Living in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, a woman’s view



This blog post is based on the book “Breadwinner” by Emma Griffin (Yale University Press 2020).  Autobiographies are used as the tool for her research and her study of them is extensive.  This raises the question about the motivation of the person composing the autobiography.  Does the existence of the text indicate a level of confidence in writing or educational achievement on the part of the writer?  The author acknowledges this as a potential difficulty but her analysis of the autobiographies to which she refers is detailed and she has an enormous data set (over six hundred) in her study.
Over two hundred of the autobiographies used in the study were written by women.  Women found work outside the home much more desirable than work within it.  Work outside the home was more likely to bring some degree of financial autonomy, manifest in the ability to buy clothes and not to accept the clothing and styles of garments made by their mothers.  Becoming a teacher was an especially sought after profession as it paid well and required those involved it in being educated themselves.  Being “in service” (doing domestic work in the home of another person or family) was preferable to being at home (as it was paid) but came with drawbacks such as a harsh employer and the possibility on unwanted male attention.  At home there was no pay and no choice.
Many young people started work before they left school.  Work was more desirable than education because of the financial benefits to both the young man and to his family. Even if a boy was eligible to go to the Grammar School he frequently would choose not to go (in order to get financial gain in paid work) and his family would not want him to go because it would prevent him from earning money to support them.  For men “progress in the work place was rooted in the experience of the work itself”.
Men got some of their earnings for their own exclusive use (through hot dinners at work or directly as cash that would not be contributed to the life of the household).  Evidence suggests that the more men earned the more they were likely to keep for themselves.  For women marriage was far more than something spiritual or romantic.  It was a place where there could be economic stability.  Household life could be tough, few households had indoor supplies of water.  It was the cotton areas of northwest England in which households were most likely to have an indoor tap.  The tasks of women included chipping salt off blocks and banking the fire as well as the cooking, washing and care of children.
Few women knew anything about sex and pregnancy at the point of marriage, nor about contraception.  The only routes to limit family size were through abstinence and withdrawal, both of which needed the men to co-operate (not always guaranteed) yet larger families needed more money to survive.   The provision of money and its use were vital to family life.  This is true today, may be the uses of money have changed?  We will see in the next section on money and can compare nineteenth century lives with our own lives in the twenty first century.

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