Historical perspectives on women
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Introduction
Dates are in red.
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other pages are in dark
blue.
Headlines are in brown.
References and
citations are in turquoise.
Contextual
history is in purple.
Introduction
From our twenty first century perspective, the predominance of the
historical records on the achievements of the menfolk is stark. It is obvious
that the historical record is heavily weighted and focused on male activity and
barely notices the lives, ordeals, achievements, and family bonding provided by
our female ancestors. We know today, that the historical record provides us
with a biased view. This cannot be the reality. It is simply what was recorded.
We should not blame the patrilineal system of our lineage for
this. As a former anthropologist, I know that the passage of a name through the
male line is not the only solution, and many societies particularly in West
Africa have adopted matrilineal systems, and others have adopted multi-lineal
systems such as clan systems. However the system adopted throughout Europe is a
patrilineal one. What is important to a family historian is that there is
structure, and the patrilineal nature of ancestry provides a structure which
allows us to peer deep into our history. Whilst theoretically possible to
explore every diverging family line backwards through time, that would be
impracticable. The unique locative nature of the Farndale name provides a
beacon, which we can follow through time, to find our history. It doesn’t
matter whether we still bear the Farndale name today, or are descended from a
relative however distant, who links into the Farndale chain, this family
history allows us to see far back to our more distant ancestry. It is no more
the history of modern folk bearing the name Farndale than a history of anyone
who is descended from this line of ancestry. The Farndale lineage provides a
tool to look back in time and no more.
In order to keep this work finite, I’ve recorded a page for every
person who was born a Farndale. The record is equally about female as male folk
who were born with the name. I have not recorded those who married into the
Farndale family separately, but have included their stories where I can. I have
sometimes explored maternal ancestry in a few instances. The patrilineal
lineage thus provides a system to record a single family, both male and female,
and to keep the research within some structure and boundaries.
What is to blame for the evidential focus on the menfolk is
the historical record itself. However, the evidence can only derive from the
historical record. It would be completely wrong for a historian to make up
historical facts that were not recorded. So, I think, what we have to do is to
start by recording the existing historical evidence, to build the story of the
family. Inevitably it is evidence dominated by the male stories. Wherever there
is factual evidence of the lives of women, those are of course brought in to
play.
However, what we must then do, is to apply our own perspective of
what must have been. Of course even in historical times, the women folk were
far from invisible, but provided the bedrock of families through time. My
granny was at the heart of my own family. My father recalled in the years of
the Second World War, “My mother would come and sit with us as we went to
sleep at night and these moments became highlights of those days. I adored her,
she seemed to understand everything and she never failed to set my mid at rest
whatever my problems. I owe her a great deal indeed. She ensured that we grew
up with balance and understanding of other people.” I suspect these
sentiments reflect the reality of family life stretching far back in time. So
we might be forced to tell stories of the recorded exploits of the menfolk, but
we can add our own perspective to provide more balance.
As I am still at a research stage, and continue to build the
available evidence into some cohesion, I am conscious that a future task will
be to do what I can to add more balance, to reflect this reality. The current
focus will remain for some time on researching the available historical
material, so please bear with me, but in time, I hope to use wider historical
sources to build up a better perspective about the lives of women, where those
are not directly available from the direct records.
The Enlightenment
From the
sixteenth century to a degree women became more independently active.
Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu (1689 to 1762) became famous for her wit, her travels
and for introducing vaccination from Turkey.
The Blue
Stocking circle was an informal intellectual association led by women in
the 1750s.
There is an In Our Time podcast on
the Bluestockings, a
group of prominent women intellectuals in 18th-century England.
A new form of literary work emerged in the eighteenth century, the
novel, focused on ordinary people and the present. The probable father was
Daniel Defoe and Robinson Crusoe (1719), with direct prose and vigorous
narrative, and vice, danger and crime in Moll Flanders (1722). Novels
worked through the imagination of both author and reader and inspired by
getting inside peoples’ heads.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 284 to 285).
The Industrial Revolution
From the late
seventeenth century, there was a new appetite among populations beyond basic
needs, but with appetites for comfort, novelty and pleasure. People consumed
more – tobacco, sugar, coffee, fresh bread, alcohol and particularly tea.
Spending more required people to work longer hours. More married women took
jobs.
Women played an
important role in the changes and had unusual economic and social autonomy.
Women in England had more choice of partner and married later, often in their
twenties. The Poor Law may have reduced the need to have large families of
children as they were not solely dependent on children in old age. Single women
had more recognition as independent of their male relatives.
