in the 1830s and the first teacher training school, the Normal School for Girls, was founded in 1838. For a long time the Catholic Church had a strong grip on the female educational sector and from 1867 this virtual monopoly was contested by the state. The private sector had been offering women teacher training from the 1850s but not until the 1880s was a state secondary schools system created for women.