Women
The sister Farndales of Tidkinhow
with Barker children - Willie B, Dorothy F, Mary F, Mary B, Kate F, Grace F,
Margaret B, John B - about 1910
The story of our female ancestors when
the historical records don’t help
A
Misrepresentation
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 often 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.
As a
historian it is important to found our narrative on the evidence which exists.
It is not open to us retrospectively to invent facts which do not exist. So the
approach to correct this imbalance in the record cannot be to portray a factual
record that simply does not exist.
However by
reflecting on the existing evidence, and applying a fresh analysis, we can
recover the story of the Farndale women, even though the underlying evidence
has not recorded everything they did. We don’t need to conjure a non existent factual narrative, but we can apply our own
experience and understandings to recover the place that we knew women played.
Patrilineal
heritage
We should
not blame the patrilineal system which records our family history for this
imbalance. 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. It would have worked the same if the
name had been passed down maternally, but it wasn’t, and the patrilineal
passage of the name is what allows our research to work.
In order to
keep this work finite, there is 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, but this cannot be
comprehensive, or we would soon find ourselves following the story of all
mankind. 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.
The
patrilineal system of lineage is not the cause of the misrepresentation of
women.
The
weighted record
What is
to blame for the evidential focus on the menfolk is the historical record
itself. The evidence used for historical research can only derive from the
historical record. It would be completely wrong for a historian to make up
historical facts that were not recorded. 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 facts are of course brought in to
our narrative. What we must then do, is to apply our own perspective of what
must have been. Of course even in deeper historical times, the women folk were
not invisible, but provided the bedrock of families through time.
Martin
Farndale recalled his experiences during the late 1930s, in the period
immediately before the Second World War. He remembered that about this time
there was much going on that I didn’t understand. My mother would come and sit
with me as I 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 mind 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. My father, who I worshipped, represented all that was strong, good and
upright in life. He was direct, outspoken and reliable. I always felt nothing
could happen to us if he was there. We were unbelievably lucky with our
parents. Almost without knowing it they gave us all an ideal upbringing,
treating us all the same, insisting on standards, respect for them, and for the
law, yet with love and understanding which gave us great confidence.
The reality
of family life was far more balanced than the historical records tend to
portray.
Peggy
Farndale, a bedrock for her family
Women in
medieval society
There is
little doubt that women have played their stabilising role in families through
the epoch of time. We sometimes come across their names. We know that Nicholaus de
Farndale (c1332 to c1400) was married to Alicia, uxor ejus, his wife and they are both recorded as paying the
controversial poll tax, which led to the Peasants’ Revolt, in 1379. This was a
period of greater bargaining power for a new middle class, and perhaps that
came with a great recognition of some involvement of women in the new
opportunities, even if all that we see is the equal opportunity to pay tax. At
about the same time William
Farndale (c1332 to 1397) of Sheriff Hutton made a
bequest in his will and the residue of his estate was shared by his wife
Juliana and she was appointed as one of his executors.
Indeed if we
consider the lives of the royal and aristocratic families who no doubt led the
way in cultural norms, it is obvious that medieval women of this period were
often the real power behind their male puppets. The story of the period of the Wars of the
Roses has revealed that, in order to understand the politics behind the
dynastic struggles of that age, it is far more instructive to consider such
influencers as Joan
the Fair Maid of Kent, the power behind the reign of the hopeless
Plantagenet Richard II, at least until she died in 1385; Margaret
of Anjou, the power behind the reign of the equally hopeless Lancastrian
Henry VI, until outmanoeuvred by the Yorkist power grab in 1461, though with a
short counter offensive in 1470; Cecily
Neville, the mother and mentor of the Yorkist Kings Edward IV and Richard
III; Elizabeth
Woodville, the wife of Edward IV,
who attempted an unsuccessful power grab to protect her son Edward V against
the designs of Richard III, but whose daughter, Elizabeth of York married the
Tudor King Henry VII; and Lady
Margaret Beaufort, the mother of the Tudor King Henry VII, who she helped
to steer to his monarchy.
Enlightenment
The perception of women in society
ebbed and flowed over time. Women in the seventeenth century may have had a
degree of independence. 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.
A new form of literary work emerged in
the eighteenth century, the novel, which focused on the lives of ordinary
people. 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 new worlds into which people could journey in their minds.
Victorian
attitudes
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 of such commodities as tobacco, sugar, coffee, fresh bread,
alcohol and particularly tea. Spending more required people to work longer
hours. More married women took jobs.
This created
a world in which there were opportunities for greater economic and social
autonomy. Women in industrial Britain sometimes 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
were sometimes recognised 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 such as 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. Yet there was also opportunity for greater exploitation.
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, but that was not
always so.
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.' (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter
III, Men Afield)
Women often
became organisers of an informal local mutual assistance regime across extended
families, giving a cup of sugar or packet of tea to a neighbour when it was
needed.
