Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood

‘A fabulous new cultural history of working motherhood … It is truly Big History and Helen McCarthy has rightly made mothers’ feelings and desires her central theme, acknowledging that even today the position of a mother remains freighted with a complicated psychology of obligation, love, need, self-fulfilment, guilt and ambition … Within the huge scope of this book, drawing together political, economic and social history, McCarthy brilliantly teases out cultural strands that persist to this day … This is a doorstopper of a book in every way, more than 500 erudite, quietly enthralling pages, not one of them dull’ Melanie Reid, The Times

‘[A work] of scholarship that casts light on all our lives … For anyone interested not just in female employment, but in the labour market generally, it will be a valuable resource … McCarthy’s impressive mining of contemporary sources brings one face to face with grinding toil, inadequate diets, and terror of illness’ Alison Wolf, Financial Times

‘A thoroughly researched monograph that leaves no stone unturned … A riveting read filled with the sounds, textures and emotions of the past. While we are often told that women of the previous generations were silent, here you can hear their voices – exhausted and defiant’ Emma Lundin, Prospect

‘[A] landmark history … McCarthy’s triumph lies in listening to many voices, revealing a complexity and richness that challenges the simple narrative that the working-class female has always needed to work for survival, the educated woman wants employment as a legitimate aspiration … Let’s hope that, in lockdown, the diversity of experiences of mothers, many coping with paid work, childcare and managing households under siege, is as well recorded and understood by future historians … Working mothers in all their variety continue to wait for equality – as do fathers wishing to have more involvement with their children. McCarthy’s book eloquently explains why the resistance is still so strong’ Yvonne Roberts, Observer

‘Helen McCarthy does a brilliant job of tracking the way attitudes to combining work and motherhood in the UK have changed from the nineteenth century to the present’ Vicky Pryce, Literary Review

‘McCarthy’s is an economic and social history, but she also wants to give shade and texture to what has been thought and said about working mothers. In this she succeeds magnificently. She is as much at home with popular novels and journalism as she is with cabinet memos, parliamentary commissions, employment law, or sociological reports … And always the voices of working mothers are raised above the cacophony of official and unofficial commentary’ Alison Light, Guardian

‘Groundbreaking … A fascinating read’ Herald

‘McCarthy charts the fascinating journey that mothers have taken from 1840 to the present day … The author pieces together a nuanced narrative which explores the social and emotional reasons why women have worked outside the home over and above economic necessity … At a time when essential workers in health, care, hospitality and many other occupations are often women, this book is a valuable addition to our understanding of why this is, and how much we still have to change’ Jan Nielsen, Socialist Review

‘Authoritative in scope and calmly judged, but with an ear for voices and an eye for detail, Double Lives is the history we have long wanted of a subject still freighted with emotion and misunderstanding’ David Kynaston

‘In a masterful analysis of the many histories of women’s work in Britain since the mid-nineteenth century, historian Helen McCarthy’s Double Lives intricately broaches issues of class, race, social norms and of course, motherhood … McCarthy deftly interrogates the complex relationship between women’s public voice, paid work and class politics … The true value of McCarthy’s study lies in the seamless line drawn from Victorian woman to the present day’ Gaby Frost, The Arts Desk

HELEN MCCARTHY is University Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of St John’s College. Her first book was The British People and the League of Nations and her second book, Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat, won Best International Affairs Book at the Political Book Awards 2015.

@HistorianHelen

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Women of the World: The Rise of the Female Diplomat

The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c. 1918–1945

To whom is her first duty, herself or the coming generation? We hold, her first, second, and third duty is to herself, and, that duty being fulfilled, she will have done her duty to the coming generation.

The Freewoman, 1912

Contents

Introduction

PART ONE DISINHERITANCE, 1840–1914

1 Bread and Butter

2 ‘The Essential Element of Evil’

3 Serving Two Masters

PART TWO CITIZENS, 1914–1951

4 Temporary Patriots

5 Modern Mothers

6 The Reserve Army

7 Put Money in Your Bag

PART THREE THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, 1951–1970

8 Housewives’ Choice

9 Come Back

10 Newcomers

PART FOUR DOING THE IMPOSSIBLE, 1971 TO THE PRESENT

11 Superwomen

12 Doing It All

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Index

Plates Section

Introduction

This is a book about mothers who worked for pay: what they have thought and felt and said about their lives, and what others have thought and felt and said about them over the past century and a half. It is not a universal history of women, for not all women are mothers, and not every mother works for pay. But it is, nonetheless, a story which lies at the heart of how women’s everyday worlds have been shaped in modern societies like Britain.

There are no ‘typical’ lives in history, but the tale of Isabella Killick, a tailoress in Mile End, east London, reveals something of the struggles experienced by poor, working-class mothers in the late nineteenth century, when our story begins. Born in the neighbouring district of Stepney in the mid-1840s, as a girl Isabella was apprenticed to the tailoring trade and continued to work for wages after her marriage to a boiler-maker named William, fitting trouser-finishing in around her household and caring duties as mother to three children. William’s health broke down in 1885, which made Isabella the family’s main breadwinner, toiling at her needle from six in the morning until eight at night. Her earnings covered the rent and kept young mouths fed, but Isabella’s own diet was woefully inadequate: a herring and a cup of tea was her ‘chief living’, she told a Parliamentary Committee in 1888, ‘as for meat, I do not expect; I get meat once in six months’.

