Women of Victorian England (Women in History) Review

History in Focus

the guide to historical resources • Issue 1: The Victorian Era •

The Victorian Era

Volume Review

Book:	A Woman'due south Place, an Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890-1940 Elizabeth Roberts Blackwell's, Oxford, 1996, edn. 237 pps.; ISBN 0-631-14754-iii
Reviewer:	Professor Sally Alexander Goldmiths College, University of London

No history of class or industrialisation is taught now without the demography of the household, the value of domestic labour, the items of working course consumption, the texture of sexual difference. Elizabeth Roberts' fine oral history of the everyday lives of "ordinary" working class women in Lancashire between 1890 and 1940 has provided a detailed study of these themes since its get-go publication in 1985. The reprint is welcome. Through Roberts' assay of the transcripts of the 160 respondents from Barrow, Preston and Lancaster we know more than now about the hidden lives of mothers and grandmothers of those of us born mid-century in Britain. The story is a bleak one. Women's lives were repetitious and hard - in the idiom of the time and identify - all "work and bed." "The women they worked and worked" Roberts was told, "They had babies and worked like idiots. They died. They were old at forty." Among the poor, wrote Ada Neild Chew, trade matrimony organiser and suffragist in Lancashire before the starting time world war, were "women who had not lived" (1).

This is not a feminist history, Roberts insists, because she institute no evidence of patriarchy among the working classes of Lancashire. Women blamed poverty not men for their plight, and women had ability - of a sort - in household and family. The mother/daughter bail was the "linch-pin" of the family. Roberts likewise resists feminist history's fixation - as she sees it - on suffering. Yet she finds no other discussion to depict women's often harsh experiences of marriage, childbirth, their labours and dearest for children alive and dead. Nevertheless, the women "knew their place, were secure in information technology, and gained much satisfaction from their achievements" which were, Roberts tells us crisply, in the way of the sociologist, the management of the family budget, the educational activity and socialisation of large families, and the upholding of the family and neighbourhood mores. Roberts reasons respectfully with the research of fellow historians, but she takes her cue from the words of her respondents on the survival of kin, the centrality of the wage to women, the spread of birth control noesis amongst married couples, the moral economies of the communities which made up industrial Lancashire. Continuity and change is her theme, and although she is merely partially convinced by modernisation theory (Lancashire had been industrialised for generations) she concludes that "modernistic" attitudes were haphazardly established by the 1940s. The book is offered every bit a memorial to the women who embodied - she tells us - a manner of life that has disappeared.

Tony Blair would agree with her. His generation he assured Sue Lawley on Desert Isle Discs earlier this yr, born in the 1950s, children of the welfare country, accept no memory of the first decades of the twentieth century, the formative decades of the Labour Motion - "old Labour" as Ross McKibbon among others has put it - so the institutions of old labour are neither advisable or adequate to deal with modern injustices. No-one wants to render to the thirties - in Lancashire Winifred Holtby wrote in 1933, a "state of war was existence waged" against poverty and unemployment (2). And anyway, Labours' old institutions had trivial to offer women, and often obstructed their demands, for instance, equal pay, family allowance, or nascency command. So why the lament from the old left most New labour'southward willed forgetting of them ? Does annihilation remain of these lives? What should nosotros remember about them ?

A Woman'south Identify tells the story of a conformist generation, obedient to tradition, their emotional and material wants narrowed by poverty and fatalism, their manners and morals disciplined by Christian values (not doctrine). They inhabited a moral earth of sharing, duty to others and a sense of fairness which derived, Roberts repeats, from Christianity and working class custom. Children had "transmitted to them," as they were growing up, " a working class culture, a complete design for living and a prepare of rules to be learned about 'proper' behaviour".

From childhood - which was short-lived and never conspicuously demarcated from adult lives - girls learned the habit of obedience, seldom criticised their parents, and submitted their wishes to family need. Families had to bide by one some other to survive. Waged work brought petty pleasance, and only a glimpse of independence; sexual knowledge was dangerous and a source of shame; marriage the universal expectation. Marriage was a lifelong partnership, and as one man told Elizabeth Roberts, the "acme of anyone'due south life was how they looked afterward their family ". "All women hoped to be able to feed, clothe and house their families" Roberts writes, to accept failed would have meant expiry. A "woman's place" was in the home, where she was both the fodder of need and the "prevailing" potency. "I was fifty-six before I answered my female parent back", 1 Preston woman remarked. "Talk of the subjection of women" Helen Bosanquet wrote of the London poor in 1906 and Roberts quotes her approvingly,

