Some thoughts on
THE METHODOLOGY OF WOMEN'S HISTORY
Some insights and anecdotes gleaned over 15 years of research.
By Helena Wojtczak
Over the last 15 years I have been researching, writing, publishing, creating websites and giving
talks, all in the area of women's history.
My research into women of the past encompasses three separate projects:
• the history of women working on the railways from the 1830s to the present day;
• the Edwardian suffragette movement, including local groups in Kent and Sussex;
• women's status, occupations and dealings with the law in mid Victorian England, using Sussex for all my primary source research.
Losing faith
When I was a child in working class south London in the 1960s there was amongst my friends and classmates a sure-fire way of winning any argument. It did not matter what the subject was; science, maths or history, there was one phrase which, when uttered by any of the protagonists, would slay the opposition and end the discussion instantly. And the person who said it first would bathe in the glory of a very smug victory.
That phrase was: 'I saw it in a book'.
Our blind trust in anything that was printed in a book was unshakeable. Without ever saying so, I think we must have all thought that there was some authority on high, a sort of Ministry of Truth, who thoroughly checked the veracity of every fact that was in a book, before it was allowed to go on public release.
It wasn't until I was in the first year of my degree that I was trained to question, and even to challenge, published works. And only by abandoning my blind faith in what I read in books could I research women's history.
This is because, when it comes to women, most conventional history books are unreliable and in some cases downright misleading. Women's lives are, on the whole, hidden from history, to use the phrase Sheila Rowbotham employed for the title of her 1973 book.
There are of course books about specific, named women - those that were outstanding in some way - a monarch, or a high-class courtesan, or someone like Florence Nightingale - but these exceptional women are, ipso facto, not representative of womanhood in general.
Conventional history only tells half the story. Professor Deirdre Beddoe argues that 'The history of men has been palmed off on us as universal history'. And one doesn't have to look far to find her words verified. I recently acquired a 1986 edition of a thick, large-format textbook published by the Reader's Digest, called The Last Two Million Years. Written by 34 expert contributors, who between them have dozens of MAs, PhDs and professorships at Oxford and Cambridge. Only one was female: she was an Egyptologist with only a B.A.
This book is very popular and has been reprinted many times. It is treated as the definitive history of mankind. The first words are: 'Man has lived on earth for more than 2 million years.' It has a chapter called 'Man and his world' and subheadings such as 'the achievements of man', and 'man the inventor'. Women appear only rarely in this 500-page book and only because photographs of actual artefacts appear. The word 'woman' isn't even in the index. It is awash with the most wonderful colour illustrations of prehistoric humans but each time an illustration was needed in 100% of cases the artist drew a male. A Martian using the book as research on the planet Earth would believe that 100% of prehistoric humans were male - after all, he'd seen it in a book!
In the last century many people criticised history books for focussing too much on the minority who were rich and powerful, and for ignoring the history of the common folk. This was rectified by an upsurge in social history and books were published which explored the labouring classes.
But this popular social history, while examining the unequal relationship between the upper and lower classes, ignores the other fundamental division in society: the huge gulf between the social and legal status of women and men. These books make repeated references to 'he' and 'him' and 'his', which enter our subconscious, so that without even realising it, we come away with our heads full of men's names and men's deeds and forget that they were less than half of the human race.
Local and regional history books are even richer sources of information on ordinary people. But they too have done their bit in obscuring women's past. When such books mention a farmer, a shopkeeper, a publican, or a philanthropist, for example, they habitually cite men and the reader is inevitably led to suppose that no women existed in those categories.
I've never seen any local, regional or social history book give even a brief analysis of women's absence from civic life or the professions. In fact, few of them ever mention that women were not admitted to these positions. Such omissions inevitably lead readers to assume that women's absence from these areas was voluntary, or was a reflection of women's lack of interest or lack of aptitude for such areas of life. The fact is, women were straight-jacketed at every turn by legal disabilities and man-made social structures, but this is never explained, and so the reader is left none the wiser.
Luckily there has been a huge upsurge in women's history, which is putting all this to rights. However, these specialist women's histories are not what you would call popular history. They often employ quite difficult academic terminology and are sometimes hard to find.
Interpreting primary sources
Women's absence from most local and national history books makes researchers more dependent upon primary sources to discover anything about our female predecessors. However, even these can be misleading.
For example, the 1792 Sussex Directory seems to indicate that the county was devoid of women. Not one female name appears; even the midwives were male! In fact, women were the majority of the population. The problem was that the only people listed were those under the headings: corporation, magistrates, overseers, clergy, physicians, and law, and women were barred from all of these positions and professions.
