Making Leisure Work
Women’s Rational Recreation
in Late Victorian and
Edwardian England
by Catriona M. Parratt
DEPARTMENT OF SPORT, HEALTH, LEISURE, AND PHYSICAL STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA
In Victorian England, partly in response to a perceived threat of social and political disorder, and partly out of a wish to improve the conditions of working-class life, reformers
embraced leisure as a means of educating and edifying the masses. These “rational recreation” initiatives were one element of a more general social meliorism. They became less
didactic as the nineteenth century wore on, but the idea that leisure could and should be
used to shape the behavior and attitudes of working people, that it was an important arena
in which to effect social “progress,” continued to have a powerful appeal. Reformers claimed
that rational recreation would uplift the working classes, and commentators accorded
wives and mothers a central role in this project. Yet historians have had almost nothing to
say about women’s involvement—either as propagandists and sponsors, or as objects of
reform—in rational recreation. Hugh Cunningham has implied an explanation for the
void in the literature. He points out that rational recreationists were “almost
exclusively . . .men dealing with men”; that they assumed that women spent whatever free
time they had “confined within the bonds of home, family and class”; and that, thus safely
contained and controlled, working-class women and their leisure attracted little attention.1
But if this was true of the 1830s and 1840s during what Cunningham dubs the
heyday of rational recreation, it was certainly no longer so by the last decades of the
nineteenth century.2 In the late Victorian and Edwardian period, upper- and middle-class
women involved themselves enthusiastically in the leisure interests of their less privileged
counterparts. They did so because of the class-bound nature of much working-class women’s
leisure—more precisely, because in it they saw a great deal that disturbed their gender and
class sensibilities. And they did so because young working women appeared to be moving
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tions of social control as the educational system. Apprehending an expanding leisure world
opening up, one which was full of worrying dangers as well as appealing possibilities,
female rational recreationists set out to forewarn and forearm their lower-class counterparts against the dangers. They also attempted to make possible alternative forms of leisure that would ennoble rather than degrade.3 This recreational reform came within the
compass of a broader philanthropy in which, from the early 1800s and increasingly after
mid-century, upper- and middle-class women played a central role. Understood to be
unfit by nature for anything other than maternity and care-giving, expected to be moral
and compassionate, and relieved by virtue of their social and economic positions from the
necessity of earning a living: these were some of the social and cultural circumstances that
predisposed female philanthropists to find in the difficulties and deprivations of the lower
classes a vocation for which they seemed—and deemed themselves—uniquely qualified.4
My purpose in this paper is twofold: first, to counter the notion that reformers were
unconcerned with working-class women’s leisure; second, to examine some of the cultural
work which the reformers undertook in the production and promulgation of rational
recreation. My interest in the latter is in the way upper- and middle-class women constructed working women’s leisure as a problem needing a remedy, represented themselves
as the ones most suited for finding and administering that remedy, and thus made working women’s leisure their work. In doing so, some found an escape from the constraints of
lives too full of leisure—ironically, leisure that was possible precisely because of the heavy
burden of labor that working-class women bore.
According to Peter Bailey, by the 1860s leisure had secured a place in the public mind as “a
necessary amenity, a basic overhead in the maintenance of an industrial society.” This
legitimacy extended even to the working classes, though the notion persisted that leisure
was a “dangerously open-ended world” in which to let them have free rein.5 During the
late Victorian period, upper- and middle-class women in a range of philanthropic and
reform enterprises began to broach working women’s leisure in much the same terms,
guided by similar principles. Churches, chapels, and other religious agencies; clergymen’s
wives, sisters, and daughters; trade unionist associations; temperance groups; upper-class
ladies playing out their customary bountiful roles; and growing numbers of college-educated young women: these were among the main propagandists and providers of a consciously reformist model of leisure. They offered working-class girls and women alternatives to the amusements of the public house and music hall, encouraged them to use
leisure as a means of improvement, and attempted to imbue them “with a love for rational
amusements indulged in a rational way.”6
Female reformers’ interventions varied considerably in scale, permanence, and political tenor, but all shared a common vision of leisure’s place and purpose in working-class
women’s lives: whatever else, leisure must conduce to respectability and edification. These
principles underpinned the Girls’ Friendly Society (GFS), for example, founded in 1874
by a group of Anglican women. The GFS’ overarching aim was to bring together unmarried and “virtuous” young women, both with one another and—in a classic rational recreation experiment in promoting social harmony—upper-and middle-class “associates.”
Serving as moral guides and exemplars, associates were surrogate mothers whose mission
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Band of Hope membership card for
Emma Hiller, Nottingham, 1880.
Courtesy Nottinghamshire Archives,
Nottingham.
