Elizabeth T., a seventy-one-year-old widow from Stourbridge in Worcestershire, applied to her Union poor law officials for financial relief in April 1871. Her application indicates that she was a non-able-bodied charwoman, suffering from general debility. Although the records note her occupation, there was no report of any income. Her age and infirmity should have made her a likely candidate for a pension. Yet the record of her application also reveals that Elizabeth had a son James, whom the relieving officer believed “ought to do a little.” This assumption, suggesting the son's ability to provide for his elderly mother, limited the type of assistance to which Elizabeth was thought to be entitled. Instead of providing monetary relief to be used as Elizabeth needed on her own terms, the relieving officer offered the workhouse.Footnote 1
On 2 July 1891, in the Stourbridge Union parish of Kingswinford, Staffordshire, there were five applicants over the age of fifty-five who approached the relieving officer for poor law assistance. Of these five, four were widows and one was a married couple. While the relieving officer's notes on the married couple do not indicate the existence of any children, it appears that each of the widows had sons who were assessed in terms of their potential to maintain their elderly mothers: Margaret J. had “2 sons single both away”; Diana H.'s son was an iron puddler who had six children; of Eunice W.'s two sons, one provided her with a home, and the other's whereabouts were unknown; and Hannah M. had three sons, all of whom were married miners, and one of whom helped “a little.”Footnote 2 Nowhere is there any mention of daughters who might have been expected to assist their parents.
Cases like these are common among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century records of applications for poor law assistance and reveal the boundaries constructed by the idea that men—fathers, sons, and husbands—were responsible for supporting their elderly parents. Research on the history of the aged poor has emphasized the significance of intergenerational family relationships in the survival strategies of the elderly. As more historical attention is paid to age as a category of analysis, it has become increasingly evident that family contributions were central to the aged poor's negotiations for public assistance.Footnote 3 Yet little attention has been given to the gendered nature of this process.
The work of women's and gender historians has demonstrated the centrality of the family wage and the male breadwinner ideal in structuring divergent relationships of men and women to welfare.Footnote 4 As Linda Gordon points out with reference to the United States, “Most welfare programs have been designed to shore up male-breadwinner families or to compensate—temporarily—for their collapse.”Footnote 5 The premise that men were providers and women were dependents shaped the development of welfare policies, although these gendered policies were expressed differently in various national contexts.Footnote 6
This study links these welfare historiographies, arguing that ideas about male breadwinning and financial responsibility for family informed the ways that English poor law authorities approached intergenerational relationships when making decisions about poor relief in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During this time, poor law policy and practice conceptualized male breadwinning in terms of family provision—the family wage—which was thought to establish masculine independence and respectability. By contrast, poor law authorities viewed women as dependents, whose wage earning was rarely if ever seen in terms of family support, even if the reality was that women's income was central to family survival.Footnote 7 Anna Clark has demonstrated the significance of the male breadwinner with regard to the English Poor Law, illustrating how the ideal changed throughout the nineteenth century, from a privilege to be granted by authorities to a right demanded by working men.Footnote 8 This article will show that poor law officials’ approaches to intergenerational support served to shore up the “ideology of ‘the monolithic family.’”Footnote 9 This ideology assumed male breadwinning and female dependency, affirming gendered ideas about family roles and economic relationships.Footnote 10 As a result of these presuppositions, poor law records make it difficult to see the role women played in contributing to the maintenance of their elderly parents.
Black Country Ideals and Realities
As has become more and more evident, local studies are essential to our understanding of the Poor Law, leading to more nuanced analyses, which have challenged earlier generalizations that collapsed policy and practice. The Black Country in the west Midlands serves as a particularly good example for examining tensions between the male breadwinner ideal and poor law practice in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, as the ability of men to find steady work was growing increasingly difficult. Women's low wages and secondary status in the labor market certainly contributed to assumptions about male breadwinning, but the reality in the Black Country was that men's wages also often were low, their work was irregular, and this situation became the norm for many men after 1870.Footnote 11
This article will concentrate on the Black Country's Stourbridge Poor Law Union from 1871 to 1911; Stourbridge Union contained parishes in both Staffordshire and Worcestershire and was known for its brick, glass, and small metals industries, and especially coal and iron production, that led to the industrial growth of the region. As a Birmingham journalist described the area in 1884, “Blue skies change to a reeking canopy of black and grey smoke. The earth is one vast unsightly heap of dead ashes and dingy refuse. Canals of diluted coal dust teach how filthy water may be and yet retain fluidity. Tumbledown houses, tumbledown works, tottering black chimneys, fire belching furnaces, squalid and blackened people.”Footnote 12 By the 1880s, however, coal and iron production were in serious decline from exhaustion of natural resources and the flooding of mines. One result of these circumstances was widespread short-time work for men, which created chronic underemployment.Footnote 13
Displaced male workers increasingly turned to the already crowded and terribly paid domestic sector of nail- and chainmaking, where many women worked.Footnote 14 Sheila Blackburn and Carol Morgan have both shown that Black Country women had few options for employment outside of the domestic small metals industries (aside from domestic service, which was unpopular in the region) and that these were quintessential sweated industries requiring little skill and resulting in little pay.Footnote 15 For men, these “domestic industries like the chain trade,” Alan Fox claims, “were a form of outdoor relief, whereby workers were able to avoid outright starvation by earning the minimum to keep body and soul together.”Footnote 16 The increasing oversupply of labor in these industries reduced wages even further. According to George Barnsby, nineteenth-century Black Country poverty was extensive: “family earning allowed just over one-quarter of the population to live above a minimum standard of comfort; 20 percent lived almost perpetually below the minimum level necessary to maintain life, while the other 53 percent lived above subsistence but below the minimum standard of comfort all their lives.”Footnote 17 Short-time work and paltry earnings combined to create this distressing situation.