Positive discrimination is widely believed to be a modern idea; in fact men practised it for hundreds of years, reserving for themselves every position of power, authority or influence, with the single exception of monarch. Even then the system was devised so that a woman succeeded to the throne only in the absence of a male sibling.
Every decision about public policy, every law and every bylaw was made by men without consulting women and only men were permitted to interpret and administer the decisions of the men in power. It has taken over 130 years for these positions and professions to be opened to women and this has been done in a piecemeal fashion and sometimes only after a protracted and occasionally bitter struggle.
Women's lack of prominence in primary sources is also linked to their lack of money. Again, this doesn't mean that men were cleverer in business, or that rich families had only male children. On the contrary, keeping money away from women was a deliberate act. Men established certain rules and customs that severely hindered women from inheriting, owning or earning wealth, forcing most to be dependent upon and subservient to men for their very survival. Although, owing to loopholes in the system, a small proportion of women did inherit money or property, the odds were stacked heavily against them, because fathers routinely bequeathed to sons.
When researching women's history, it is useful to categorise life into three categories:
(1) domestic
(2) occupational
(3) leisure, criminal activity, religion and political activity.
(1) Women's domestic life is the hardest to investigate. The vast majority of people did not write down anything about their domestic lives, partly because it was too banal and ordinary to be worth writing about. There are in existence diaries, but you won't find many by working class women, for two reasons: firstly they were too busy working and secondly their education was so poor that until the late 19th century, most were illiterate. Quite a lot has been written lately about the history of housework and the rise of domestic technology. As for the 19th century, the census can tell us a lot about the composition of households and things like how many people lived in how many rooms. There are also sanitary reports and the like, which throw light on working class homes.
(2) Records of occupations are easier to find, although I did discover while researching Women of Victorian Sussex that very little has previously been written about women's paid work in the 19th century. Prior to the introduction of National Insurance in 1911, little documentary evidence existed in relation to employment and particularly to that of women. Most surviving records relate to areas of economic activity in which women rarely featured - for example income tax, apprenticeship indentures, pensions, and civic appointments.
Censuses
The most obvious sources of information are the censuses, which began in the early 19th century; but these are not as useful or as reliable as one might wish.
A census was taken only once every ten years, and anything that began and ended in between two censuses went unrecorded. It was quite usual for a woman to own a business for less than ten years. A spinster might open or inherit a shop and give it up upon marriage; a widow might run a business from the death of her husband until her eldest son took over.
Historians now accept that the mid-19th century censuses grossly underestimated women's employment, as Edward Higgs has explained in his book Making Sense of the Census.
The 1851 Census reported that 2.8 million women in England and Wales, and 22% of all married women over 20 were in paid work. You may be surprised to hear that so many married women were employed at that time. And yet these figures are gross miscalculations. There were far more working wives its just that they were not recorded.
For various reasons people lied or withheld information. Some people objected to officials prying into their private affairs. Some women (or their husbands) did not tell the census enumerators that they worked for wages. Some wives wanted to protect their husband's dignity by pretending that he earned enough to support them. A wife might not mention that she earned money as a childminder or a charwoman, or that she took in laundry, or did needlework, or manufactured small items. Typically, wives' paid work was unskilled, part-time, casual, seasonal or domestic. She, or whoever gave the family's employment particulars to the enumerator, may not have deemed such lowly labour worthy of the grand title 'occupation'. Some husbands did not even know their wives performed paid work, if they did a few hours while the men were working a 12 or 14 hour day, which was not unusual in Victorian times. Sometimes a woman's employment was not revealed to the enumerator because it was illegal (for example prostitution) or performed in unregulated (and therefore illegal) sweatshops.
But the biggest reason that the census is inaccurate on this subject is because in mid Victorian England, census enumerators were instructed that: 'The profession of wives … living with their husbands and assisting them … need not be set down'.
At this time, the typical business was a family one, and so the number of working wives omitted from the census must be considerable. To give just one local example, Harriet Fisher of Hastings, advertised, and was listed in trade directories, as a confectioner, and another source - her court evidence against a shopkeeper - confirms that she worked in the shop. But according to the census her husband was the confectioner and Harriet was officially recorded as 'unoccupied'.
We have to ask ourselves: how many other women suffered the same treatment? This inaccuracy impacts severely on the statistics of female employment in the mid-1800s.
