My apologies Heavenlyannie for forgetting you had written history as well. I have enjoyed your posts on your research over the years.
Certainly not a problem! I am lucky in that I can study for free and I use my studies as therapy.
I’m currently doing an MA in Classical Studies and I am now writing an essay about ancient perspectives on disability. The move from studying the ‘Classics’ to ‘Classical Studies’ is a good illustration of the importance of understanding historiography. The ‘Classics’ were traditionally studied and written by rich white men, and integrated with linguistic knowledge which kept the subject elitist. There is now an encouragement towards interdisciplinary studies and an emphasis on wider perspectives, not just as to who we study (such as the women in NEQ’s post or the disabled people in my studies) but also who studies it. I come to my studies as a disabled woman with a working class background who is a lecturer in health and social care, including disability. I am not an expert in Classical Studies, and I have never studied Latin, but I probably know more about disability studies than all the course lecturers and that is going to bring a fresh perspective to the topic.
My MA thesis was on a primarily gentile organization that was lobbying for the admission of Jewish refugees into Canada between 1938 and 1948. The organization had only been mentioned a few times in the literature prior to my thesis. I spent 4 months in the National Archives researching it and then 4 months writing. The external member of my thesis defense committee had been a member of the organization in his young university days.
I do love an archive, and old rare books, but much of my research is really, really simple. Victorian Post Office Directories, listing the female teachers, the female business owners (hotels / shops / crafts / milliners etc etc), the midwives, the Biblewomen, etc etc, all there, with addresses are a goldmine. It's hardly challenging.
And as this is a thread about literature, there's an odd paradox. Most secondary history sources and school history curricula just assume women did nothing outwith the home till - from nowhere - the Suffragettes popped up.
But literature is often true to life. Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song who did well at school, and won prizes, but whose aspirations were shattered by her mother's death. Martha Ironside in Nan Shepherd's Quarrywood, the ploughman's daughter who goes to University. I could give more examples if I was at home and had access to my notes. Turn to fiction if you want historical accuracy.
I don't understand that--In the books, you just turn the page and you see a "news" item showing what happened next. You know, in the beginning, so-and-so is planning a voyage somewhere, and it doesn't give you spoilers about whether the ships will go down, or make it, or the like, and then you see what happened next, and what happened after that, without necessarily knowing how various things are going to turn out unless you already know that particular bit of history. How does this (in itself) go against virtue? *confused*
I wouldn't spend too long thinking about virtue - it wasn't a well-formed thought.
Otherwise, I haven't yet been able to read any copy from a Chronicle, but even if you don't know any of the history relating to a particular item, you do know that all the news items in the book are deemed to be historically significant according to some criteria. (For starters, it's content produced for general public consumption.)
It seems to me that much of the significance of an event selected for news broadcast or distribution derives from events that precede it. Conversely, much of the significance of an event selected for historical exposition derives from events that came after (ie hindsight). Conflating these serves to muddy the significance of the editorial position in selecting the contents of the book. I think it also blinkers and blurs whatever it is that we might learn by considering these events.
History is ambiguous, meaning both the activity of studying the past and that which is studied.
Isn't that also true of many other academic areas of study- physics, chemistry, chemistry, maths?
I think so.
Although it seems rather less "meta" to me - STEM subjects don't look to their own disciplines to inform the theories and the revaluation of theories about their own disciplines (how their disciplines should be conducted), in contrast to literature and history.
Conflating these serves to muddy the significance of the editorial position in selecting the contents of the book. I think it also blinkers and blurs whatever it is that we might learn by considering these events.
I’m really not seeing this, honestly. But I’m not entirely sure how much more productive it’s going to be to talk about a book that you haven’t seen anything from, based on my description of my own memories of reading it years and years ago. I think it was very good and interesting, and you may not think that. But maybe I haven’t explained it very well. I don’t know.
