Category Archives: Arts

Books History Women's history

“Come on, Nell, what shall we have Goodwife Bird and you fall out for a few babbling words?”

January 2, 2013 – 5:57 pm

A shorter version was first published on Blogcritics

Since Laura Gowing’s Domestic Dangers, there’s been something of a surge of books exploring women’s “ordinary” life in early modern England through court records, of which City Women: Money, Sex and the Social Order in early Modern London by Eleanor Hubbard is one of the latest.

That’s a demonstration of just how a rich a source these records are; the material can be approached from many different directions – whether to study the (alleged) deviance for which the court hearing took place, or to understand the assumptions about “proper” or “ordinary” behaviour that lay behind them. The latter approach is that taken by Hubbard on the London consistory (religious) court records between 1570 and 1640, with due notice of the fact that the ordinary life, of a maidservant, wife, widow or daughter of course would never appear before the courts.

The date limits are set by the records – when they become fairly regular, to when they fall apart before the Civil War. Hubbard also adds in other records and recent research to provide as complete as possible a picture of the life-cycle of a London woman – arriving around age 12-14 from the countryside, going into service, getting married around 24-26, then quite likely widowed and running a household after around 15 years, possibly for many years, or, more likely, remarrying.

The cases fall into two main groups – defamation charges relating to claims falling under ecclesiastical sway – mostly sexual, and those affirming and dissolving marriages (not divorce as we understand it, but “separation from bed and board”, the right to live apart). Usually men claimed adultery, women cruelty.

Hubbard tells us that the defamation cases mainly come from the poorer end of the “middling sort” – “they were not too dignified to wash their dirty laundry in public, but could afford to at least pay the fees to begin a case”. Those involved in marriage cases were richer individuals – the cases were expensive to prosecute and at stake were often portions or alimony of some size.

This is very much an academic monograph, but for its breed a very readable, jargon-light one – entirely of interest to the general reader who wants to get under the skin of early modern London. It would make a great source for anyone wanting to collect real life detail or minor characters for historical fiction.

So we learn that the wages for maidservants were usually around 30 shillings a year – but the quality of food and lodgings, and the wealth of the family, might matter more – with gifts and tips from visitors, the possibility of a little casual theft, and the chance of gifts or legacies. So around the middle there’s Elizabeth Chatfield, the wife of a tailor, who in 1613 reported that she paid her servant Anne Clare 40 shillings a year “beside her vails which are ordinarily worth 20 shillings per annum”. (p. 35)

Hubbard notes, interestingly, that maids would typically have moved quite a lot around London – so by the time they married they’d probably have a pretty good “map” of the city in their head. Partly, Hubbard says, this was because poaching a neighbour’s maid was bad form, partly because they were always on the trawl for marriage opportunities. She notes that in 1572 Elizabeth Doughty, 30, broke her contract with her existing family to move to the household of William Brown, a middle-aged tailor with neither wife nor children. After a few months she married him. (p. 36)
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Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

December 28, 2012 – 9:59 pm

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
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Books Feminism Women's history

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

December 24, 2012 – 10:38 pm

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

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Books History Politics

Co-operative history

December 8, 2012 – 12:17 am

Notes from Nicole Robertson’s The Co-operative Movement and Communities in Britain: 1914-1960

p. 52 “Co-operative society membership gave an entitlement to the dividend – a cash return from the members’ local society at the end of every quarter or half-year. For Beatrice Potter, one of the main motives ‘that impels the rank and file of members … is the ‘divi’…. her criticism of these ‘dividend hunters’ who failed to engage with the ideology of the movement has contributed to the establishment of a ‘dominant narrative within labour history of the limited appeal of consumer co-operation’.”

p. 136 A pamphlet for the Co-operative Women’s Guild “attempted to ‘bring home to every woman the power and danger of the Capitalist Combines’ and to inform its members how ‘sometimes the separate capitalist firms in an industry join together in one great firm, as in the Soap Trade. When a Combine is supreme, it constantly restricts production in order to keep up prices’.(Indeed a 1921 survey found Co-op soap was consistently cheaper than that of the Soap Manufacturers’ Association members, even though its production was lower.

p. 154 “The movement was founded in the 19th century on a commitment to sell pure and unadulterated food at fair prices, and this remained of central importance to its work in the arena of consumer protection during the 20th century. The co-operative movement was involved with … food safety and testing, the problems caused by profiteering, and ensuring an equitable supply of food during periods of work … During the Second World War … it provided advice to civilians on a range of consumer issues. In the 1950’s, the cooperative movement actively supported the BSI’s Kite-Mark scheme, and in 1960 it was responsible for sponsoring and publishing the first book that explained to consumers their legal rights.