The economic circumstances of the Black Country began to pick up with the development of new industries in the 1890s, with larger firms and technological developments defining the region's economic comeback. Those involved in the declining sectors, however, continued to suffer, and domestic nail- and chainmaking, in addition to overcrowding from displaced men, began a steady regression as well from competition with new large factories.Footnote 18 In his study of Staffordshire, D. M. Palliser notes that by the mid-twentieth century, the Black Country landscape had changed: “gone are the pitheads, most of the glasshouses, nailers’ and chain-makers’ workshops, the tilery chimneys, the taller factory chimneys, and the proud facades of the major Victorian manufactories.”Footnote 19 The men and women who turned to the Poor Law from 1871 to 1911 were often associated with these declining industries.
The Poor Law: Background and Context
English poor laws had been in existence since Tudor times, establishing the state's responsibility to assist those unable to work or to find employment, and to supplement low wages when needed. In 1834, Britain's parliament amended the Poor Law in an effort to curtail the rising rates used to pay for poor relief as well as curb the perceived tendency of the poor to rely on the state instead of developing independence and respectability through labor. Whereas the Old Poor Law was shaped around the premise that society had to take responsibility to care for those who could not care for themselves—whether they were sick or unemployed—the New Poor Law that came into existence with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 aimed to abolish relief to able-bodied applicants, except in the humiliating setting of a workhouse. The disabled, the infirm, the ill or injured, as well as the elderly and widows (especially those with small children) could receive outdoor relief—assistance in money or in kind outside the workhouse. Reformers assumed that those who had received public assistance out of laziness before the 1834 reforms would become independent laborers through the administration of relief based on the workhouse test: aid in workhouses would be given at the lowest possible standard of living and in such demeaning circumstances that anybody able to avoid it would do so. Of course this assumed that work was available and wages were high enough to keep the able-bodied away from state assistance. While there were significant differences in the local implementation of central poor law policy, the law of 1834, with several changes, informed practice throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth.Footnote 20
This article is based on a collection of relieving officers’ Application and Report Books.Footnote 21 These books contain serial lists of petitions for relief for the poor law district of Stourbridge Union.Footnote 22 The Application and Report Books are rich with demographic data, such as age, marital status, and occupation, as well with the causes to which each applicant's petition was attributed. The books also reflect the outcomes of the applications, revealing the type of relief—monetary outrelief, medical relief, relief in kind, or the workhouse—provided or denied by the local poor law authorities. The documents suggest that district relieving officers made initial recommendations that were then approved or refused by the Union Board of Guardians. The records define my chronological boundaries, as they exist in ten-year intervals from 1871 to 1911.Footnote 23 My study analyzes 4,466 applicants and 7,679 applications, which shows that people applied for relief more than once, a significant indicator of continuing poverty. These records allow an examination of the local interpretation and implementation of state policy.
What did it mean to Black Country inhabitants to apply for poor law assistance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? Lynn Hollen Lees has argued that from the inception of the Elizabethan Poor Law well into the nineteenth century, reliance on poor law allowances was common among the poor, and the people who used them felt entitled to relief.Footnote 24 Money or food, linen or medicine from the poor law authorities was expected to help individuals and families in need. By the late Victorian era, however, things had changed. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act had gone some way to deter the poor from seeing state assistance as a right by making it as unpleasant and indeed as humiliating as possible, particularly for those labeled able-bodied. Yet it was not until the last third of the century that the poor actually relied less upon this welfare. Richard Trainor in his study Black Country Elites stresses the aversion of Black Country inhabitants to the Poor Law except in the most dire of circumstances and argues that “old people in the area tried to avoid indoor relief even when the alternative was very low outdoor assistance or dependence on a charity.”Footnote 25
When the Black Country, as well as England in general, entered an era of economic downturn in the 1870s, poor law authorities reasserted the principles of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in what has generally come to be referred to as the “crusade against outrelief.”Footnote 26 Trainor has written that “in the last three decades of the [nineteenth] century Black Country guardians had to formulate policies for outdoor relief in the face of increased need, rising sympathy, and increased working-class pressure, on the one hand, balanced by strained resources, residual hostility to the destitute, and the Local Government Board's energetic though not formally coercive `crusade' to cut out-relief, on the other.”Footnote 27 This crusade, among other things, led poor law authorities to be much more exacting in their attempts to enforce the Poor Law's “liable relatives clause.”Footnote 28 This clause held that in the unfortunate circumstances of intergenerational neglect, “fines, distress warrants, or imprisonment act as substitutes for gratitude and love,” in effect forcing relatives to care for each other.Footnote 29 The English state had taken on the maintenance of unsupported relatives since the Elizabethan poor laws, but always in terms of an assessment of family liability. As M. A. Crowther has indicated, “the laws of maintenance had remained virtually intact since 1601, when the Poor Law had imposed an obligation not only on parents to support children, husbands to support wives, and adults to support their aged parents, but grandparents to support grandchildren.”Footnote 30 The implementation of the law regarding maintenance varied over time and in different regions, but the last third of the nineteenth century saw an effort to enforce it rigorously.
