It is, I suppose, the historian's purpose to peel away the comfortable layers obliterating many of the brutalities of the past centuries and expose the underlying archaeology to our modern gaze. Uncovering the buried past can, it would appear, be revealingly gruesome - and at the same time overwhelmingly surprising. Helena Wojtczak, herself a woman of modern day Hastings, in her book ' Women of Sussex' disinters the working lives of women and lays them out for our scrutiny with a detail which, if reported today, would most likely generate plangent headlines, splutterings on Breakfast TV about Health and Safety followed by terse questions barked across the portly benches of the House of Commons.

Crucially the author plunges into the doctrine of coverture whereby, in law, the wife becomes a non-person '....by marriage.....the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended.....' ( Judge William Blackstone 1765)

Coverture, the disempowerment of married women, lies like the invisible worm at the root of the lives of mid Victorian women, and the writer is both horrified and sympathetic as she explores its paralysing effects upon women's lives. Being invisible; being a non-person, enjoying no separate existence severely impacted upon the lives of working class women who either through poverty or desire toiled hard and long to acquire the necessary means to survive.

The working class married woman could own no property nor engage in any contract; his was the money she might bring to the marriage. Even if he had abandoned her he could return and claim any wages she had earned to support herself and her children! He could administer correction if he deemed it justified, and should she run away he could capture, imprison her, and enforce his conjugal rights. Miss Wojtczak probes and uncovers these old crusty scabs of Victorian England, pointing out that the horror which these attitudes evoke in us today lies very much in that they were enforced by law from the local bench. In a quick dip into the lives of middle class women she pertly points out that it was to overturn these injustices that the women's movement and the demand for the franchise finally rose up from the middle classes in violent defiance.

Yet, for there is always a 'yet,' the writer looks beyond the harsh struggle of Victorian lower class womankind; uncovering an amazing diversity of their trades and occupations, she also reveals an amazing spectrum of achievement and gain. For in spite of the crippling legal disadvantages, the long and tedious hours put in, many of these women did manage to carve out a singular and gainful life for themselves out of financial and legal adversity . Often a rich and rewarding life too, both in their own right and as wives (possibly later as widows) - alongside their husbands. Women did work, they worked well and with energy and vigour: looking for them in the backwaters of history Miss Wojtczak has found shining examples of women who worked in every trade and calling known to the working people of rural and urban Sussex.

Women were not only butcher, baker and candlestick maker but artist, baby linen dealer, baths manager, bookseller, bootbinder, carrier, chair bottomer and caner, china and glass dealer, clothier, coal merchant … and this only in Hastings and the start of a long alphabetical list of over 100 trades and occupations ending in Wine Merchant. Women brewers and licensees abounded in the inns and public houses of Victorian Sussex: there were women blacksmiths, plumbers, and farmers: you name the trade or calling, somewhere a woman knuckled down and got on with it.

The writer has scoured the local newspapers for intriguing stories of real lives; she has opened up the dusty pages of the censuses and the thick reams of the Trades Directories to discover and illuminate these fascinating stories of success and achievement amongst the working women of Victorian Sussex. Miss Wojtczak in her book has added a new lustre to the re-discovered history of women: the women who managed to make their own lives and their own livings, often with considerable skill and expertise, in spite of the cruel shackles of the law and the grinding teeth of coverture.

28th August 04