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The Gendered Economy of Family Liability: Intergenerational Relationships and Poor Law Relief in England's Black Country, 1871–1911

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Marjorie Levine-Clark
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 72 - 89
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 Staffordshire Record Office (SRO), D585/1/5/48, Application and Report Book, Stourbridge Parish, Stourbridge District, Stourbridge Union, 6 April 1871.

2 SRO, D585/1/5/73, Application and Report Book, Kingswinford Parish, Kingswinford District, Stourbridge Union, 2 July 1891.

3 This is a growing and changing literature; see Thane, Pat, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (New York, 2000)Google Scholar, and “Old People and Their Families in the English Past,” in Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. Daunton, Martin (New York, 1996), 113–38Google Scholar; Crowther, M. A., “Family Responsibility and State Responsibility in Britain before the Welfare State,” Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (1982): 131–45CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Thomson, David, “‘I Am Not My Father's Keeper’: Families and the Elderly in Nineteenth-Century England,” Law and History Review 2, no. 2 (1984): 265–86CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, and “The Decline of Social Security: Falling State Support for the Elderly since Victorian Times,” Ageing and Society 4 (1984): 96–107Google Scholar; Anderson, M., “The Impact on the Family Relationships of the Elderly of Changes since Victorian Times in Governmental Income-Maintenance Provision,” in Family, Bureaucracy, and the Elderly, ed. Shanas, Ethel and Sussman, Martin B. (Durham, NC, 1977)Google Scholar; Pelling, Margaret and Smith, Richard M., eds., Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (New York, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wall, Richard, “Relations between Generations in British Families Past and Present,” in Families and Households: Divisions and Change, ed. Marsh, Catherine and Arber, Sara (New York, 1992), 63–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Elderly Persons and Members of Their Households in England and Wales from Preindustrial Times to the Present,” in Ageing in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age, ed. Kertzner, D. and Laslett, P. (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar; Bothelho, L. A., Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Rochester, NY, 2004)Google Scholar; and Ottaway, Susannah R., The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (New York, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Some important work along these lines includes Gordon, Linda, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison, WI, 1990)Google Scholar; Lees, Lynn Hollen, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (New York, 1998)Google Scholar; Clark, Anna, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage: Contrasting Assumptions,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 261–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pedersen, Susan, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the British Welfare State, 1914–1945 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Orloff, Ann, “Gender in the Welfare State,” Annual Review of Sociology 22 (1996): 51–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lewis, Jane, “Gender and the Development of Welfare Regimes,” Journal of European Social Policy 3 (1992): 159–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Daly, Mary, The Gender Division of Welfare: The Impact of the British and German Welfare States (New York, 2000)Google Scholar; Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, “The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth Century Britain,” International Review of Social History 42, suppl. 5 (1997): 25–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Janssens, Angélique, “The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? An Overview of the Debate,” International Review of Social History 42, suppl. 5 (1997): 1–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Seccombe, Wally, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Social History 11, no. 1 (1986): 53–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Linda Gordon, “The New Feminist Scholarship on the Welfare State,” in Gordon, Women, the State, and Welfare, 12.

6 Koven, Seth and Michel, Sonya outline some of these national differences and their implications in “Womanly Duties: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States in France, Germany, Great Britain and the United States, 1880–1920,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (1990): 1076–1108CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 For studies that specifically address gender and the Poor Law, see Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, English Poor Law Policy (London, 1910)Google Scholar; Thane, Pat, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop Journal 6, no. 1 (1978): 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lees, Solidarities, especially the sections on “Gender, Family and Work,” 135–45, and on “Women and Welfare,” 196–210; Clark, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage”; Long, Jane, “Regulating Poverty, Regulating Gender: The Administration of Poor Relief,” in her Conversations in Cold Rooms (New York, 1999), 115–63Google Scholar; and Levine-Clark, Marjorie, “Engendering Relief: Women, Ablebodiedness, and the New Poor Law in Early Victorian England,” Journal of Women's History 11, no. 4 (2000): 107–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Clark, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage.”

9 Thorne, Barrie, “Feminism and the Family: Two Decades of Thought,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Thorne, Barrie with Yalom, Marilyn (Boston, 1992), 4, 6–10Google Scholar.

10 Rose, Sonya presents an excellent discussion of these aspects of the Poor Law in Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992), 51–55Google Scholar.

11 See Barnsby, George, Social Conditions in the Black Country, 1800–1900 (Wolverhampton, 1980)Google Scholar, and “The Standard of Living in the Black Country during the Nineteenth Century,” Economic History Review 24, no. 2 (1971): 220–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Quoted in Palliser, D. M., The Staffordshire Landscape (London, 1976), 197Google Scholar.

13 Barnsby, “Standard of Living,” 221.

14 Morgan, Carol, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries (New York, 2001), 105–7Google Scholar; see also Blackburn, Sheila, “Working-Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-Sweating Legislation, 1880–1930,” International Review of Social History 33, no. 1 (1988): 46–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities; Blackburn, “Working-Class Attitudes to Social Reform.”