"I doubtfulness if the bare thought of father beingness equal to mother in rank and authority ever entered the mind of any kid nether sixteen. "

Children remembered their parents' authority as accented. The vivid recall of instruction, refusal, alarm - "don't ask where babies come from"; "don't show your nakedness"; "say nix nearly the blood;" "keep silence"; "y'all know too much" undermined feminine cocky-esteem. Obfuscations and euphemism made formulation and nascence, not to mention desire, mysterious and shameful processes about which it was improve to know zilch. Bodies were hidden, their parts and functions unnamed. Only when dead could the body be looked at and touched. Amongst the labouring poor, Roberts reminds us, appearances were everything: hands, faces, outer clothing, doorsteps and entrances were kept spotless, equally were reputations. Death offered a rare and valued opportunity for display. All but the destitute aspired to the horses, ostrich plumes and procession of the funeral cortege, while the laying out of the torso, visitors coming to call, look and touch, were the gestures and rituals of a communal spectacle which formed a carapace of feeling. Rules to govern behaviour and idea were intended to stifle curiosity, to suffocate desires. But although only the most "brazen" defied their parents' authorisation, the young remained remarkably true to the inventions of their peers: zips and belly buttons rather than silence and old wives tales.

"Scant cognition" - one of Elizabeth Roberts' telling phrases -formed one of the bonds between mothers and daughters, unbroken through developed life. Mothers it seems, right through to the 1940s, had known as little as their daughters did at their age. They had been awakened by spousal relationship, and the daze of birth, as Ellen Ross has documented for women of the London poor before the commencement world war (3). Mothers refused to enlighten their daughters, Roberts believes, for fearfulness of the consequences of such cognition: babies, abandonment, poverty and loss of respectability. Women strove for respectability and respectability one time meant, Roberts reminds u.s.a., respect from others, an aspiration which made sense in a world in which neighbourhood and kin gave affiliation. Respectability was measured by cleanliness, provision for the family unit, an absence of shame - ruthless taskmasters in weather of overcrowding, irregular pay, long hours of difficult physical labour, the unpredictable advent of births and deaths.

The consequences of extramarital sexuality were dreaded: "My mother went mad"; "I would have drowned myself"; "my father would have murdered me". A fathers' give-and-take was law: "One word from my father"... If this vehement imagery refers to a mythical ability, then the myth in this example seems to follow Freud'southward model of having been founded on some real consequence. A Woman's Place records ii startling pre-2nd-world-war memories of avenging violence: one of a pregnant bride stoned at the church building; the other, a father beating his meaning girl to death. Some pregnant women drowned themselves. Such memories give spooky resonance to the phrase reiterated by the respondents: "nosotros were every bit innocent every bit the grave".

Whether the deaths were apocryphal or non they reinforced the prohibition. Illegitimacy over the period remained remarkably abiding at well-nigh 5%. And they endorsed a climate of fearfulness and shame, the two emotions most readily admitted to by the women (John Burnett too constitute fear and shame the universal emotions of working class autobiography in the nineteenth century) (four). Shame extended beyond the act to its legitimate outcome. Women hid themselves when they were meaning, every bit one woman said, explaining her self-consciousness, "I knew that they would think what I had been doing". A Mrs. Harris summed upward the atmosphere of the urban villages where everyone knew everyone else, which fabricated up industrial Lancashire: in that location was tolerance and pity, merely the shame too which came from being talked almost.

Sex other than for procreation was something that simply men indulged in. The double standard was stronger in Lancaster than Barrow and Preston. No-i tells of a man being punished. The closest the respondents came to the mention of pleasure, was past admitting either that "some took the risk", or that someone, commonly a father or hubby, was or was non "a lustful man". Ane woman quotes her married man as saying, "if they had seen this squad" referring to his six children in the 1920s, "anyone would call back we had had a wonderful time". No-one of course used the give-and-take sex - it wasn't needed: "flying their kites"; "tasting their soup earlier it was set"; "doing incorrect" or "dirty" were some of the phrases. "Don't go all the fashion to Blackpool" was 1 bus conductor's caution; "he just came home to sort of make us" was a child'southward account of her father's presence; "it was him as was playing the game", was the lament of an aggrieved wife.