If a married woman had a business, it is extremely difficult for us to find it. It belonged in law to her husband, even if she alone had provided the capital and ran it without his involvement. The business was rarely listed in her name and it is therefore fiendishly difficult to compile lists or statistics of women in trade. Her husband was entitled to its profits and was responsible for its debts.
A married woman's legal inability to make contracts in her own name or to sue or be sued means that transcripts of court cases in which both defendant and plaintiff are men might be concealing the fact that the plaintiff is really the wife. In these types of cases, if one was just looking at a list of defendants and the charges against them, one would never guess that this was in fact a woman's business. Yet another way in which women are hidden from history.
Owing to property laws and social customs, official documents - such as licensing records - also fail to help us discover the extent of wives' work in family businesses. Social custom dictated that only the husband's name be used for publicity, although a few people disregarded this, and one does occasionally come across a business advertised as being run by Mr and Mrs; this is very usual. In Brighton one avant-garde couple involved in secondhand clothes-dealing advertised themselves as 'Mrs and Mr' Baker. This couple appears to have been unique.
Unless a business owner was a bachelor or widower, or married to an invalid, his wife is almost certain to have worked in his business. Often, the only record of wives carrying out such work is hidden, like a needle in a haystack, within documents unrelated to female employment. These sources reveal that wives not only served the public but worked behind the scenes, stocktaking, ordering, and training the staff. Only from some unpublished reminiscences did I learn that a doctor's wife in Hastings was her husband's chauffeuse, driving him about in a horse and chaise in the 1830s. Similarly, during an embezzlement case in Brighton in 1868, it emerged that a wife worked as her husband's bookkeeper. I've read court cases in which the chief witness is the wife, who during the course of her working day in the shop saw the robbery. Yes when I checked the census she was listed as 'unoccupied'.
Licensed trades
A pub, small hotel, or lodging house, although listed in a man's name, was usually run jointly by a married couple and, in some cases, the wife had sole charge while her husband followed a different occupation. But a married woman could not be a licensee, regardless of the circumstances. Even if her husband took no part whatsoever in the business, it was always licensed in his name. In Sussex for example I found a man being prosecuted for failing to register his lodging house. I only found out it was his wife's business because he offered this as a defence and added that he knew nothing whatsoever about the business, as he followed his own career.
The custom of refusing licences to wives makes it impossible to establish the extent to which women ran licensed premises. The licensing records for pubs are particularly misleading. Records show for example that in 1844 the license of the Horse and Groom in Worthing was transferred from Elizabeth Hopkins to Henry Budd. Sounds pretty straightforward doesn't it? She left, he took over. If you were writing a history of that pub, that is probably what you'd write, isn't it? Except that's not what happened. Elizabeth Hopkins didn't leave at all. She carried on as landlady until her retirement. Mrs Hopkins was a widow, you see. When she remarried, her licence had by law to be transferred to her new husband, Henry Budd, because a married woman could not be a licensee.
Another case I found was that of Jane Cox, who supported herself, her husband and four children, by running the Dun Horse beer-shop. Although her husband was a bedridden invalid she could not get the licence transferred to her while he lived, and so in official records it is he who is listed as the licensee for 3 years. Only on his death did Jane get listed as licensee.
The same would have happened to a spinster licensee who perhaps took over from her father and subsequently married. For a year the license is held by a Miss Jones, and for the next 40 years by a Mr Smith. Smith may have followed his own career; he may not have pulled a single pint in all that time, but his name is on record for posterity to find.
There must have been thousands of women whose participation in the licensed trades is completely hidden from our view.
I cannot say whether wives working in family businesses were paid a wage or given a share of the takings for their personal use. In any case, it really doesn't matter, because everything a woman earned belonged to her husband, so for him to be recorded as paying her cash while still legally retaining ownership of that cash, would have been a little absurd. It seems likely that the husband gave his wife an allowance to run the household and an allowance for her personal use, regardless of whether or not she worked in the business.
The most powerful evidence of wives' involvement in family businesses was the universal practice of their taking over, seemingly automatically, after their husbands' death. Records show that this was the custom long before 1800. Most interestingly, by this method women became the proprietors of trades that were considered unsuitable for them: blacksmith, glazier, plumber, housepainter, builder, butcher, cabinet maker, copperplate printer and harnessmaker. No woman would have been accepted as an employee into any of these kinds of trades, either as a manager, a worker or an apprentice; and yet many women ran such businesses successfully and, in some cases, expanded them as they prospered. Prejudice may lead us to assume that women performed none of the work themselves but employed men, yet we have no way of knowing; after all, photographic evidence exists that a widow worked as a gravedigger in Sussex in the 1880s, having taken over the job from her late husband.