Three years later, William’s condition deteriorated, prompting a temporary admission to the parish infirmary, and misfortune struck again in 1895, when both husband and wife entered the workhouse, the last resort of the destitute. After William’s death in 1902, Isabella survived as best she could through earnings from needlework, charring and cleaning. In 1911, she returned to the workhouse and remained there until discharging herself in 1915, possibly because she was, by then, eligible for the modest old-age pension introduced by the Liberal government seven years earlier. It was not to be a lengthy or restful retirement. Isabella died in 1920 aged seventy-six, no more than a mile or two from her place of birth.¹

Isabella Killick was one of 4 million girls and women working for wages in late Victorian Britain, as factory hands, domestic servants, shop assistants, clerical workers, agricultural labourers, small-business owners, teachers, nurses, midwives, writers and actresses.² They participated in the urban spectacle of the towns and cities in which the majority of Britons now lived, travelling to work on trams and trains, serving behind counters, populating office blocks, pacing hospital wards and scrubbing the floors of municipal buildings. They belonged, too, to the army of toilers cleaning and cooking in the basements and sculleries of private homes, tilling fields or slaving, like Isabella Killick, in their own modest dwellings as seamstresses, matchbox makers, childminders or washerwomen.

Many of these working women were mothers. According to the census, which forms the historian’s chief guide to the composition of the Victorian workforce, 13 per cent of married women were engaged in waged occupations across Britain in 1901. To this must be added the busy wives of shopkeepers, pub landlords and farmers, as well as those employed in seasonal work such as hop-picking and harvest-gathering, all of whom were likely to have gone unrecorded in the decennial population count.³ Not every occupied wife had children, but most did, and their ranks were further swelled by unknown numbers of unmarried mothers reliant on their own earnings for survival. We cannot be sure exactly how many mothers worked for pay at the end of the nineteenth century, but there is little doubt that working motherhood was a well-established feature of the late Victorian labour market and a daily reality for hundreds of thousands of British women.⁴

And yet it was not a social norm. The dominant ideal across all classes was that of the breadwinner family: a household headed by a male worker earning a wage large enough to keep his wife and children, typically through secure, skilled work. Many men never achieved this aspiration, thwarted by low pay, unemployment, disability or old age, leaving their wives little choice but to work in order to survive. Despite this reality, the ‘family wage’ retained its ideological power over British society.⁵ The belief that fathers had a duty to provide justified men’s higher wages as well as the exclusion of women from skilled trades and the restrictions on married women’s employment, and it legitimised social welfare policies which assumed that all men had dependants whereas women had none. The labour market was structured so fundamentally around gender difference that only a few isolated voices saw, in the lives of wage-earning mothers, a template for women’s economic independence beyond marriage and maternity. Instead, working motherhood was blamed for idleness amongst men, high infant death rates, and the evil of low-paid labour. For late Victorians, wage-earning by mothers was a warning that something had gone seriously wrong along Britain’s pathway to industrial modernity. The working mother stood as a symbol of domestic and economic disorder, the antithesis of progress and civilisation.

Now consider the testimony of this thirty-four-year-old secondary school teacher from a town in north-east England, written for the Mass Observation archive in 2015:* ‘For me there has never been any question about whether I would work and that is the same for virtually all of my friends … and indeed virtually all of the girls I teach expect to have a career of some sort.’ Looking back to a 1980s and 1990s childhood, the writer recalled that ‘whether someone’s mum worked or didn’t work didn’t seem to be a huge issue at the time’. Her own mother had returned to teaching when she and her sister were old enough to attend nursery school. Although currently single, the correspondent hoped to have a family one day and felt that under ideal circumstances one partner – she didn’t specify which – would be in a position to work part-time while the children were very young: ‘I think it is important for children to see their parents working and being good role models,’ the writer concluded.⁶

These reflections signal how far norms regarding mothers and paid work changed over the course of the twentieth century. By the early 2000s, women made up half of Britain’s workforce and the participation rate of mothers with dependent children was nearly two-thirds. ⁷ In 2018, it stood close to three-quarters.⁸ Women in regular employment now enjoy a statutory entitlement to maternity leave and pay and to request flexible working hours to care for dependants. Today some progressive employers go even further, offering generous parental leave schemes, subsidised childcare places, job-share opportunities and programmes to support mothers making the transition back to work. These laws, policies and initiatives seem to affirm the proposition voiced by our schoolteacher to Mass Observation: that seeking to combine the care of children with paid work has become an ordinary and legitimate aspiration for women.

Despite this shift in values, workplace equality is still elusive. The gender pay gap stands at around 14 per cent, affordable childcare is hard to find, and occupational segregation, sexual harassment and discrimination against pregnant women remain rife.⁹ Nor has attitudinal change been universal. Not everyone approves of parents who pay others to look after their children while they work, and attitudes and practices often vary according to differences of class, generation, ethnicity and religion – although never in wholly predictable or straightforward ways. Nonetheless, few would now describe, as late Victorians did, the employment of mothers as a ‘social problem’ or the sign of a dysfunctional economy. Nineteenth-century observers recognised that some mothers had to earn to secure their family’s basic subsistence, but they lacked a vocabulary for describing the wider significance that paid work might hold in these women’s lives. By the end of the twentieth century, it became possible to speak about other motives and desires propelling mothers into the workplace: for personal autonomy, professional achievement, mental stimulation, friendship and sociability, or to set a good example to sons and daughters. All are now broadly accepted as legitimate reasons for why mothers might stay in or re-enter the workforce.

This is the first and major claim of this book. The meaning of working motherhood has changed dramatically over the past century and a half. What was understood to be a social problem arising from economic pressure on families has become a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers. This amounts to a profound transformation in the lives of British women and this book aims to describe and account for it.

*

Some of the voices we will hear over the following chapters looked back to an even earlier transformation as they sought to make sense of women’s changing position in the economy and the family. The Industrial Revolution which remade Britain between 1750 and 1850 threw a long shadow over all subsequent debates about working motherhood. The enclosure of the common land, the coming of the factory system and the rise of the city had major consequences for women’s economic status.¹⁰ The claim that married women lost out as production moved from cottage to factory was frequently made by feminists in the early twentieth century. In 1911, the free-thinking author and intellectual Olive Schreiner argued that wives and mothers were dispossessed of their rightful share in the economic life of the community, describing in her book, Woman and Labour, the encroachment by men and machines upon women’s traditional domain. No longer required to bake, brew or spin, and with children absent for many hours of the day at school, the modern woman, Schreiner feared, could sink easily into a state of moral and intellectual dissipation with disastrous results for the future race. It was, in her view, the desire to reclaim their former economic status which animated the contemporary women’s movement and their demands for votes, legal equality and access to all occupations.

Writing three years later, the Fabian socialist Mabel Atkinson concurred with this analysis of the middle-class woman’s revolt, but suggested that economic dispossession had assumed a different form for women of the labouring classes. The working-class housewife’s grievance against the Industrial Revolution was not that it had given her too little to do but too much: eking out an inadequate male wage to feed a whole family, cleaning a dwelling which might be riddled with vermin and damp, nursing a baby while hoping that the next one didn’t come too soon. ‘The reforms she demands,’ Atkinson observed, ‘are not independence and the right to work, but rather protection against the unending burden of toil which has been laid upon her.’¹¹ Eleanor Rathbone, one of the leading British feminists of the 1920s and 1930s, shared this conviction that restitution for the disinherited working-class mother would not be achieved through greater access to waged work. Her campaign for State-funded payments to mothers, known as family allowances, rested on the belief that woman’s role in sustaining the family as an economic unit – ‘something which has its own claim, based on its own value to the nation, to its own share in the nation’s wealth’ – had been tragically forgotten.¹²

These early twentieth-century perspectives are worth recovering because they remind us that even feminists have never been united as to the desirability of wage-earning by mothers. By the 1970s, and under the influence of the Women’s Liberation Movement, paid work was more consistently identified as the key to autonomy and independence, yet questions about how to value women’s unpaid caring work and how ‘stay-at-home’ mothers ought to be supported remained very much live ones. These reflections also point to the ways in which women’s relationship with paid work could be calibrated differently depending on class, educational background and, as Britain became an increasingly multicultural society, race and ethnicity too. If, in the later twentieth century, it became possible for mothers to talk about paid work as a fulfilling aspect of their lives and an important component of personal identity, for many its primary meaning continued to be defined by economic need. Wage-earning formed an integral part of women’s strategies for ‘getting by’ throughout the entire period covered in this book. For mothers living on the edge of poverty, decision-making about paid work was always driven by calculations about how best to make ends meet. The presence or absence of other earners in the household; the number and ages of children and the options for their care; the availability of suitable jobs and the wages on offer; the workings of the local Poor Law and later of the welfare state – all these factors influenced women’s thinking about what kind of work to do, where and when to do it, and indeed whether to do it at all.¹³

And yet, even when considering the poorest mothers, material survival did not determine everything about the place which wage-earning occupied in their lives. Beyond basic subsistence, economic needs are socially and culturally defined, and to say ‘I work because I need the money’ had different resonances in 1900, 1960 and 2020. This book does not start from the premise that paid work is emancipatory for mothers in all places and at all times, but nor does it assume that only privileged, middle- and upper-class white women could experience paid work as an arena for independence, self-expression and pride in skill. Working mothers from all walks of life have found meaning in their jobs which transcended the struggle for food and shelter, crucial though their earnings may have been in securing those resources for their families. We must not conspire, to quote the historian Carolyn Steedman, in ‘the refusal of a complicated psychology to those living in conditions of material distress’.¹⁴ Instead of making assumptions, as contemporaries often did, about what wage-earning meant to mothers based on their class, education or ethnic identity, this book tries to reconstruct those meanings in all their human complexity and track how they have changed over time.

This means writing a cultural history of working motherhood, as well as a social and economic one. As the following chapters set out, the pattern of women’s employment was determined by multiple factors across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from developments in the economy and industrial relations, to reductions in family size, improvements in health and welfare and the impact of two world wars. These broad narratives of historical change move into sharper focus when viewed, as this book views them, through the lens of the working mother’s day-to-day life and in light of prevailing ideas about women’s relationships with family and work. Teasing out the interplay between structural forces, cultural attitudes and lived experience is never an easy task for the historian, but it is key to unlocking one of the major social revolutions of modern times. Double Lives takes women’s feelings and desires as its central theme, not because these alone prompted growing numbers of mothers to enter the workplace from the middle of the twentieth century, but because they became crucial to the reimagining of working motherhood as a social norm. This transformation had many sources, but standing at its heart was women’s changing conception of themselves and their growing determination to claim a life of their own.

*

How one might recover these feelings and desires at the beginning of the period covered in this book is no simple matter, given that most working mothers left no personal archives and appear only as names on the census form, the workhouse ledger or the register of births, marriages and deaths. I discovered Isabella Killick’s story because she, alongside a handful of other women from east London, appeared before a House of Lords Select Committee in 1888 to give evidence about her wages and working conditions as a tailoress. Killick’s brief testimony is a rare instance of a working-class mother speaking directly to us across time, but consider the setting: a poor, uneducated woman stands before an audience of aristocratic men in a lushly ornate committee room in Westminster, answering the questions they put before her. We hear her voice through the written record, but it is muffled by the glaring imbalances of power which determined who got to speak for themselves in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain.

Some working-class men narrated their lives by writing autobiographies, but few women put pen to paper in this way, lacking the necessary time or ego to do so.¹⁵ More typically, the lived experience of working motherhood is mediated for us by Victorian reformers diagnosing the wider moral, social and physical condition of the nation. These self-styled experts formed their knowledge about wage-earning women through processes of inspection, observation and inference, entering factories and working-class homes and reporting what they saw to middle-class audiences. This way of ‘seeing’ the woman worker was reinforced by the images produced by artists and photographers and by living displays of bodies, such as the real flesh-and-blood women featured at the famous Sweated Industries Exhibition of 1906, an event staged to expose the problem of precarious, low-paid employment.

As well as looking, these investigators listened to their working-class subjects, often sympathetically, but what exactly did they hear? Studying women in the clothing trades in 1908, the trade unionist and suffragist Clementina Black felt it necessary to let her informants ‘tell their story in their own way’ if she were to obtain ‘the industrial facts that one sets out to learn’. But this was evidently a frustrating experience. The personal testimony, Black wrote, ‘is often very interesting – as a glimpse into any human life can hardly fail to be – but listening to it is apt to take a long time’.¹⁶ Black, as we will see, was one of the more sensitive observers of working mothers’ lives, but in prioritising the collation of ‘facts’ over the narratives told by poor women she was typical of the late Victorian reformer mindset. These encounters between middle-class experts and working-class mothers helped to shape official understandings of women’s industrial labour, with important effects on public policy and in the workplace.

Those belonging to the modest but growing ranks of professional women were in a somewhat more fortunate position in the late nineteenth century. These educated women were able to articulate their demands for wider training and employment opportunities and to describe what paid work meant to them in letters, diaries, memoirs and autobiographies, which some published in later years.¹⁷ Yet only a fraction of this pioneer generation found it possible to combine the professional work they loved with motherhood, thwarted by regulations requiring resignation on marriage and wider codes of bourgeois respectability. Many middle- and upper-class mothers filled their time instead with voluntary work for charitable organisations or public service in local government.¹⁸ Some women pursued these non-remunerated activities with astonishing levels of commitment and expertise, but this type of unofficial working motherhood remained firmly bounded by the middle-class traditions of female voluntary action. With some notable exceptions, women of education and means had to choose between professional careers and motherhood in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.

From the middle of the twentieth century, it becomes easier for the historian to recover women’s voices across all social classes, reflecting broader democratising forces at work in Britain – from universal suffrage and the founding of the welfare state to expanding educational opportunities and mass consumerism. Observers of women’s employment from the 1940s and 1950s became interested in attitudes and orientations, especially those of working mothers, who were returning to the labour market in ever-increasing numbers following the completion of smaller, closely spaced families. A fundamentally new outlook seemed to be at large amongst British women, who now regarded paid employment as a lifelong pursuit, rather than one terminated by marriage or maternity. Policymakers and employers alike were keen to understand these changing aspirations as they wooed women into jobs in the expanding public services or booming consumer industries. Newspaper columnists and magazine editors were similarly intrigued, turning women’s shifting expectations regarding home and work into topical material for an increasingly pervasive print and broadcast media. The working mother became a cultural figure who could channel all manner of post-war anxieties and fantasies about marriage, the family and the character of ‘affluent’ Britain.

None of this meant that working mothers ceased to be an object about which generalisations were made by experts professing authoritative knowledge of their lives. But it did create greater space for mothers to articulate their own feelings and desires about work and family, a move reinforced in the 1970s by second-wave feminists, who placed women’s self-expression and self-determination at the heart of their radical sexual politics. As a result, mothers played a more active part in articulating the meanings which paid work held in their lives, rather than having others determine it for them, as had been the fate of most working mothers a century earlier.

*

Women’s quest to become authors of their own lives in the later twentieth century was not achieved without costs. One major reason for why working motherhood had been framed as a problem by the Victorians was the fear that wage-earning made it impossible for women to fulfil their higher duty as nurturers of the ‘race’. The tendency to reduce women to this reproductive function lingered on in social policy debates as late as the 1940s, when concerns about Britain’s falling birth rate reached fever pitch. By the 1980s and 1990s, by contrast, politicians rarely talked about parenting as a ‘service to the state’, seeing it instead as a choice to be exercised freely by individuals. This undoubtedly meant greater autonomy for women in making decisions about childbearing, but it reinforced the assumption that reconciling the demands of work and family was a private matter for mothers to resolve for themselves. With career structures still predicated on the male norm of continuous employment and with childcare options limited, the freedom to ‘choose’ the life of the working mother translated into high levels of stress for women. Failure to achieve the ‘Superwoman’ ideal of combining career success with a fulfilling family life was personalised. A lack of willpower, an inability to multitask, insufficient commitment to the job – these became the explanations for why mothers could not compete with men in the workplace, rather than society’s wider failure to support parents in meeting their economic and caring responsibilities. The disinherited family lived on.