16 Fox, A., “Industrial Relations in Birmingham and the Black Country, 1860–1914” (B. Litt. thesis, University of Oxford, 1952–53), 218Google Scholar, quoted in Blackburn, “Working-Class Attitudes,” 47.

17 Barnsby, “Standard of Living,” 233.

18 Blackburn, “Working-Class Attitudes”; Morgan, Women Workers.

19 Palliser, Staffordshire Landscape, 199.

20 The New Poor Law has occupied historians for many years. For overviews of the debates, see Digby, Anne, The Poor Law in Nineteenth-Century England and Wales (London, 1982)Google Scholar; Rose, Michael, The Relief of Poverty, 1834–1914, 2nd ed. (London, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Fraser, Derek, ed., The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Some important work on the New Poor Law and its effects on the poor includes Lees, Solidarities; Digby, Anne, Pauper Palaces (Boston, 1978)Google Scholar; Rose, Michael, ed., The Poor and the City: The English Poor Law in Its Urban Context, 1834–1914 (Leicester, 1985)Google Scholar; Brundage, Anthony, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment, and Implementation, 1832–1839 (New Brunswick, NJ, 1978)Google Scholar; Williams, Karel, From Pauperism to Poverty (London, 1981)Google Scholar; Wood, Peter, Poverty and the Workhouse in Victorian Britain (Wolfeboro Falls, NH, 1991)Google Scholar; and Driver, Felix, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (New York, 1993)Google Scholar.

21 Lees discusses the opaque nature of these line-item records in Solidarities, 260.

22 For general histories of the Black Country in this period, see Allen, G. C., The Industrial Development of Birmingham and the Black Country, 1860–1927 (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; Barnsby, Social Conditions, and “Standard of Living”; Elwell, Charles, Aspects of the Black Country: Black Country Social and Economic History (Kingswinford, UK, 1991)Google Scholar; Trainor, Richard H., Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830–1900 (Oxford, 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Carol Morgan has recently taken the Black Country example to study women's work and gender, in Women Workers and Gender Identities.

23 The archival collection on which this analysis is based is the Application and Report Books for Stourbridge Union, held at the Staffordshire Record Office. From the Halesowen District, see D585/1/5/27, D585/1/5/29, D585/1/5/32, and D585/1/5/35. From the Stourbridge District, see D585/1/5/47 and D585/1/5/50. From the Kingswinford District, see D585/1/5/68, D585/1/5/70, D585/1/5/73, and D585/1/5/76.

24 Lees, Solidarities.

25 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 309–10.

26 On the crusade, see McKinnon, Mary, “English Poor Law Policy and the Crusade against Outrelief,” Journal of Economic History 47, no. 3 (1987): 603–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty; and Lees, Solidarities, 259–87.

27 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 306.

28 See, e.g., Thane, Old Age, 170; Wall, “Relations between Generations,” 80–81.

29 Checkland, S. G. and Checkland, E. O. A., eds., The Poor Law Report of 1834 (1834; repr., New York, 1974), 115Google Scholar. For discussion of the legal aspects of family liability, see Crowther, “Family Responsibility.”

30 Crowther, “Family Responsibility,” 132.

31 Thane, Old Age, 167.

32 Crowther, “Family Responsibility,” 145 (my emphasis).

33 See, e.g., Thane, “Old People”; Wall, “Relations between Generations”; Crowther, “Family Responsibility”; Thomson, “I Am Not My Father's Keeper.”

34 See Levine-Clark, “Engendering Relief.”

35 Anna Clark and Sonya Rose have addressed these issues in their studies of gender and class in the nineteenth century: Clark, , The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995)Google Scholar; Rose, Limited Livelihoods.

36 Women in England more generally made up a greater percentage of poor law applicants and recipients. See Lees, Solidarities, especially the sections on “Gender, Family and Work,” 135–45, and on “Women and Welfare,” 196–210.

37 On women's legal status in relation to marriage, see Shanley, Mary Lyndon, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, NJ, 1989)Google Scholar; and Holcombe, Lee, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women's Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Buffalo, NY, 1983)Google Scholar.

38 For discussion of gender and types of assistance in intergenerational relationships—and the invisibility of women's help—see Gill Jones, “Short-Term Reciprocity in Parent-Child Economic Exchanges,” in Marsh and Arber, Families and Households, 26–44; and Thane, “Old People,” 129. Thane specifically mentions how the records themselves make any form of nonresidential support invisible. Yet the Application and Report Books do reveal other types of financial contributions. For more general discussions of gender and what counts as work, see, e.g., Bourke, Joanna, “Housewifery in Working-Class England, 1860–1914,” in Women's Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914, ed. Sharpe, Pamela (New York, 1998), 332–58Google Scholar; August, Andrew, Poor Women's Lives: Gender, Work, and Poverty in Late Victorian London (Madison, NJ, 1999)Google Scholar; Boris, Eileen, Home to Work: Motherhood and the Politics of Industrial Homework in the United States (New York, 1994)Google Scholar; Boris, Eileen and Daniels, Cynthia, eds., Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home (Urbana, IL, 1989)Google Scholar; Hennon, Charles B., Loker, Suzanne, and Walker, Rosemary, eds., Gender and Home-Based Employment (Westport, CT, 2000)Google Scholar.

