So I'd like to start today by thanking the conference organisers, particularly Liz Bagian,
for the invitation to speak today to be part of the celebration of the anniversary of women's degrees at Oxford.
And part of this conversation this past year has again brought to our attention the importance of service sector workers.
And my paper today looks at the history of the women who worked in this capacity
at Oxford colleges and upon whom this comfortable academic life depended.
Members of colleges lived in sets of rooms, arranged on staircases.
Domestic servants are college servants, provided personal service and depending on the college and the time period.
This meant carrying coal in hot water upstairs, clearing slops, tending fires, scrubbing floors, looking after shoes,
boots and clothing, preparing, inserting meals in rooms or in the halls and cleaning up afterwards.
And many other tasks. Besides, it was physically demanding work.
And during the terms, the days were long, often from six thirty in the morning until late in the evening, nine or 10 perhaps, and seven days a week.
In every century, women are found working in or for the colleges in some capacity.
But today I'm focus on the domestic work of women in the Oxford colleges from the 19th to the early 20th centuries.
And this is a period when opportunities for some mostly middle class women in Oxford were expanding.
But as we'll see, this story is more complicated for the working class women employed by these colleges.
So really, the first challenge is first to locate these workers and historians usually turn to first to wage records into the census.
But these sources can often obscure the work of women during this period.
College service is often described in gendered terms, a masculine dynasty of fathers and sons with jobs passed down from one generation to the next.
This narrative usually omits the contribution of women entirely, and it's more accurate to replace this idea of dynasties with family labour networks.
Women were frequently hired as part of a team together with their husbands and children.
Wages for the team were paid to one worker, and that's almost always the senior male servants.
And as a consequence, women and children worked in these roles often don't appear in wage records at all.
So we need to look for them elsewhere. And to do this, my research uses a wide variety of sources to recover the history of these workers.
And here's an example of these types of our credible sources.
This is a notice from the Dean of Christ Church, Henry Liddell, reminding scouts that their assistance.
So here that scouts, wives and a boy need to be approved by the steward who is responsible for the day to day management of college servants.
And none of these women appear in wage records, even though they were a constant presence in the college.
So this practise is one of wives working alongside husbands is widespread.
Christchurch was a large, wealthy college.
Balliol, much smaller, much less well-off, but you can see here that the college employed not only wives, but mothers and daughters too.
And in the second paragraph, the person mentions the hiring of Charr women or day labour.
Women, particularly middle aged women, have always been an important source of casual labour in colleges and in the university.
One of the most familiar college servants is the college porter, but much less well known.
The Contributions of Porter's wives. This is a document from the archives at Balliol again and is essentially a contract for the college porter.
It describes the preferred candidate and the details of the position. So hours of work cetera is a few pages long.
So I just included one quote.
But you can see from the quote here that the porter's life was expected to work as an assistant and the annual salary was for the work of two people,
although it was only paid to one person, just the porter. And there are many examples of these.
And here's just another one.
This is from the porter at Hartford writing to the bursar to negotiate an increase in his pension, which the college to Grant.
And Robert Brian here reminds the college of the decades of Labour provided by his wife.
The porter's job is slightly unusual in that while women worked alongside their husbands, they couldn't take over the job in the event of his death.
In other roles, property rights accrued in these jobs and colleges recognised that it was the
right of the widow to take over the work in the event of her husband's death. And this tradition puts women in a variety of roles.
So Scouts', messengers and even in a few examples, senior positions.
For example, in the early decades of the 19th century, Lincoln College had a woman, Mansel Mary Mason, who took over the job on her husband's death.
The man supplied was an important and well remunerated role, responsible for securing the supply of food for the college.
So in this way, after the death of a male breadwinner, women could continue to support their households and keep their families together.
And they often carried on with the assistance of a child if that was possible. And this raises another important point that in these arrangements,
although women worked alongside men often doing the same job, they didn't receive the same entitlement to a pension.
Colleges were unusually early adopters of contributory pension schemes.
So from the eighteen fifties, which is really early. But these excluded women for at least 70 years and it was difficult for any worker in
this highly seasonal low wage economy to accumulate any significant savings for old age.