Something which used to really bother me was reading the obituary of some woman who was described as having been "the first woman to..." and I'd know she wasn't the first woman, or even the second, or tenth. Because the story of the actual first / second / tenth had been lost and so the next generation of women had to re-invent the wheel and forge ahead without role models. Which just made things so much harder than if they'd been male, with role models aplenty, and the ability of men to do whatever it was unchallenged.
Those sort of obituaries are becoming rarer, as the post WWI generation dies out.
That's what drives me. I don't want the next generation of girls to be unaware of their female role models.
Thinking about other possible contributory factors, the majority of obituaries that I see appear in news media, and I presume are subject to the same broad editorial criteria that apply to the rest of any particular news medium's content. This would include being newsworthy, which I think would tend to select for novelty / notability, such as being "known as" the first person to have achieved something. For any given "something", I wouldn't be too surprised to find more than one person whose obituary included the detail of being the first to have achieved it, possibly with caveats.
It also strikes me that the obituary as a form combines both news and historical significance. What do obituaries tell us about how productively (for example) these two perspectives can be combined? (Obituaries being plentifully accessible, unlike massive coffee-table tomes.)
I've given a lot of talks to groups over the years - WRIs, Women's Guilds, local history groups etc. One question I have asked many times is "what do you know about Victorian schoolmistresses?" Inevitably, someone will say "unmarried." And everyone else will nod.
The Marriage Bar, which prevented married women from reaching, was introduced as a result of the First World War, to create jobs for men. In Scotland it was introduced in Dundee in 1917, and then in stages elsewhere, with Aberdeenshire being the last area in 1923.
Married-with-children full time female teachers were unusual (lack of contraception often created large families) but they did exist. Married former teachers doing supply teaching was very common. Married former teachers teaching an evening class was also common.
One woman in Aberdeenshire was promoted from head teacher of a small rural school to head teacher of a much larger school in the city, as the mother of three small children. This promotion entailed a move and her husband changing jobs too. She had a further four children, then resigned when her eighth pregnancy (by which time she was in her forties) appears to have been difficult. Her first seven children all reached adulthood, but her eighth died aged 6 months.
She is the only woman I know who maintained a career in the C19th while raising seven children, but women with two or three children wouldn't have raised many eyebrows.
And yet a whole generation of female teachers after the Second World War thought they were doing something unprecedented by combining marriage / children / a career. They were having to "reinvent the wheel" rather than just following on from women before them.
And of course there's the parallel problem where anything done or discovered by a non-white non-English speaker isn't really done or discovered yet at all...
The Marriage Bar, which prevented married women from reaching, was introduced as a result of the First World War, to create jobs for men. In Scotland it was introduced in Dundee in 1917, and then in stages elsewhere, with Aberdeenshire being the last area in 1923.
…
And yet a whole generation of female teachers after the Second World War thought they were doing something unprecedented by combining marriage / children / a career. They were having to "reinvent the wheel" rather than just following on from women before them.
Thanks, North East Quine, and for your other post.
Apparent in the 20th century because of the way it was disrupted by the World Wars (for example), I believe there was a significant amount of government legislation and messaging directed at the social engineering of the labour-force. I don't doubt that structural and institutional sexism was implicated in this, along with other ~isms. I suspect we still don't know the half of it. Illumination is appreciated.
@North East Quine a number of reprints are available of various railway and travel guides from the nineteenth century. These usually include numerous advertisements for hotels. It is surprising how often the proprietor or manager of a hotel is presented as 'Mrs'. Whether that actually denotes that she was married or not, I cannot say, but it is very clear this was a sector of the economy where it was taken for granted women could succeed, could manage and could reach senior levels.
I have wondered whether this was a career one could sidestep into from domestic service. Being housekeeper at a large country seat or the London residence of a Duke cannot be that different from running a hotel.
And, of course, with a nod to the 'literature' in the title of this thread, there is the 'Cockney Signora' in Room with a View.
Often small hotel or boarding house proprietors were ‘Mrs’ because they were widows. A middle class widow with a large property might not have her own income or be able to go out to work but she could let out rooms. Presumably some of them were also successful enough to expand to bigger premises.