Death tolls
fell after 1880. Children were better fed. Children born in long term marriages
fell from 6 to 4 between the 1860s and 1900s. Marriage was often delayed.
Attitudes
changed and the reality of life no doubt varied between families.
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 I, Poor People's Houses)
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.
(Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter III, Men Afield)
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. Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter IV,
At the ‘Wagon and Horses’.
Of course Victorian
women could be subject to abuse. In December 1883 at a hearing in the divorce
of a well known actor, brought by the husband,
better known as “Mr
Arthur Dacre”, the actor, for a divorce by reason of his wife's adultery
with the three co respondents. Answers had been filed denying the charge, and
there were counter allegations. Ellen Crouch, examined by Dr Tristram QC, said
that for some time she was in the service of Mrs James. Have you at any time
committed adultery with Mr O'Neill, Mr Clifford, or Mr. Brooks? Certainly not.
Cross examined by Mr. Clark: In 1877 my husband was in trouble about his
practise. His mother and brother died within a short time of one another. A
patient had also complained of his partner. He took opium and chloral. In 1878
I made complaints of his violence and showed the bruises to Martha Farndale.
I think I wrote to Miss Paley, and I did so to my mother. On November 18th I
called the attention of my husband's brother to the state I was in. When he
threw me across the railway carriage I had used the word “disgrace” twice in
reference to a marriage in his family. I complained of Mrs Swain to my husband.
How soon did you find the fatal influence that you say was hostile to you? Very
shortly. Did you before on the night of October 6, 1877 believe that adultery
had been committed? I did.
Girl’s
Employment
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. (Lark
Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter X, Daughters of the Hamlet).
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, which were
referred to as illegitimacy, rose from 1% to 5% of births. In all over
half of first born children were conceived out of wedlock. The trend then fell
sharply from 1850s to its lowest ever level in 1901.
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. (Lark Rise, Flora Thomson, Chapter
VIII, the Box)
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.
By 1914
Florence Farndale, Rev
William Edward Farndale’s wife, was president of the North Eastern
Federation of Suffragettes. On 23 March
1914 a very successful social evening was held at the Suffrage Rooms,
Birtley. Mrs Farndale presided. Miss Beaver and Miss Sheard gave two very
interesting speeches on the Suffrage Movement. Miss H Auton and Miss Elliott
provided a splendid musical programme, and the Rev F D Brooks also assisted by
giving two humorous recitations, which were much enjoyed. There was a very
large attendance. A plentiful supply of refreshments, which were provided by
the committee, were served during the evening. 20 new members were enrolled. On
April 16th, a members meeting was held at the suffrage rooms Birtley at which
Mrs C M Gordon spoke.
In April
1914, in asking why women need the vote, a meeting was held in the
Cooperative Hall, Birtley, on Friday night, under the auspices of the local non
militant Women's Suffrage Society. The Rev W E Farndale presided over a good
attendance. Miss Geraldine Cook, London, gave an address. She pointed out the
evils of sweating, which was so prevalent amongst women. This was largely due
to their low status, which would be raised if they were given the vote. The
burden of much present day social reform fell upon the shoulders of the mothers
of the nation, because politicians were content to tinker with effects rather
than causes. Where women had been granted the parliamentary franchise, the
result had been an improvement in the conditions of the workers, better
protection for the young, the emptying of prisons and workhouses, the raising
of the age of consent, and the lessening of the drink evil.
In March
1915 the sister hood at the Ouston Primitive Methodist Church was visited on
Wednesday week, by Mrs Farndale, the wife of the Primitive Methodist minister
of Birtley. She gave an interesting address on “The Ministry of Women”. A solo
was rendered in splendid style by Miss Fenwick of Ouston. After a very
satisfactory report had been given by Mrs Cook of the good work that has been
done by the Select Committee, a cup of tea was served round which brought a
very pleasant hour to a close.
In March
1916 the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies received a cable announcing
that our maternity hospital in Petrograd was opened on Monday by the grand
Duchess Cyril, Sir George and Lady Georgina Buchanan, and Madame Sazonoff being present at the ceremony. The donors
included Mrs Florence Farndale, 2s 6d. The total collected was £3,108 6s
10d.
The First World War suspended normal
politics, but British women achieved the vote when peace returned.
In 1918 the
Representation of the People Act was passed which allowed women over the age of
30 who met a property qualification to vote. Although 8.5 million women met
this criteria, it was only about two-thirds of the total population of women in
the UK. The same Act abolished property and other restrictions for men, and
extended the vote to virtually all men over the age of 21. Additionally, men in
the armed forces could vote from the age of 19. The electorate increased from
eight to 21 million, but there was still huge inequality between women and men.
At the
Ladies Missionary Auxiliary in January 1929 “Forward be our watchword” was
the clarion call with which Mrs Farndale concluded her address at the meeting
held on Wednesday afternoon in the Primitive Methodist Church. The address
throughout was very interesting and greatly enjoyed. Mrs Abbott presided over
the meeting.