Women

Historical perspectives on women

Dates are in red.

Hyperlinks to 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.