was to keep GFS members from sliding into sin and to educate them in “religious principles and domestic duties.” By 1885, the GFS operated 821 branches in England and
Wales and in its peak years of 1913 and 1914 had 39,926 associates, 197,493 full members and 81,374 “candidate” or probationary members. Closely allied with the GFS—
indeed, organized with the express intention of serving as its extension—was the Mothers’
Union, established in 1885 as a kindred organization for married women. Within four
years of its foundation the Mothers’ Union numbered 157,668 members and associates in
branches throughout Britain and between 1902 and 1920, its branches and members
doubled in number.7 Recreation was critical to these agencies’ objective of preserving
members’ moral character and preparing them for “Christian marriage and... motherhood.” The GFS strongly discouraged any leisure behavior that tended in the opposite
direction, “whether it be drinking, extravagance, or the reading of light literature.” 8 Likewise, the Mothers’ Union warned its members about the hazards of “bad books,” wandering the streets at night, and “unsafe companions and...dangerous amusements.”9 Both
associations provided “safe” alternatives and spaces for women’s recreation, which included
counter-attractions such as “pure” literature and garden parties hosted by titled ladies,
social clubs, country holidays, meeting rooms, and rest homes. And both encouraged
working-class girls and women to use leisure for their own and their families’ betterment.10
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Other women’s organizations, including those with patently more radical objectives
than the GFS, also saw working-class women’s leisure primarily in terms of its didactic
utility. The Women’s Protective and Provident League (WPPL) and the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC) incorporated recreational and educational elements in their efforts to
improve the working conditions, status, and rights of women. WPPL officers knew that
the leisure activities and services they offered helped attract and retain union members,
and that in working-class families leisure resources were often a privilege men enjoyed at
the cost of their wives’ and children’s well-being. The League regularly conducted its business in the context of social gatherings and entertainments, and provided women with
facilities such as meeting rooms, pianos, and circulating libraries, as well as recreational
evenings and classes in history, reading, arithmetic, botany, grammar, French, German,
Shakespearean literature, ambulance, first aid, and drawing. The WPPL and the WIC
viewed leisure as conducive to the personal health and happiness of working-class women,
and their publications are noticeably free of the conservatism and unquestioning deference that marked the GFS. Nonetheless, like the GFS, the largely upper- and middle-class
leaders of both these organizations insisted that they had a responsibility to guide women
in their leisure choices and habits, and in this respect the recreational philosophies and
practices of all three associations were very much of a piece.11 The WIC’s Circulating
Library for Working Girls’ Clubs, for example, took as its twin missions encouraging
working-class women to read, and the elevation of their reading tastes. Unfortunately,
reported the Women’s Industrial News, only “light literature” ranging from “blood and
thunder to twaddle” appealed, despite the library’s best efforts “to provide wholesomer”
books.12 (According to one contemporary critic, there was “hardly a magazine read by
[working-class girls] which it would not be a moral benefit to have swept off the face of
the earth.”13) WPPL clubs and homes for working women were seen similarly as places in
which upper- and middle-class women would use their influence to shape working-class
behavior and values: “the ladies who visite[d]. . . had a very beneficial effect on the girls,
which [was] shown in their improved manner and high moral principles,” the Women’s
Union Journal enthused of one such enterprise in Soho, London.14
These organizations were not as exclusive as the GFS—and were less inclined to
sanctimony about working-class women’s moral characters—but they depended on the
patronage and benevolence of the ruling classes quite as much as it did.15 WPPL and
WIC social gatherings (especially the more formal events) evoked the class power, privilege, and condescension that were hallmarks of rational recreation. Describing a dinner
provided by Lady Brassey and a speech by her husband to 250 members of the London
Women’s Union in September 1883, the Women’s Union Journal enthused over the order
and decorum that marked the occasion. “The tables. . . were tastefully laid out and decorated with flowers,” and the gathering of “what were justly termed ‘respectable well behaved workwomen”’ [emphasis added] was “a novel and pleasant sight,” according to Sir
Thomas Brassey. Novel, presumably, because in the world-view of the aristocratic patrons
of women’s rational recreation, qualities such as respectability and decorum were not easily admitted of laboring women.16
Institutional efforts such as these were an important part of women’s rational recreation, but they were neither the only contributions to it nor, according to more than one
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proponent, necessarily the most effective. “Vast numbers . . . [of] women and girls are not
touched by such influences,” Kathleen M. Townend informed the National Council of
Women of Great Britain (NCWGB) at its 1894 conference. “These must be reached in
humbler fashion, they must be brought into contact more with the individual.” Among
the various, personal attempts that privileged women made to touch and—in Townend’s
words, “make brighter, purer, and freer from temptation”—laboring women’s lives were
some imaginative schemes. “One lady. . . got up entertainments for poor people at her
own house, and she called on those poor people from time to time. Then they [sic] gave
out plants in the autumn, and in early March had a flower show.” Other offerings of
“healthful counter-attractive recreation” included wealthy women opening their gardens
and grounds occasionally for the “use and pleasure” of the less privileged, or entertaining
female workhouse inmates “allowed out for a day.”17 Or organizing concerts and “lantern
exhibitions” to mitigate the “dulness [that]. . . often sent people to the public-house” on
long winter evenings.18 Recreational ministrations were among the duties some clergymen expected of female relatives. Wives and unmarried sisters entertained female parishioners at tea, gave girls and young women dancing lessons in their parlors, and accompanied them on excursions to the country or seaside. All the while, they imparted lessons in
religion and refinement, for, the proponents of women’s rational recreation believed, it
was “an education to the girls even to be with a refined woman, to watch her, talk to her.”
So different was her “whole standard of life” from theirs, that “unconsciously they [were]
learning by being with her.”19
Perhaps the favorite form of upper- and middle-class provision for working women’s
recreation was the “girls’ club” which offered a variety of social and educational activities.
Associations large and small, national and local, and individual women, organized weekly
or fortnightly gatherings of this kind. From Bournemouth and London to Birmingham,
Cardiff, and Edinburgh, for example, young women trained at the renowned Madame
Bergman Osterberg’s Physical Training College gave free gymnastics’ classes in the evenings for working girls and women—some in association with established clubs, others
independently. Women’s settlement houses in London held girls’ clubs four or five times a
week, many of which were allied with the Federation of Working Girls’ Clubs or the
London Girls’ Club Union. There was a large and dynamic club movement in Birmingham. Edward Cadbury, Cecile Matheson, and George Shann indicated in a 1906 study of
the city’s female wage-earners that there were 45 girls’ clubs with a total of 4,000 members
run by Anglicans, Congregationalists, Wesleyans, the Society of Friends, and Unitarians.
