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Girls and their families in an era of economic change

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2020

Jane Humphries
Jane Humphries*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jane.humphries@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

The paper uses autobiographical accounts by 227 working women alongside a larger sample of men's life stories to compare girls’ and boys’ experiences of first jobs, schooling and family life in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It asks whether girls were disadvantaged in seizing the opportunities and fending off the threats to wellbeing occasioned by economic change. Girls were more likely than boys to experience sexual harassment and this constrained the ways in which they could earn a living and live their lives. Fathers as breadwinners merited respect and often affection, but it was mothers with whom girls identified.

French abstract

French abstract

L'expérience des filles à l'ère du changement économique

Les filles et leur famille à l’ère du changement économique

L'article s'appuie sur 227 autobiographies de femmes actives et un échantillon plus large d'histoires de vie masculine, afin de comparer les expériences vécues par les filles d'un côté et les garçons de l'autre en ce qui concerne leurs premiers emplois, leur scolarité et leur vie de famille, à la fin du XVIIIe et au début du XIXe siècle. La question est de savoir si les filles ont été désavantagées face aux opportunités qui se présentèrent et si elles purent échapper aux menaces pesant sur leur bien-être avec le changement économique. Les filles étaient plus susceptibles que les garçons d’être victimes de harcèlement sexuel, ce qui limitait les moyens de subvenir à leurs propres besoins et de vivre leur vie. Le père, en tant que soutien de famille, méritait respect et souvent affection, mais c’était à leur mère que les filles s'identifiaient.

German abstract

German abstract

Erfahrungen von Mädchen in einem Zeitalter des ökonomischen Wandels

Dieser Beitrag stützt sich auf autobiographische Berichte von 227 arbeitenden Frauen und einer größeren Stichprobe von Lebensgeschichten von Männern, um Mädchen und Jungen im späten 18. und 19. Jahrhundert im Hinblick auf ihre Erfahrungen auf ihrer ersten Arbeitsstelle, in der Schule und im Familienleben miteinander zu vergleichen. Er geht der Frage nach, ob Mädchen benachteiligt waren, wenn sie die Chancen ergriffen oder die Gefahren für ihr Wohlergehen abwendeten, die durch den ökonomischen Wandel versursacht wurden. Mädchen erfuhren häufiger als Jungen sexuelle Belästigung, wodurch sie in ihren Verdienstmöglichkeiten und ihrer Lebensweise eingeschränkt wurden. Väter ernteten als Brotverdiener Respekt und oft auch Zuneigung, aber es waren die Mütter, mit denen sich die Mädchen identifizierten.

Type
Research Article
Information
Continuity and Change , Volume 35 , Issue 3 , December 2020 , pp. 311 - 343
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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References

Notes

1 Andrews, E., A woman's work is never done (Cymric Democrat Publishing Society – South Glamorgan, 1957), 15Google Scholar; Ashford, M.-A., Life of a licensed victualler's daughter, written by herself (Saunders and Otley, 1844), 20Google Scholar.

2 The formative contribution remains Pinchbeck, I., Women workers and the industrial revolution 1750–1850 (London, Virago, 1981)Google Scholar. See also Honeyman, K., Women, gender and industrialisation in England, 1700–1870 (St Martin's – New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Burnette, J., Gender work and wages in industrial revolution Britain (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharpe, P., Adapting to capitalism: working women in the English economy, 1700–1850 (Macmillan – London, 1996)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Horrell, S. and Humphries, J., ‘Women's labour force participation and the transition to the male-breadwinner family’, Economic History Review 48 (1995), 89–117CrossRefGoogle Scholar. More focussed studies include Wall, R., ‘Some implications of the earnings, income and expenditure patterns of married women in populations in the past’, in Henderson, J. and Wall, R. eds., Poor women and children in the European past (Routledge – London, 1994)Google Scholar; Froide, A. M., ‘Marital status as a category of difference: single women and widows in early modern England’, in Bennett, J. M. and Froide, A. M. eds., Singlewomen in the European past 1250–1800 (University of Pennsylvania Press – Philadelphia, 1999)Google Scholar; Moring, B. and Wall, R., Widows in European economy and society 1600–1920 (Boydell – Woodbridge and Suffolk, 2017)Google Scholar; and, Goose, N. ed., Women's work in industrial England: regional and local perspectives (Local Population Studies – Hatfield, 2007)Google Scholar.