Some contemporary commentators identify these dynamics as the product of ‘neoliberalism’, an ideology rooted in free markets and competitive individualism which became politically ascendant in Britain in the 1980s and 1990s.¹⁹ There can be no doubt that the deregulatory policies and welfare cuts instigated by Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative successors adversely affected millions of women, including many working mothers. Yet, as this book shows, the gender inequalities produced by unregulated labour markets were not unique to the late twentieth century. Furthermore, even at the high point of social democracy between the 1940s and 1970s, mothers who needed or wanted to work for pay were poorly served by the welfare state and marginalised by male-led trade unions. For most of the post-war period, Labour and Conservative governments alike invested in maternity services and nursery education with a view to stabilising the family rather than promoting women’s economic independence and choice through paid work. Despite sustained pressure from feminists in recent decades, the major political parties in Britain, alongside trade unions and employers, have been slow to devise policies which recognise society’s responsibility to families in all their diverse forms, and which do not entrench women’s dependence within them.

This raises a final question about the role of men. Double Lives is a history of working motherhood, but fathers played an important part in shaping women’s employment trajectories throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The size of a husband’s wage packet was often a key determinant in whether or not his wife would work, but men’s attitudes were influential too. Some were staunchly opposed in principle and some were indifferent, but others encouraged their wives to seek waged work for a variety of reasons: because they appreciated the extra income, because they thought it was good for a wife to have interests beyond the family, or, more rarely, because they recognised their partners’ career goals as equal in value to their own. A supportive stance towards certain forms of married women’s work became increasingly common amongst husbands from the 1950s, when men were generally spending more time at home and marriages became increasingly ‘companionate’.²⁰ Yet this had only a limited impact on men’s primary identity as providers or on their working patterns: full-time employment pursued continuously over the course of their life remained the norm for British fathers – and, despite some growth in part-time and flexible working amongst men since the 1990s, it remains so today.²¹ As the following chapters reveal, the meanings attached to working motherhood were transformed dramatically over the course of the past century and a half, but the cultural significance of fathers, who are always assumed to be in or looking for full-time paid work, remained much more stable.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY AND THE SCOPE OF THIS BOOK

Throughout this book, the terms ‘working mothers’ and ‘wage-earning mothers’ are used more or less interchangeably to refer to women who work for pay whilst having parental responsibility for the care of at least one dependent child. I use ‘paid work’ to refer to regular waged or salaried employment, as well as casual or intermittent forms of earning inside and outside the home, and to self-employment in all its varieties. The huge volume of unpaid work performed by women, including the embodied labour of mothering itself, is integral to the story, but this book does not purport to provide a general history of motherhood in its every aspect.

Most of the women whose lives are described in this book were the biological mothers of their children, although stepmothers and adoptive mothers occasionally make an appearance. I have cast my net as widely as possible, exploring working motherhood across social classes, ethnicities, regions and occupational cultures, and amongst unmarried mothers, separated and divorced mothers as well as those in more conventional married-couple households. However, not every experience features here. The lives of working mothers in same-sex relationships, mothers with disabilities or caring for children with disabilities and the more recent phenomenon of trans-parenting all deserve space that I am unable to offer within the scope of this book. Those fascinating and complex subjects will, I am confident, find their historian before too long.

*Mass Observation is a research project recording the history of everyday life in Britain, first established in 1937 and now based at the University of Sussex. It regularly collects written testimonies from a panel of over 500 volunteers spread around the UK, typically in the form of responses to ‘directives’ on a range of subjects. See www.massobs.org.uk.

PART ONE

Disinheritance, 1840–1914

1

Bread and Butter

Consider this account of a gruelling day in the life of a mother employed in the cotton mills of early Victorian England:

Half an hour to dress and suckle her infant and carry it out to nurse; one hour for household duties before leaving home; half an hour for actually travelling to the mill; twelve hours’ actual labour; one and a half hours for meals; half an hour for returning home at night; one and a half hours for household duties and preparing for bed, leaving six and a half hours for recreation, seeing and visiting friends and sleep; and in winter, when it is dark, half an hour extra time on the road to the mill and half an hour extra on the road home from the mill.¹

These words were spoken by William Ferrand, a Yorkshire MP and passionate advocate of factory reform, shortly before Parliament passed the Ten Hours Act in 1844 to limit women’s working time in the textile industry. Even after this landmark measure, the average week for a textile operative stood at sixty-five hours, with most wage-earning mothers leaving the house before 6 a.m. and not returning until early evening.² The work itself, standing all day long amidst noisy machinery and in sweltering heat, was monotonous yet required sustained mental effort to keep machines correctly fed and safely running. The working-class suffragist Ada Nield Chew described the typical day of a weaver of her acquaintance, Mrs Bolt, as one punctuated by the relentless discipline of supplying the four power-looms in her charge, replenishing the cops of cotton inside the shuttles every three minutes.³

