No study of boy life can be complete without some reference to the "girl in
the background"; her influence has been recognised since the day when Adam
attempted to 
justify
himself in the Garden of Eden. Indeed, we believe that the power of women over
men is based on a law of nature against which rebellion is impossible. It is one
of the cherished principles underlying the national life of countries which
boast of Western civilisation that the influence of the "girl in the
background" tends towards purity, temperance, righteousness, and peace.
"O woman, lovely woman! Nature made thee
To temper man; we had been brutes without you:
Angels are painted fair to look like you;
There’s in you all that we believe of heaven;
Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
Eternal joy and everlasting love."
This faith was embodied in the forms of chivalry which, in spite of their narrow artificiality, inflamed the popular imagination during the Middle Ages. Gradually the influence of this same faith broadened, until to-day it serves as the sanctification of home life and the life [Page 234] of the State. The fact that woman has inspired most of the evil as well as most of the good known to human experience has happily not shaken our belief in her blessed potentialities.
In this chapter it is our purpose to discuss the relations between working girls and working boys. But we must at the outset of our inquiry recognise that there is one factor in these relations which baffles any attempt at scientific investigation. Womanly charm, the ewig weibliche, existing apparently by spontaneous generation, appears again and again to beautify and ennoble the lives of our working girls. Under present conditions, however, the training and environment of these girls militates against the existence and growth of the best in womanhood. The limits of space render it impossible to make a comparative study of the conditions prevailing in other classes of society. Otherwise we should probably be obliged to admit that even among the most cultured, the relations of girls to boys has not yet reached its highest development. It is only in modern times that conscious effort has been made to teach girls that they do not exist as the mere supplements to men, but that they possess the dignity of human beings with, infinite possibilities and definite responsibilities. Heretofore they were as far as possible protected from contact with ugliness and evil. To-day they are being equipped with that moral, physical, and intellectual strength by which the world’s pain may be combated. [Page 235]
We want to see in girls the finest perceptions of truth, beauty, and purity, the greatest capacity for self- restraint and for the highest joys of self-sacrifice. While freely and gratefully admitting that these qualities are to be found not infrequently among working girls whose lives have not been subjected to much refining influence from without, we believe that social effort can be directed to rendering these instances of feminine nobility less miraculous in character. It is education, physical, mental, and religious education, that must ultimately be the chief factor in influencing the lives of working girls in their relation to boys.
The average working girl is intensely individualistic, very excitable, and pleasure-loving, and her sense of responsibility is little developed. What circumstances of life and training have contributed to these characteristics? What educational influence may tend to modify them? Before the great industrial revolution which initiated factory life in England, girls contributed their share to the home industries. They did their work under the natural protection of their parents. To-day, at the most susceptible age of fourteen, they are sent to factories as wage-earners, and become to a large extent independent of home control. In work they are exposed to the fierce knocks incidental to competition, or to the degrading influence of success won at the cost of another’s discomfiture. The pauses in season trades have a bad influence on the moral fibre of the working [Page 236] girl; her natural tendency to loafing becomes more marked. Girls are thrown into the arena of the industrial struggle without any training in citizenship. They have no idea that the State has any claim on their lives; their philosophy is of a fatalistic order. During the tiresome years preceding marriage they must work hard and take the pleasures and the pains which come their way, and make the best of both. They seek no way to control the circumstance of their lives. The conditions of factory life accentuate the girls’ individualistic tendencies, which have to a certain extent been created in the school and in the home. In the school the large classes of children make individual character training difficult. Each pupil struggles either to pass the standards, or to escape the punishments inflicted on the idle. There is little time or opportunity to inculcate corporate feeling. The home conditions of our working classes is largely dependent on economic laws. Small and overcrowded rooms limit the outward realisation of the joys of family life. In tenement dwellings, where every corner of home is utilised for some domestic or industrial purpose, brothers and sisters can hardly enjoy that free intercourse which is a corrective of individualism. Excepting during the hours of sleeping and feeding, most of the scenes of family life are enacted in the streets. It is one of the most ghastly results of overcrowding that home life has no privacy for our poor. Except in those rare districts, blessed with the posses- [Page 237] sion of open spaces, the children of the street play together in the street and grow to adolescence, as units of a crowd, rather than as members of a family bound together to devote of their best to the service of the State. We must remember, moreover, that the wife of a working man has little leisure for character training. By warnings, bribes, and punishments she may exact a certain measure of obedience from her children. Her example influences them, whether for good or for evil. The extent of this influence depends ultimately on the individual responsiveness of each child. So a working girl enters her factory, feeling self-sufficient and self-dependent. Is it surprising that she has little sense of personal responsibility?