But women were much more likely than men to receive only a subsistence level pension for college work,
which often left them unable to live independently. And many had a very meagre existence.
Once they were unable to work. So here's an example.
In 1832, when the butler at Balliol died, his wife Elizabeth carried on as the college under Butler with her daughter,
also named Elizabeth, working as your assistant.
When the mother, Elizabeth, died in 1859, her daughter carried on in that work until her own retirement.
And you can see here that she was paid slightly more than the man who took over her job, which is unusual.
And in this example, the occupations of both of these women are recorded accurately in the census in 1851 here,
even with their employer, which is very unusual. And you can see Elizabeth Hicks was 73, still working.
And this is this is a really good example of what a servant would hope to achieve in old age,
that they would be working until they were incapacitated and had the labour of an assistant to help provide for them here.
Your family member, which is ideal. And her daughter here is 42, working with her.
And sometimes these arrangements give us a glimpse of the relationship between gender and wages.
Here's another couple.
Amelia and Thomas Abby, who worked together at modelling college play rooms where crockery and tableware were cleaned and stored,
were often stuffed by husband and wife team with additional labour hired as needed.
These workers were traditionally paid by a fee levied on each resident member of the college.
And this couple are a good example of this type of arrangement and show how long these traditional patterns of employment persisted.
Thomas Abie retired. Here you can see in 1919. This is quite an interesting story.
Thomas and Amelia work together as pub landlords.
Before they came to the college, she was employed by Modlin first and he was brought on a few years later.
And you can see that she has very little success in negotiating any improvement in her wages while her husband has quite a rather easier time of it.
And it seems likely that although they're paid separately,
the college considered their household income to be fair and repeatedly denying her an increase.
Women on these low wages were almost always paid the same rate, with one or two women in a senior role.
And here that's the difference between that twelve shillings and the 14 shillings that
she's asking for weekly with one or two women in a senior role paid slightly more.
And in raising Amelia's wage, the college knew that they would have to raise the wages of all women working in similar jobs.
And we'll see in a minute how women at Modlin responded. But first, one more husband and wife team.
And the occupation most closely associated with women at Oxford is out of college law dress.
And here's an example from St John's College. But the reverse and Jackman here brings in considerably more than her husband.
He's also a college servant. And although we ought to consider the costs associated with her work.
So her work is home based. So she needs to rent extra space to have the laundry drying.
She needs supplies, extra labour if her children are old enough to help her.
This is still quite a good income. And for some women, it became a home based business like arms.
And we see entrepreneurial activity, women investing in larger spaces, taking on employees,
training them and earning a good, albeit physically demanding living.
But from 1868,
there's a significant change in the labour market for women at Oxford University expands rapidly through the admission of unattached students.
The lodging house delicacy is formed to licence private homes to provide room and board for these students.
And the third point here is what I really wanted to focus on. Colleges relied on servants and their wives to stop these lodging houses.
Colleges converted existing properties. They purchased additional houses.
All of these require trustworthy workers to superintend undergraduates away from home, often for the first time.
So this work requires pastoral care as well as domestic service lodging.
Housekeeping is traditionally described as subsistence work. But for some women, again, this is an entrepreneurial activity.
Women can take on larger and larger houses, more students hiring more labour and increasing their earnings.
And we do see that where women show a particular aptitude or an interest in this type of work and colleges move them to larger and larger houses.
So here's an example of a widow who supported herself by running a university lodging house after her husband died.
This is Kate and Daniel Styles.
Daniel Styles died, sadly, while he was away working at a resort in York and left Kate a widow with several young children to support.
She ran as lodging house for decades, you can see that the capital initially required to furnish lodging houses provided by
a fundraiser that was held by Daniel's co-workers at the College Servant Society,
which was the workingman's club in Oxford for college servants.
So through this work, she was able to keep her family together and she's also able to access good quality housing stock through the colleges,
the quality and affordability of housing for working people has always been an issue in the city.
And here's a nice photo on the left of Kate. Daniel Styles and on the right.
This is the house in the Wall Street where Kate spent most of her career as a lodging housekeeper.
And I think that's actually still a student housing today.
So when I give presentations about college servants, I usually have difficulty choosing which images to include.
There are so many great photos, but only male college servants. There are very few photos of women workers from this period.