These punishing realities of industrial life were, of course, shared by male operatives, yet for wives and mothers, housework added a second shift to be squeezed in during the early morning hours or between getting home and bedtime. With no regular ‘wash-day’ during the week, laundry often took place late at night whilst the rest of the family slumbered. Some women stored up major chores for Saturday afternoons when the factory was shut. From midday, smartly suited men and mill girls in their finery could be seen in town making a ‘real holiday’, but for Lancashire wives, these were precious hours in which to clean the house, bake bread, mend clothes and buy provisions for the week ahead. Many mothers spent a portion of their wages paying others to do their washing, sew their dresses and even warm up their tea and coffee ready for the morning break. One visitor to Lancashire in the 1860s noticed the existence of ‘a very large class of women [who] derive their maintenance entirely by providing for the wants of mill hands’.⁴ This included meals: every factory district had numerous chippies or ‘eating-shops’ as well as a public bake-house where hotpots, the traditional dish of meat, onions and layered potatoes, could be heated during the morning shift and collected at dinner time. Some factories, like Samuel Courtauld’s silk mill in Essex, allowed operatives the use of kitchen facilities, which gave mothers the opportunity to ‘take home something for their own and their children’s dinners’.⁵

Childcare was provided in the main by local networks of paid minders, often close relatives or neighbours. Mrs Bolt took her five-year-old and toddler each morning to a Mrs Earnshaw, who lived in ‘an exact replica’ of her own house on a nearby street. Sometimes a resident grandmother, sister or aunt might watch the children for payment or in return for bed and board.⁶ A less satisfactory but cheaper option was to leave infants with an older sibling kept home from school, perhaps asking a friend to pop by to ‘take a look’ at intervals during the day. Very young babies were amongst those minded in this way, for many mothers returned to the factory within a few months or even a few weeks of giving birth. A survey in Preston found that two-thirds of new mothers were back at their looms within three months, and only a tiny proportion were away for longer than six.⁷ Legislation passed in 1891 prevented factory owners from ‘knowingly’ employing women within four weeks of childbirth, but this law was widely evaded. Working into late pregnancy was also common. Amongst eighty-two cases studied by investigators in the Dundee jute industry, some forty-six worked to within a month of confinement, twenty-seven to within a week, and seven to within a few hours.⁸

If minders lived close to the factory gates, mothers might nurse their babies during the dinner hour, but this was not always possible. In 1844, the Tory peer Lord Ashley reported the case of ‘M.H.’, who left her newborn from five in the morning until eight at night: ‘during the day milk runs from her breasts,’ he luridly described, ‘until her clothes have been wet as a sop.’ Another married woman, ‘H.W.’, told the noble lord that her breasts gave her ‘the most shocking pain, and I have been dripping wet with milk’.⁹ From the 1850s, day nurseries were opened in factory areas offering care for babies from the age of one month, with breastfeeding encouraged during meal breaks. Yet many of these institutions closed when they failed to become self-supporting enterprises, whilst others, run on philanthropic lines by committees of middle-class ladies, were cold-shouldered by mothers who disliked accepting ‘charity’. The nursery opened at Courtauld’s in 1850 never filled its twenty places, partly because mothers were suspicious of its moralising motives and partly because they found local minders to be cheaper and more convenient.¹⁰

The picture was not dramatically different for mothers in factories outside the textiles districts, although few places had as sizeable a presence of occupied married women as the cotton towns of Lancashire.¹¹ The Staffordshire potteries probably came closest, where, according to an estimate from the early 1890s, married women accounted for just under a third of all female workers, whose jobs were carefully demarcated from men’s and paid on a separate scale.¹² Laundries, which were increasingly mechanised in the later nineteenth century, also became well-known employers of married women, who represented nearly 30 per cent of the female workforce in 1911.¹³ Wives and mothers were found in other industrial occupations, although generally in much lower proportions and always employed on tasks designated as ‘women’s work’. Of the Bristol factories investigated by the Royal Commission on Labour in 1892, wives and widows comprised 16 per cent of female employees at a boot and shoe firm, 13.4 per cent at a corset factory, but less than 1 per cent at a cocoa and chocolate works.¹⁴ Female labour underground was banned by the 1842 Mines and Collieries Act, but ‘pit-brow’ women were discovered in the collieries of South Wales: ‘roughly dressed, with their hair carefully protected from dust with a handkerchief’, these women spent their days in the open air oiling trains, unloading coal, picking out bits of ironstone and carrying messages.¹⁵

Households with wage-earning mothers came in different shapes and sizes. Many were headed by widows. In 1901, just under a quarter of all married women aged between forty-five and sixty-five were widowed, a reflection of men’s poorer life expectancy resulting from their greater susceptibility to acute illnesses and workplace accidents.¹⁶ Some widows drew upon small pensions or the earnings of adult children, or supported themselves by continuing with their husband’s small business, but many were left penniless and had to rely on the wages they earned, supplemented by the parish. In the later nineteenth century, Poor Law Guardians generally paid outdoor relief to widows if they had more than one dependent child, which allowed those families to stay out of the workhouse. Payments, however, were rarely made at a level adequate to live on and women were expected to add to this sum through waged work. Deserted and legally separated wives were similarly placed, unless aberrant husbands could be tracked down and forced to pay maintenance, which often proved impossible.¹⁷