3 For a discussion of the gender bias in general studies of youth, see the introduction M. J. Maynes, B. Soland and C. Benninghaus eds., Secret gardens, satanic mills. Placing girls in European history (Indiana University Press – Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2005). Honourable exceptions to this bias include Maynes, Soland and Benninghaus, Secret gardens as above; and, M. Gomersall, Working-class girls in nineteenth-century England: life, work and schooling (St Martin's Press – New York, 1997). Recent studies of child labour in the British industrial revolution include J. Humphries, Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2010); S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘Child work and wages’, Explorations in Economic History 73 (2019), 101272.

4 D. Simonton, ‘Bringing up girls: work in preindustrial Europe’ in Maynes, Soland and Benninghaus, Secret gardens, 23–38; D. Simonton, A history of European women's work, 1700 to the present (Routledge – London, 1998); D. Simonton, ‘Women and education’, in E. Chalus and H. Barker eds., Women's history, 1700–1850 (Routledge – London, 2005), 33–56; P. Kirby, Child labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (Palgrave – Basingstoke and Hampshire, 2003); Horrell and Humphries, ‘Child work’.

5 S. Horrell and D. Oxley, ‘Bargaining for basics? Inferring decision making in nineteenth-century British households from expenditure, diet, stature and death’, European Economic History Review 17 (2013), 147–70.

6 Maynes, Soland and Benninghaus, Secret gardens, 5.

7 D. Simonton, ‘Bringing up girls: Work in preindustrial Europe’ in Maynes, Soland and Benninghaus, Secret gardens, 23–38.

8 Humphries, Childhood and child labour.

9 G. Frost, Review of J. Humphries, Childhood, Journal of British Studies XX (2011), 517. More generally, Simonton argues that ‘the economic nexus of labouring life meant that the image of the child-oriented mother remained alien among the lower classes' in ‘Bringing up girls’: 26.

10 J.-M. Strange, Fatherhood and the British working class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2015); E. Griffin, ‘The emotions of motherhood: love, culture, and poverty in Victorian Britain’, American Historical Review 123, 1 (2018), 60–85. Ginger Frost also provides legal case materials that demonstrate the particular tensions and stress in the relationship when children were illegitimate, see G. S. Frost, Illegitimacy in English law and society, 1860–1930 (Manchester University Press – Manchester, 2016).

11 Such constraints are best understood within Amartya Sen's ‘capabilities approach’ which focuses on what people are able to do and to be which he sees as providing barriers to gender equality, see A. Sen, Inequality re-examined (Clarendon – Oxford, 1992).

12 M. J. Maynes, Taking the hard road: life course in French and German workers autobiographies in the era of industrialization (University of North Carolina Press – Chapel Hill, NC, 1995).

