EXPORTING THE HOME
So powerful was the idea of the home in the lives of nineteenth-century European women that it moved wherever they went. The working-class woman took the home into the street when she networked with her neighbours.
The middle-class woman took the home with her for a different function — to export it to the less fortunate.To qualify as a lady of the middle classes, the bourgeois woman had an obligation to proselytise the home — to preach the virtues of the feminine domestic sphere to those amongst the lower working classes who were failing to fulfil the expectations of respectable society. The middle-class lady possessed a sensibility built upon her concern for women and children who required the guidance of her experience and knowledge. This was an act of evangelism which conferred on the middle-class woman access to the world. It took her out of the private sphere of the home, and gave her a legitimate role in the public sphere. Bringing the female world of home and family to the places of poverty, vice, drink and ignorance, the middle-class woman secured protection and privilege in a place which was otherwise considered dangerous. Indeed, many middle-class women undoubtedly regarded this as a source of excitement, and perhaps as a means of self-discovery. But walking in her fine clothes down the public thoroughfare of ‘rough’ areas, and even entering working-class homes in ‘slum districts’, she was effectively surrounded by a force-field which gave her protection from molestation and obstruction. In this way, the middle-class woman could go where others, including men, might fear to go.
Whether of a liberal persuasion like the female reformers of post-1848 Germany, Catholic conservative like the women of northern France or evangelical like those in England, female philanthropists or social activists shared a belief in their ability to bring about change.
This so-called woman- centred approach to social reform was characterised by their faith in the value of the maternal role in ‘the great social household’.51 Moreover, these women’s unshaking belief in their own domestic morality not only informed the kind of charity they chose to sponsor (mother and baby homes, kindergartens, temperance campaigns, health and hygiene reform), but also those persons deemed worthy of help and the conditions demanded for the receipt of charity. Members of the French Catholic maternal societies ‘revealed a firm intention to mould members of their sex into their own image’. In sum:the working of the maternal societies corresponded to the workings of the microcosm of the home and the macrocosm of the universe. On the social level, it reflected the image of the women, demanded the mastery of reproduction in the maintenance of a chaste presence, ordered the relationship between rich and poor mothers, and connected them to the moral authority of God through the mechanism of Caritas'5
It was this limited vision which determined the contradictory nature of their beneficence. These women could provide help to mothers and infants in the name of improving infant and maternal mortality rates, whilst barring illegitimate children from their creches. They could lecture working-class women on cleanliness in homes resembling slums whilst they employed servants to maintain their own houses to the standards they required in others. To acknowledge the presence of unmarried mothers and their illegitimate children would have blemished the image of motherhood in whose name these ‘lady bountifuls' were dispensing their goodwill. Philanthropy was seen as a natural extension of their domestic role, and there could be no compromise
Female charitable activity was informed by religious commitment, moral superiority and humane charity. In Britain, evangelism inspired the formation of an extensive range of female associations, from temperance, missionary and Sunday School societies to female benevolent institutions, societies for the care of widows, orphans, the sick and the infirm.
The numbers involved were considerable. In Glasgow, for example, in 1895 two-thirds of the 10,766 Sunday School teachers were female.53 In Germany the first such female associations developed under the aegis of the Catholic and Protestant Churches such as Amalie Sieveking's Women's Association for the Care of the Poor and the Sick, founded in Hamburg in 1832. Here the early female associations might also be described as patriotic in that they were established in response to the problems caused by the Napoleonic Wars; organisations such as the Frauenverein von 1814 and the Frauenverein fur das Verscbdmte Arme von 1816 aimed to help needy families by lending them money to buy work tools, visiting, and ensuring the children attended school.54 Jewish women also established their own philanthropic organisations. In Britain, in the context of the Jewish immigration in the late nineteenth century and the rise of fears about racial degeneration, Anglo-Jewish women worked to ensure respectability and good maternal standards in the new urban Jewish communities.55 Women believed that the key to philanthropy was the personal touch: ‘the primary goal for most women was the reestablishment of a network of friendships across class lines, between women of shared interests and concerns.'56Personal charity, then, could be seen as an extension of the personal kinship networks so painstakingly established by middle-class women. Instead, though, of waiting for family and friends to approach her with their problems, the lady reformer ventured out to those in need. In London, however, it was found that one of the best ways of reaching the poorest families was by employing a ‘Bible-woman' from the working classes who would more likely be welcomed inside as ‘a motherly woman of their own class'.57 Similarly, the English housing reformer Octavia Hill (1838—1912) also used women as sanitary visitors in an effort to exploit poor women's tacit acceptance of the dominant discourse on cleanliness and hygiene; male visitors, she found, were likely to be thrown out by the husband.