Given the mental atmosphere of conformity, fatalism, shame and fearfulness, Roberts is difficult put to explain the decline in family size between 1890 and 1940 - the well-nigh profound modify in the menstruation, and arguably the defining feature of twentieth century modernity. "Family limitation" is "formidably circuitous" she argues, and oral evidence doesn't assistance much since it is "bedevilled by inhibitions, ignorance and reticence about sexuality". Roberts runs through the familiar explanations for fewer children: higher aspirations, and rational calculation (Habbakuk); no unmarried causal caption (Banks and Gittins). Roberts herself follows Gittins in favouring a multiple caption with differential strategies according to occupation, education and degree of communication betwixt husband and wife. She rejects every bit besides simple the assumption that "all women, if only they had not been so ignorant or fatalistic, would have limited their families". The emotional economy of these women, she outlines, was a protean mix of devotion to children, constant worry, the admission that sex was something to be avoided, and the acceptance of any God sends. As one mother of 6 told her,

"Well, I mean, we never idea of it. They just came and that was it. "

Roberts' findings are contradictory however. She does notice a correlation between the babe mortality rate and family size equally Habbakuk had suggested, although as Carol Dyehouse demonstrated, this was not necessarily linked to women'southward waged piece of work. In that location had been no incentive to limit family size when babies died as often as they had done in the 19th century. She also finds that among the couples who defied "tradition" and overcame "ignorance" at least one of them valued either education or leisure and a more comfortable standard of living. A "malthusian determination to match family size to material resource" can be found among the labouring poor in the inter-war years, presumably because relative living standards were rising, though not as fast as cloth expectations. People began to limit families because "I was likewise valuable working", and "there was no family allowances and then you lot know". Just this - not quite Habbakuk's rational adding - was retrospective wisdom.

How families were limited is too a puzzle. Roberts found no testify from the respondents that neither birth control propaganda, nor books, nor doctors were sources of information; neither did the cognition filter down through the middle classes every bit historians one time believed. If that had been the case, then the families of domestic servants could be expected to be smaller than average, and they were not in her sample. Roberts condemns the British government's refusal to make (birth control) information available until 1931 when General Practitioners could offer limited advice to married women if their health was threatened. Government lie reinforced the attitude strongly held by some women that artificial limitation of births was both immoral and distasteful (though several women confessed to lying about limiting their families). Birth-control did not become respectable until after the second world war. The Lambeth Council issued just a cautious approval in 1930, and all three towns had sizeable Catholic minorities. Nevertheless, at that place is evidence from the respondents, absolutely often oblique, of determined attempts to limit family size in spite of the very uneven knowledge of methods. Mechanical appliances were expensive, breastfeeding, and coitus interruptus - as every woman knows - were non foolproof. Withdrawal and abstinence were the well-nigh frequent resort - one adult female's response to her daughter's persistent questioning was, "He didn't do it often just when he did he made a good job of it". About women improvised. They slept in separate beds, pleaded illness, a stonemason'south wife saturday on the window ledge until her husband fell asleep. Some took desperate risks. They pushed needles inside themselves, they used washing soda, glace elm bark, quinine, Epsoms salts and hot baths - "everybody tried that". No adult female admitted to having had an abortion, but many repeated stories (usually when their husbands left the room, or the tape recorder was turned off) of home-abortions, imprisonment and decease. If women did "accept what came " they did so information technology seems only when all else failed.

The unwillingness of demographic historians to hear women's wish to refuse the dangers of childbirth and the stresses of raising children on no money at present seems extraordinary. Threescore years into the literature of family limitation, only Diana Gittins in the mid-eighties and Simon Szreter and Wally Secombe recently have recognised the forcefulness of women's own wishes to avoid too many children (5). Feminist writers through the twentieth century - Maud Pember Reeves, Ada Nield Chew, Stella Browne, Leonora Eyles, Sylvia Pankhurst, Enic Charles and Marie Stopes, Eva Hubbock knew of and wrote about women's resistance to frequent childbirths. The records of the beginning birth control Clinics in the 1920s, the messages to the Women'south Co-operative Order and to Marie Stopes, testify to the huge number of illegal abortions, miscarriages and suspicions of infanticide. The memories accept always been there but few historians have heard them. Paul Thompson in The Edwardians listened to i son'southward retentiveness of his mother:

"My mother nursed a bit of bitterness because she had a big family and would accept liked to have washed different...Me mother used to be upset when she used to meet her sister with only two and nosotros'd the houseful. "(6)

A mother's wish for fewer children, Kathleen Woodward has shown, was printed indelibly on the minds of the young to powerful effect (7).