13 https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk

14 John Burnett introduced teachers and students to proletarian life-writing through excerpts clustered thematically and contextualised using standard sources, see J. Burnett ed., Destiny obscure: autobiographies of childhood, education, and family from the 1820s to the 1920s (Allen Lane – London, 1982); J. Burnett ed., Useful toil: autobiographies of working people from the 1820s to the 1920s (Allen Lane – London, 1994). David Vincent edited some important writings by nineteenth-century radicals, rescued and saw published one key working-class autobiography and used the sources to explore how working men conceptualised their circumstances, see D. Vincent, Testaments of radicalism: Memoirs of working-class politicians 1790–1885 (Europa – London, 1977); D. Vincent ed., The autobiography of a beggar boy (Europa – London, 1978). D. Vincent, Bread, knowledge and freedom: a study of nineteenth-century working class autobiography (Europa – London, 1981). Ellen Ross produced path-breaking work, describing motherhood in deprived families at the turn of the nineteenth century in Love and toil: motherhood in outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford University Press – Oxford, 1993). Carolyn Steedman has used individual memoirs as lenses on working-class life particularly emotional life, see The radical soldier's tale. John Pearman, 1819–1908 (Routledge – London, 1988); and, Master and servant. Love and labour in the English industrial age (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2007). Jane Humphries, as noted, combined qualitative and quantitative methodologies in her analysis of the effects of economic change on working-class boyhood, see Humphries, Childhood. Emma Griffin used a similar set of autobiographies, including some by women, to argue for greater optimism. Liberty's dawn (Yale – New Haven, 2013) painted the industrial revolution as an era of opportunity and release from social constraints. Jonathan Rose's The intellectual life of the British working classes (Yale – New Haven, 2001) used autobiography (and other sources) to find out what and how working people read. Julie-Marie Strange's Fatherhood used memoir to challenge dominant assumptions about absent or ‘feckless’ fathers and sympathetically reintegrate the paternal figure within the emotional life of families. Other work drawing on autobiography is discussed in Humphries, Childhood, 14–23.

15 For more detail on methodology, see, J. Humphries, ‘Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution’, Economic History Review 66 (2013), 395–418.

16 ‘[N]o truths either in general or in particular, can be deducted by adding up their contents and dividing by the total number’, Vincent, Bread, 10, cited in Humphries, Childhood, 20. More ambiguously, Helen Rogers and Emily Cumings have argued that ‘quantitative approaches to the authors and their writings cannot reveal the complexity of individual lives and are no substitute for close reading and textual analysis’, a criticism which leaves room for a combined methodology, see ‘Revealing fragments: close and distant reading of working-class autobiography’, Family and Community History 21 (2018), 180–201.

17 Rogers and Cuming, ‘Revealing fragments’, 189, 191.

18 In 1700, 25 per cent of women could read and write according to signatures on marriage certificates compared with 40 per cent of men and this gap narrowed over the next 150 years. By 1860, 63 per cent of women were literate and 70 per cent of men. D. Cressey, Literacy and the social order: reading and writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 1980); D. Vincent, Literacy and popular culture in England 1750–1914 (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 1989).

19 Hence the autobiographies by politically involved women like Andrews, Bondfield, Bryson, Gawthorpe and Mitchell, by nurses and camp-followers in war zones like Cadwaladyr and Exley, and by adventurers like Lacey.

20 E. Oakley, ‘The autobiography of Elizabeth Oakley, 1831–1900’, Norfolk Record Society 56, (1993), 148.

21 R. Pascal, Design and truth in autobiography (Garland – New York, 1985).

22 W. J. Jones, ‘Editor's note’, preceding M. Evans, Memories of New Quay, translated from Welsh by Mary Jane Stephenson (Ceredigion Book Society – Aberystwyth, 1961).

23 http://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O70506/sampler-parker-elizabeth/ I thank Kate Heard for drawing my attention to the item.

24 Sources include Reports from Commissioners, On the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, Parliamentary Papers, 1843; Reports from Commissioners, Children's Employment (Mines), Parliamentary Papers, 1842; Reports from Commissioners, Children's Employment (Trades and Manufactures), Parliamentary Papers 1843; Children's Employment Commission (1862), Parliamentary Papers, 1867.

25 For example, Elizabeth Rignall provides an extensive account of her mother's childhood and early life in ‘All so long ago’, TS, Brunel University.

26 H. Mayhew, London labour and the London poor(London, Charles Griffin, 1851), Vol. 1; A. Munby, Diaries (Trinity College Library – Cambridge); Working days. Being the personal records of sixteen working men and women written by themselves and edited by Margaret Pollock (Jonathan Cape – London, 1926).

27 W. Marcroft, The Marcroft family (John Heywood – London, 1886); B. Shaw, The family records of Benjamin Shaw of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1772–1841, in A. G. Crosby ed., Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (1991).