39 Higgs, Edward, “Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 23, no. 1 (1987): 59–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Household and Work in the Nineteenth-Century Censuses of England and Wales,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 11, no. 3 (1990): 73–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

40 Several scholars have discussed the various financial resources used by the poor, and especially the elderly, in their survival strategies, focusing on the relationships among family, the state, and charity. See, e.g., Thane, “Old People,” 113, and Old Age, 169, 177–78; Lees, Solidarities, 259; Wall, “Relationships between Generations,” 80; Crowther, “Family Responsibility”; and Lewis, Jane, The Voluntary Sector, the State, and Social Work in Britain (London, 1995)Google Scholar.

41 Thane, Old Age, 168–69.

42 Wall, “Relationships between the Generations,” 70, 76–84.

43 See Barnsby, “Standard of Living.”

44 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 302.

45 Barnsby, Social Conditions, 213.

46 SRO, D585/1/5/29, Application and Report Book, Cakemore Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 2 April 1891.

47 SRO, D585/1/5/76, Application and Report Book, Kingswinford Parish, Kingswinford District, Stourbridge Union, 15 June 1911.

48 SRO, D585/1/5/29, Application and Report Book, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 7 May 1891.

49 Thane, “Old People,” 120.

50 Ibid., and Old Age.

51 SRO, D585/1/5/48, Application and Report Book, Stourbridge Parish, Stourbridge District, Stourbridge Union, 31 March 1871.

52 SRO, D585/1/5/68, Application and Report Book, Kingswinford Parish, Kingswinford District, Stourbridge Union, 9 June 1871. Elderly widows and widowers with unmarried sons (and sometimes married sons) seem to have been routinely assigned the workhouse by the Kingswinford relieving officer in 1871.

53 SRO, D585/1/29, Application and Report Book, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, 2 April 1891.

54 Ibid.

55 SRO, D585/1/76, Application and Report Book, Kingswinford Parish, Kingswinford District, Stourbridge Union, 30 March 1911.

56 SRO, D585/1/5/48, Application and Report Book, Stourbridge Parish, Stourbridge District, Stourbridge Union, 8 September 1871.

57 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Application and Report Book, Halesowen Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 4 April 1901.

58 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Hill Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 22 August 1901.

59 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Hasbury Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 4 April 1901.

60 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 27 June 1901.

61 In 1871, the difference was about 600,000; by 1901, this had grown to over a million. Cook, Chris and Keith, Brendon, British Historical Facts, 1830–1900 (New York, 1975), 232Google Scholar.

62 SRO, D585/1/5/73, Application and Report Book, Kingswinford Parish, Kingswinford District, Stourbridge Union, 27 March 1891.

63 Ibid.

64 Great Britain Census, 1881. Available at Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, http://www.familysearch.org (accessed 13 September 2005).

65 SRO, D585/1/1/37–38, Board of Guardian Minutes, Stourbridge Union, 1890–92.

66 SRO, D585/1/1/80, House Committee Book, Stourbridge Union, 1910–13.

67 SRO, D585/1/5/29, Application and Report Book, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 2 April 1891.

68 Among elderly parents seeking residential assistance from their children, however, women stand out. Of the 243 parents sixty and over living with their children, 188 (or 77 percent) were women. This is a much higher percentage than the total of women to men aged sixty and older, which is 53 percent. In this regard, Wall, in a study of intergenerational relationships, argues that if we take coresidence as a sign of the closest familial ties, “then for women in old age it was ties that crossed generations that were important while for elderly men the ties within generations were the critical ones.” Elderly men lived above all with their spouses; they died earlier than women, who were then left as widows to rely more on their children to provide homes. See Wall, “Relationships between the Generations,” 70.

69 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Application and Report Book, Cakemore Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 13 June 1901.

70 Thane, “Women and the Poor Law,” 38. See also Lees, Solidarities, 264–68.

71 Since I have little information about the wages and occupations of younger women who were actually contributing to their parents’ maintenance, I am using the broader category of all adult women under age fifty-five in the study whose earnings were recorded as a way to assess regional wages for women.

72 Barnsby, Social Conditions, 213.

73 SRO, D585/1/5/29, Application and Report Book, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 9 April 1891.

74 SRO, D585/1/5/32, Application and Report Book, Cradley Parish, Halesowen District, Stourbridge Union, 25 July 1901.

75 Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State. See also Lewis, Jane, “Women's Welfare and the State,” in her Women in Britain since 1945 (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 92–113Google Scholar; and Riley, Denise, “Some Peculiarities of Social Policy concerning Women in Wartime and Postwar Britain,” in Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars, ed. Higonnet, Margaret Randolph, Jenson, Jane, Michel, Sonya, and Weitz, Margaret Collins (New Haven, CT, 1987), 260–71Google Scholar.