A number of Hebrew societies also organized recreation classes. In addition, the GFS had
35 branches with around 5,500 members and candidates, while a Sunday School Union
ran 14 Girls’ Evening Homes with a combined membership of 800. These figures represented some 8 percent of the total number of the city’s wage-earning girls and women.20
In the northern city of York—to illustrate an individual project of this kind—in
1902, seventeen year-old Winifred Rowntree, daughter of the president of the York Cocoa
Works, formed a club for working-class girls and young women. This met one evening a
week in the rooms of an adult evening school in the city’s Leeman Road district. By the
time of its founder’s death in 1915, the “Honesty Girls’ Club” numbered 200 members
ranging in ages from 5 to over 25, organized into five age groups. The club offered drill
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classes, needlework (a compulsory subject), blouse-making, millinery, part singing, a dramatic class, Old English folk dancing and modern dancing, swimming, allotment gardening, nature study, and a Sunday afternoon class. “The fun and merriment” of the social
and educational activities was “followed by. . . quiet reading and. . . hymn singing,” with
which the evening invariably closed.21 Many clubs, even those that were not were directly
connected with churches or chapels similarly encouraged religious devotion and piety by
opening or closing meetings with a prayer. All emphasized “worthwhile,” “improving”
activities such as needlework and (“for the more energetic spirits”) drill or dancing. All
anticipated that members would adopt the quiet and decorous habits and manner of the
ladies who taught, led, and managed them. All aimed at “refining...members by offering
opportunities for wholesome recreation and development” and providing “a counter-attraction to the streets, where many a girl [otherwise found] her sole relaxation.” 22
There is little question, then, that by the latter decades of the nineteenth century,
rational recreation programs, promoted and organized by upper- and middle-class women,
for working-class girls and women, were a feature of urban and even, to a certain extent,
rural England. The scope and impact of these exercises in reformist leisure, and especially
the degree to which and how (if at all) they figured in the lives of the intended beneficiaries, remain open and important questions. Some certainly were able to articulate the
moral agenda of the clubs they attended. Sara of the Hyson Green Girls’ Evening Home in
Nottingham, for example, delighted one of the club’s leaders at the beginning of its 1890
season with the pronouncement: “I am glad I’ve been level-headed and know where to go
to be respectable of an evening [sic].” 23 But working-class “voices” such as these are few
and far between in the documentary history of women’s rational recreation, and even then
they have passed through several middle- and upper-class filters. The circumstances and
motivations—social and personal, altruistic and self-interested—that impelled privileged
women to undertake these reforms, however, have left a more accessible record.
Like their counterparts in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century, late Victorian and
Edwardian female rational recreationists were uneasy about the deleterious consequences
of its wide-sweeping economic and social transformations. And, like other reformers and
commentators of their time, they particularly feared the nation’s physical and moral degeneration and the imminent eclipse of the British Empire. The working-class woman—
and especially the young working-class woman, the embodiment and hope of the next
and all future generations—figured in their apprehension of this “degeneracy crisis” as a
central actor and, therefore, the primary focus for intervention.24 The family and (as a
consequence of the post-1870 piecemeal introduction of compulsory elementary education) the school were two institutions charged with shaping working-class girls and women
into the stuff from which wives and mothers of the empire were made. Domestic service,
which in 1891 employed almost a third of the female wage labor force, was considered an
ideal training for marriage and motherhood.25 But to a nation that, according to Thomas
E. Jordan, sensed it was in a social and cultural crisis, these mechanisms appeared all too
fallible.26 Public education, for example, though applauded for inculcating such worthy
habits as order, discipline, and cleanliness, was criticized for failing to teach anything
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ance at the most critical moment of their lives.”27 In addition, by 1911, although domestic service was still one of the single largest forms of female employment, it was a declining
occupation to which fewer and fewer young women were favorably disposed. Those with
a zest for life and a reluctance to submit to the very immediate and sometimes oppressive
authority of a master and mistress saw alternative employment in manufacturing, and
retail and service industries as holding the promise of greater independence and a more
interesting and lively worklife. Finally, many reformers believed that lower-class families
were incapable of raising young girls and women with the will or skills to be the good
wives and mothers, the makers of those healthy and happy homes that the nation and
empire needed. This was a problem compounded by the changing patterns of employment, for factory and shop work were notorious for leaving young women ignorant and
careless of domestic duties.28
Cognizant of these changes and concerned about the ramifications, upper-and middleclass women insisted that leisure could be used to transform recalcitrant working girls and
women into dutiful wives and mothers. Female rational recreationists asserted that they
could reach over the social and cultural divide and, through personal influence and example, raise and reform their laboring counterparts during the latter’s “precious hours of
leisure.”29 Drawing on—while at the same time constructing and fuelling—the anxiety
over degeneracy, they made working-class women’s leisure work; critical and difficult work
which they claimed as their own, work for which they were singularly fitted.
The language of articles and letters in periodicals, speeches, and conference papers
insisted on this. “A vast work lies before us,” Lady Albinia Hobart-Hampden declared in a
typical call to arms, “who will rise up and do it?” Working women’s recreation was “work
of supreme importance both for the present and for the future welfare of [the] nation,”
Hobart-Hampden explained. It was work that was “sorely needed,” work with issues stretching “far into the future, when these girls shall be wives and mothers, wielding a mighty
influence over the next generation—an influence which... will be nobler and better because of the lessons learned long ago in some girls’ club.” 30 “Vice, disease, crime would
sweep over this great Babylon as the waters of the Atlantic,” warned Maude Stanley, “but
we must raise barriers, we must stem the tide of evil,” “[we must] establish in every locality
clubs for working girls.” Experience showed that girls’ clubs would do “a great work... a