And, as you say, a housekeeper could manage a hotel, though she would need to gather enough money to buy.
My gran's best friend ran a Blackpool boarding house in the 1930s and 40s. She was married at the time, but the boarding house was known as Mrs Colenso's, and the house was in her name. Mr Colenso was her second husband, and already had children, so when they arrived for his funeral thinking to inherit the boarding house, they had a nasty surprise!
The Marriage Bar, which prevented married women from reaching, was introduced as a result of the First World War, to create jobs for men. In Scotland it was introduced in Dundee in 1917, and then in stages elsewhere, with Aberdeenshire being the last area in 1923.
…
And yet a whole generation of female teachers after the Second World War thought they were doing something unprecedented by combining marriage / children / a career. They were having to "reinvent the wheel" rather than just following on from women before them.
Thanks, North East Quine, and for your other post.
Apparent in the 20th century because of the way it was disrupted by the World Wars (for example), I believe there was a significant amount of government legislation and messaging directed at the social engineering of the labour-force. I don't doubt that structural and institutional sexism was implicated in this, along with other ~isms. I suspect we still don't know the half of it. Illumination is appreciated.
There was a huge moral panic around the sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects after WW1.
Wasn't that "sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects" entirely predictable?
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
Wasn't that "sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects" entirely predictable?
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
I don't think the average British person anticipated WW1 to wipe out entire villages of men.
More so in France. Brittany lost more per capita than any other European region.
British Commonwealth and French colonial casualties were also very high.
The number of names on war memorials in tiny French villages is staggering. Some English villages too, although few were actually 'wiped out'.
I knew an old school ma'am whose 'intended' died in WWI. It certainly had a terrible effect but the idea that an entire generation of young men was lost doesn't stand statistical scrutiny.
Still, a million dead in the British Isles and 500,000 across the Commonwealth is a hefty figure. Canada lost 60,000 I think and Australia a similar number.
Wasn't that "sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects" entirely predictable?
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
I don't think the average British person anticipated WW1 to wipe out entire villages of men.
It would appear that many women DID anticipate just this! It was frequently remarked of female school teachers in the 1920s / 30s / 40s, that they were teaching "because there were no men for them to marry." I have seen this said of female teachers who were already into their thirties, even their late thirties, by 1914.
Teaching at that time generally involved becoming a pupil teacher at 12, passing the highly competitive entrance exam for Teacher Training College at 17 or 18, spending two years at college, and then a third year as a teacher under supervision, before becoming fully qualified (in Scotland, I'm not sure about the rest of the U.K.)
To embark on all that in the 1890s or early 1900s, when teaching wasn't actually something they wanted to do, and were ultimately dismayed to find themselves doing, suggests that they did anticipate that some catastrophe would result in a dearth of men.
Wasn't that "sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects" entirely predictable?
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
I don't think the average British person anticipated WW1 to wipe out entire villages of men.
It would appear that many women DID anticipate just this! It was frequently remarked of female school teachers in the 1920s / 30s / 40s, that they were teaching "because there were no men for them to marry." I have seen this said of female teachers who were already into their thirties, even their late thirties, by 1914.
This may be a misreading of something descriptive as something intentional. Until 1944 there was a marriage bar in place for teaching, and so an older woman who was still teaching might be described in that way - but that's by way of explanation rather than indicating intent.
More so in France. Brittany lost more per capita than any other European region.
British Commonwealth and French colonial casualties were also very high.
The number of names on war memorials in tiny French villages is staggering. Some English villages too, although few were actually 'wiped out'.
I knew an old school ma'am whose 'intended' died in WWI. It certainly had a terrible effect but the idea that an entire generation of young men was lost doesn't stand statistical scrutiny.
Still, a million dead in the British Isles and 500,000 across the Commonwealth is a hefty figure. Canada lost 60,000 I think and Australia a similar number.
But nothing about this changes the fact that there was still a moral panic surrounding the number of single women after WW1.
Wasn't that "sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects" entirely predictable?
