Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899

Melanie Reynolds

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137369048
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

Infant Mortality and Working-Class Child Care, 1850-1899 unlocks the hidden history of working-class child care during the second half of the nineteenth century, seeking to challenge those historians who have cast working-class women as feckless and maternally ignorant. By plotting the lives of northern women whilst they grappled with industrial waged work in the factory, in agriculture, in nail making, and in brick and salt works, this book reveals a different picture of northern childcare, one which points to innovative and enterprising child care models. Attention is also given to day-carers as they acted in loco parentis and the workhouse nurse who worked in conjunction with medical paediatrics to provide nineteenth-century welfare to pauper infants. Through the use of a new and wide range of source material, which includes medical and poor law history, Melanie Reynolds allows a fresh and new perspective of working-class child care to arise.

1

The Scholarship on Working-class Women’s Work and their Child Care Models

This chapter will deal with the long, complex trajectory of women’s waged and unwaged work. Studies show that women have historically provided for their families and the family economy to a considerable degree. As a high IMR coincided with northern women’s introduction to industrialisation, contemporaries made, and historians have continued to make, strong connections between women’s work and a high infant mortality rate, with particular emphasis being placed on the culpability of factory work.

Women have always worked. It was mainly working-class women who engaged in waged work, because their personal and family economies and/or cultures dictated it. Female factory work characterised the nineteenth century, though working-class women also carried out unwaged work as they were responsible for a range of domestic duties for which there was no pay. We will see that women were not strangers to waged labour, contributing in a wide range of roles to their family’s income, although that work was subject to ebb and flow.

This chapter will begin by discussing the barriers to women taking up waged work, and the strength of feeling against it. By promoting a domestic ideology, patriarchy sought to control working-class women’s lives by limiting their recourse to, and availability for, waged work. Home sweated labour and its associated low wage was a distinctive feature of women’s work during the latter half of the nineteenth century. One of the justifications offered for the patriarchal ideology was that home-working mothers could care for their infants at home rather than having to pass them over to a carer when going out to work; however, this reduced their families to poverty which had a knock-on effect on the health of the family, particularly women and their children. To alleviate the pressure of poverty, working-class women sold their labour in a variety of guises, and, through their waged labour, played a larger part in supporting their families than has generally been allowed for.

It is to the obstacles to working-class women’s work that we first turn.

Barriers to waged work – the domestic ideal

Nineteenth-century censuses were meant to record the numbers of working women in any occupation, but, as a source, census data are controversial due to the way that the numbers were captured and categorised. The works of Eddie Higgs, Sonya O. Rose, Jane Humphries and Sara Horrell give us good reason to suspect that many women’s occupations slipped through the net of the nineteenth-century’s censuses for various reasons (although Michael Anderson suggests that for all its problems the census ‘is the best indicator we have at present’¹). The debate over the numbers of women workers looms large in women’s and economic history, but it is clear that the idea of the working woman in the nineteenth century was constantly under attack, and this may have resulted in regular under-recording.

Industrialisation changed the working-class woman’s life: the rationale which had informed their working day during the pre-industrial period began to disappear and with it the home-labour by which they had provided for their families. Historians have argued that industrialisation reduced employment opportunities for women in general, and generated particular problems for mothers as work in factories forced maternal separation.² Another complication for working class women who found work was that they were obliged to move into the public sphere, which was a significant barrier to obtaining work. One of the strongest ideological forces operating against women’s waged work was, and still is, patriarchy, which identified nineteenth-century working-class mothers who worked as ‘out of their sex’ and ‘feckless’.³ Further character assassination averted to them being morally culpable for the deaths of their infants.⁴ As Sonia O. Rose notes, ‘mothering and breadwinning were oppositional constructs’.⁵ Carolyn Malone argues that a strong link was made between ‘work and maternity’ by Drs Bridges and Holmes, who had been commissioned by government in 1873 to investigate the effect that women’s waged work had on infant mortality.⁶ A collective opinion of these doctors and 130 others asserted in the strongest terms, by a vote of 101 out of 132, that women’s waged work ‘increased the rate of infant mortality’.⁷

Prescriptions of the best model of motherhood abounded during the nineteenth century, nearly all drawn from the middle-class model of mothers who did not work and therefore were able to focus their love and attention on their families.⁸ These women were characterised as the ‘angel of the house’, whose sole raison d’être was to steer and nurture their families.⁹ This opinion shaped the nineteenth-century Factory Acts, which aimed to limit women’s work.

Although the domestic ideal was prescribed, working-class women had little control of the family’s purse. Without access to waged work they had to rely on a steady income from their husbands and lovers; this made wives’ daily existence tricky to navigate and often reduced the family to penury. Anna Clark points to the struggle for the ‘breeches’ during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as women strove to take control of the family’s budget from husbands prone to give their wages to the landlord of the public house rather than contribute to ‘housekeeping’ – a cause of many rows and arguments in plebeian families.¹⁰ The male head of the household was not compelled to ‘tip up’ his wages to his wife, irrespective of whether the family had enough money to provide for the necessities of life. As Amanda Vickery reminds us, patriarchy was a useful device by which to control the family. The social order – ‘master, mistress, and children, with servants and perhaps apprentices, remained a universally recognised ideal type’.¹¹