work which raises, which ennobles, which brings out the best traits in a girl, which by its
wholesome pleasures, by its varied interests, by its human sympathies between the ladies
and the girls will make their lives happy and good ones.”31 In urban centers and rural
districts, among “mothers, field and farm workers, [and] factory girls,” leisure reformers
assured themselves that their “garden-parties, out-door lantern exhibitions, girls’ clubs,
friendly teas, and wholesome work for mind and body,” 32 were doing a “noble,” “splendid,” and “very real work.” 33
Leisure was, in fact, much too serious to be left to lower-class women. Without guidance, they were liable to find “for themselves all sorts of amusement,” some of which was
34
“unworthy and unstimulating,” and all of which was “unsatisfying.” In the view of
many in the upper and middle classes, the working masses were “a pleasure-loving race,”
often infuriatingly and irresponsibly so.35 The masses wallowed in a leisure culture that
was rooted in a past more at ease with hedonism and sensual gratification and one that,
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despite a certain taming, still celebrated those values. It was a culture whose appeal reformers well understood, but also one whose temptations they believed working-class
women were woefully ill equipped to resist. And it was a culture they felt sure was inimical
to the best interests of those women, their families and, ultimately therefore, nation and
empire.36
The main leisure fare of working-class women included gossiping, drinking, attending cheap theatres and music halls, meeting and promenading with acquaintances and
friends, shopping, celebrating holidays, birthdays, weddings, and a modest consumerism.37 Sympathetic reformers could appreciate that, given the circumstances of their lives,
working women sought out forms of leisure that tended to either narcotize or excite. “ IS it
any wonder,” wrote one,
that the tired seamstress, the washerwoman after standing long hours at the tub, the wild
factory girl after a day pent up within four walls—that each, as she drags her way back to
comfortless rooms, by courtesy called home, should linger at the swing door of the public
house, with its glaring lights, its warmth and glow on winter nights, and yield to the
seductions of strong drink which, for a time, brings a forgetfulness of sorrow, and drowns
the gnawing sense of looking for something different? [Or that, to] the weary mother in
some scattered country village, with her large family of children and scanty means.. the
visit of the grocer’s cart, with its tempting bottles of cheap wines and spirits [is] an opportunity to which she flies to drown the ceaseless aching of her limbs, and to revive the
flagging energies which must be kept going if the home is to be kept going as well?38
Or that girls and women “cramped and confined” for hours on end in dreary, miserablypaid occupations should hope to find in “the garish lights and dresses, the impure atmosphere” of theatres and music halls, in “the impossible passions” and “artificial emotions”
of cheap literature, an exuberant reaction from the monotony, the deadening “greyness”
of their lives?39
But reformers also worried that these circumstantial pressures met little resistance
from working-class women about whose natures and innate characteristics they were sure;
and of whom most reformers seemed to hold the lowest expectations. “Giddy and weak,”
“overflowing with animal spirits,” brimming over “with the frank enjoyment of low life,”
to the censorious, lower-class women (especially young, wage-earning women) had little
control over their sensual appetites or any discrimination when it came to satisfying them.40
They were “wild and careless,” lacking in “purpose or perseverance,” craved “change and
variety.” 41 They took their “silly and sensational” 42 pleasures recklessly and drifted through
life with no higher object in view than “gaining [their] daily bread or getting as much
amusement as possible.”43 Writing in the “dark continent” convention of late nineteenthcentury imperialism, commentators such as Walter Besant rendered the women of the
laboring classes as an exotic and engaging fauna or a more earthy, primitive race of human. Besant’s description of “Liz,” the stereotypical factory girl in his East London, is
infused with an animalism and exuberance which is not easily contained and which threatens
the order and stability of civilized society. “Liz” has “quick and restless eyes” and “mobile”
lips; she is full of fun and “quick to laugh,” “ready-witted and prompt with repartee and
retort.” She can not walk sedately, but must dance along the street. Like her work-mates
who, “adorned with crimson and blue feathers... run about laughing and shrieking,” she
is an “impudent, saucy bird, always hungry, always on the lookout for something more.”44
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It was an imagery which upper- and middle class commentators and critics commonly
employed in their accounts of working-class women at public play. “Ready with a saucy
word, a sharp retort, a rude laugh, and often, alas! even foul words or swearing,” 45 female
factory hands released from work and out for an evening of fun overflowed “with animal
spirits,” moved “in shoals” and “swarms” through the crowded thoroughfares, “always on
the look-out for a lark.”46 East London seamstresses in their “typical” “rowdy slovenliness
[and] tarnished finery”47 (“such hats! and such feathers in them!”48): “with warm hearts,
with overflowing good nature,” they carelessly played in a “Garden of Eden of uncivilised
life.” 49
Beatrice Potter (later Webb) sensed no “consciousness of sin” among the work-girls
and women of the East End tailoring trade, whose uninhibited enjoyment of “the multitudinous excitements of. . . the streets” she observed in the 1880s. Consequently, she concluded, “you cannot accuse them of immorality. . . . There is only one Fall possible to
them—drink, leading slowly but inevitably to the drunkard’s death.” 50 But for most rational recreationists neither drink nor any of the working-class woman’s “cheap amusements” was far removed from sin. Sin, in fact, was often the sorry price that had to be paid
for those amusements, and in pressing the case for their reform of lower-class leisure,
upper- and middle-class women re-told and re-worked an ancient tale of careless delight,
temptation, and Fall.
There were several versions of the story, some of which focused on adolescent, wageearning workers, others on married women and mothers.51 Some charted in detail the
stages of a life course marked by tragic beginnings and disastrous decline. Others telescoped the narrative around a first, fatal misstep—a drink taken at a workplace party that
engendered “the taste for a dangerous indulgence,” for example.52 All warned of the dire
consequences of what might first appear innocently in the guise of “harmless recreation.”
Maude Stanley’s “Clubs for Working Girls” is an exemplar of these cautionary tales. Stanley’s
woman-child becomes a wage earner at fourteen and thus earns a dangerous freedom and
independence from her parents. Fearful of losing a contributor to the family exchequer,
they “will not venture to draw the reins too tightly,” but instead let her “have her fling.”