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
I don't think the average British person anticipated WW1 to wipe out entire villages of men.
It would appear that many women DID anticipate just this! It was frequently remarked of female school teachers in the 1920s / 30s / 40s, that they were teaching "because there were no men for them to marry." I have seen this said of female teachers who were already into their thirties, even their late thirties, by 1914.
This may be a misreading of something descriptive as something intentional. Until 1944 there was a marriage bar in place for teaching, and so an older woman who was still teaching might be described in that way - but that's by way of explanation rather than indicating intent.
I agree, it would be odd to suggest that women who started teaching in the 1890s were doing so out of some kind of psychic predictive powers.
I agree many women became teachers and then married. But to suggest that the only reason a woman who was already in her late thirties by 1914, was still unmarried and childless in the 1920s, was because of the slaughter of WWI is ridiculous. Perhaps she would have married and stopped teaching in her early 40s, but perhaps not.
Women teachers were paid approx 2/3 of the pay of a male teacher, but a two-woman household of two teachers (sisters or friends) had a higher household income than a household with one male teacher and a non-working wife. So there wasn't a lot of financial pressure to marry, as it was very common for female teachers to live with a sister, cousin or friend.
There was a moral panic about the number of single women after WWI, but it was far from being the first moral panic about single women.
But were the women themselves panicking? I assume that what happened in Aberdeen, happened elsewhere.
In the 1921 census, Aberdeen had a population of 158,969. Women outnumbered men by 86,235 to 72, 734.
1919 - St Katherine's Club, for working class women, moved into larger premises. Activities included keep-fit, dressmaking, drama, and talks on health.
1921 - Soroptomists founded.
Post war generally - Girl Guiding boomed, with a huge increase in the number of women involved as Guide captains etc. In 1924, there were 1000 Girl Guides in Aberdeen.
1926 - the huge increase in membership of the YWCA meant that a split off, the Aberdeen Businesswoman's Club, was formed. In 1928 it bought a large property, which had a ballroom which could accommodate 400 people, a dining room which served inexpensive lunches to working women in their lunch hours, a library and reading room, and it offered a range of activities – a drama club, an exercise class, a Bridge club, dances, etc.
1920s generally - the Former Pupils Club of the High School for Girls' expanded, forming sub-groups including a literary society, hockey team, and an all-female orchestra. I believe the Albyn school for Girls' FP club did likewise.
The church Women's Guild expanded.
The SWRI expanded.
Women's activities within the church expanded - more Sunday school teachers, more Young Women's Groups.
There had never been so many opportunities for women to socialise with other women, and pursue hobbies. Marriage was ruled out for many, because of the loss of life in WWI, but many / most of these women weren't spending sad lonely evenings staring into the fire.
(Of course, the "single women" who did face overwhelming problems were the women who were widowed with young children. They had limited prospects of decently paid employment. No jollying off to a keep fit class in the evening for them. For them the reduced chance of re-marriage was a serious problem.)
Although there was a reference to literary societies in 1920s Aberdeen.
More seriously and perhaps to link women's issues with the production of literature more directly, there was Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own of course.
To write fiction Woolf argued that women needed to have independent means and the room of the title.
Women's writing was always seen as something of a 'blue-stocking' thing.
Comments
I’m currently doing an MA in Classical Studies and I am now writing an essay about ancient perspectives on disability. The move from studying the ‘Classics’ to ‘Classical Studies’ is a good illustration of the importance of understanding historiography. The ‘Classics’ were traditionally studied and written by rich white men, and integrated with linguistic knowledge which kept the subject elitist. There is now an encouragement towards interdisciplinary studies and an emphasis on wider perspectives, not just as to who we study (such as the women in NEQ’s post or the disabled people in my studies) but also who studies it. I come to my studies as a disabled woman with a working class background who is a lecturer in health and social care, including disability. I am not an expert in Classical Studies, and I have never studied Latin, but I probably know more about disability studies than all the course lecturers and that is going to bring a fresh perspective to the topic.