Women could
become heads of families and own businesses.
By the Napoleonic
Wars two thirds of married women earned wages in trades like retailing, lace
making, brewing and spinning.
It was often the
new earnings of young folk and married women which enabled the acquisition of
new luxuries.
(Robert
Tombs, The English and their History, 2023, 370 to 371).
Victorian attitudes
As men’s wages
rose, working class mothers increasingly stayed at home. The Trade Unions
Congress founded in 1868 in Manchester expressly sought to allow wives to find
their proper sphere at home. Women in turn took on a role of moral
superiority in the home. No doubt men
were demanding higher pay and using their breadwinner status to exclude women.
Mothers concentrated on domestic comfort, nutrition and health. They sometimes
controlled the family budget and handed out pocket money. By the 1870s, men
were drinking less. Death tolls fell after 1880. Children were better fed.
Women also became
organisers of an informal local mutual assistance regime across extended
families, giving a cup of sugar or packet of tea when it was needed.
Children per long
term marriage fell from 6 to 4 between the 1860s and 1900s. Marriage was often
delayed.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 471 to 477).
Lark Rise, Flora
Thomson, Chapter I, Poor People's Houses: A few of the younger, more recently married
women who had been in good service and had not yet given up the attempt to hold
themselves a little aloof would get their husbands to fill the big red store
crock with water at night. But this was said by others to be 'a sin and a
shame', for, after his hard day's work, a man wanted his rest, not to do ''ooman's work'. Later on in the decade it became the
fashion for the men to fetch water at night, and then, of course, it was quite
right that they should do so and a woman who 'dragged her guts out' fetching
more than an occasional load from the well was looked upon as a traitor to her
sex.
Lark Rise, Flora
Thomson, Chapter III, Men Afield: A few
women still did field work, not with the men, or even in the same field as a
rule, but at their own special tasks, weeding and hoeing, picking
up stones, and topping and tailing turnips and mangel;
or, in wet weather, mending sacks in a barn. Formerly, it was said, there had
been a large gang of field women, lawless, slatternly creatures, some of whom
had thought nothing of having four or five children out of wedlock. Their day
was over; but the reputation they had left behind them had given most
country-women a distaste for 'goin' afield'. In the
'eighties about half a dozen of the hamlet women did field work, most of them
being respectable middle-aged women who, having got their families off hand,
had spare time, a liking for an open-air life, and a longing for a few
shillings a week they could call their own
Many husbands boasted that they never asked
their wives what they did with the money. As long as there was food enough, clothes to cover everybody, and a roof over
their heads, they were satisfied, they said, and they seemed to make a
virtue of this and think what generous, trusting, fine-hearted fellows they
were. If a wife got in debt or complained, she was told: 'You must larn to cut your coat accordin'
to your cloth, my gal.' The coats not only needed expert cutting, but should
have been made of elastic.
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson,
Chapter IV, At the ‘Wagon and Horses’: To spend their
evenings there (the Wagon and Horses Inn) was, indeed, as
the men argued, a saving, for, with no man in the house, the fire at home could
be let die down and the rest of the family could go to bed when
the room got cold. So the men's spending money was fixed at a shilling a week,
sevenpence for the nightly half-pint and the balance for other expenses. An
ounce of tobacco was bought for them by their wives with the groceries. It was
exclusively a men's gathering. Their wives never accompanied them; though
sometimes a woman who had got her family off hand, and so had a few halfpence
to spend on herself, would knock at the back door with a bottle or jug and
perhaps linger a little, herself unseen, to listen to what was going on within.
Women’s suffrage
Between the 1790s women, particularly the educated and religiously
motivated, started to play a greater role in public life. Florence
Nightingale’s struggle against male incompetence in hospitals and women’s
involvement in protests against the Bulgarian horrors in 1876 including sexual
violence and enslavement, and criticism of British policy towards Boer women
and children are examples. Very large numbers of women were volunteer Torty and
Liberal; Party workers.
Women’s colleges, though not equal to men’s, were established in
Oxford and Cambridge in the 1870s and other universities, led by London
admitted women on more equal terms. Ther British Medical Association admitted
women in 1892.
There were growing professional opportunities in medicine,
teaching and social administration.
There remained strong taboos – even for croquet and especially
bicycling. There was controversy at the use of more practical ‘rational
dress’.
The Married
Women’s Property Act 1882 gave women the right to own and manage property
independently of their husbands.
As early as 1848, Disraeli felt that if women could be head of
state and landowners, she could certainly exercise the vote.