Seeking recreation in the street, the “main playground” of the people, she begins her
moral descent by loitering with “some chosen companion” or indulging “in rough play
with boys and lads.” Eventually the mere “walk around, the looking into the shop-windows, the passing by the glaring gaslit stalls in the evening markets” cease to be enough to
entertain or divert. And so, if the means can be found, comes the first “visit to the music
hall, the cheap theatres, the gin-palaces, the dancing saloons, and the wine shop.” Then
follows—finally and inevitably—the “easy sliding into greater sin. . . [and] degradation. . .the
downfall of all womanly virtue.”53
In all these narratives, the reformer cast herself as a moral and cultural superior whose
duty it was to save working girls and women, nation and empire, from the consequences
of profligacy and dissolution. Prepared for the task by birth and breeding, education and
upbringing, she was a stalwart guide and teacher, a friend who would lead the workingclass woman “forwards and upwards,” who would “raise. . . purify, and strengthen her.”54
GFS leaders saw their organization as the nation’s “largest preventive society,” acting as a
“fence between [working girls] and vice.” The association essayed an almost continuous
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surveillance and instruction of its members from the time they joined as candidates at the
age of eight until they married and came under “a husband’s protection.” The educated,
cultured ladies who made up the women’s corps of the late Victorian and Edwardian
rational recreation movement thus attempted to provide the controlling influences and
instruction about which they believed working-class parents—and, more specifically,
mothers—were indifferent. “Thousands of lower-class mothers are. . . utterly and culpably careless about their daughters,” opined one aristocratic associate and leader of the
GFS. “It is here the Girls’ Friendly Society steps in,” she continued. “Modesty in behaviour
at home and on the streets is enforced. . . instruction [is] given. . . in the first principles of
purity and honour. . . . the protection and refining influence surrounding the daughters of
the upper classes [is] extended to the daughters even of the lowest!”55
Mired in the debasing culture of working-class homes and neighborhoods, caught up
in the frantic and tawdry pleasures of the lowest forms of leisure, it was almost impossible
for the working girl or woman to raise her thoughts to what was “lovely, pure, or of good
report.” But with help, she might do so, and who better to give that help than upper- and
middle-class women? “We have had leisure and opportunities of culture and of entering
into the elevating thoughts of our time,” Lady Albinia Hobart-Hampden reminded her
peers, “have we not something we can give to our less favoured sisters? Cannot we seek to
show them the deeper meanings of life, and raise their thoughts above their surround56
ings.?” “There is. . . a real, a felt, and an unsatisfied need for social ministrations of a
secular kind, such as our unoccupied young ladies, and perhaps nobody else, could adequately meet,” suggested Edith Simcox. “Any number of young ladies with a natural
enthusiasm for the ordinary drawing-room accomplishments of singing and dancing,
might be profitably employed as missionaries for the spread of such accomplishments.” 57
This missionary work was the special charge of the conscientious woman of leisure for, if
the working-class woman was society’s Eve, she was its immaculate, moral center. Consequently, it fell to her to educate and elevate working girls and women. This she could do
by raising the standards of their leisure, by enlightening them as to “the nature of true
happiness,” by making them conscious of “the capacity for pure [original emphasis] enjoyment [that] exists in every human heart,” and by giving “them the opportunity for satisfying” that pure enjoyment. “As women workers,” Lily H. Montagu argued at the 1902
NCWGB conference, “we have to admit with Ruskin, that ‘the object of true education is
to make people not merely do the right thing, but enjoy the right thing,’ and until we
have courageously undertaken this educational work among our girls, we may well ask
ourselves with shame ‘Watchman, what of the night?”’58
Making leisure work as an educational tool, as a preventive and remedial force against
a host of social and cultural ailments, was the essence of rational recreation. And during
the late Victorian and Edwardian period, numbers of upper- and middle-class women
worked to administer the nostrum to girls and women of the lower classes. Yet, in the
writings and pronouncements of leisure reformers, dominant though the motifs of solemn duty, of sacro-secular mission are, there is another strain to be heard. This spoke of
the benefits that rational recreation also provided privileged women. For them this work
could be an antidote to too much leisure.59
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Philanthropic, charitable, and social reform movements were arenas in which upper-and
middle-class women stretched the class and gender conventions that historical wisdom
tells us frequently rendered their lives ones of “refined [and “enforced”] idleness.” By the
turn of the century, charity work had been firmly established as a “respectable alternative”
to genteel idleness and many privileged women found in it a sense of purpose that was
denied them elsewhere. Thousands established a presence in working-class neighborhoods
and workplaces where, ministering to the poor and deprived, they sought and found selffulfillment and excitement. (One contemporary estimated for the final decades of the
nineteenth century that there were over 500,000 such women engaged in charity work.) 60
Some were inconsistent and half-hearted “workers” about whom the more diligent complained. These approached charity and philanthropy as they did shopping: in the words of
Judith Walkowitz, as a “roughly equivalent recreational [activity] appropriate to their station.”61 But even the most idealistically-minded experienced the foray into working-class
culture as an adventure, a release, emancipation from dull respectability. As Martha Vicinus
notes, the colonial and imperialist overtones of women’s settlement work were much more
than symbolic for middle-class women: “Emigration to Canada or Australia meant adventure, freedom, and space for their brothers. Tied more closely to their families, women
could find freedom by ‘emigrating’ to the East End [of London].”62
Thus, the very features of working-class women’s leisure which rational recreationists
bemoaned and determined to reform, paradoxically, had a powerful appeal for them.
While reformers exhorted working girls and women to avoid the dangerous, disorderly
passions of popular culture and remain aloof from its cheap excitements, they themselves
enjoyed rubbing up against that culture. Lily Montagu, one of the keenest proponents of
raising working women’s recreational standards, nonetheless envied the “abandonment”
with which they joined “the leisured classes” once the working day was over. Emily Kinnaird,
in a 1900 presentation to the NCWGB conference on “The Bight Use of Leisure,” similarly admitted the contradictions inherent in the project in which she was engaged. “Leisure, to be leisure, must be spontaneous,” she mused. “I have felt how easily leisure vanishes from our sight and eludes our grasp if we talk of it or try to organise it. . . . leisure is
abandonment to miscellaneous impulses.” 63 Busily organizing and policing working
women’s leisure, women of privilege were able thus, in a qualified and guarded fashion, to
partake of the abandonment and excitement of popular culture, to enjoy being ‘in’ but
not ‘of’ its raucous world. Ellen Chase, a settlement worker in Deptford, London, loved
the fact that “there was always something going on,” that “there was always a spice about
‘going into the street.”’ Margaret Nevinson, who spent the early years of her married life in
settlement work in Whitechapel recalled that “life was always full of interest, change, and
excitement. . . . I never remember one dull moment during the two years we lived there.”
At the beginning of her “apprenticeship” as a social investigator and reformer, Beatrice
Webb, who experienced the “want of employment” in her comfortably upper middleclass life as “almost torture, a silent misery,” described her relationship with the East End
and its lower-class inhabitants as a “weird romance.” Though the squalor and coarseness
of much of popular culture depressed her, Webb more often “[felt] envy than pity” for the
East Enders. She relished the unprecedented freedoms that social missionary work brought
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her and her colleagues. “Ah! what would conventional West End acquaintance say to two
young women smoking and talking in the bed, sitting, working, smoking and bath room
of an East End School Board visitor?” she recorded in her diary of an afternoon she and a
friend spent in the company of a former seaman employed by the local school board. “We
have entertained freely and thoroughly enjoyed our life in working-class society.”64
Few leisure reformers acknowledged the paradox and tensions in such encounters
with working-class culture, and in the nexus of class and gender relations that lay at the
heart of women’s rational recreation. Immured and immersed in a class system that was
based on the assumption that “the lower classes laboured to sustain the rich. . . in comfort,”65 it was possible for most to avoid facing their own complicity in sustaining its
inequities. Equally, they might never see or recognize the inequalities in the relationship
between themselves and laboring women, between their own bounteous leisure and the
latter’s unremitting labor. While insisting that working women curtail their involvement
in working-class culture, they simultaneously continued in their enjoyment of its pleasures. Few shared or articulated Lily Montagu’s discomfort with such inconsistencies.
