ON women's labour. 297 



(1844-) to their own factory, and found its advantage. A similar case has 

 been told me here by another manufacturer from his own experience. 

 Others, although not old enough to remember so far back, have explained 

 to me most carefully the bad economy of overtime. In former times, 

 when customary hours were longer, it would seem that in cases where the 

 men's work required the assistance of women in distinct but complementary 

 operations, as in the tinning and enamelling trade, the Factory Act resulted, 

 not in the substitution of men for women, but in the shortening of men's 

 hours also.i 



The tendency is evidently in the direction of a still further shortening 

 of hours in some quarters. ' There may be a limit to which hours can be 

 profitably reduced, but we haven't found it yet,' was one remark. Many 

 employei's prefer to stop work at 6 rather than give an interval for tea ; a 

 firm of hinge manufacturers have recently made this reduction, and con- 

 sidered that more regular work was obtained. Others, again, seem to 

 prefer to take the interval and work a little longer, one giving the reason 

 that ' the girls loould have their tea ' ; while another, whom I heard of at 

 second hand, thought ' the girls worked better after tea.' On the other hand 

 the meal-times regulation is sometimes felt as a grievance, but not very 

 acutely. The same hinge manufacturer considers the ' period of employment* 

 a grievance in summer, and thinks it would be better for hajids to work 

 early and late rather than in the middle of the day. The managing foreman 

 at a firm of printers finds it a distinct inconvenience not to be able to 

 keep women to work overtime in turn, as he only requires about two 

 women twice a week, and dismisses them other days well within legal 

 limits. These, howevei', are comparatively trivial and inconsiderable 

 objections. The ' important exception ' alluded to above is a well-known 

 manufacturer whose indictment of legal regulation of women's labour is 

 all the more formidable in that he is himself an advocate of shortening 

 hours on economic grounds, and women in his employ work only forty -eight 

 hours a week as a rule. This gentleman disapproves of the fixed ' period of 

 employment,' and charges the Act with hindering women from rising in 

 their trade. Women are employed, he argues, but at a disadvantage : 

 they are prevented, in his opinion, from holding responsible positions as 

 managers, for which they are perfectly competent, by the fact that on an 

 occasional emergency they cannot be at hand to deal with it. It will be 

 seen that this attack is strictly relevant to the scheme of investigation, 

 while on the other hand it cannot well be met by evidence from manual 

 industry alone. His case is that the Factory Acts disqualify women for 

 the higher and better remunerated posts, and thus restrict la carriere 

 ouverte aux talents, and it is no answer to him to show that women are 

 in great request for lacquering or machine tending. Part of this argu- 

 ment, however, tells both ways ; for the development of industrial 

 efficiency in women may itself be due to the regulations of the Acts. 

 If the conditions of women's work have been humanised, and the strain 

 of it diminished, industry itself may have been made more attractive, 

 and drawn a larger number of recruits from good homes and healthy 

 families than would otherwise have been the case. 



As to Query II. (1) the general notion seems to be that women's 

 wages liave risen in Birmingham industries. The brassworkers' secre- 

 tary attributes the rise to the operation of the Acts themselves. He 



' See Factory and Worliihop Commimon, 1876, Minutes of Evidence, Query 6505. 