p. 179 “Co-operators were continually reminded that an alliance with the Labour Party was necessary, as independent representation on local councils and in general elections would involve ‘tak[ing] on all comers, including the Labour candidates … That would be political folly.’ However, this in no way meant that relations were always amicable. Sidney Pollard argues that, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, the ‘natural groundswell which drove the Co-operative movement into the arms of the Labour Party seemed to be irresistible’. However, an exploration of relations between the two parties at a grassroots level during the period 1914-60 challenges any assumptions of this being a wholly ‘natural’ or ‘irresistible’ alliance.”

p. 216 “Peter Gurney in his study of the movement from 1870 to 1930, argued that ‘just as there were historical alternatives to mass production, so too were there alternatives to mass consumption’ and the co-operative movement was one of these…. He argues however that whatever revolutionary potential the cooperative movement did posses, was lost by 1930, and during the interwar period the fact that the movement could not complete with the shopping experience offered by stores like Marks and Spencer and Lewis’s (‘the stress on utility meant that cooperative stores did not usually stock the latest fashionable designs’) is evident.

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Books Science

Allomothers and human evolution

December 7, 2012 – 11:44 pm

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding begins with an unforgetable image – of a planeload of chimpanzees in the place of human passengers. “Any one of us would be luck to disembark with all ten fingers and toes still attached, with the baby still breathing and unmained. Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.” It’s a dramatic way illustrate the truly amazing sociability of the human race, the desire of strangers to at least get along and often empathise with each other. The aim of her book, she says, is to “explain the early origins of the mutual understanding, giving impules, mind reading, and other hypersocial tendencies that make this possible”. (p. 4)

At the core of her theory is a belief that at some time in human evolution, possibly as long as 2 million years ago, going back to Homo habilis or erectus, with what distinguished us from other similar species was that the young started to be too expensive for an individual mother to care for, so she had to rely on others – usually female relatives (“allomothers”), to provide extensive care and provisioning for the child, and the child had a better chance of survival if it was good at encouraging that care by its behaviour. This can also be used to explain human menopause.

I don’t by any means agree with all of it – there’s a few parts of rather crude socio-biology type analysis about modern societies – but an interesting read.

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Books London Politics

Throw away the keys and lose the fear – no gates, no CCTV please

November 7, 2012 – 10:04 am

I was really pleased when residents in my block of flats voted recently against becoming a gated community – or at least against locking the gates we already, unfortunately, have installed. I don’t want to live in something that feels like a prison, when you have to rattle keys to get to your front door, with the gate clanging shut behind you as you walk towards it. And I think that having people around in the communal garden, a pleasant, social environment, as we have now – I regularly say hello to at least 20 of my neighbours, and know some people who use it as a walkthrough – is much better security than a lockdown that screams “something to fear here!”.

I found academic backing for that instinct in Anna Minton’s Ground Control, in which she concludes (talking here about the awful One Hyde Park in London where apparently the penthouses have bulletproof glass, iris scanners, purified air and panic rooms) “no matter how much military hardware is installed, the aim of creating a maximum security environment to make people feel safer is doomed to failure because … security is as much an emotional as a physical state”. (p. 66) (Even the attempt by owners to secure themselves against stamp duty has apparently failed.)

There’s evidence, as Minton wrote recently in the Guardian, that CCTV makes people feel less secure. I’d very much like to get rid of the one in our garden – and not just because of its recent controversy. Minto: “One of the most important studies is by criminologist Jason Ditton, who carried out a study for the Scottish Office of CCTV in Glasgow, which found that recorded crime actually increased after CCTV had been installed …. the majority of people supported its introduction and believed that it would make them feel safer, but the findings after CCTV was put in showed that there was no improvement in feelings of safety.” (p. 169)

She reports on the case of a Dutch architect brought to Liverpool astonished by public housing estates surrounded by walls and CCTV. Hans Van der Heijiden, she reports, worked for six years with local people in Fazakerley, consulting on a proposed scheme, more continental in design and relying on the presence of people for security, but the “Secured by Design” certificate was unlikely to be granted on this basis, so the scheme fell through, the architect was sacked, and a new one built a “traditional”, prison-like structure. His words on consultation are telling: “The consultation process was a big book with procedures we had to follow with boxes to tick. An enormous amount of money was spent on it – venues were rented and bus services were provided.” But their support for his scheme was ignored.
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