Conversely, an embezzlement case in 1841 revealed that a widow who inherited her husband's milk business took no part in the business. Although listed as proprietor, she engaged a man as a milk-carrier, while her son acted as manager and did the paperwork.
Directories
Street and trades directories seem to be a wonderfully fruitful resource. They began in London in the 1700s and were widespread by the mid-1800s. They list, house by house, the name of the inhabitant and any business that was run from that premises. David Foster in his PhD Thesis at the University of Exeter in 2002 discovered women following 774 different trades, either as proprietors or employers.
But, like the census, the directories must be treated with caution. They are riddled with inaccuracies, their information was at least a year out of date, they omitted more businesses than they included, and they were published at irregular intervals. This meant that a woman could open and close a business without ever appearing in a directory.
Another source of business information is newspapers, although it is rather like looking for a needle in a haystack when it comes to women. The classified section included advertisements from people publicising their businesses. The problem is, these were paid advertisements and many female-owned businesses were small neighbourhood grocers, corner shops and the like, who had no need to advertising. Because of women's inferior financial status, they were less likely than men to own a big businesses with a large advertising budget. Because of this most adverts for women-owned businesses were high-class milliners, seminaries and convalescent homes.
It's very difficult to find unpublished documents. In Hastings Reference Library I found some unpublished reminiscences of a journalist and an unpublished diary of a girl who worked in a milliner's shop in the 1860s. A former curator of Hastings Museum compiled a list of female licensees in the 18th and 19th centuries. He later wrote a history of Hastings but did not include the list. It was abandoned in a folder hidden deep in the archives.
(3) Leisure, politics, religion and criminality
It's hard to find records of individual women's leisure activities. You might find records of memberships of sports and other clubs. You will certainly find references to leisure pursuits in diaries. Local newspapers might tell you if women were admitted to associations, clubs and societies, because reports from meetings might mention female names as attendees or speakers.
Women's involvement in the fight for the vote - the suffrage movement - is very well documented nationally, though not locally. The local groups have proven to be fiendishly difficult to research. You have really only three sources: mentions of local groups within national records held at the Women's Library; minute books of your local societies, if you can find out who has them; and newspaper reports of meetings and other activities. Even then, you have to remember that the press instigated a ban on the reporting of militant suffragette activities around 1911. Since women won the vote, researching how they used it is no different from researching how men used theirs.
Criminality amongst women is again little different to researching men. Court reports were in the newspapers and you can get original court transcripts from the local records offices. Prostitution and infanticide were female-only crimes; but be aware that you are making a political statement if you choose to categorise prostitution as a criminal activity rather than an occupation. In my book Women of Victorian Sussex I repeatedly moved the section on prostitution between the occupations chapter to the crime chapter, unable to decide where to put it. In the end I split the material over both chapters.
Hostility to women's history research
I've encountered a fair bit of unexpected hostility while researching women's history. Throughout my researches I have been treated strangely. It has been assumed that I am making a political stance, that I am being antagonistic to men. So, not only is women's history different to that of men, but doing women's history is seen as being different to doing men's history. Men's history is the norm; no man ever had to explain why he chooses to research and write about a group of people who are male. At school we sit though endless lessons detailing men's history, we didn't think that was antagonistic to women.
So often have I been asked 'Why are you researching only women? that now I keep two neat answers up my sleeve.
• Because if men research men AND women research men, who is left to research women?
• If I were a book about cats, would you find it strange and ask me why I don't write about dogs?
I once met with obstruction from a librarian, and a female one at that. In the early days of my research I lived in Ramsgate. I visited the library to research the local suffragettes. On arrival I discovered that the local studies room was kept locked unless someone requested entry. When I did so, the woman librarian asked me what I was researching. Now, Ramsgate isn't London; they are rather narrow minded and parochial there, and so I felt a bit tentative about my unusual field of research. However, she was a woman and she was a librarian and so I told her. She had just taken the keys out of the drawer and as soon as I spoke she replaced them and closed the drawer with the words: 'We didn't have any suffragettes here'. I had considerable problems with assertiveness in those days and it took all my courage to say 'well I'd like to take a look, anyway.' She folded her arms - a bad sign - and told me I'd be wasting my time. I said I didn't mind, and eventually she gave a big sigh and let me into the local studies room. Once there I found that everything I wanted was locked away and I had to repeatedly go back and forth to this woman's counter and follow her back into the local studies room while she sighed and huffed. She was irritated because she felt sure that I was inconveniencing her for nothing. As it was, I found heaps of information on the local suffrage movement.