Smaller countries allowed women suffrage earlier – New Zealand in
1893, South Australia in 1895, and some US states such as Wyoming. It seemed a
bolder move for larger nations.
In the 1890s and majority of Conservative and Liberal MPs
supported some degree of women’s suffrage. However they had other priorities to
contend with.
There was opposition, Some working men feared that women would
close down their pubs.
There emerged a group of women who were not willing to wait. In 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel
Pankhurst established the Women’s Social and Political Union.
In 1906 they moved to London. The Daily Mail nicknamed them the
Suffragettes.
In January 1908 two women chained themselves to the railings of No
10 Downing Street.
They became inventors of the hunger strike. In 1909, William
Gladstone’s son, Herbert Gladstone, the Liberal Home Secretary, authorised the
force feeding of those on hunger strike and this drew widespread repugnance.
There was support for a cross party private member’s bill for
women suffrage, but Parliament was dissolved over the budget crisis. Two more
bills failed in 1911 and 1912.
There was a hostile response from the Suffragettes. The Orchid
House at Kew was smashed; Lloyd George’s house was bombed and in 1913 Emily
Davison was fatally injured when she stepped in front of the king’s hose at the
Derby.
It may be that the suffragettes’ campaign was counterproductive,
but it forced attention on suffrage, and may have hastened it.
The First World War suspended normal politics, but British women
achieved the vote when peace returned.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 528 to 531).
There is an In Our Time podcast on
Suffragism.
Girl’s Employment
Lark Rise, Flora
Thomson, Chapter X, Daughters of the Hamlet: After the girls left school at ten or eleven,
they were usually kept at home for a year to help with the younger children,
then places were found for them locally in the households of tradesmen,
schoolmasters, stud grooms, or farm bailiffs. Employment in a public house was
looked upon with horror by the hamlet mothers, and farm-house servants were a
class apart. 'Once a farm-house servant, always a farm-house servant' they used
to say, and they were more ambitious for their daughters.
Unmarried women
In the industrial era, there were rising premarital conceptions
(from 15% to 40% over the course of the eighteenth century). Births out of
wedlock (“illegitimacy”) rose from 1% to 5% of births. In all over half of
first born children were conceived out of wedlock.
However illegitimacy fell sharply from 1850s to its lowest ever
level in 1901.
(Robert Tombs, The English and
their History, 2023, 370 to 371, 473 to 474).
Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter VIII, the Box: The
hamlet women's attitude towards the unmarried mother was contradictory.
If one of them brought her baby on a visit to the hamlet they all went out of
their way to pet and fuss over them. 'The pretty dear!' they would cry. 'How
ever can anybody say such a one as him ought not to be born. Ain't he a beauty! Ain't he a
size! They always say, you know, that that sort of child is the finest. An'
don't you go mindin' what folks says about you, me dear. It's only the good girls, like you, that has 'em; the others is too artful!' But they did not want
their own daughters to have babies before they were married. 'I allus tells my gals,' one woman would say confidentially to
another, 'that if they goes getting theirselves
into trouble they'll have to go to th' work'us, for I won't have 'em
at home.' And the other would agree, saying, 'So I tells mine, an' I allus think that's why I've had no trouble with 'em.' To those who knew the girls, the pity was that their
own mothers should so misjudge their motives for keeping chaste; but there was
little room; for their finer feelings in the hamlet mother's life. All her
strength, invention and understanding were absorbed in caring for her
children's bodies; their mental and spiritual qualities were outside her range.
At the same time, if one of the girls had got into trouble, as they called it,
the mother would almost certainly have had her home and cared for her. There
was more than one home in the hamlet where the mother was bringing up a
grandchild with her own younger children, the grandchild calling the
grandmother 'Mother'. If, as sometimes happened, a girl had to be married in
haste, she was thought none the worse of on that
account. She had secured her man. All was well. ''Tis but Nature' was the
general verdict. But though they were lenient with such slips, especially when
not in their own families, anything in the way of what they called 'loose
living' was detested by them. Only once in the history of the hamlet had a case
of adultery been known to the general public, and, although that had occurred
ten or twelve years before, it was still talked of in the 'eighties. The guilty
couple had been treated to 'rough music'. Effigies of the pair had been made
and carried aloft on poles by torchlight to the house of the woman, to the
accompaniment of the banging of pots, pans, and coal-shovels, the screeching of
tin whistles and mouth-organs, and cat-calls, hoots, and jeers. The man, who
was a lodger at the woman's house, disappeared before daybreak the next
morning, and soon afterwards the woman and her husband followed him.