In the economic world the girl’s place is inferior to that of the boy. She is of less value, for she is less well trained. She knows herself to be a fairly cheap article, and this fact lessens her sense of personal responsibility. Boys and girls very seldom compete in trade; they may perform different processes in the same industry, but their work is almost invariably quite distinct, and the boys’ work is generally more skilled. The girl is glad to enter those trades in which she can pick up a few shillings quickly, for her wage-earning faculties improve her position in the matrimonial market. Indeed, her industrial life is only of temporary interest to the working girl, who regards it merely as a preliminary to marriage. Therefore she is disinclined to [Page 238] spend much time in training, and prefers unskilled work in which wage-earning begins immediately.
The absence of industrial organisation among girls further tends to diminish their sense of personal responsibility. There is little incentive to good work beyond the desirability of good pay. The working girl does not realise that she can contribute to the honour of her trade. She merely knows that if she does not do well enough to satisfy the requirements of her employer, a hundred other girls will be ready to take her place in the factory. As soon as the factory working hours are over her responsibilities arc at an end, and she is ready to forget, as far as her weariness will permit, the drudgery of the day in the enjoyment of any fun which may come within her reach. It is only when we realise the monotony of the workshop life that we can understand why the craving for excitement is almost a necessary element in the working girl’s composition. As a child she was dependent on street incidents for most of her pleasures. She is not as an adult impervious to the nervous excitement which characterises all sections of the community at the present day, and this craving is, of course, intensified by her limited experience of other forms of happiness, and by the dulness and repression of her working life. Her very nature cries out for change and amusement. She loves crudities, for she has not been initiated into refined joys. The susceptibility and sensitiveness of girl nature are the sources of its highest [Page 239] potentialities. But these very qualities render girls more liable than boys to surrender their best selves to the degrading influences of their environment. It is because of their individualistic, irresponsible, and pleasure—loving tendencies that we find so many unsatisfactory elements in the working girl’s influence over the boy. Flirting is the main object of their intercourse. Public opinion demands apparently little else. Anyone travelling on the Great Eastern Railway in a third-class carriage on a Sunday can never have gathered from the prevailing conversation any suggestion of serious comradeship. It is the talk of children, but it is not child talk. We ask in fear, what does it promise for the future? Flirtation affords amusement, and even when it passes the boundary of pure fun, and becomes degrading in character, the elders listen and are not offended. They know from personal experience the monotony of workshop life, and they would be loath to interfere with Sunday play. The boys and girls see no serious meaning in love-making; they are playing a game. They have been trained less to reverence one another than to protect their own independence.
In working-class homes, owing to the economic conditions which we have noted, there is little opportunity for healthy intercourse between brothers and sisters. Their interests are generally separate, and this separation is emphasised by the crude and obvious efforts made to secure a proper standard of decency. [Page 240] His superior value in the labour market gives the boy an artificial superiority in the home, and it is not unusual to find his sisters waiting upon him hand and foot, as if, indeed, he belonged to a higher order of creation. During work hours boys and girls in large factories and large workshops do not as a rule come in close contact, for, as we have already noted, they devote themselves to different trades, or to different branches of the same trade. In the small domestic workshops their relations are often unsatisfactory, owing in a great measure to the want of self-control shown by the girls, who are ready to relieve workshop monotony by flirtation. During their leisure hours "walking out" is the chief interest in the lives of the boys and girls. This amusement hardly begins before the girls have reached the age of sixteen. Up to that time they regard boys with objective interest, but gradually a more intimate intercourse suggests infinite opportunities for delightful excitement.