Women's historian Dale Spender maintains that 'a patriarchal society depends in large measure on the experience and values of males being perceived as the only valid frame of reference for society, and that it is therefore in patriarchal interest to prevent women from establishing their equally real, valid and different frame of reference, which is the outcome of different experience.' She contends that men's superior position in society enables them to be 'experts' and to make pronouncements on what makes sense in society, on what is to be valued, and what is considered real, and what is not. She further states that: 'Fundamental to patriarchy is the invisibility of women'. She also talks about women's 're-inventing the wheel', by which she means that different generations of women have been told that it is the first to do something, for example the first to complain about women's lot, or to enter the workplace. My own experience supports her contentions.
I became a railway guard when I was 19, and I was repeatedly told that I and my few female colleagues in former male jobs were the first women ever to work on the railways in such roles. Over the years I read various histories of my predecessors, the railwaymen, whose story began in the 1830s. In the first few books I borrowed from the library women were not mentioned. This supported what my colleagues and managers had told me. Then, one book mentioned in passing that women worked in the industry during the 1939-45 war. It got even more exciting when another book actually quoted one of these war-workers in her own words. I then worked my way through a stupefyingly dull, 700-page history of the NUR and found only three short references to women, all in connection with war work. One of them stated that over 100,000 women performed war work on the railways.
I decided that, as a hobby, I'd make it my business to find out everything I could about these war workers and any other women workers on the railways. Judging by the sparseness of material in the secondary sources, I guessed I might collect enough material for a small essay that I would send to the author of NUR history, a professor of history at a London university, partly as a slap in the face, and partly to add to his knowledge of railway workers. A published railway historian I contacted hoping for leads advised me that if there was a story to be told of railwaywomen, it would have been done by now, since railway history is very popular and every aspect of it has been covered time and again. He confirmed the lack of women on the railways by saying that I might gather enough material for 'a little booklet' and if I did he might even read it.
Fifteen years later the little booklet has just been published as a 384-page hardback called Railwaywomen - and I have so much extra material that the overspill is being turned into a second book on the same subject.
This story illustrates that - much more so than is the case when researching men - when embarking on research on women you must go back to the primary sources. If you rely on secondary sources then you are letting someone else filter information through their own set of preferences and prejudices, not to mention bias and bigotry.
It is simply not feasible to believe that the various railway historians who wrote books on railway workers did not come across references to railwaywomen in the course of their primary source research. Therefore, they must have made a conscious choice to omit women. More than that, they omitted to mention that they had omitted women. By not mentioning that there was another area of research out there just waiting to be done, they threw readers off the scent, letting them think that men's history is THE definitive history of railway workers.
Dale Spender's contention that men's superior position in society enables them to be 'experts' and to make pronouncements on what is to be valued, and what is considered real, and what is not reminds me of a conversation I had in the coffee bar of the National Archives some years ago. I got talking to a male railway history researcher who took a rather snooty and slightly jeering attitude to my research. He stated that I need not bother to waste my time - there hadn't been any women working on the railways in the past.
I told him with some pride that I'd discovered that 13,000 women were working for Britain's railways just before the war broke out in 1914. He retorted with the following objection: - they were only cleaners, office staff and caterers, not 'real' railway staff. Now, if he was told that say, 250,000 men worked on the railway, would he find out what proportion of those were cleaners, electricians, bootblacks, caterers, office clerks, printers, horse-keepers, bakers, police, ship's captains, blacksmiths, painters, chemists, French polishers, and gas fitters, and deduct them from the total, because they were not 'real'? Of course not. All of these grades of male workers were employed by the railway; they all made a vital contribution to the running of a railway, or they would not have been on the payroll.
I've never seen a railway history book deduct cleaners and clerks from the total number of male railway staff. And yet, if these same jobs are performed by women, in the eyes of the patriarchal man they aren't real railway workers.
Next I put before him the spectacular statistic that over 100,000 women worked on the railways during the Second World War, and some were porters, guards and signalwomen - and, let's face it, you can't get more close to railway operating than those jobs! He retorted that they didn't count either, because they were 'just' temporary war-workers. I pointed out that, like the war-workers, some railwaymen only held their jobs for 2, 4 or 6 years, and asked him if they weren't 'real' railway workers, either. Oh that's different, he retorted, the women were only temporary, their contracts of employment weren't exactly identical to men's, some of them bypassed the normal promotional stepladder and went straight into more senior posts, their training was truncated. No straw was too flimsy for him to clutch to prove that women were not real railwayworkers. He was a man straight out of Dale Spender's textbook: only men had the right to define what was real.
