The Education and Employment of Women

The Education and Employment of Women

Josephine E. Butler's essay "The Education and Employment of Women" confronts what she calls society's "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the economic plight of unmarried and self-supporting women in Victorian England. Drawing on the 1861 census, Butler demonstrates that marriage cannot be relied upon as a woman's sole means of support: of nearly six million adult Englishwomen, over two and a half million widows and spinsters were working for their own subsistence, a number that had grown sharply since 1851. She argues that industrial and social structures have failed to keep pace with this reality, leaving women "neither the old necessity of shelter, nor the old certainty of support" that existed when physical strength, rather than education, determined economic value. Butler focuses first on the governess trade as emblematic of women's economic desperation, citing advertisements for unpaid nursery governess positions that drew hundreds of applicants, and Manchester Governesses' Institution registers showing most qualified governesses earning under £50 a year. She catalogs the resulting suffering: inadequate food, breakdowns leading to asylums, and cases of women driven to opium, drink, or prostitution after exhausting their resources. She quotes an anonymous governess describing the "aches and pangs of ignorance" as more painful than physical want, and argues that women's hunger for education stems not from vanity but from necessity and a genuine desire to serve. She proposes two remedies for governesses' plight: raising the intellectual and social status of the profession through higher education (such as the newly proposed women's college) and university certification, and diverting unqualified women toward other suitable employment. She then surveys three obstacles blocking women's access to broader occupations: the prejudice and indifference of employers and the public; trade union combinations that forcibly exclude women from skilled work (citing the Worcester china painters, where men seized women's tools to prevent them from executing finer work, and the Apothecaries' Company's exclusionary practices); and women's own defective education, which traps them in a vicious circle where poor training limits them to teaching, yet unfits them even for that. Butler rejects the argument that employing women necessarily displaces men, noting that thousands of men work in trades—millinery, dressmaking, hairdressing—seemingly better suited to women, while healthier opportunities await men in the colonies. She attributes the root problem to middle-class parents who "educate their daughters to get husbands, and for nothing else," comparing this deliberate ignorance to how slave-owners withheld education from slaves to prevent emancipation. The essay's second half addresses two flawed schools of advocacy for women. The first treats women's education solely instrumentally—valuable only insofar as it improves them as wives and mothers—while fearing that independence will produce an unwomanly "masculine race." The second, reactive camp undervalues maternity and domestic virtue, urging women simply to imitate men's ambitions. Butler stakes a middle position: freedom and education will not diminish women's natural womanliness but allow it to flourish "like plants brought out into the light from a cellar," and she invokes Christian theology—"in Christ Jesus there is neither male nor female"—to argue that spiritual equality demands practical equality, while distinctive feminine virtues remain valuable rather than erased. She defends unmarried and childless women against the charge that they have missed their "vocation," arguing that maternal instinct and capacity for nurture are not confined to biological mothers, and proposes that unmarried women could serve as caretakers for the nation's orphaned and neglected children, framing this as a matter of urgent Christian duty. She includes an extended quotation from Mrs. Heatherley describing the successful integration of mixed-sex art classes at the Newman Street School of Art as evidence that co-education produces better behavior and outcomes than segregation, countering fears about impropriety. Butler closes by acknowledging that reform movements sometimes provoke excess or "grotesque" expressions of protest, which she attributes to long-suppressed grievance rather than to the reforms themselves, urging patience and pity rather than alarm. She favors incremental, faith-guided action—doing "the work of to-day" while keeping sight of a distant goal—over rigid programmatic schemes, and expresses gratitude toward sympathetic male reformers and educators. The essay ends on a note of religious conviction, framing the emancipation and education of women as part of a providential unfolding of justice, akin to the historical abolition of slavery and the gradual dissolution of barriers between races and classes.

By Josephine E. Butler · First published 1868 · Genre: Social Essay, Feminist Literature, Economic Analysis · 10,492 words

First lines

The economical position of women is one of those subjects on which there exists a "conspiracy of silence. " While most people, perhaps, imagine that nearly all women marry and are supported by their husbands, those who know better how women live, or die, have rarely anything to say on the subject. Such social problems as this are certainly painful; they may or may not be insoluble; they must not be ignored.

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women's education · employment rights · gender equality · feminist advocacy · Victorian era · social reform · women's rights · higher education · economic independence · statistical evidence · women's welfare · social conventions

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