* The city working girl feels no hesitation in passing the time of day with any boy she meets. If she is self-respecting, she knows exactly how far her friendship may go without becoming dangerous. The boy is made to feel immediately the limit of intimacy beyond which he may not pass. It is more amusing for a girl to walk
------
* This passage is mainly taken from a paper on "Popular Amusements of Working Girls,’ read at the Conference of the National Union of Women Workers at Edinburgh in the autumn of 1901.
[Page 241]
out with a "fellow" than to walk alone, and she sees no reason why she should not accept the favours which chance puts in her way. This walking out is undertaken with a light heart, as it can be given up at any moment. Moreover, the long period of acquaintance is a satisfactory preparation for marriage, and suggests a principle which might with advantage be adopted by other classes of society. Betrothal is among working people nearly as binding as the marriage ceremony itself. Roman Catholics consecrate their betrothal by making their communion together; if after this ceremony the match is broken off the matrimonial prospects of the offending party are for ever blighted. A working girl’s eagerness to have a young man is perfectly comprehensible. Marriage alone can save her from the dreary prospect offered by the uncongenial workshop, where she can never save enough from her wages to be independent in her old age. The girls are so happy in the company of their young men, they so thoroughly enjoy the fun they have together. As with every other woman, a working girl’s chief need is to be cared for, to be loved and protected, to be wanted by somebody, to make a difference to somebody. She is tired of being part of the industrial machinery of the great callous city to which she belongs. She wants consideration for herself, for her individuality, she wants appreciation for her person. Are we seriously surprised that early marriages occur so frequently? [Page 242] As a rule girls run after boys, and in due course the boys turn and run after the girls. The girls make their first onslaught in a spirit of frivolity, their more serious motives being at the beginning at least subconscious. It is true that they are influenced by the conventions of their sets, inasmuch as the dread of being "odd women" strongly affects them. The horror of a continuous workshop life has entered into their soul, and "the young man" possibility alone offers them an escape. They are also strongly of opinion that if they let their opportunity slide it may never return. Their experience in the labour market has made them self-reliant and combative, and they realise that in the struggle for the prizes of life they must help themselves, and these subconscious considerations certainly influence their conduct. Primarily, however, girls "run after boys" because it amuses them to do so; because the pursuit offers unlimited excitement; because they are conscious of certain powers, and are anxious to exercise them fully. Their sense of responsibility has never been trained, and therefore it is not strong enough to curb their desire for enjoyment. But it often happens that when the fun is at its height the girls suddenly realise that if they persist their days of gaiety are numbered. They have tested their powers, and realised the joy of conquest. Now they pause to consider whether they shall seize their prize. They do not wish to make themselves too cheap. Some more fun can be derived from aloofness. Then [Page 243] comes the turn for the boys. The charm has worked upon them, they have become voluntary bondsmen, and they refuse now to be free. The girls test the boys’ worth by the degree of persistency shown in courtship. They themselves yield ultimately to this persistency, and their surrender is sometimes expedited by fits of jealousy or by the desire to excel their companions in the speedy settlement of their matrimonial plans. They are only inclined to jilt the boys who do not show enough spirit or eagerness in courtship, for at whatever cost they are determined to prove their independence, that one possession which makes their lives worth living.
To some girls marriage itself s merely an incident in their business career, but to most it offers the change for which their nature craves. They are seldom oppressed by the thought of the struggle which follows marriage, of the tragedy of motherhood for her who has not the means to lead a complete life, of the difficulties of wifehood. They think nothing of all these.
While the industrial and home conditions of a working girl’s life tend to produce that restless love of excitement for which she is remarkable, we find that her natural recreations serve merely to sustain it. The novels which she chooses do not reveal the highest possibilities of love and marriage. Their sentiment is either so mawkish as to promote hysteria or so artificial as to leave untouched the real issues of life. Again, [Page 244] the working girl enjoys on the stage the display of morbid passion, because she is familiar with it in her own life. Can we be surprised that, having had no experience of pure enjoyment, she soothes her feeling of unrest in the contemplation of crudities, whether revealed in the newspaper column of police news, in the halfpenny novelette, or on the music-hall stage? Girls living in rough districts are often inspired by "these studies" to instigate and encourage fights among their boys by rewarding the victors with their favour.