Mothers with babies born out of wedlock were in a more difficult position, and were likely to be offered only the workhouse and refused places at day nurseries on moral grounds. Many unmarried mothers were cast out by parents and employers, although some factory owners adopted a more flexible policy. At Courtauld’s, for example, reinstatement was possible for girls of otherwise good character who demonstrated sufficient penitence for their sin.¹⁸ Families could be forgiving too. The diarist Arthur Munby recorded the story of Ellen Grounds, a young pit-brow worker whom he befriended in the 1870s. Her ‘sweetheart’, he learned, had died of smallpox – ‘Ah never had a chance te marry him, yo know!’ – leaving Ellen with a two-year-old son who was looked after by her mother while she worked at the pit. ‘Neither she nor her parents were ashamed of the matter,’ Munby mused, ‘though they are all decent folk. Her father was evidently fond and proud of the child.’¹⁹ It was a very different story for unmarried mothers who sold sex to survive. In Plymouth, women working as prostitutes often ended up in workhouse infirmaries for their confinement, where they were separated from ‘those of a better character’ and sometimes made to wear special clothing advertising their shame.²⁰

In households with husbands present and in full-time regular work, the assumption that wives would see to domestic duties regardless of whether they also toiled for pay outside the home was firmly entrenched. Such men regarded wage-earning as their primary contribution to the household for which leisure – frequently taken at the pub, club or football ground – was their rightful reward. This masculine code did not preclude fathers from spending evenings by the fireside or building warm ties with their children, but it rarely translated into any significant shouldering of housework or childcare.²¹ Relations seem to have been somewhat more egalitarian between dual-earning textile workers. One elderly ring-spinner from Preston remembered how her husband used to warm up the dinner, help get the children ready each morning and take charge of certain household tasks: ‘I never wound up a clock in all my married life,’ she recalled. ‘I never made a fire and I never chopped wood and I never made a bed. He did all that whenever he had his tea and washed his hands.’²²

The dynamics also differed in households where female breadwinners supported unemployed or disabled husbands. In 1893, the Royal Commission on Labour reported the case of an Acton shoemaker who, failing to find employment, stopped in to look after the children while his wife, a laundress, went out to work.²³ The Women’s Industrial Council, a body of female social investigators specialising in the study of women’s waged work, discovered a number of involuntarily domesticated husbands in its survey of married women’s employment carried out in 1909–10. In London, one investigator encountered a consumptive father who was able to work only in the summer months, when he took the family hop-picking. The rest of the year this ‘poor fellow was a devoted parent, who among other services cooked midday meals for all his children’ while his wife worked.²⁴ Then there was the former rag-and-bone man, similarly stricken by consumption, who cared for his younger offspring on Saturdays when his wife and eldest daughter went out to sell flowers.²⁵ These families, as the survey’s author Clementina Black noted, were in desperate circumstances, but the childcare provided by fathers had real value in freeing wives for wage-earning. ‘Even an unemployed husband,’ Black wrote, ‘will keep toddling children from being run over, tumbling downstairs or setting themselves on fire.’²⁶ This role reversal released some mothers from the burden of attending to domestic chores on top of their waged work. One woman whose injured husband was well enough to take charge of the home told a member of the Fabian Women’s Group: ‘It is such a nice rest for me to go out to work.’²⁷

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Two questions loomed large whenever middle-class Victorians discussed the subject of mothers employed outside their homes: why did they seek wages, and did their wage-earning cause harm? Nearly everyone who publicly debated such questions agreed with the broad principle that married women’s work was socially undesirable. Back in the 1840s, this consensus spanned a wide spectrum, from working-class Chartists demanding political democracy to Tory paternalists nostalgic for the old social hierarchies of pre-industrial times. One Chartist periodical argued that female factory labour ‘deprives the poor man of a virtuous wife’, whilst an orator from Stalybridge insisted that English men wanted their womenfolk running clean, well-ordered homes, and not ‘polluted by lickspittles’ in factories.²⁸ Middle-class advocates of shorter hours for female mill workers similarly dwelt upon the evils which they believed inevitably followed when mothers left their ‘proper sphere’ to enter factories and workshops. Richard Oastler, a leading agitator behind the Ten Hours Bill, declared his desire ‘to see woman in her right place, on her own hearthstone, making it ready and comfortable for her industrious husband, when he returns to his meals and to his bed at night’.²⁹ Speaking in favour of the bill in Parliament, Lord Ashley told his colleagues that the employment of mothers disturbed ‘the order of nature, and the rights of the labouring men’. He continued:

It affects – nay, more, it absolutely annihilates, all the arrangements and provisions of domestic economy – thrift and management are altogether impossible … everything runs to waste; the house and children are deserted; the wife can do nothing for her husband and family; she can neither cook, wash, repair clothes, or take charge of the infants … Dirt, discomfort, ignorance, recklessness, are the portion of such households; the wife has no time for learning in her youth, and none for practice in her riper age; the females are most unequal to the duties of the men in the factories; and all things go to rack and ruin, because the men can discharge at home no one of the especial duties that Providence has assigned to the females.³⁰

The claim that home life suffered when mothers engaged in wage-earning continued to dominate debates on the same subject half a century later. But by the 1880s and 1890s, the problem of working motherhood had become yoked to different and even higher stakes, as new questions were raised about the social, moral and physical condition of the British population.