Noting the irony of social reformers attempting to “improve”’ working women’s lives
through philanthropy when they were so often a cause of the hardships those women
endured, she recalled asking a young female clerk of her acquaintance whether she was
likely to get a desperately needed rise. “‘Oh no, I am afraid I cannot get one yet awhile,’”
was the reply, “‘for we are owed at least £200.’ She then gave me the names of one or two
well-known social workers with whom her firm had contracted bad debts which were to
be paid in the nebulous future.” “The era must come,” Montagu insisted, “when. . . life’s
opportunities [will be] better equalised, because on the other side of the scale [from the
woman of leisure] there is the sweated, over-strained piece worker, whose charm is completely crushed by the excessive load of toil to which the over-leisured...contributes.”66
This inequality was an elemental feature of working women’s lives about which the
proponents of rational recreation were largely, eloquently silent. As, in the main, historians have been silent on women’s rational recreation, despite the importance that late Victorian and Edwardian social reformers attributed to it. Both silences speak to the privilege
and power that derive from class and gender; the balances struck, and inequalities sustained as women and men, working classes and ruling classes live their lives and make
their worlds. Upper- and middle-class women in late Victorian and Edwardian England
could and, for the most part did, choose to make working women’s leisure a moral problem for which they had a solution. And this solution, happily for them, also facilitated
their negotiation of the cultural constraints that were part and parcel of being over-leisured ladies. Similarly, in overlooking women, a predominantly masculinist scholarship
has effaced them from the history of rational recreation, rendering it almost exclusively a
men’s realm when it actually occupied large numbers of privileged women, and figured
prominently in ruling-class schemes for the reform of working-class women’s lives. Important empirical, conceptual, and political questions remain, both on the specifics of rational recreation and working-class women’s leisure, and the more general issues of class,
gender, and leisure within which the present examination of women’s rational recreation
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MAKING LEISURE WORK
has been framed. But this essay is intended as an initial contribution to a consideration of
these neglected topics.
A version of this paper was presented to the Nottingham Trent University History Workshop in June,
1998. I wish to thank Jeff Hill and Ian Inkster for inviting me to contribute to the seminar and
acknowledge the participants’ questions and comments.
1.
Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution c.1780–c.1880 (New York: St. Martin’s,
1980), 90–107, 110–11, 129–30 (quote), 155–156, 184. See also Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class
in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830-1885 (London: Routledge
& Kegan Paul, 1978); Anthony Delves, “Popular Recreation and Social Conflict in Derby, 1800–
1850,” in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo, eds., Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton, UK: Harvester Press, 1981), 89–127; J.M.
Golby and A.W. Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd: Popular Culture in England 1750–1900
(London: Batsford Academic & Educational, 1984), 88–110; Richard Holt, Sport and The British:
A Modern History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),136–148. On the late nineteenth-century
recognition of the importance of the working-class mother see Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5, 21–26.
2. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 132.
3. Lady Albinia Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of Today,” The Nineteenth Century (May
1898): 724; Walter Besant, East London (London: Chatto & Windus, 1901), 288–89.
4. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 132; Bailey Leisure and Culture, 100. There
were significant and complex gradations within and between the social classes of Victorian and
Edwardian England that I have not attempted to delineate or discuss here but intend to address in
subsequent work.
On female philanthropy and reformism more generally see, for example, Barbara Leslie Epstein,
The Politics of Domesticity Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981); Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Centuty England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women
and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Kathleen D. McCarthy, ed., Lady Bountiful Revisited:
Women, Philanthropy, and Power (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Maria
Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
For similar concerns about young working women in the United States and Canada, see Joanne
Meyerowitz, Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 46–53; Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure
in Turn-of-the Century New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), 164–71; Ruth M.
Alexander, The ‘Girl Problem’: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1995), 11–66; Carolyn Strange, Toronto’s Girl Problem: The Perils and
Problems of the City 1880–1930 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).
5. Bailey, Leisure and Class, 102, 94 (quotes), 58–63, 65–67, 71–72, 80–105, 169–71.
6. Kathleen M. Townend, “Methods of Recreation as They Affect the Causes of Intemperance Amongst
Women,” National Council of Women of Great Britain Handbook: The Official Report of the Central
Conference of Women Workers, 1894 (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilm, 1980), 139 (hereafter,
NCWGB, Report of Central Conference); Lady Laura Ridding, “The Relation of Amusements to
Life,” ibid. (orig. 1902), 131 (quote); The Women’s Union Journal (hereafter WUJ ) (Dec. 1883):
112. On the widespread children’s temperance organization, the Band of Hope, see Lilian Lewis
Shiman, “The Band of Hope Movement: Respectable Recreation for Working-Class Children,”
Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 49–74.
7. Brian Harrison, “For Church, Queen and Family: The Girls’ Friendly Society 1874–1920,” Past
and Present No. 61 (1973): 107–38, 109 (quote); Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late
Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 108–10; Theresa
Shrewsbury, “Prevention,” The Nineteenth Century (Dec. 1885): 957–64.
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8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
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Harrison, “For Church, Queen and Family,” 116.
V.B. Lancaster, Short History of the Mothers’ Union (London, 1958), 15, quoted in Harrison, “For
Church, Queen and Family,” 111.
Shrewsbury, “Prevention,” 961.
Emma Paterson, the daughter of a schoolmaster and herself an apprenticed bookbinder, founded
the Women’s Protective and Provident League in 1875. The organization opposed restrictive, protective legislation of women’s wage work, believing that the way to improve wages and conditions
was through union activism. Clementina Black established the Women’s Industrial Council in
1889 as the Women’s Trade Union Association. Both organizations tended to be dominated by
upper- and middle-class women. WUJ (Feb. 1889): 9 (quote); Dina M. Copelman, London’s Women
Teachers: Gender, Class and Feminism 1870–1930 (London: Routledge, 1996), 12–14; Ellen Mappen,
Helping Women at Work (London: Hutchinson, 1985), 17, 19; Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), 70; WUJ (Jun. 1883): 49; WUJ (Jul. 1883): 58; WUJ (Aug. 1883): 66; WUJ (Dec.