28 The earliest female writer was born in 1667 whereas the earliest male writer was born in 1627, hence the different starting points.

29 M. Anderson, Family structure in nineteenth-century Lancashire (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 1971).

30 The Lady Cranworth, ‘A Norfolk labourer's wife’, Eastern Counties Magazine and Suffolk Notebook II (1901), 125.

31 M. Cox, Employment of women and children in agriculture, Parliamentary Papers (1843), 89–90; L. Jermy, The memories of a working woman (Goose and Sons – Norwich, 1934).

32 M. Saxby, Memoirs of a female vagrant written by herself (J. Burditt – London, 1806), 4.

33 Oakley, ‘Autobiography’, 126, 131. Interestingly, the uncle does appear to have adopted one of his sister's girls and raised her as his own, 126.

34 The almost universal assignment of fathers to occupational groups enables a check on the representativeness of the data. Fathers are allocated by cohort to primary, secondary and tertiary sectors of employment, following the occupational divisions established by the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure. Comparisons can then be made with the CAMPOP estimation of the occupational structure of England and Wales and with the distribution of the fathers of the male writers, as shown in Table A1 in the appendix. Although fathers involved in primary production are overestimated in cohorts 2 and 4 while those in the tertiary sector underestimated in cohort 2, relative to the CAMPOP distribution and the fathers of the male writers, the distributions are roughly but reassuringly in line. See L. Shaw-Taylor and E. A. Wrigley, ‘Occupational structure and population change’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries and P. Johnson eds., The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain, Volume I, 1700–1870 (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2014), 59.

35 A. Candler, Poetical attempts by Ann Candler, a Suffolk cottager with a short narrative of her life (John Raw – Ipswich, 1803); C. Exley, ‘Catherine Exley's diary’ in R. Probert ed., Catherine Exley's diary. The life and times of an army wife in the peninsular war (Brandram – Kenilworth, 2014); C. Watt, The Christian Watt papers, D. Fraser, ed. (Birlinn – Edinburgh, 2004); D. Smith, My revelation: an autobiography (Houghton Publishing – London, 1933).

36 Father's occupational group was unrecorded more frequently in cohort 2 but this reflects the clustering of interview evidence from the Parliamentary Papers. For cohorts 1, 3 and 4, fathers’ occupational group is missing in 12.5, 13.3 and 11.4 per cent of cases, respectively.

37 L. Luck, ‘A little of my life’, The London Mercury 76 (1926), 354–373.

38 Mrs W. Shorely, Mrs Emma Thompson, and Mrs Daniels, The Bedfordshire times and independent, 8 April 1910 and 29 April 2010.

39 Mrs John Sharp, The Bedfordshire times and independent, 8 April 2010.

40 B. Harvey, ‘Youthful memories of a horsekeeper's daughter’, in E. A. Goodwyn and J. C. Baxter, eds., East Anglian reminiscences (Boydell – Ipswich, 1976); C. Maclaughlin, untitled manuscript, Brunel.

41 Sharp, The Bedfordshire Times and Independent.

42 Humphries, Childhood, 95. For standard sources, see, R. Allen, https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/people/sites/allen-research-pages/ G. Clark, ‘The long march of history: Farm wages, population and economic growth, England 1209–1869’, Economic History Review 60 (2007), 97–136; I. Gazeley, ‘Income and living standards, 1870–2010’, in R. Floud, J. Humphries and P. Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, Volume I, 1700–1870 (Cambridge University Press – Cambridge, 2014). Strange, Fatherhood.

43 The origin and evolution of the male breadwinner family, as ideological and economic construct, has long been debated, see C. Creighton, ‘The rise of the male breadwinner family: a reappraisal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 38 (1996), 310–37.

44 M. Clarke, untitled, Brunel.

45 Strange, Fatherhood.

46 The Lady Cranworth, ‘A Norfolk labourer's wife’, 124.

47 S. Horrell and J. Humphries, ‘The origins and expansion of the male breadwinner family. The case of nineteenth century Britain’, International Review of Social History 42 (1997), 25–64.