We have then only to recognise the natural effects of a working girl’s surroundings in order to appreciate the fact that until her sense of personal responsibility is aroused and her conception of happiness is purified her influence must inevitably tend to lower the standard of conduct prevalent in the society to which she belongs. Social workers have to ask themselves how far it is possible by means of educational and recreational organisation to combat the evils which we deplore. We would on no account admit that human effort will not ultimately triumph over the economic conditions which are at the root of much of our social demoralisation. But, seeing that these conditions are interwoven with the foundations of modern civilisation, they cannot be speedily eradicated. In the meantime the girls who are growing up at the present day must be helped to realise the birthright which they receive from God, and to use it in His service. Let us then turn from examining the [Page 245] influences affecting the girls’ lives to investigate some of the aspects of the remedial work undertaken by various agencies, and note its beneficent possibilities.
In elementary schools a few experiments have been made in co-education, but it would be premature to estimate its influence on the lives of the pupils. In many schools, however, the efforts of teachers and managers through guilds and happy evenings, and above all through personal influence, to awaken the corporate instinct in girls must be regarded with satisfaction. The teachers are trying to free themselves from the slavery of routine in order to consider the individuality of their pupils. County Council scholarships have stimulated a search for talent, and so relieved the crushing monotony of board school life. The democratic faith of the age has inspired teachers and managers to appeal to the highest instincts of the children under their care, instead of creating an artificial standard of plebeian ineptitude, and these appeals seldom result in disappointment. Managers are learning to regard the pupils less as units in the industrial aggregate than as members of human families. In the face of every sort of discouragement the parents’ sympathy is sought through home visiting, and the school authorities are beginning to consider the possibility of enlisting their interest in the educational problems affecting their children. Efforts are made to arouse mothers to regard seriously the technical training of their daughters, as well as of their [Page 246] sons. Energetic managers visit mothers during the last years of their girls’ school-life, and ask that the choice of a trade should rest on more important considerations than the immediate picking up of a few pence. Even though all the girls in one Street have for years been engaged in the fur-pulling, or in the trouser trade, a zealous manager may induce an individual mother to apprentice her daughter to a skilled trade, where her self-respect is likely to increase with her efficiency as a worker.
The girls who have been encouraged by their teachers to develop their individuality, and those who have become skilled workers in honourable trades, are not likely to throw away their chance of complete self-realisation in order to enjoy promiscuous flirtation.
Nevertheless we have noted that as soon as the discipline of school is removed and the process of wage-earning begins, girls are most seriously in need of training and protection. Their precocious self-dependence in itself menaces their proper development. Since the conditions of tenement life limit the possibilities of home influence, clubs for working girls have come into existence to counteract the present unsatisfactory tendencies of girls’ industrial life and to suggest higher standards in work and in conduct.
These clubs include in their scheme of work the attempt to correct that tendency to individualism and self-seeking which are produced by workshop life. They [Page 247] stimulate the members’ power of self-control and their sense of responsibility and widen the average conception of happiness. Inasmuch as they do these things, they have become powerful agents in improving and adjusting the relations between working boys and girls.
"The club stands to its members for the realisation of their womanhood," wrote Miss Pethick in her article on Working Girls’ Clubs which appeared in Mr. Reason’s book on University and Social Settlements. "In our overcrowded cities we have crowded out womanhood. I know that moral miracles happen, that purity and virtue can survive in the most infected atmosphere, and can be the stronger for the resistance to evil; but the average man is such as his environment makes him, and the average factory girl does not hold a higher standard than that she sees adopted by her neighbours. Even where the conditions of life are very much better, where the imagination and feeling are not vitiated, the working girl is generally quite untrained to any thoughtful apprehension of life. She grows up unguarded into irresponsible and unguarded womanhood, and unready to hold the keys of a future destiny—the woman’s most sacred trust. And in the club a high standard is being lifted. It must be lifted, otherwise the club not only misses its opportunity, but is in danger of becoming a positive evil. It can be lifted because there is nothing a girl’s heart more quickly expands to than the idea of womanhood dignified into its consciousness of duty." The girls can be made [Page 248] to recognise the meaning of their trust, and this knowledge corrects that spirit of irresponsibility which so often causes their intercourse with boys to end in degradation.