1883): 112; WUJ (Sep. 1884): 80; WUJ (Feb. 1885): 10; WUJ (Apr. 1885): 26; WUJ (Jun.
1886): 50; WUJ (Mar. 1887): 19; WUJ (Dec. 1888): 91; The Women’s Industrial News (Sep.
1897): 14, 28; The Women’s Industrial News (Mar. 1898): 29. On the GFS’ alignment with conservatism (in both the lower and upper case senses), see Harrison, “For Church, Queen and Family”;
Dyhouse, Girl’s Growing Up, 108–09.
The Women’s Industrial News (Mar. 1898): 28.
Edward G. Salmon, “What Girls Read,” The Nineteenth Century (Oct. 1886): 523.
The Women’s Industrial News (Mar. 1898): 28; WUJ (Jul. 1890): 56.
Harrison reports that in 1879–80, a schism arose in the GFS over the issue of chastity, a state
which some claimed could not be guaranteed of urban work-girls. The Society refused to change
the rule requiring chastity of its members and a breakaway organization with less exalted principles
was formed. Harrison, “For Church, Queen and Family,” 118, 120. On the overly exclusive nature
of the GFS, see also WUJ (Oct. 1884): 84.
WUJ (Oct. 1883): 81.
Townend, “Methods of Recreation,” 139, 142.
Miss Lidgett, NCWGB, Report of Central Conference (1894), 145 (quote); Townend, “Methods of
Recreation,” 139; M.B. Blackie, NCWGB, Report of Central Conference (1894), 142.
Hobart–Hampden, “The Working Girl of To–Day,” 728 (quote); Martha Vicinus, Independent
Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1985), 232–34; Robert R. Dolling, Ten Years in A Portsmouth Slum (London: Swann &
Sonnenschein, 1898), 24–25, 38, 41, 44–47; Richard Free, “Settlements or Unsettlements?” The
Nineteenth Century (Mar. 1908): 376.
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, 1906), 268–79, 272; Vicinus,
Independent Women, 212, 232–34, 241.
The role of female physical educators and the place of physical training in the working women’s
club movement are important issues that warrant further study. A preliminary examination of the
archives of several women’s physical education colleges suggests that the principals, staff, and students were closely involved in club work. See, for example, Madame Bergman Osterberg’s Physical
Training College, Report for 1895, 26, 29, 30–31, 32, 33, the Bergman Osterberg Archive, University of Greenwich, Dartford; Anstey Physical Training College Magazine (Autumn 1905): 17–28
and (Summer 1906): 6–8, both courtesy of Mrs. Frankie Calland, secretary of the Anstey Association; Cohn Crunden, A History of Anstey College of Physical Education (Sutton Coldfield, UK:
Anstey College of Physical Education, 1974), 10, 11, 14, 16, 18–21; Ida M. Webb, “The History
of Chelsea College of Physical Education with Special Reference to Curriculum Development,
1898–1973,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leicester, 1977), 51, 52, 58, 139, 153; Dorette
Wilkie, “Physical Training in Girls’ Clubs,” Girls’ Club News (Nov. 1916): 3–5; Dorette Wilkie,
“Physical Training for Girls,” Japan British Exhibition, Women’s Congress (Jul. 9, 1910), available
in the Chelsea College of Physical Education archive, University of Brighton. Dorette Wilkie, the
Volume 26, Number 3
MAKING LEISURE WORk
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
founder of Chelsea, was a native of Prussia. She became a British citizen in 1908 and changed her
name by deed-poll from Wilke to Wilkie; the typewritten copy of the 1910 paper which is in the
college archive is, however, inscribed “Wilke.” See Webb, “History of Chelsea College,” 41, 48–
50. I am very grateful to Dr. Webb for giving me access to the Chelsea archives, directing my
attention to the article and paper by Wilkie, and sharing a draft of her forthcoming history of the
college with me.
The Cocoa Works’ Magazine: A Journal in the Interests of the Employees of Rowntree & Co., Ltd., York,
(May 1915): 1757–59 (quote); Interview with Ethel Smith, York Oral History Project, November
1983, transcript at 4.
Cadbury, Matheson, and Shann, Women’s Work, 271–72.
DD 765/17, Minute Book, Hyson Green Home, Girls’ Evening Home, Monday, September 29,
1890, Nottinghamshire Archives, Nottingham.
Thomas E. Jordan, The Degeneracy Crisis and Victorian Youth (Albany: State (University Press of
New York, 1995); Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 79-114; Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up, 79–114;
June Purvis, Hard Lives: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Nineteenth-century
England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1981), 63–70; Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,”
History Workshop Journal No. 5 (1978): 9–65.
Ellen W. Darwin, “Domestic Service,” The Nineteenth Century (August 1890): 283–93; Catriona
M. Parratt, “‘The Making of the Healthy and the Happy Home’: Recreation, Education, and the
Production of Working-Class Womanhood at the Rowntree Cocoa Works, York, c. 1898–1914,”
in Jack Williams and Jeff Hill, eds., Sport and Social Identity in the North of England (Keele, UK:
University of Keele Press, 1996), 53–83.
Jordan, The Degeneracy Crisis.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-day,” 724.
Helen Dendy [Bosanquet], “The Children of Working London,” in Bernard Bosanquet, ed., Aspects of the Social Problem (London: Macmillan, 1895), 33; C. Violet Butler, Domestic Service: An
Enquiry by the Women’s Industrial Council (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1916), 9–12, 130; Clementina
Black, “The Dislike to Domestic Service,” The Nineteenth Century (Mar. 1893): 454–56; Blackie,
NCWGB, Report of Central Conference, 1894, 142–45; Thomas Wright, The Great Unwashed
(London: Tinsley Bros., 1868; reprint ed., New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), 37–41, 48.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 726. Instructing and edifying the working
classes through personal example was a primary impetus behind the settlement house movement
that began in the 1880s. The first London settlement was Toynbee Hall, established in Whitechapel
in 1884 and staffed by Oxbridge students. The first women’s settlement was the Women’s University Settlement, founded in 1887. Girls’ clubs, mothers’ meetings, and other social and educational classes were among the services that settlements provided to working-class communities. On
the women’s settlement movement, see Vicinus, Independent Women, 211–46.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 724, 729–30.
