“Princesses and Sweated-Wage Slaves Go Well Together”: Images of British Sweated Workers, 1843–1914

Abstract

Taking a long-term perspective, this article charts how sweating was represented in different ways in different periods. It examines the practical difficulties reformers faced when moving from portraying certain images exposing sweated labor to the advocacy of remedies for it. At the turn of the twentieth century, the explanation of sweating as a wider issue of poverty had changed considerably from the narrow definition of sweated labor dating back to the 1840s. Initially this identified needlewomen and male artisans in declining trades as the primary victims of sweating. Jews later stereotypically featured prominently as both exploiters and exploited. By the 1890s, women homeworkers were simultaneously foregrounded as passive victims as well as perpetuators of a degenerate sweated “underclass.” From 1906, those depicted in sensational exhibitions plying their trade of sweated labor were no longer designated as isolated “white slaves” but as exploited citizens denied a fair day's pay for a fair day's work. They were also viewed as a danger to national efficiency. Even so, a Liberal government was only prepared to concede one small anti-sweating measure in the form of the 1909 Trade Boards Act. This piece of legislation was gender neutral and covered homeworkers as well as factory hands. But it encompassed only the most notoriously low-paying industries and less then a quarter of a million workers. Successive British parliaments shied away from enacting a national minimum wage until 1999.