48 On breadwinner frailty, see Humphries, Childhood, 120.

49 D. C. Jones, Social Surveys (Hutchinson – London, n.d.), 63.

50 R. Allen, ‘Engels’ pause: technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the British industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History 46 (2009), 418–35.

51 Mrs M. A. Deacon, ‘Memories of Desborough 70 years ago’, Village Memories Collection, Northamptonshire Record Office.

52 Mrs Layton, ‘Memories of seventy years’, in M. L. Davies ed., Life as we have known it by Cooperative women (Virago – London, 1977).

53 M. Coe, ‘Mary Coe’ in M. Chamberlain ed., Fenwomen. A portrait of women in an English village (Virago – London, 1975), 28.

54 D. Tack, My Brixton childhood (Brixton Society – Brixton, 1992), 3.

55 Mrs Sargeant, ‘Memories of a villager’, 2.

56 H. Fowler, untitled, Brunel.

57 Autobiographical letter, Reports from Commissioners, Local Government Board, Parliamentary Papers, XXV (1874), 248.

58 E. Johnson, ‘The factory girl’, in J. R. Simmons Jr ed., Four nineteenth-century working-class autobiographies (Broadview Press – Toronto, 2007).

59 M. Barber, Five score and ten. A true narrative of the long life and many hardships of M. Barber (Penny and Makeig – Crewkerne, 1840), 4–6.

60 M. L. Triggle, ‘Autobiographical letters’, Brunel.

61 D. Cowper, ‘De Nobis’, Brunel.

62 Strange, Fatherhood.

63 Tack, Brixton childhood, 1.

64 M. Bondfield, A life's work (London – Hutchinson and co., 1950), 23.

65 M. Gawthorpe, Up hill to Holloway (Traversity Press – Penobscot Maine, 1962).

66 E. Evans, ‘Growing up’.

67 Gawthorpe, Up hill.

68 Humphries, Childhood, 63–8.

69 Humphries, Childhood, 102–3.

70 I. Smith, ‘A hired lass in Westmorland’ (Local History Reserve, Cumbria County Library – Carlisle, n.d.).

71 See J. Humphries and C. Sarasúa, ‘Off the record: female labour force participation in the European past’, Feminist Economics 18 (2012), 39–67.

72 Although this rose to over 40 per cent if the wives of men in occupations which the Registrar General's office counted as active by dint of husbands’ work were included as participating.

73 The range of estimates depends on whether cases are included where information on parents is missing.

74 The Lady Cranworth, ‘A Norfolk labourer's wife’, 124.

75 Humphries, Childhood, 105. The range of estimates depends on whether cases are included where information on parents is missing.

76 Oakley, Burrows, Spriggs, Smart, Coe, Mrs Palmer, Gittings, Jarvis, Walker, Groom.

77 M. Howitt, ‘The Howitt Family in England and Australia’, Brunel; Layton, ‘Memories’, 2.

78 E. Allen, The faithful servant or the history of Elizabeth Allen (Francis Westley – London, 1824), 3.

79 K. Wilkinson, Memoir of Kitty Wilkinson of Liverpool, 1789–1860 (Henry Young and Sons – Liverpool, 1927) 1; Gibbs, ‘In service’, 1.

80 J. Debney, Breaking the chains (Brewin – Coventry, 2010).

81 Humphries, Childhood, 109–10.

82 Her husband was a London policeman and his wife's employment would have impugned his ability to provide and status as a respectable breadwinner, see, A. August, ‘How separate a sphere? Poor women and paid work in late Victorian London’, Journal of Family History 19 (1994), 285–309; A. August, Poor women's lives (Associated University Presses – London, 1999).

83 Tack, Brixton childhood, 3.

84 N. Raisbeck, ‘A north riding childhood’, Bulletin of Cleveland and Teeside Local History Society, 85 (2003), 15.

85 Testimony of Mrs Mary Hunt, Commission on the Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture, Parliamentary Papers, XII (1943), 88. Examples from the men's autobiographies are provided in Humphries, Childhood, 110.

