Jennifer Newby - Womens Lives: Researching Womens Social History, 1800–1939

With thanks to: Sergio Goncalves Coelho, Wendy Parsons, Marielle Reuser and Julie and Graham Newby, for encouragement and support; and Simon Fowler and Penny Law for valuable editorial criticism.

Introduction

S ometimes it can seem as though there are two histories: an active military, political and creative male history, and another invisible domestic history: womens history. Of course, this is nonsense. Women have always taken active roles in history - sometimes in unlikely ways, but these have been less well documented. Fewer women were literate, their achievements were less likely to be recognised and, until recently, they did not have the same educational or career opportunities as men.

You might think that it is impossible to research these invisible women, that their lives went on out of sight and have already been consigned to the dust heap of history, yet this is not true. While women are often poorly represented in the archives, with a bit of creativity and luck, it is possible to find fruitful research sources. In some cases you will use the same sources that you would consult to research men, but you will be looking for different things, often for the stories behind the dates and names. By comparing marriage and birth certificates, you could learn that a woman was pregnant when she married or that she was making a financially advantageous match.

While researching this book, I spent a great deal of time at The National Archives unwrapping fragile documents and discovering pieces of obscure womens lives. I was particularly touched by the story of Amy Gregory, a young married woman in her early twenties, who somehow became destitute in the late nineteenth century. In January 1894, Amy gave birth to a daughter, Frances Maud, in the workhouse, but soon left the institution to try to find work. Amy appealed to local housewives for charity, tramping the streets daily, looking for a job. Alone, penniless and half-mad with hunger, she abandoned Frances in Richmond Park. The authorities soon tracked Amy down, and she was tried and sentenced to death. Her case received a great deal of sympathetic press coverage and the Home Secretary commuted her sentence to life imprisonment.

I traced Amy further through the archives, and discovered that she served just five years at Aylesbury Prison and was released in 1899. She was initially placed in service through a home of refuge in Oxford, but her husband took her home to Richmond instead. Amy wrote to the refuge: We are very happy and we have got a nice home here I am doing well, and happy with my husband and my loving children. In the 1901 census, Amy and James were still living together.

Like any piece of historical research, Amys story left many unanswered questions: why was she separated from her husband? why didnt she take Frances back to the workhouse, if she could not feed her? While there are plenty of places to research women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, you will not always be able to find the exact information that you are looking for, or may discover something entirely unexpected instead.

In the following chapters I have tried to show what kind of material you might find if you look at wider social history alongside individual lives. I have focused on more recent history, from the 1800s to the 1930s, which has a huge range of archives and resources for researchers. I chose to divide the chapters into types of occupation and social class, because these labels - perhaps more so than any others - were the ones which our female ancestors were conscious of, and found difficult to escape.

While women were excluded from many occupations during the nineteenth century, they constantly entered new ones, for example as doctors, shorthand typists, waitresses and shop assistants. In 1919, the Ministry of Reconstruction reported on the range of jobs that women did:

Large numbers of married women are known to work in seasonal trades, such as jam-making and fish-curing, as charwomen, as school and office cleaners In many districts married women are largely employed for part of the year in agricultural work, and they are to be found engaged in practically all forms of unskilled and casual work open to women, while they form a considerable proportion of the homeworkers.

I felt that it was important to focus on working-class women, as they constituted the majority of the population. A large proportion had to support themselves and their families, and I have included chapters on domestic service, agricultural labour and factory work. These by no means cover the whole range of work that women did, but they do chart conditions and womens experiences in that particular area at the time. Some of their stories are incredibly poignant: for instance, charity worker Frances Power Cobbes memoirs record the story of two women in late-nineteenth-century Bristol who worked together to make a living using just one pair of sheets and a bit of ingenuity: