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Fifty Years of Association Work Among Young Women, 1866-1916
Fifty Years of Association Work Among Young Women 18661916 Author:Elizabeth Wilson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AN OPEN DOOR IN LONDON MISS ROBARTS' classification of young women was no doubt made more from observation than from statistics. However, the B... more »ritish census of 1851 reported 3,000,000 young women in Great Britain (excluding Ireland) engaged in industrial occupations; of this number 500,000 were wives helping their husbands either behind the counter, at the desk, or in manufacturing processes. The 39,139 nurses in domestic service largely outnumbered nurses in hospitals and on cases, but the age of those nurses—half ot them were from five to twenty years old—helps us to understand that Tilly Slowboy was as true to life as Sairey Gamp or Betsey Prig, who have come to the front as the representative English nurses of that period. As to the living-in system which prevailed for young women shop assistants as well as for youths, it was probably a survival from the time when one extra pair of hands was called in to help the shop keeper, of whose family the owner of the pair of hands then became a part. But the family idea had long since been abandoned. The girl shop assistants spent most of every week-day wakinghour in the shop itself. Recesses for meals were of the shortest and even on Sunday the girls were not allowed to stay in their own rooms. That knight of womanhood, who has been called the most spiritual Christian of his age, Antony Ashley Cooper, later the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, had spoken with alarm a few years before of the displacement of male by the substitution of female labor in industrial occupations at large. Although he had led Parliament to put a stop to the degrading colliery practices where women and girls crawled through dangerous passages, harnessed like beasts of burden, dragging after them heavily loaded carts, yet women were still la...« less