And this probably also contributes to the perception that there just weren't many women working in colleges.
This is Eliza Haynes. You can see her in the centre of this photo with her children. She worked as a bed maker at Oriels, so at Auriel, Listman,
an assistant to Scouts' at colleges over different periods than makers and scouten of the same thing.
And sometimes different things like here at Auriel, where the bed makers,
the assistant oriels one of the few colleges to directly hire women for this work, which is unusual for this period.
So they employ women independent of a male family member. Eliza Haynes didn't have a male family member through whom she could access this work.
She has seven children to support. So she needs to take on two jobs.
She never remarried. So in the morning, she works at Auriel from early in the morning until afternoon.
And then in the afternoon, she goes and works as a domestic servant for the warden of People College in his home.
Auriel employed women because they're cheaper than men. And this is always true.
This quote at the top of the slide is from a memo at Corpus Christi referring to the recruitment of a third cook in 1920.
So the colleges decided how much they want to pay for that cook. And if a man can't be obtained, then they'll hire a woman.
So the feminisation of college staff over the course of the 20th century is an interesting question.
But the answer is not to be found exclusively in wages. Women were always cheaper than men.
And colleges were well aware of this. So, as promised, we return to modelling college and in 1919, a number of college servants joined a trade union.
This is across several colleges to secure better wages and improvements in working conditions.
There's very good evidence to suggest that women as well as men were active members of the Union Drive.
And this certainly appears to be the case that Mundelein. So I don't have a list of union members for this particular college.
But if you'll look at that last sentence. I'd like to think that this is Amelia Abby finally getting that raise.
So let's say something about women's colleges to women's colleges are run very differently than men's colleges.
They're designed to avoid some of the inefficiencies and the excesses associated with life in men's colleges.
They're organised much like a large private household with a housekeeper in charge.
You can see in that background it's not a very good picture. But the woman in White.
That's Emily Sherlock, who's the housekeeper on that lady, Margaret Hall.
So these are young women who would not have ordinarily had an opportunity to work at a college for obvious reasons,
many colleges don't hire young women at women's colleges.
Domestic servants lived in again, unlike sermons at men's colleges who left the doubt and maintained their own households for a number of reasons.
We do see lower wages at women's colleges and we do see it men's colleges. And so here's a quote from one of these women, May Cripps,
who reluctantly came to work at the college in 1926, aged 15, May described the work as physically demanding.
But she did enjoy the camaraderie of her co-workers and she appreciated the meals, which she described as first class.
And you can see from her, quote, The domestic service was not her first choice.
Reminding us that educational opportunities were not extending for all women.
And May here she refers to herself as Little May, because when she came to Lady Margaret Hall,
there was already a maid working there and in her letter made Cripps expresses relief at that idea that her name wasn't changed as a consequence.
And that does happen to domestic servants during this period. I've seen several examples of this at colleges.
And quite frankly, it makes it fiendishly difficult to find a worker in the census when you have the wrong name and you don't know it.
And so there's a nice collection of letters at LNH that offers a glimpse into these workers.
And for many of them, it's their first employment experience,
often the first experience away from home, because these workers lived in women's colleges,
tended to recruit from further afield rather than from a local labour market,
which also generates more correspondence and fortunately at elevates, it survives.
So this is just one example of that. This is a school report that's provided as a reference for an applicant.
Winifred Austin, you can see here, this gives us an idea of what colleges are looking for when they hire domestic servants.
And that's good character as well as hard workers. So to conclude, women have always been an important part of the workforce in Oxford colleges,
patterns of employment and artefacts of record keeping has meant that they're usually excluded from college histories.
My research does go some way to addressing that inequality. Until the late 19th century, women worked in a variety of positions and colleges, scouts,
cooks, lawn dresses, plate rooms, common rooms and infrequently in senior positions, too.
But by the late 19th century, a combination of factors limited women's employment opportunities and colleges in particular colleges
preferred women to run lodging houses working in their own homes rather than inside the colleges.
And I would be remiss if I didn't include this portrait of Alice George,
which is believed to be the earliest portrait of a domestic servant in England commissioned by her employer,
Wadham College, as she approached her own centenary.