In the club, the leaders have to direct their girls’ energy to the realisation of the highest standards of happiness, the happiness of self-development and the happiness of service. By dint of technical art-teaching a girl is initiated into the joys of creation. The production of a beautiful piece of handiwork stimulates her self-respect. Her corporate feeling is roused when she joins a choral class, or a class for physical drill, and contributes her individual energy to the general success. Factory life makes little claim on the individual capacity of the worker; she therefore finds recreation in simple brainwork, which does not overtax her physical strength. The passing of standards does not inspire the average pupil with any great reverence for knowledge. The effort to study subjects which she had always thought easy, but which in reality call for long and patient perseverance, tends to correct in adolescence the false impressions conveyed by a short school-life. The girl’s outlook on life is readjusted by the club—she realises the power of truth and purity, and is training to seek these essentials even in her intercourse with friends.
The club member’s sense of responsibility is further stimulated by her desire to uphold the honour of her club. Gradually she herself is required to take a share [Page 249] in its management. She sees how her own conduct affects those with whom she is brought in contact, and her training in citizenship begins as soon as she is subjected to the discipline of associated interests. When she is away from the club this training helps her to triumph over the temptations and difficulties of her life.
Through friendship with women of culture, working girls become acquainted with the pleasures of peace afforded by reading, by country life, by the contemplation of works of art. Their dangerous craving for excitement is counteracted by indulgence in healthy recreation. They are no longer so inclined to accept flirtation as their only possible escape from the monotony of their lives. They have other interests besides the supreme one of courtship. If in the factory they feel of small account, they have in the club to set a truer value on themselves. New possibilities are revealed to them, and their lives become irradiated by ideals. Men are not slow to recognise self-control in girls; and the best results of club life are to be seen in the increased respect with which the members are treated by their boy friends. Perhaps the harvest of results would be greater if club—leaders would themselves more generally recognise their responsibilities. Like other philanthropists, club-workers are too easily satisfied with fringing the problems with which they should endeavour to grapple. They peep down the abyss in which the underfed, the ill-housed, and badly clothed work out [page 250] their life’s drama, and then they turn their energies to surface polishing. They try to make their girls conduct themselves well in the clubs, and interest them and amuse them as best they can during their evening’s leisure. But they are inclined to ignore the industrial life, they like to forget the grim truth that if girls work for less than a living wage, in a vitiated atmosphere, they are not likely to become the strong, self-controlled women whom we desire the clubs to train. They are afraid in their club to discuss the relations of girls to boys, lest they alight on dangerous ground. But if they are to serve their generation and satisfy the claims of posterity on their work, they must make their girls realise the difference between passion and love based on spiritual affinity. The girls’ club can suggest ideals which may be developed even in the most uncongenial environment of tenement life. Club training, perhaps, achieves its best results generally by indirect methods. But unless the leaders do realise the most serious significance of their work, and do acquire some industrial and sociological knowledge; unless they are willing to understand the temptations affecting the girls’ lives—their efforts are likely to be capricious and their influence merely superficial.
Undoubtedly the club leader’s most important attribute is an unlimited power of sympathy, but this sympathy to be valuable must be based on knowledge, and must be expressed in the spirit of reality. [Page 251] Experience tends to prove that between the ages of fourteen and eighteen mixed clubs for girls and boys do not achieve the best results. It is possible that the method of separation may have only transitory value.