This was the era of Charles Booth’s mammoth survey, Life and Labour of the People in London, which mapped income and social status street by street, and of Seebohm Rowntree’s famous study of conditions in York, which established the concept of the ‘poverty line’ as the earnings threshold below which basic subsistence was judged impossible. It was a moment when, as the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb described it, the comfortably-off middle classes were gripped by a

new consciousness of sin … a growing uneasiness, amounting to conviction, that the industrial organisation, which had yielded rent, interest and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain.³¹

In this climate of heightened concern for the poor, working-class mothers became targets for scrutiny and remedial action by a troubled bourgeois public. Fears about the link between the quality of population and British power and prosperity at home and abroad reconfigured mothering as a service to the State and a duty to the Empire.³² If the nation was to be saved from physical degeneration, class revolution and moral decline, it was to the ‘nurturers of the race’ that reformers now increasingly turned their attention.

The qualities and habits of Britain’s working-class mothers – earning and non-earning alike – were thus elucidated in the greatest possible detail by an expanding army of middle-class reformers colonising the national and municipal arena. Medical officers, health visitors, factory inspectors, sanitary inspectors, school attendance officers, lady rent-collectors, social workers from the formidable Charity Organisation Society, investigators of poverty following in the paths of Booth and Rowntree – all these, and more, weighed in on the question of who or what was to blame when families fell into destitution. Was it idleness and improvidence? Unscrupulous landlords and exploitative employers? Or was it the ordinary human risks which everyone ran when they started a family or became too old or sick to work? Between the 1880s and 1910s, the centre of gravity in these debates moved slowly and unevenly away from the moral chastisement of the poor and towards backing for State intervention to protect its citizens, a shift reflected in the introduction by the Liberal government of free school meals, old-age pensions, compulsory health insurance and unemployment benefits for workers in selected industries between 1906 and 1911.³³ Nonetheless, the question of where ultimate responsibility lay for the welfare of the working-class family would remain a fraught debate, and one in which the working mother and her earnings were directly implicated.

She was an object of concern, too, for those preoccupied with the closely linked problem of labour. The 1880s witnessed a sharp upswing in trade union membership and industrial action, often involving workers in unskilled or semi-skilled trades where low wages were endemic and employment insecure. Franchise reforms in 1867 and 1884 meant that millions of working men now had the vote, fuelling the growth of an independent Labour movement committed to achieving direct parliamentary representation for the working classes. This increasingly assertive spirit amongst workers prompted Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government to appoint a Royal Commission in May 1891 with a broad remit to inquire into workplace conditions and relations between employers and their employees.³⁴ Women’s industrial labour was identified as a key area of study, although the all-male Committee dealing with it was unsure as to how best to approach their subject and sought the views of Clementina Black and three working-class trade unionists, Amie Hicks, Elizabeth Mears and Clara James. These witnesses insisted that working women should be called to give their own evidence, for, as Mears put it, ‘no one can speak for us as well as we can speak for ourselves’.³⁵ Black warned that factory girls, if accosted by an unknown ‘lady’ asking questions, ‘would simply amuse themselves by telling tales, one more sensational and amusing than another, and in that way she would get a good deal of curious information’.³⁶

The Committee, however, disregarded this advice and turned instead to the expertise of their next witness, the celebrated author of Life and Labour, Charles Booth. Booth had sent his secretary, the economist Clara Collet, to east London for three months in 1886 to collect data on women’s wage-earning for his famous survey. Her method was to ‘become acquainted with the girls and invite them to her house’, Booth explained. ‘She found it very difficult to get information that was satisfactory; but I think in the end that she did succeed with them.’³⁷ Despite this rather mixed endorsement, the Committee decided to replicate Booth’s model and appointed Collet and three others, Eliza Orme, May Abraham and Margaret Irwin, as Lady Sub-Commissioners with a remit to report to the Committee on matters relating to women’s employment. All thoughts of engaging working-class women for the job were put aside, a decision which proved consequential when the Commission later recommended the permanent addition of ‘Lady Inspectors’ to the existing Factory Inspectorate, and Collet found employment as Labour Investigator to the Board of Trade.³⁸

This cadre of female experts in government formed the core of a new tradition of social investigation by middle-class women into working-class women’s work. Their expertise played a major part in framing public debates about working mothers, supplemented by the fact-finding enquiries of the Women’s Industrial Council and by the surveys, reports and studies carried out over the following decade by bodies like the Fabian Women’s Group, the Women’s Labour League, the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the National Federation of Women Workers. These organisations offered some opportunities for wage-earning women to speak for themselves, as Mears insisted that they should to the Royal Commission, but in nearly all cases the leadership and direction was supplied by educated ladies of independent means. These middle-class inspectors, investigators and trade unionists did not, by any means, draw identical conclusions from the evidence they collected about wage-earning mothers in ever more voluminous quantities. But, nevertheless, they peered at their subjects through a lens calibrated by the ideologies and shared assumptions of their class and their times.³⁹

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What exactly did they see when they looked through this lens at the mother who worked outside the home? Perhaps more important was what they did not see, which was the ideal, well-ordered household headed by a male breadwinner in secure employment. Working mothers were nearly always defined in terms of this lack, as suggested by the list of circumstances leading to wage-earning by mothers compiled by the Principal Lady Inspector of Factories, Adelaide Anderson, in 1904. The primary causes were a husband who was deceased, unemployed or earning an inadequate wage, with desertion by her husband following close behind.⁴⁰ Some experts added a further, morally charged, category: ‘idle and worthless husbands, who