Women’s labor during the Victorian period was all but neglected, marginalized, and discounted, wherein female laborers in mass, earned significantly less than their male counterparts while performing similar industrial factory-level tasks in horrific conditions and unsustainable hours. Women were a new component of the workforce, because of industrialization and urbanization factories hired women; and because their labor was cheaper it was, in some instances, preferred. Movements of feminism steadily grew from the 1850s and 1860s due to campaigns regarding issues of employment, education, voting rights, the Married Women’s Property Act, and women’s industrial organization. The first publication of ‘The Song of the Shirt’ was in 1843 and while it was culturally important at that time. The poem's impact persisted sixty-seven years later as Emmeline Pethick Lawrence engaged with Hood’s poem in 1910 as a means to indicate the persistence of hazardous working conditions as well as the death and destruction of women at the hands of the patriarchy. Thomas Hood’s ‘The Song of the Shirt’ draws upon the ‘cheapness’ of flesh and blood, specifically that of women. Feminist writers in the early 20th century cite Hood’s poem as a prime example of the injustices, degradation, and cruelties that women like Mrs. Biddell, the seamstress Hood used as inspiration, faced. Here again, Emmeline Pethick Lawrence uses the words of Hood’s poem to call for change, namely, human rights as women were undeniably actively participating in the commonwealth’s economy and had been for decades. Working-class women faced many problems and did not retreat into domesticity despite their blatant lack of representation in government. Victorian ideals of womanhood, motherhood, and virtue were also challenged as women became laborers. Critiques of marriage and acknowledgments of furthering one’s standing through goals separate from motherhood or marriage which was the typical Victorian attitude emerged as did spaces of female friendship outside of the domestic sphere.  

Other Sources:

• As Separate as if We Were in Two Worlds’: Working-class Women’s Neglected Labor in Victorian Literature by Kristine Noel Lee
• A City Girl by Margaret Harkness
• Married Women’s Property Act
• Victorian Periodicals A Guide to Research Vol. 2 edited by J. Don Vann and Rosemary T. VanArsdel