The new generation of parents may train their children to meet in a spirit of innocent camaraderie, which will have the best effect on both sexes. But so far most attempts to form mixed clubs have failed. In evening schools the organisation of mixed classes is seldom conducive to serious work; even in clubs where the personal influence of the leader is the strongest guarantee of success, the girls’ tendencies to flirtation have again and again destroyed the usefulness of the enterprise. In a few cases, when a proper club spirit has been maintained, it has been found that the girls have worked separately from the boys, even though the lessons may have been given in the same classroom by the same teacher. Generally speaking, the mixed clubs have failed because the girls will not be interested in the boys except as potential bridegrooms. But when club—leaders have recognised their duties and given their members the training in responsibility and self-control, which they need, it is most desirable that the girls and boys should meet occasionally for social or educational purposes. Some preliminary training is, of course, necessary in the boys’ clubs as well as in those of the girls’. The higher the standard of honour in the boys’ club, the more successful are the mixed evenings likely to become.
[Page 252] Much good has been effected in boys’ clubs by the influence of ladies. The boys begin to reverence womanhood when they have come in contact with real refinement in individual women. Ladies have been able to instil in rough lads a proper regard for the value of the domestic arts by cooking for them in a holiday camp. Later, the boys find that their own girls can respond to the influence of this same respect. For, as Mr. J. H. Badley says, "girls experience a ready sensitiveness to the opinion of others, expressed or guessed at, and a ready expression of personal feeling. This sensitiveness to approval or disapproval, and quickness, not only to feel, but to show their feeling, I take to be the real basis of authority among girls. This is, needless to say, a great advance . . . upon coercion by force. For the boy it represents a stage of progress, an ideal to move towards. When he is brought up against the fact that other means than physical force must be used towards a girl, he finds also that the expression of authority in other ways, and especially the pressure of public opinion, is surprisingly effective."
Much can also be done by the managers of clubs to stimulate the boys’ sense of responsibility, and to broaden their interests, so that they may be able to resist the temptations of those early marriages which threaten the welfare of the state. It is not unusual for a boy who has attended his club regularly until the age of seventeen to suddenly absent himself without explana- [Page 253] tion. Perhaps some months later he is found by an interested manager to have already married, or to be inextricably entangled with the "girl in the background." In seizing her victim she probably did not mean any harm; her life was monotonous and dreary; she wanted a lark. Club members of both sexes must be taught to realise the joy and dignity of youth, and they will then be inclined to hesitate before sacrificing it on the altar of flirtation.
The experience of club—leaders bears complete testimony, that occasional mixed evenings are likely to be most successful. Indeed, their tone often compares favourably with that of many West End drawing-rooms. But the organisation of these evenings must be the outcome of a slow and careful preparation. It is recorded of an earnest club-leader that she once took her girls out for an excursion, and was to her amazement and sorrow obliged to return alone, because the camp which they passed had offered so many engrossing attractions to her girls. After some years of hard club work she was proudly able to take her party past those same attractions and suffer no similar humiliation. The appearance of a few boys at outings often creates a flutter of excitement, and an inexperienced leader once threatened her girls with expulsion from her club if they were found speaking to a boy while in her company!
When the period of probation is over, the responsibility of the mixed entertainments is best left to the [Page 254] members themselves. For the honour of the clubs they will secure proper behaviour on the part of all the guests.
If we admit that the girl’s influence, owing to her quick development and to her natural gifts, is paramount in her intercourse with boys, we dare not disregard the educational work necessary to render that influence beneficent. Of course, the ultimate responsibility for her advancement rests on the social workers who themselves have had the opportunities of the best training. They must seek to reveal in their work their devotion to the eternal verities rather than to the passing interests of the hour; their conception of God as the Judge "who sees every work, whether it be good or whether it be evil," and as the Father who expects from His children the development of their best faculties. They will find that working girls respond readily to these suggestions when inspired by love and sympathy; that they are loyal and steadfast in their behaviour to those whom they respect. The very hardness of the girls’ lives gives them some moral strength; it rests with their leaders to see that this strength is directed to the realisation of the high destiny to which the human race aspires.
When girls and boys are able to approach the serious issues of life in a spirit of responsibility, they will have learned to understand the true meaning of recreation, and the greyness of life will be dispersed in the full light of human joyousness.
For a biography of Lily Montagu see Jean Spence's piece on the informal education homepage
This piece has been reproduced here on the understanding that it is not
subject to any copyright restrictions, and that it is, and will remain, in the
public domain.