86 The Lady Cranworth, ‘Norfolk labourer's wife’ 125.

87 ibid.

88 M. Saxby, Memoirs of a female vagrant written by herself (J. Burditt – London, 1806).

89 J. Debney, Breaking.

90 B. Shaw, ‘The family records of Benjamin Shaw’, 90.

91 Regression analysis tests the relationship between a group of explanatory variables and a dependent variable, identifying the size and sign on the coefficient linking independent and depended variables and suggesting whether or not relationships were too well defined to be the result of chance.

92 For detail on the CAMSIS scale, see Humphries, Childhood, 89, 121–3.

93 Mrs Burrows, ‘A childhood in the Fens about 1850-60’, in M. Llewelyn Davies ed., Life as we have known it by co-operative working women (Hogarth Press – London, 1930), 112.

94 Johnston, ‘Factory girl’, 7.

95 Humphries, Childhood, 181; R. Davis, The rise of the English shipping industry in the 17th and 18th centuries (Macmillan – London, 1962), 152.

96 Andrews, A woman's work, 6.

97 For comparison with the much more frequent rates of apprenticeship for working-class boys in the same time period (45–56 per cent), see Humphries, Childhood, 258–63.

98 Kirby, Child labour, 51–92.

99 Saxby, Memoirs.

100 C. Watt, The Christian Watt papers (Birlinn – Edinburgh, 1988), 36.

101 A. Hughes, nee Hodgson, ‘Unpublished autobiography’, Brunel, 5.

102 Watt, Christian Watt papers, 57.

103 Luck, ‘A little’, 361.

104 Johnston, ‘Factory girl’.

105 Marcroft, The Marcroft family, 21.

106 Luck, ‘A little’, 365.

107 E. Smith, A Cornish Waif's story (Odham's Press – London, 1954), 31.

108 J. Humphries, ‘Protective legislation, the capitalist state and working-class men: the case of the 1842 Mines Regulation Act’, Feminist Review 7 (1981), 1–35; J. Humphries, ‘“The most free from objection…”, The sexual division of labour and women's work in nineteenth century England’, Journal of Economic History XLVII, 4 (1987), 929–50.

109 J. Bowden, ‘Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture,’ Parliamentary Papers XII (1843), 113.

110 Mrs Moody, Children's Employment Commission, Sixth Report of the Commissioners, Parliamentary Papers, XVI (1867), 28.

111 Cullwick, Diaries, 36.

112 Luck, ‘A little’, 365.

113 Smith, ‘A hired lass’, 9.

114 Hughes, ‘Unpublished’, 5.

115 D. Cowper, ‘De nobis’, Brunel.

116 W. P. Baker, Parish registers and illiteracy in east Yorkshire (East Yorkshire Local History Society – Micklegate, Yorks, 1961); T. W. Laqueur, Religion and respectability, Sunday schools and working-class culture 1780–1850 (Yale University Press – New Haven, CT, 1976); W. B. Stephens, Education, literacy and society 1830–1870 (Manchester University Press – Manchester, 1987).

117 Harvey, ‘Youthful memories’, 52; Andrews, A woman's work, 2. A. Hughes, ‘Unpublished autobiography’.

118 B. Farquhar, The peal of days or the advantages of the Sabbath to the working class (Patridge and Oakey – London, 1851), 21; M. Farningham, A working woman's life: an autobiography (James Clarke and Co. – London, 1907), 13.

119 M. Frisby, ‘Memories’ TS, Brunel, 2; Harvey, ‘Youthful memories’, 53.

120 M. Hull, ‘A Derbyshire schooling: 1884–1893’, History Workshop Journal, 25, Spring (1988), 167.

121 See E. Spriggs, ‘My earliest memories of a villager’, Village Memories, Northampton Record Office, 1. M. A. Smith, ‘Memories of a villager’, Village Memories, Northampton Record Office, 1.

