A Woman’s Place

Abstract

To begin with the biographies of four women. The first was born in 1888, the daughter of a farm labourer in Cheshire. She was good at school and, unlike her own mother and generations of women before her, she was actually given a systematic education, though there was no question of her staying on beyond the age of 13. Then she followed her mother into service, at Eaton Hall, the nearby great house of the Duke of Westminster. She stayed there until she married a farm labourer, then had two children, a girl and a boy. Both were difficult births which permanently impaired her health. Her husband died in the ’flu epidemic which followed the First World War. To support her children, before there was a welfare state, she left them with her sister-in-law in Chester, while she returned to service, as housekeeper to a pawnbroker in Birkenhead. She remarried, an intermittently unemployed boilermaker, battled to keep house in the bug-ridden terraces of Merseyside in the 1930s and late in life had another child, who died in infancy. Always busy, always resilient; respectable, always poor, she died in a council flat in Birkenhead in the 1950s.