And as this is a thread about literature, there's an odd paradox. Most secondary history sources and school history curricula just assume women did nothing outwith the home till - from nowhere - the Suffragettes popped up.
But literature is often true to life. Chris Guthrie in Sunset Song who did well at school, and won prizes, but whose aspirations were shattered by her mother's death. Martha Ironside in Nan Shepherd's Quarrywood, the ploughman's daughter who goes to University. I could give more examples if I was at home and had access to my notes. Turn to fiction if you want historical accuracy.
Isn't that also true of many other academic areas of study- physics, chemistry, chemistry, maths?
Otherwise, I haven't yet been able to read any copy from a Chronicle, but even if you don't know any of the history relating to a particular item, you do know that all the news items in the book are deemed to be historically significant according to some criteria. (For starters, it's content produced for general public consumption.)
It seems to me that much of the significance of an event selected for news broadcast or distribution derives from events that precede it. Conversely, much of the significance of an event selected for historical exposition derives from events that came after (ie hindsight). Conflating these serves to muddy the significance of the editorial position in selecting the contents of the book. I think it also blinkers and blurs whatever it is that we might learn by considering these events.
I’m really not seeing this, honestly. But I’m not entirely sure how much more productive it’s going to be to talk about a book that you haven’t seen anything from, based on my description of my own memories of reading it years and years ago. I think it was very good and interesting, and you may not think that. But maybe I haven’t explained it very well. I don’t know.
Thinking about other possible contributory factors, the majority of obituaries that I see appear in news media, and I presume are subject to the same broad editorial criteria that apply to the rest of any particular news medium's content. This would include being newsworthy, which I think would tend to select for novelty / notability, such as being "known as" the first person to have achieved something. For any given "something", I wouldn't be too surprised to find more than one person whose obituary included the detail of being the first to have achieved it, possibly with caveats.
It also strikes me that the obituary as a form combines both news and historical significance. What do obituaries tell us about how productively (for example) these two perspectives can be combined? (Obituaries being plentifully accessible, unlike massive coffee-table tomes.)
The Marriage Bar, which prevented married women from reaching, was introduced as a result of the First World War, to create jobs for men. In Scotland it was introduced in Dundee in 1917, and then in stages elsewhere, with Aberdeenshire being the last area in 1923.
Married-with-children full time female teachers were unusual (lack of contraception often created large families) but they did exist. Married former teachers doing supply teaching was very common. Married former teachers teaching an evening class was also common.
One woman in Aberdeenshire was promoted from head teacher of a small rural school to head teacher of a much larger school in the city, as the mother of three small children. This promotion entailed a move and her husband changing jobs too. She had a further four children, then resigned when her eighth pregnancy (by which time she was in her forties) appears to have been difficult. Her first seven children all reached adulthood, but her eighth died aged 6 months.
She is the only woman I know who maintained a career in the C19th while raising seven children, but women with two or three children wouldn't have raised many eyebrows.
And yet a whole generation of female teachers after the Second World War thought they were doing something unprecedented by combining marriage / children / a career. They were having to "reinvent the wheel" rather than just following on from women before them.
Apparent in the 20th century because of the way it was disrupted by the World Wars (for example), I believe there was a significant amount of government legislation and messaging directed at the social engineering of the labour-force. I don't doubt that structural and institutional sexism was implicated in this, along with other ~isms. I suspect we still don't know the half of it. Illumination is appreciated.
I have wondered whether this was a career one could sidestep into from domestic service. Being housekeeper at a large country seat or the London residence of a Duke cannot be that different from running a hotel.
And, of course, with a nod to the 'literature' in the title of this thread, there is the 'Cockney Signora' in Room with a View.
And, as you say, a housekeeper could manage a hotel, though she would need to gather enough money to buy.
There was a huge moral panic around the sudden dramatic rise in single women without marriage prospects after WW1.
In the U.S., this occurred in the mid-1800s due to (a) men running off to look for gold out west (and mostly dying in the process), and (b) several hundred thousand men died in the Civil War.
