18/30: resources and support - women’s work both paid and unpaid (part 1)
Another deep dive into my maternal family history, this time looking at how social attitudes to women in work changed through the twentieth century
Day 18 and Day 19’s words have blurred into one as a result of a long day in the office yesterday and some catching up today. I’ve divided what’s essentially a single piece of writing into two separate ones in order to stick to my 1000 (ish) words a day pattern. Day 18 covers my grandmother and great-grandmother’s experiences of work, with my mum’s and mine to follow tomorrow.
I’m always interested by questions of resources, like time and space and money. By the ways in which the resources available to us shape the choices we make, the choices that are available to us. If I hear about someone who’s resigned from their job to become a freelance writer, for example, I’m fascinated to know how they have been able to do that. I want to ask the socially unacceptable questions about money: did they inherit a large sum of money or win the lottery, is their partner in a job well-paid enough to support their family financially, have they been working as a freelance writer as a side-hustle for years before finally making the leap?
I think it’s partly to do with the fact that I have firmly entered into midlife now. The finite amount of time and space available to me is constantly at the forefront of my mind as I juggle parenthood, paid employment, home ownership, and then the things that I want or need to do for myself as a person (writing, strength training, reading, sleeping). There’s also a looming awareness of the growing caring responsibilities myself and my brother have for our increasingly elderly father. There are hard decisions to be made about what I want to prioritise and how I’m going to do it. If I’m going to devote more time to writing, what I am going to give up or do less of?
Leaving my paid job or reducing my hours is not an option. So that’s probably another reason why I’m fascinated by stories of people who are able to do this. In my little nuclear family I’m the one with an office job with fixed hours and a monthly salary, while my husband is self-employed, with a fluctuating income and working hours. I think we can both sometimes feel envious of the perks of the other’s job. We’ve also effectively flipped the setting I grew up in; my dad was a secondary school teacher and my mum, by the time I entered my teens, was a self-employed yoga teacher.
In my research into the lives of my great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, it’s been unavoidable that I’ve made comparisons between their lives and my own. The choices available to me that weren’t available to them. The way that you can trace the changing social and cultural norms of the twentieth century through their lives. I’ve written before about one of the most glaring differences: my great-grandmother's probable shotgun marriage in 1921 to avoid the scandal of an unmarried mother and an illegitimate child, versus my ability to freely choose to have a baby outside of marriage in 2012. Tracing the differences in how and when each generation of my maternal ancestors worked is another interesting route to explore.
My great-grandmother Lily was 18 when she got married in 1921. When that year’s census was taken she was living with her new husband and his widowed mother, 7 months pregnant and is listed as being engaged in ‘household duties’. In the 1911 census, Lily was 8 years old and unsurprisingly listed as a school pupil. So there’s no records to show what jobs, if any, she may have had before her marriage. However, in 1921 her 17 year old sister is listed as a factory worker at the Meccano Toy Works in Liverpool, so it’s possible that Lily may have also been employed there before she got married.
Lily’s husband Sydney died in 1929 when he was 30 and she was 27, and she moved in with her parents and younger siblings (at that point ranging in age from 22 to 7 years old). My theory is that after she was widowed, Lily returned to work, leaving her children (then aged 8 and 6) in her mother’s care. Her wages, alongside her father’s and adult siblings’ would contribute to the combined income needed to support a family of nine people, now expanded to twelve after Lily and her children’s arrival.
In 1939 both Lily and her daughter Edith are listed as shorthand typists in the register taken at the start of World War 2. Edith, my grandmother, was 18 that year. From stories my mum told me, I know that during the war, Edith worked in the Liver Building on the Pierfront in Liverpool, in a job that was somehow linked to the American GIs billeted in the city. Apparently she was gifted nylon stockings and cigarettes by the GIs, part of a thriving black market in luxury goods during rationing.
But Edith lived in an era when it was expected and accepted that women would give up working when they got married. She and my grandfather Eric got married in 1942 and had three daughters in the 1950s. I imagine her life in the 1950s as being similar to that of Betty Draper in Mad Men (if probably slightly less glamorous as my grandfather was a toolmaker rather than an adman): a young mother staying at home to care for babies and children while her husband went out to work each day. It’s not something I ever talked to her about, though I wish I had, but I think she would have found this frustrating and stifling. She always seemed to me like someone who wanted to be up and doing, more than a nurturer.
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