The promotion of gender and its associated notions stained the character of working women, painting women who undertook work in a vulgar and crude hue. Although Amanda Vickery argues against a ‘golden age’ for women during the pre-industrial era, when domesticity was supposedly an obtainable ideal for working women, Joan Scott identified the ‘sexual difference’¹² and ideas about femininity and masculinity which acted to limit women’s waged work though gendered notions which labelled the ‘dangerous and immoral trades’ women worked in and facilitated the passing of dangerous-trade legislation against their work.¹³ Alex Shepherd and Garthine Walker have examined this lens and argue it is a powerful heuristic device by which ‘historians [can] explore not only relations between the sexes or sexuality but also markets, classes, [and] diplomacy ….’¹⁴ Anxieties emanated from men not wishing to be involved in domestication with their family and, particularly during the nineteenth century, desperate not to be seen ‘pushing the pram’. The scourge of patriarchy ran wide and deep during the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and whilst it is not as strong as previously, it still has some bite today. Historians have argued that nineteenth-century working-class women had little political power to fight against controls on their behaviour. The need to adhere to patriarchal models when taking up waged work in the twentieth century was as strong for some women as in the eighteenth century. (For instance, Pat Ayers interviewed the wife of a Liverpool dock worker during the 1930s, who remarked that she did indeed work but hid it from her husband for if he had known, ‘he would have gone berserk’¹⁵ ). Although there was some change in attitudes in the nineteenth century, Elaine Chalus has argued that ‘there is no neat, whiggish trajectory that can be traced for women and politics across 1700–1850’, while in the seventeenth century ‘the idea of enfranchised women was so outlandish that they could only be imagined satirically’.¹⁶ As a consequence, it has been declared that ‘women have been unable to lobby and instigate policy for their own needs.’ In her brief chronology Gerry Holloway shows us how, although blighted by patriarchy, women fought this powerlessness and were able to take control of their working lives.¹⁷

The patriarchal model is challenged by Bridget Hill, who argues it was the middle-class mode of capitalist production, not merely patriarchy, that posed the most problems for working-class women: She argues: ‘Once work took husband or wife, or both, away from the home, there could be no approximation to a working relationship between them’.¹⁸ She contends that the onward march of capitalism drove a wedge between men and women, causing men to be in competition with women in the workplace, and it was to ease this competition that the latter were identified as the weaker sex,¹⁹ ‘which led to a feminization of women’s work’ and the ‘gendered division of labour’.²⁰ This feminization promoted women as creatures in need of protection. Medical men and the government concurred with this notion, so we see a whole raft of legislation during the nineteenth century which sought not merely to limit women’s work but actually to prohibit it. For working-class women who needed to work to support their families, this environment meant they were in for an extremely difficult time of it.

In a further bid to limit women’s work, women workers also faced discrimination in respect of their skill set. Many of the skills they learned during the pre-industrialisation period lost their utility during industrialisation. As Freifeld shows, the de-skilling of women’s work in the cotton industries meant that fewer spinning jobs were open to them²¹ and without recourse to a trade union women who worked in these cotton industries had few or no means of obtaining redress for grievances.²² Gerry Holloway shows that us ‘women tended to feature in the less skilled lighter end of the trade where employers could justify lower wages.’²³ Lacking skilled positions, women’s wages were lower in general than men’s, which contributed to a lack of respect from men and husbands who disapproved of working for low pay.²⁴

Factory Acts, particularly those of 1847, 1850 and 1853, further compounded women’s problems, as they linked women with children supposed to be in need of protection against the dangers of waged work. Carolyn Malone has commented in depth on the volume of legislation restricting the employment space for women during the nineteenth century.²⁵ Notions of patriarchy deemed many roles ‘unfit’ for women.²⁶ Women’s identity was determined in the ‘domestic sphere’, where they could attend to their families. Indeed, not only was it considered that women needed protecting against waged work but also it was held to affect their ability to produce children: a committee reporting on the nail and chain trades concluded that work in this trade ‘imperilled women’s reproductive functions’.²⁷ It was suggested that lead poisoning impacted on the ability of women to ‘bear children’.²⁸ Indeed, as Anna Davin has shown us, working-class women were blamed for the poor physique and weak health of the soldiers sent to fight in the Boar War –medical men claimed that recruits had been ill cared-for by their mothers.²⁹

The depth of patriarchal feeling led to a reduction in the amount of women’s, and in particular married women’s, work during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Susie Steinbach points out that: ‘Over time, married women found it more difficult than single women to find work. In 1851 75% of married women performed waged work but by 1911 only 10% of married women were recorded as employed.’³⁰ The marriage bar and unequal pay further compounded women’s waged-working roles and although the First and Second World Wars punctured this ideology, the 1950s and 1960s re-entrenched the idea that women’s participation in the waged workforce should be extremely limited.³¹ Historians argue these barriers acted as a significant bulwark against women’s waged work, but working-class women who could not depend on their husbands’ wages and were in need of money to contribute towards their families’ subsistence had to sell their labour to the highest bidder in their geographical location. Thus, despite the ‘rhetoric’ employed against them for working, they had little option but to disregard the prevailing ideology and join the ranks of the employed.

Types of work

Working-class waged work

Some of the best-documented accounts of working-class women’s waged work are of factory work during the industrialisation period in the northern districts of England. Historians have noted the degree of fervour this work provoked amongst nineteenth-century commentators, but as Judith Bennett, Elizabeth Ewan and Joyce Burnette show us, as early as the medieval period women were earning a wage.³² Judith Bennett and Joyce Burnette note, for example, that single and married women were in charge o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Scholarship on Working-class Women’s Work and their Child Care Models
• 2. Industrial Mothers
• 3.Workhouse Nurses
• 4. Workhouse Infant Diet
• 5. Day-care and Baby-Minding
• Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Notes
• References
• Index