Everything about women's history is interconnected and very often things don't make sense unless they are put into context.
For example, marriage was very disadvantageous to early-Victorian women. It has been described as hardly better than slavery hidden under many layers of hypocrisy. Like a slave, a wife lost her identity, was stripped of her property, had no rights to her own children and could not leave without her master's permission. A wife surrendered her legal existence upon marriage. She also surrendered her body for his use and enjoyment, while she was not supposed to obtain any enjoyment. A wife could not refuse sexual relations, could not practice birth control nor obtain a termination. Men vowed 'with all my worldly goods I thee endow', but, ironically, the opposite was true. Upon marriage, a woman's personal property was automatically transferred to her spouse, who could dispose of it however he saw fit. The wages, savings and any windfall received by a working class woman belonged exclusively to her husband.
All this leads modern day students to wonder how on earth any man persuaded any woman to join him at the altar. A woman would have to be stupid to agree to such terms.
Only by looking at the wider picture can we see why most women wanted to get married. Firstly, they were ideologically indoctrinated by parents and teachers and most especially by the church to believe that marriage and motherhood was their God-given purpose in life. It was essential for a woman to be married in order to be seen as both mature and respectable. Spinsterhood constituted failure as a woman. The spinster was both a pitied creature, and an object of derision. She had to live off her parents and when they died, her brother would probably feel obliged to keep her, and she would have to act as a skivvy to him and his wife to pay for her bed and board. At least being married she was mistress of the house. Secondly, spinsterhood was made economically difficult. It was rare for a woman to inherit enough to support her though life. Society was set up so that women did not inherit except in the absence of a male heir. Women's education was poor, and all professions and lucrative trades were closed to them. The few trades and jobs open to women were overcrowded and wages were pitiful; in fact, even working 12, 14 and even 16 hours a day a woman struggled to pay the rent on even one small room and feed herself. Promotion and bettering oneself were out of the question. And if she became sick and could not earn, she would end up in the workhouse.
Thirdly, a spinster had to suppress all her desires to have any sex life and most of all, to have children. A single mother was a disgrace and a social outcast. Nobody would employ her and her family would frequently disown her. Again, the workhouse beckoned.
When you take all this into consideration, getting married doesn't seem so bad after all. I hope that by going into detail about one aspect of women's history, I have illustrated the importance of seeing the whole story and analysing how everything interconnects, and how you should not take one aspect out of context. Jeering that there was no female Shakespeare is another example of taking one aspect of women out of context.
No female Shakespeare?
It used to be fashionable for men to tease feminists with taunts such as: 'how come there is no female Shakespeare or Rembrandt?' Sometimes women feel so powerless when faced with this challenge. The correct answer is that there may well have been one, but if there had been, her talent may not have come to light.
Even among well-off families, girls' education was always inferior to that given to boys. Girls were taught domestic subjects with the overt intention that they would make pleasing and useful companions to men and graceful ornaments in society. In the 1830s, Frances Power Cobbe's parents sent her to a top boarding school in Brighton. The fee was £1,000 for two years, the same as it cost to send a boy to Oxford University for three years. Despite this, she found 'There was no solid instruction, no real mental training'.
The social expectations of women were also very different to those of men. For example, a woman was not supposed to flaunt her cleverness or knowledge while in the presence of men, because it damaged men's egos; this kind of behaviour had most especially to be hidden from any potential suitors, for it rendered women unmarriageable. In the vast majority of cases, if a woman should become highly skilled as a pianist, for example, she was expected to hide her light under a bushel, play down her skills, and quench any ideas she might have been harbouring that she might go to a music school and perform publicly, and worse, for money.
There were many women in the past who had great talent for painting, writing, architecture, sculpture and music, just as there are today. We have to remember that, just because they didn't become famous, doesn't meant they weren't any good. Women were so much under the control of others that they could easily be denied access to the tools and materials required - paper, pens, canvasses, oils, musical instruments, education, a place in which to work, exhibition space, a publisher, patronage, the old boys' network, and, above all, the time and the solitude to pursue their chosen subject.