All these organisations tended to use women on the front line as the first point of contact with the recipients of charity in their own homes, or at least on the doorstep. It was to this face-to-face task that women were believed to be most suited. Not only were they more likely to be admitted to a working man's home but it was also felt that female visitors shared a common set of moral and maybe also religious values with the working-class woman which transcended class difference. All of this activity rested upon the belief that all women shared common values about the importance of home and family.The example of the founding of kindergartens in France and Germany illustrates how similar attempts to bestow charity were conceived quite differently. In northern France the kindergarten movement was conceived as a means of providing a basic education for working-class children. The nature of that educational experience was coloured by religious imagery and insistent catechising, reminding the children of the temptations of industrial society and the dangers of falling into sin. In northern Germany, by contrast, the Froebel kindergarten model which promoted creativity, healthy exercise and natural growth, was a more reformist philanthropic response to social problems. For activists such as Bertha von Marenholtz-Bulow, education was the key to reform, promoting social harmony and instilling in children the values of community and citizenship. Underlying this noble aim was the female mission to promote female values of nurture and community that the rest of male-dominated society neglected.58 French and German women shared a common agenda which was to see maternal values influencing the ‘great human household’, but the difference between the two groups lies in their deeper objectives. In France, female charity was an end in itself, simply reflecting well upon the dame patronnesse and rarely evolving into a critique of society. In Germany, however, the philanthropic activities informed by ‘spiritual motherhood’ were to provide a springboard for a wider vision encompassing female emancipation, the concept of social work and, as in Britain, a challenge to the double-standard of morality.
Philanthropic work invariably carried with it a moral message involving an implicit criticism of working-class standards. Yet, the inevitable dissonance between the standards imposed by women philanthropists and the achievements of their working-class clients was sharper in some conditions than in others. Where infant care was concerned, it is clear that the first phase of involvement by voluntary associations prioritised the survival and health of the infant at the expense of the mother’s interests, such was the eagerness to see infant mortality rates fall. We have already seen how middle-class mothers had embraced motherhood as central to their identity and had come to see child nurture as a key element in their duty to the nation. By the end of the century, in response to a number of external stimuli such as imperialist expansion, war and national aggrandisement, the stronger European nations were concerned not only for the quantity but also for the quality of their populations. In Britain, shock at the poor state of recruits to fight in the Anglo-Boer War (1899—1902) prompted massive official concern with the health of the population. Similar concerns were expressed in France following the Franco-Prussian war of 1870—1. The response was an army of health visitors, sanitary inspectors and sundry others who sought to educate working-class mothers on how to care for their infants, dispensing advice rather than financial aid and not infrequently casting a disapproving gaze over the homes of their struggling clients. Their belief was that ‘bad’ mothers could become ‘good’ mothers if placed under scrutiny and continual supervision.59 Not surprisingly, mothers were often suspicious of the visitors’ intentions, and sceptical about their chances of being able to put into practice the advice they had been given. In one London borough, though, there were some who understood the tensions implicit in the infant welfare movement. ‘I do not think that my Hoxton mothers would let a lady in if she said: “I hear you have got a baby and I want to teach you about it” ’, commented one local worker in 1904.60
Two issues brought middle-class values into conflict with working-class life: temperance and sexual morality.
Both of these social problems forced women reformers to address broader gender issues. Women active in the temperance movement regarded male drinking as a threat to women and children, to the very foundations of family life. Alcohol was seen as a corrosive substance which ate away at the foundations of domesticity. Female reformers, many of whom came to temperance from a religious background, regarded drink as an enemy of the family and domesticity, and women themselves could counter it if they adopted middle-class moral values. The temperance movement was, in part, an ‘assertion of domestic priorities’.61 Indeed, women were seen as the key not only to change in the family but also in the moral elevation of society as a whole. One of the most prominent temperance campaigners in Britain remarked in 1849 that women were the ‘most influential moral teachers of society’; it was they who had the responsibility to reform those weaker than themselves.62 The man who drank away his wages in the pub needed to be encouraged back into the home by a wife who created a peaceful domestic environment. But it was soon realised that the solution to the problem did not lie in the hands of women alone. The existence of a male drinking culture in pubs which excluded women, and the brutal consequences of excessive alcohol consumption in the form of domestic violence convinced many amongst the reformers that the provision of alternatives in the form of alcohol-free cafes and pubs, and the campaigning amongst women and children, did not reach the root of the problem. The solution to intemperance, like drink itself, had to be seen in the context of unequal power relations between men and women, in the home, in the workplace and in the social sphere.Sexual morality forced women reformers to address broader gender issues in a more radical way. Prostitution, vice and moral purity took women activists into a whole new arena. Whilst they initially believed that the eradication of vice and commercial sex could be solved by encouraging working-class women to conform to the domestic ideal, they soon realised that change could only come about with a thoroughgoing alteration in the condition of women as a group. Chapter 6 considers this issue in more detail. This shift from criticism of the working classes, to self knowledge and a broader feminist consciousness on the part of the women philanthropists resulted in a realisation that female campaigning against the laws on vice (and drink) could never be successful as long as there was no equality before the law and as long as women were disenfranchised.