122 Farningham, Working woman, 17.

123 Farningham, Working woman, 18.

124 Farningham, Working woman, 13.

125 Farquhar, Pearl, 26.

126 See Farningham, Working woman, 45–8.

127 C. Watt, The Christian Watt Papers, 23.

128 F. Thompson, Lark rise to Candleford (Century Publishing – London, 1983), 58.

129 J. Bathgate, Aunt Janet's legacy to her nieces. Recollections of humble life in Yarrow at the beginning of the century (George Lewis and Co. – Selkirk, 1891).

130 A. Cowper, A backward glance on Merseyside (Willmer Brothers – Birkenhead, 1948), 40.

131 Andrews, Woman's work, 2.

132 Smith, ‘A hired lass’, 3.

133 C. Maclaughlin, untitled manuscript, Brunel.

134 As Jean Leid reported. Her mother was a bondager responsible for the upkeep of her illegitimate children, so it was Jean's granny who raised her: ‘ … ah didnae really see much o'ma mother when ah wis a wee girl. It was granny that wis at home … .’. I. MacDougall ed., Bondagers. Personal recollections by eight Scots women (East Lothian – Phantassie, 2000), 123–42.

135 Maclaughlin, untitled.

136 Gawthorpe, Up hill, 115–6.

137 Humphries, Childhood, 129.

138 Frisby, ‘Memories’, 1.

139 Frisby, ‘Memories’, 16.

140 R. Mynachlog, Memories of Ruth Mynachlog (Gomer – Llandysul, 1939), 9.

141 M. Bondfield, A life's work (Hutchinson – London, 1950), 23.

142 E. Evans, Growing up 1903–1928, 1.

143 Cowper, ‘De nobis’, no pagination.

144 A. Auty, Annie being a faithful account of the life and experience and labours of Annie Auty (Simkin, Marshall and Co. – London, 1888), 2.

145 Bondfield, Life's work, 19.

146 Mrs M. Whyman, Village memories collection, Northampton Record Office.

147 Harvey, Youthful memories, 52.

148 Cowper, ‘De nobis’, no pagination.

149 M. King, in I. McDougall, ed., Bondagers, 6–7.

150 For a different interpretation of similar material, see, Griffin, ‘Emotions’.

151 Whyman, ‘Village memories’, no pagination.

152 Cowper, ‘De nobis’, no pagination.

153 Farningham, A working woman's life, 38.

154 Farningham, A working woman's life, 40.

155 Farningham, A working woman's life, 43–4.

156 H. Mitchell, The hard way up. The autobiography of Hannah Mitchell suffragette & rebel, edited by Geoffrey Mitchell (Faber & Faber – London, 1968). For male writers who could not abide their mothers, see Humphries, Childhood, 239.

157 Cowper, ‘De nobis’, no pagination.

158 For this point, see E. Duché, ‘The missing spouse. The wives of British prisoners of war in Napoleonic France: their lives & writings’, in Probert ed., Catherine Exley's diary.

159 Luck, ‘A little’, 364; Cullwick, H., The diaries of Hannah Cullwick (Virago – London, 1984), 37Google Scholar.

160 M. Keens, ‘Granny Keens of St. Julians’, Bedfordshire Magazine vol. 26, no. 201, Summer 1997, 39–40.

161 Maclaughlin, ms, no pagination.

162 A.M. Chase.

163 E. Evans, ‘Growing up’, 2.

164 E. Evans, ‘Growing up’, 1.

165 A. Hughes, ‘Unpublished ms’, Brunel, 1.

166 C. Watt, Christian Watt papers, 46.

167 A. Hughes, ‘Unpublished ms’, 1.

168 E. Evans, ‘Growing up’, 5.

169 Cowper, ‘De nobis’, no pagination.

170 For a broader discussion, see Seccombe, W., Weathering the storm (Verso – London, 1993)Google Scholar.

171 Keens, ‘Granny Keens’, 40.

172 E. Rignall, ‘All so long ago’, Brunel, 57.

173 Bryson, E., Look back in wonder (David Winter – Dundee, 1966), 22Google Scholar.

174 E. Bryson, Look back, 95.