Roberts' emphasis on fatalism and the tenacity of working class custom reflects her qualified credence of the modernisation thesis. The decline in drinking (role revulsion, part Government policy), education, cinema and the increasing interference of the state into family life had began to intermission the dorsum of working grade custom between the wars. But working class custom, insofar as information technology springs from social structure and conditions, was maybe more fluid, more improvised than Roberts allows. Neither the populations in the three towns nor the economy were stable. Well over half the respondents from Barrow and Lancaster came from migrant families, and of the 43 respondents from Preston, only 21 had both parents built-in at that place, or in its neighbouring villages. Migration, as E.A. Wrigley has pointed out, creates new people.

The wage in the easily of young women was a leaven of change. A man's wage was seldom plenty to back up a family, and young women could earn most equally much as their fathers in some places and occupations during the depression. The wife's domestic labour was often more valuable to the family's standard of living than their waged work. Some men anyway did not similar their wives to work because it seemed to reflect badly on their status as earner and Roberts found no show that the women disagreed with this. Most mill-workers worked function-time after their children came. The minority who worked full-fourth dimension in the mills in Preston, for example, the poorest of the 3 towns, barely covered costs of childcare, cooked meals and laundry.

The wage did not bring immediate financial or moral independence - information technology was handed straight over to the mother for the outset years - but it did bring a change in status inside the family. Immediately the young worker, like her father, was given more than to consume. Mrs. Mulholland, for instance, 1 of thirteen surviving children, became a drummer at the skating rink in Barrow aged thirteen. She earned 18s a calendar week, when her begetter earned 21s as a labourer. Her mother gave her a poached egg on toast for her tea, saying "she was non going to kill the goose that laid the golden egg."

Causes cannot exist assumed, they take to be looked for, Marc Bloch wrote (eight). Oral testimony in this respect delivers few certainties. Sentences begin with a "aye" move to a "simply well..." and end on a question; "I" shifts to "you" mid-clause; conversation is punctuated with sudden reversals, admissions of ignorance; stories blend hearsay with anecdote. Alessandro Portelli stakes his merits for oral history on these qualities unique to speech which expose, he argues, the truths of subjectivity, as well every bit the provisional nature of all historical narratives (nine). The truths of subjectivity which the retentivity-piece of work of A Woman'due south Place reveals include the enduring features of the female life-cycle - the tensions of sexual knowledge, the continuities of myth and family romance, the repetitions of domestic labour - traces of female feel as indicative of man need, and as unlikely to go away, as poverty however differently formed and experienced in different epochs (10). The sources of private alter are more than elusive. Few women were politically conscious. Labour'southward institutions - based on masculine collectivism and mutuality - scarcely touched women's lives. Before the second world war the women of Lancashire's labouring poor lived outside the provenance of all institutions including the Law. The spirit of alter sounds from private memory: Mrs. Hesketh'southward remark for instance equally she described her father, a skilled man, a fitter,

"He e'er had that piffling wallet at the back that wasn't ours. On a Saturday night he would go ready and put his jewellery on, his gilt chain and rings, and what not. He would plough with his back to Mum, like this, to count his coin. He had an eye for the ladies when he were out. He used to become to what they called the Long Vaults... Well, we accept come a long style since then."

Notes:

1. Ada Nield Chew, The Life and Writings of a Working Woman, presented by Doris Nield Chew, Virago, 1982.

two. Winifred Holtby, Women, John Lane the Bodley Head, 1934, p.190.

iii. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil, Maternity in Outcast London, 1870-1918, Oxford Academy Press, 1993, ch.4.

4. John Burnett, Destiny Obscure, Autobiographies of Babyhood, Educational activity and Family unit from the 1820s to the 1920s, (1982), Penguin edn, Introduction.

5. Diana Gittins, Fair Sex: Family size and structure, 1900-39, Huchinson, 1982; Simon Szreter, Fertility, class and gender in Britain, 1860-1940, Cambridge, University Press, 1996, Part 1V; Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Tempest, Working-grade families from the Industrial Revolution to the fertility decline, Verso 1993, ch.v.

6. Paul Thompson, The Edwardians, The Remaking of British Society, Routledge, edn. 1992, p.43.

7. Kathleen Woodward, Jipping Street, (1928), Virago 1984.

8. Marc Bloch, The Historian'due south Craft, Manchester University Press, 1954, p.xviii.

ix. Alessandro Portelli, 'The Peculiarities of Oral History', History Workshop Journal, issue 12.

10. National patterns of ill-wellness and the cases and ages of death in Britain have returned to the patterns established during the 19th century industrialisation and constant till the 2nd earth war. Evening Standard, 16.8.97.

March 1998

Writer'southward Response

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