Time and space and peace and quiet were in particularly short supply: women were supposed to make themselves available to amuse other people and keep them company. If unmarried, their parents and siblings, aunts, uncles, and sundry visitors, when married, their husbands, children and guests. There are all kinds of references in Victorian literature to women's not being able to get any time or space to themselves. Florence Nightingale complained about this in an essay of 1852, called Cassandra. She wrote:
Women are never supposed to have any occupation of sufficient importance not to be interrupted … and women … have accustomed themselves to consider intellectual occupation as a merely selfish amusement, which it is their 'duty' to give up for every trifler more selfish than themselves…
Women never have an half hour in all their lives … that they can call their own, without fear of offending or of hurting someone.
To add to women's difficulties, Dr. Edward Clarke, a respected professor at Harvard University, stated in his widely read tract of 1873 called Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for the Girls, the female system is not able to do two things well at once. When a woman studied, he explained, blood would be diverted to her brain, robbing essential organs of a precious life force. The organ that was in direct competition with the brain, was of course, the uterus. Clarke's book, which was so popular in the 1870s that it had to be reprinted 17 times, warned that higher education would cause a woman's uterus to atrophy and she would be rendered sterile.
Lastly, women in the past didn't achieve as much as men because men have controlled women's lives for as far back as we have records. Women have been pushed into the shadows by men, who took the limelight for themselves. Men have systematically stripped women, as a class, of property and money, even of their identities. Men also denied women education, and thus kept them in a state of ignorance and without power. They kept women out of the professions and the lucrative trades. They obliged women to marry by making all other options worse, and they made women vow to obey their husbands. They made violence in marriage acceptable, made marital rape legal, denied women any means of controlling their fertility and gave themselves total ownership of the resulting children.
Women have been forced into acting as servants to men, leaving men free to concentrate on higher-brow pursuits, free of the unending, draining burdens of housework and childcare. Millions of women have sacrificed their lives to and amuse, comfort, encourage and give domestic support to men, not just husbands but brothers and sons, and this left them no time or energy to spend on honing and nurturing whatever emerging skills they might have had as poets, artists, philosophers, architects or playwrights.
We have to take all this into account when researching women's history. We have to be sympathetic to their plight and realise just how strait-jacketed they were. We cannot judge them through 21st-century eyes. Nowadays, when in England a woman can be anything she wants if she applies herself, it is hard to imagine a time when she was totally subjugated to other people.
SOME MISCELLANEOUS TIPS
Beware of one sided history
I remember being told at school about Lord Shaftesbury and how he stopped women from working down the mines. He was painted as a great hero: wasn't it terrible that women worked in mines? Simultaneously we must have been allowed to think that women didn't need their wages to live upon, because we didn't realise that there was a negative side to the ban. It wasn't until I studied women's history many years later that I discovered that some of those women didn't want to leave the mines and that they were put out of work at a time before unemployment benefits, and that no provision was made to give them alternative means of earning money.
Names and titles
Women were - and still are - expected to abandon their surnames and take their husbands', but until recently women were also known as 'Mrs. John Smith', to signify that her identity had been completely subjugated to that of her husband. Newspapers would announce a child born to 'the wife of John Smith' rather than to 'Jane Smith'.
An interesting exception occurred in town directories, where workhouse and gaol matrons married to masters were nearly always given the dignity of a separate listing, as in: 'John Smith, Master; Jane Smith, Matron'.
Until the early 1800s, widowed women were described as 'relicts' of their late husbands and took the title 'Widow' followed by his surname. The change began in the late 18th century and by 1830 the practice had almost completely ceased and widows retained the married form: 'Mrs.' (pronounced Mistress). Generally, the style 'Mrs. John Smith' signified that her husband was alive, while 'Mrs. Jane Smith' meant she had been widowed.
Use the internet but be prepared for a long search!
The internet can be a most valuable source of information on women's history. For me, it yielded a list of workhouse matrons' duties, a description of a female gaol-keeper's work, an article on Victorian prostitution, and some details of two Sussex women who were hanged for murder. But it did take me many hours of wearisome searching to find them. There are some really fabulous resources out there in cyberspace. Look for example at the Victorian women writers' project - they have transcribed about 100 pieces of writing by women, from short articles to whole books. Naomi Symes owns an online bookshop which specialises in women's history and social history. Naomi puts her whole catalogue on her website, so there is a lot to browse there. Sometimes you have to employ a bit of lateral thinking. For example, there is a website called victorianlondon.org which offers superb primary source material on prostitution and other aspects of poor women's lives in the late 19th century. A website on the Titanic shows that many women worked on board, as stewardesses and so forth.