Maude Stanley, “Clubs for Working Girls,” The Nineteenth Century (Jan. 1889): 74, 77.
Blackie, NCWGB, Report of Central Conference, 1894, 142.
Townend, “Methods of Recreation,” 139, 141 (quotes). See also The Englishwoman’s Review (Jan.
15, 1900): 67–68; Cadbury, Matheson, and Shann, Women’s Work and Wages, 270–71; Clara
Dorothea Rackham, “Cambridge,” in Helen Dendy Bosanquet, ed. Social Conditions in Provincial
Towns (London: Macmillan, 1912; reprint ed., New York: Garland, 1985), 33.
Lily H. Montagu, “Popular Amusements for Working Girls,” NCWGB, Report of Central Conference, 1902, 153.
Dendy [Bosanquet], “The Children of Working London,” 33.
On efforts to “tame” or “civilize” popular recreation see, for example, Alun Howkins, “The Taming
of Whitsun: the Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century Rural Holiday,” Yeo and Yeo, eds.,
Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 187–208; Golby and Purdue, The Civilisation of the Crowd.
The latter challenges the interpretation of a traditional leisure culture in retreat which is advanced
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37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
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in Robert W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreation in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
Montagu, “Popular Amusements for Working Girls,” 152.
Townend, “Methods of Recreation,” 138–39 (emphasis in original).
Montagu, “Popular Amusements for Working Girls,” 151, 153.
Beatrice Potter, “Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary,” The Nineteenth Century (Sep. 1888): 311.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 727, 729.
Charles E.B. Russell, Social Problems of the North (London: A.R. Mowbray, 1913), 94.
Stanley, “Clubs for Working Girls,” 74.
Besant, East London, 128–29, 295. The sexually charged and voyeuristic tone of Besant’s description of “Liz” was a convention employed by many upper- and middle-class male observers of
working-class women. See Leonorre Davidoff, “Gender and Class in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick,” Feminist Studies 5 (1979): 87–141.
The term “dark continent” is from journalist George Sims’ How the Poor Live and Horrible London
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1889; combined reprinted., New York: Garland Publishing, 1984),
1. How the Poor Live was one of a number of journalistic exposes of the latter decades of the
nineteenth century in which the East and West ends of London, and their inhabitants, represented the divisions and cultural and racial hierarchies of England and its Empire. For more on
Sims and other similar constructions of working-class London, see Judith R. Walkowitz, City of
Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sextual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1992), 26–39; Vicinus, Independent Women, 219–21; Ellen Ross, “Good and Bad
Mothers: Lady Philanthropists and London Housewives before the First World War,” in McCarthy,
Lady Bountiful Revisited, 174; Ross, Love and Toil, 11.
Stanley, “Clubs for Working Girls,” 75.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 726.
Potter, “Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary,” 311.
Helen Dendy Bosanquet, The Standard of Life and Other Studies (London: Macmillan, 1898),
176.
Potter, “Pages from a Work-Girl’s Diary,” 311.
Ibid.
More or less elaborate versions of this narrative of popular leisure abound in the sources upon
which the present article is based. See, especially, Townend, “Methods of Recreation,” 137–142;
Stanley, “Clubs for Working Girls,” 74–77, 82; Samuel Smith, “Social Reform,” The Nineteenth
Century (Jan. 1883): 910; Shrewsbury, “Prevention,” 957–64; Hobart-Hampden, “The Working
Girl of To-Day,” 725–29; Montagu, “Popular Amusements for Working Girls,” 147–54; Ridding,
“The Relation of Amusements to Life,” 129–30; Dolling, Ten Years in a Portsmouth Slum, 38; WUJ
(Sep. 1884): 80; Helen [Dendy] Bosanquet, Rich and Poor (London: Macmillan, 1908), 120;
Dendy [Bosanquet], “The Children of Working London,” 29-43; Blackie, NCWGB, Central Conference, 1894, 142–45; Besant, East London, 119–29.
Cadbury, Matheson, and Shann, Women’s Work and Wages, 196.
Stanley, “Clubs for Working Girls,” 74–77.
Ibid.
Shrewsbury, “Prevention,” 958–59.
Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 726, 728.
Edith Simcox, “Ideals of Feminine Usefulness,” The Fortnightly Review (Jan.–Jun. 1880): 669.
Montagu, “Popular Amusements for Working Girls,” 149, 153.
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 52–59; Vicinus, Independent Women, 219–27.
Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 5, 10.
Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, 53; Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local
Government 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 11.
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MAKING LEISURE WORK
62. Vicinus, Independent Women, 220. On the themes of self-fulfillment and self-interest in women’s
philanthropy and social work see Julia Parker, Women and Welfare: Ten Victorian Women in Public
Social Service (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 20, 38; Vicinus, Independent Women, 212; Walkowitz,
City of Dreadful Delight, 52–59; Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 1–17; Ross, “Good and Bad
Mothers,” 176; Luddy, Women and Philanthropy in Ireland, 24, 48, 56.
63. Lily H. Montagu, “The Responsibility of Leisure,” NCWGB, Report of Central Conference, 1912,
125; Emily Kinnaird, “The Right Use of Leisure,” NCWGB, Report of Central Conference, 1900,
141.
64. Hobart-Hampden, “The Working Girl of To-Day,” 725; Ellen Chase, Tennant Friends in Old
Deptford (London: Williams and Norgate, 1929), 57, 61, 106; Margaret Nevinson, Life’s Fitful
Fever, A Volume of Memoirs (London: A. & C. Black, 1926), 82; Bergman Osterberg’s College Report
for 1895, 26, 29, 32; Norman MacKenzie and Jeanne MacKenzie, eds., The Diary of Beatrice
Webb, vol. I, 1873–1892: Glitter Around and Darkness Within (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press,
1982), 31, 132, 185–187, 208.
65. MacKenzie & MacKenzie, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, 7.
66. Montagu, “The Responsibility of Leisure,” 119.
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