I don't think the average British person anticipated WW1 to wipe out entire villages of men.
British Commonwealth and French colonial casualties were also very high.
The number of names on war memorials in tiny French villages is staggering. Some English villages too, although few were actually 'wiped out'.
I knew an old school ma'am whose 'intended' died in WWI. It certainly had a terrible effect but the idea that an entire generation of young men was lost doesn't stand statistical scrutiny.
Still, a million dead in the British Isles and 500,000 across the Commonwealth is a hefty figure. Canada lost 60,000 I think and Australia a similar number.
It would appear that many women DID anticipate just this! It was frequently remarked of female school teachers in the 1920s / 30s / 40s, that they were teaching "because there were no men for them to marry." I have seen this said of female teachers who were already into their thirties, even their late thirties, by 1914.
Teaching at that time generally involved becoming a pupil teacher at 12, passing the highly competitive entrance exam for Teacher Training College at 17 or 18, spending two years at college, and then a third year as a teacher under supervision, before becoming fully qualified (in Scotland, I'm not sure about the rest of the U.K.)
To embark on all that in the 1890s or early 1900s, when teaching wasn't actually something they wanted to do, and were ultimately dismayed to find themselves doing, suggests that they did anticipate that some catastrophe would result in a dearth of men.
This may be a misreading of something descriptive as something intentional. Until 1944 there was a marriage bar in place for teaching, and so an older woman who was still teaching might be described in that way - but that's by way of explanation rather than indicating intent.
But nothing about this changes the fact that there was still a moral panic surrounding the number of single women after WW1.
I agree, it would be odd to suggest that women who started teaching in the 1890s were doing so out of some kind of psychic predictive powers.
I agree many women became teachers and then married. But to suggest that the only reason a woman who was already in her late thirties by 1914, was still unmarried and childless in the 1920s, was because of the slaughter of WWI is ridiculous. Perhaps she would have married and stopped teaching in her early 40s, but perhaps not.
Women teachers were paid approx 2/3 of the pay of a male teacher, but a two-woman household of two teachers (sisters or friends) had a higher household income than a household with one male teacher and a non-working wife. So there wasn't a lot of financial pressure to marry, as it was very common for female teachers to live with a sister, cousin or friend.
But were the women themselves panicking? I assume that what happened in Aberdeen, happened elsewhere.
In the 1921 census, Aberdeen had a population of 158,969. Women outnumbered men by 86,235 to 72, 734.
1919 - St Katherine's Club, for working class women, moved into larger premises. Activities included keep-fit, dressmaking, drama, and talks on health.
1921 - Soroptomists founded.
Post war generally - Girl Guiding boomed, with a huge increase in the number of women involved as Guide captains etc. In 1924, there were 1000 Girl Guides in Aberdeen.
1926 - the huge increase in membership of the YWCA meant that a split off, the Aberdeen Businesswoman's Club, was formed. In 1928 it bought a large property, which had a ballroom which could accommodate 400 people, a dining room which served inexpensive lunches to working women in their lunch hours, a library and reading room, and it offered a range of activities – a drama club, an exercise class, a Bridge club, dances, etc.
1920s generally - the Former Pupils Club of the High School for Girls' expanded, forming sub-groups including a literary society, hockey team, and an all-female orchestra. I believe the Albyn school for Girls' FP club did likewise.
The church Women's Guild expanded.
The SWRI expanded.
Women's activities within the church expanded - more Sunday school teachers, more Young Women's Groups.
There had never been so many opportunities for women to socialise with other women, and pursue hobbies. Marriage was ruled out for many, because of the loss of life in WWI, but many / most of these women weren't spending sad lonely evenings staring into the fire.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
Although there was a reference to literary societies in 1920s Aberdeen.
More seriously and perhaps to link women's issues with the production of literature more directly, there was Virginia Woolf's A Room Of One's Own of course.
To write fiction Woolf argued that women needed to have independent means and the room of the title.
Women's writing was always seen as something of a 'blue-stocking' thing.