Use some lateral thinking
Cheshire County Council has uploaded to the internet a database of railway workers from 1867 to about 1914. You cannot view the actual list; it is only available by doing a search. Location and name were only available searches, and I sat there rather depressed for quite a few minutes, unable to see a way that this database could be of any use to me. Desperation took over : I began to do searches for every Victorian name I could think of 'Emily', 'Mary', 'Anne', 'Elizabeth' ,'Charlotte' etc. This of course resulted in finding some women, with their jobs and the date they joined. 'Emily', for example, unearthed a waiting room attendant at Shrewsbury in 1900 and a gatekeeper in Moreton-on-Lugg in 1913. Long into the night I tried every female name I could think of. I got quite a few hits - about 20 or so. But I still could not be sure that I had tracked down every single woman on that list. Then another brainwave came to me: I did a search for the word 'Miss' as a Christian name, but this resulted in only 3 hits. Then I tried 'Mrs', I got 16 pages of names. Turned out that women were rarely listed by Christian name but almost always as Mrs so-and-so.
Beware of name traps
Once I was reading magistrates' court reports on a broken microfiche reader that had lost its capacity to print. I was searching for examples of female criminality around 1850 and among the large number of shoplifters I did find one or two burglars. I found these rather exciting as we don't imagine mid-Victorian women doing such things do we? I searched for many hours, my eyes getting increasingly tired. I had trained myself to scan the column picking out only the words in italics, because the defendant's names were all in italic. Just as my eyes were on the point of giving up, finally I hit the jackpot: A woman called Florence Smith was a cat-burglar and her long catalogue of crimes took up a whole long, narrow column in tiny typeface. Now, I don't take shorthand so I sat there for about 2 hours peering at the screen and laboriously copying down every word of it, and there were hundreds of words. I was so excited about Florence that I decided to include the entire text of her trial in my forthcoming book to show the world that mid-Victorian women did some outrageous acts. It was 'Smith did this' and 'the accused' did that and 'the defendant' performed this and that audacious robbery. Fabulous stuff. Only when I came to write the final line did I discover that Florence was in fact a man. Later I discovered that in those days Florence was a unisex name.
Beware of misprints in transcribed censuses
If you see something that seems to be unreal, check your source, because it probably is.
Sometimes the census is transcribed and blunders and misprints are created: in the 1881 census, which has been compiled by the Mormon Church, Sarah Owen's record reads as follows:
Birth Year 1835. Birthplace Neath, Glamorgan, Wales.
Age 46. Occupation: Railway Engine Driver ( L & NW RY)
What has happened here is that the husband was the engine driver. The enumerator could not fit all of those words into the tiny box provided for the man's occupation, so the words split over onto the woman's box. In the original, one can see that those words are written only once; in the Mormon transcription, the person doing the copying put it down twice. In this case, I have emailed Swansea Archives and asked them to photocopy the original handwritten entry for me.
Remember - a transcribed census is a secondary source, not a primary one.
Some final points
♥ We need to do women's history because it has been ignored by other historians.
♥ We need to do women's history because it is different to the history of men. It must be studied
as a separate subject because all women, regardless of class, shared a unique legal and social
status as females, they were subject to special laws and social customs which governed every part
of their lives. All women suffered disadvantages with regard to law, marriage, money, business and
employment, regardless of social class.
♥ We need to do women's history because so much remains to be discovered.
♥ We need to women's history to explain why women are missing from history.
♥ We need to do women's history because we owe it to our foremothers to rectify the omissions
and half-truths.
Some salient points to remember:
♥ Just because women are missing from secondary sources does not mean that they were
not there.
♥ Just because women are missing from primary sources does not mean that they were not
there.
♥ In order to create a methodology of researching women's history, it is essential to
understand the subordination of women. Without knowing the ways in which they were oppressed, you might draw the wrong conclusions from their actions and their absences.
Sources
Women of Victorian Sussex. Helena Wojtczak, 2003.
Women of Ideas. Dale Spender.
The Railwaymen. Dr P. Bagwell, 1968.
The Last Two Million Years. Reader's Digest, 1986.
Cassandra. Florence Nightingale, 1852.
Directory of Sussex, 1792.
Making Sense of the Census. Edward Higgs.
Albion’s sisters: A study of trades directories and female economic participation in the mid-nineteenth century. David Foster, 2002. (Unpublished.)
Hidden From History. Sheila Rowbotham, 1973.
© HELENA WOJTCZAK 2004
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