II Social and Historical Developments

The first thread of argument to be unfolded here concerns the social and historical situation of women between the turn of the century and the years following the First World War. These years saw the advent of the female detective novelist, and I propose that the changes gradually brought about in the first 25 years of the century had an impact on this development. After a concentrated presentation of the socio-historical conditions I will therefore, in final paragraph, embed the results into the question that is central to this study: What enabled women to begin writing detective fiction.

I will restrict myself to a very limited description of the general social, political and historical developments of those years and focus on those aspects that relate to the status of women. 25 years, including one of the greates upheavals of the century, are bound to contain many complex processes and deserve (and have received) in-depth analysis elsewhere. The following chapter is a compact summary of the events as they concern the situation of women, particularly their emancipation and enfranchisement, and of the social and political changes that affected them and those they effected. It has to be borne in mind, however, that all changes before, during and after the First World War are set in a continuity of reforms, and that their consequences and their origins reach far beyond the rather arbitrarily selected period of time. For reasons of briefness and relevance, then, the description is by necessity circumscribed.

1 The Edwardian Era

The 19th century in Britain was dominated by one of the most powerful figures in its history; when Edward VII ascended the throne in 1901, few of his subjects had known anything else but the reign of Queen Victoria. The new century was destined to bring two World Wars and a torrent of change unknown to previous eras. Social, political and technological revolutions, some of them begun in Victoria's reign, determined and continue to determine the twentieth century. On the eve of the First World War, however, few of these changes were evident enough to unnerve the great majority of people, and especially if not only in hindsight, particularly in contrast to the atrocities of the war, the Edwardian Era was pleasant, old-fashioned, prosperous and happy for almost everyone.

As is usually the case with nostalgia, only some of these perceptions were borne out by facts. The country on the whole, its economy, its colonial expansion, its industries both at home and overseas, was faring well; the wealthy profited from the economic affluence and tinkered with a new toy, the motor car; the upper-middle-class could afford to enjoy itself almost as unhindered as the rich. Income tax was low, cost of living reasonable, luxury articles relatively easy to come by.^[1]

"The 'rich', defined by economists of the time as those with over £700 a year, were less than one in every thirty of the population - and yet they received more than one third of the national income. The 'comfortable', with between £160 and £700 a year, who were about one ninth of the population, received one seventh. So that [...] some 14 per cent of the total population [...] received nearly half the national income."^[2]

The rest of the population only dreamed of splendour, and a quarter or a third existed on or under the poverty line.^[3]

During the Victorian Era, industrialisation had led to increased migration from the countryside to urban centres. In the first decade of the twentieth century, this urbanisation had reached its peak and more or less remained there, with 75-80% of the population accumulating in towns.^[4] Advances on the fields of medicine and hygiene had reduced the death rate, and a population that had numbered less than nine million people in 1800 had grown to almost 14 million by 1837 and to 32 million at the beginning of King Edward's reign.^[5] Both the increase in urban population and in industrialised workers resulted in the growth of urban slums, and the congregation of large numbers of people in factories facilitated the rise of unionisation.

The economic prosperity inherent to the Edwardian Era was almost exclusively confined to the upper stratas of society, but it was in some, though few, ways reflected in the lower classes as well. Trade Unions had contributed to a rise in real wages, and campaigns against so-called sweated industries had made working conditions easier to bear. Many of these improvements, however, were confined to men, who enjoyed a greater degree of union organisation. Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, 25 per cent of the female population were employed in one of the 400 trades and occupations available to women.^[6] Even though these included professions such as medicine, teaching, nursing, architecture and engineering, only a handful was occupied in any of these. Almost three quarters of the female working population were employed in domestic service, in dress manufacture and the production of textile fabrics.^[7] Information on the average weekly wage (in 1906) varies between 7s 6d^[8] and 15s 5d^[9], but the fact that women earned much less than men, usually not even half as much, is unquestioned. Working conditions were exhausting with long hours in badly lit and badly vented rooms, and worst probably for those who worked at home. Even those employed in white-collar trades, such as shop assistants and clerks, suffered the hardships of sweated labour, for their hours were just as long and circumstances just as adverse. Whatever monetary advantage they had over factory and home workers was likely to be swallowed by the demands a socially 'better' position entailed.

Nevertheless, the Edwardian Era saw the faint beginnings of an overall improvement of opportunities for women. The typewriter, telephone and telegraph had opened the way for professional secretaries, almost invariably female. Compulsory elementary education as well as an increase in secondary and tertiary colleges for women had equipped them with the intellectual tools to gain employment in the professions. All this endowed women with a pecuniary independence that would have been unthinkable 50 years earlier. Working as a shop assistant or in an office was still considered an interim state with the ultimate goal of marriage, but the foundations were laid for later generations. It was certainly not £500 and a room of her own, as Virginia Woolf demanded, but it was a start.

