From Voyeurism to Feminism: Victorian and Edwardian London's Streetfighting Slum Viragoes

Abstract

The cover of the Illustrated Police News of 21 July 1888 [Figure 1] shows two contrasting images of working-class women of London's East End: the victim and the virago. In the main picture montage, skeletal workers are portrayed as victims of the sweated labour system, watched over by a Victorian 'fat cat* industrialist They are surrounded by germs and disease. Captions detail the low rates paid to them for piece work. Watching these exploited humans, their employers' dog thinks I'm glad I was born a dog. This picture is surrounded by images of the strike at the Bryant and May match in the East End, including a picture of supposedly starving strikers (who in fact look remarkably healthy and well-fed). Another inset shows two women making matchboxes for 2Vi[d] a gross in a dingy room with paper peeling off the walls. By contrast, the picture immediately above this montage shows three factory girls (who were not connected with the strike) violently assaulting a policeman who has been unwise enough to interfere in one of their personal disputes. The contrast between the two images vividly illustrates the popular press's Jekyll-and-Hyde conception of the East End female. She was seen as both a figure of pathos and a threat, a virtuous victim and a vicious virago. These stereotypes were fundamental to late Victorian popular culture's view of slum women, and gained increasing currency as the middle-classes' fascination with the London slums grew at the fin de si?cle.1 Women are often the central characters in slum fiction and slum