By 1902 women were recognised as potential consumers not only of traditional household goods such as clothing and food, but of entertainment products.

"This exploitation of women as a market was not matched by a similarly significant change in their 'civil life'. Women, especially married women, were no longer, it is true, without civil rights as they had been when Victoria came to the throne, when a woman's legal existence was suspended on marriage and became incorporated into that of her husband [...].^[10] [...] [L]egislation was passed giving some women certain political rights, as, for example, the right to fill a number of public posts, [...] and, from the late 1880s, the entitlement to vote in the majority of municipal elections."^[11]

The Divorce Act of 1857 made divorce obtainable without a special Act of Parliament, and the " [...] Married Women's Property Acts of 1870, 1882 and 1893 successively granted married women [...] full rights over their own earnings [...] and [...] over all their own property [...]".^[12] During the Edwardian Era, however, these reforms grated to a halt, despite vociferous calls for social reforms from the Women's Suffrage movement, and the enfranchisement of women was still 20 years away.

After the first parliamentary debate on women's suffrage in 1867, the attitude towards the movement changed from hostility to ridicule, a sign, according to Crow, of its ineffectiveness. Hopes had been raised when women's suffrage were granted in New Zealand in 1893 and in South Australia in 1894, but in Britain "[...] the enfranchisement of women was always guaranteed to raise a laugh in political debates."^[13] On the socio-political side, enfranchisement met two strong opponents: the Paulines who claimed that God according to St Paul had decreed that woman was subject to man, and the political parties who concluded with infallible logic that women, given the vote, would indubitably vote for the respective opponent. This did not prevent any of the two, later three political parties to employ women in conducting elections, canvassing and clerical work. Women's organisations were created, "[...] their sole purpose being to clutch the women to the parties as unpaid helpers. There was no question of their being invited to give their views on political questions or to help in initiating policy. They were not wanted for any intellectual abilities they might have, but solely for the help they could give in the practical matters of fund-raising, canvassing, converting, disseminating propaganda, and keeping up registers."^[14] These activities, however, provided women with an opportunity to meet, to organise themselves, to discuss and to gain experience of political methods and, most of all, to "[...] explode the old idea that politics was a male preserve."^[15]

By 1901, the "[...] record of parliamentary approval for women's suffrage [...] was not impressive."^[16] Various bills were rejected, and opposition to enfranchisement was abundant in all parties as well as in the broad spectre of male society. The Boer War, which was fought to grant British "Uitlanders" representation in the Transvaal parliament, was turned into an asset by the suffragists: if "[...] England could fight the Boers to give Englishmen the vote, surely English women had an innate right to the vote at home."^[17] While contending that the government, at that specific moment, had a priority duty in fighting and winning the war, this point was driven home at every turn.

In the meantime, the Manchester Suffrage movement linked its cause with the new Independent Labour Party. The Suffrage Society offered to encourage factory workers to support them in turn for Labour's promise to make enfranchisement a key point on their agenda.

"But this classic type of back-scratching failed to work. Labour was starting on its course to power; it could not afford to nail its proud red flag to the slender mast of Women's Suffrage. Talk about it in general terms, by all means; let platitude follow platitude; but for Marx's sake don't let's forget that the point of politics is power and the power won't come from the women - most of them would vote Tory anyway!"^[18]

The platitudes did not help; the suffrage movement became disillusioned with the Labour Party, and, led by Emmeline Pankhurst, formed the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) with a straightforward goal: Votes for Women. Its opposition to all political candidates who failed to credibly endorse women's enfranchisement, voiced loudly at meetings and in parliament, and its militant actions, made the WSPU the strongest, though not necessarily the most successful, contendant in the struggle for political equality between the sexes.

^[1] Barker, T.C. 'History: Economic and Social' in: Cox , C.B. and A.E. Dyson (eds.) The Twentieth Century Mind: History, Ideas and Literature in Britain, Vol. 1: 1900-1918, Oxford, 1972, pp. 51-99, p. 52

^[2] Crow, Duncan The Edwardian Woman, London, 1978, p. 23

^[3] Barker, op. cit., p. 70

^[4] ibid., p. 79

^[5] Borer, Mary Cathcart Britain - Twentieth Century: The Story of Social Conditions, London, 1966, p. 4

^[6] Crow, op. cit., p. 137

^[7] ibid., p. 141

^[8] ibid., p. 95

^[9] Borer, op. cit., p. 78

^[10] Crow, op. cit., p. 13

^[11] ibid., p. 14

^[12] ibid., p. 14

^[13] ibid., p. 80

^[14] ibid., p. 82

^[15] ibid., p. 84

^[16] ibid., p. 85

^[17] ibid., p. 86

^[18] ibid., p. 87