To apply for poor law assistance in the context of the crusade against outrelief meant to endure much stricter scrutiny of familial socioeconomic relationships than before. The records themselves demonstrate the transition. In 1871, the Stourbridge Union relieving officers responsible for recording applicants’ petitions in the Application and Report Books rarely filled in names under the column registering “Observations and Names of Relations Liable by Law to Relieve the Applicant.” However, things had clearly changed during the decade-long gap when no records survive. From 1881 on, the Application and Report Books reflect the greater interest of poor law authorities in the question of family liability, with regular recording of relatives considered responsible to assist each applicant. As Pat Thane has demonstrated in her excellent study of old age in England, “The existence of liable relatives suspected of being able to provide support often determined whether outdoor relief was given and how much. … It was taken for granted that any older paupers would live with relatives who could not afford wholly to support them, and rates of relief were fixed with this expectation in mind.”Footnote 31 Crowther has pointed out, however, that “families were not responsible for their adult, able-bodied members, and could not be brought to law for their maintenance.”Footnote 32 Additionally, while relatives were “liable” to care for their aged or infirm kin,Footnote 33 this liability was circumscribed by gendered conceptions of work and family relationships, which were reproduced in the Black Country documents recording relief.
In all cases, the breadwinner ideal shaped both individuals’ and families’ chances for welfare assistance. The poor law notion of “ablebodiedness” itself was structured by ideas about gender, based on a male body, and tied to assumptions about men's work. Masculinity was defined through able-bodied, independent labor, while femininity was constructed around a reproductive body that dictated dependence on a male breadwinner. In the purview of the Poor Law, ablebodiedness signified the ability to provide. As women were never classified as fully able-bodied because of the supposed instability of their biology, they were not normatively seen as economically independent and certainly not regarded as responsible for providing for others. Yet poor law authorities were inconsistent in their application of these gender norms in practice, especially regarding women's dependence and corresponding theoretical exemption from work: while married women in effect were released from wage-earning expectations, single women and many widows often were expected to work.Footnote 34 This inconsistency complicates the putatively natural separate spheres of men and women so emphasized in middle-class gender ideology. Moreover, officials’ assumptions about gender obviously proved problematic in a wide variety of ways for individuals and families living on the edge of pauperism; most men could not earn a family wage, and many women were forced to work out of economic necessity.Footnote 35 These economic realities, however, tended to be buried under the ideological framework within which poor law authorities were operating. While the principles informing the Poor Law mandated that all able-bodied people should work, prevailing gender assumptions meant that the question of women's work and capability for wage earning was always ambiguous. This was certainly the case with regard to questions of intergenerational support.
Stourbridge Poor Law Union's Application and Report Books represent male and female applicants differently. The most obvious way that the poor law records communicate gender assumptions is in the profiles of the applicants themselves. Of the 4,466 total applicants in my sample, 2,446, or 55 percent, were women, revealing women's greater economic vulnerability and dependency in the region.Footnote 36 This 55 percent, however, does not account for women applying for and receiving relief as wives, spoken for by their husbands. A married couple was most often represented by the husband's application: 83 percent of the 1,608 petitions by married people were put forward by men. Men appeared as “spouses”—or the nonprimary applicant—only when they were absent as a result of deserting their families, searching for work, or being in prison or a medical institution. This covering over of women in the Application and Report Books can be seen as an expression of coverture, which held that women lost their independent identity upon marriage, being covered by their husbands legally, politically, and economically. Even with the passage of Married Women's Property Acts in 1870 and 1882, marriage remained an institution based on women's economic dependence on men, precisely because government, public and private forms of assistance, and the working poor themselves assumed a male breadwinner norm, even if people did not live it in reality.Footnote 37 Women might have been increasingly “uncovered” legally, but policies, social assumptions, and social practices still proclaimed women's dependency.
Digging deeper, this covering over of women is evident in the construction of liability itself. The manner in which poor law authorities dispensed aid and held certain family members accountable for assisting welfare applicants served as a way to define family and model family relationships and responsibilities. Women, in this context, were not considered to be as accountable as their male relatives. Adult female children, older mothers, and mothers-in-law do not appear nearly as frequently as male relatives as potential sources of support. (I want to stress again this issue of potentiality, since Black Country men suffered severe un- and underemployment in this period, which made the construct of male breadwinner even more difficult to embody.) Part of the official absence of women in these records suggests a rendering invisible of certain types of nonmonetary support and domestic work, which women historically have provided, such as cooking meals, doing laundry, and cleaning house. As historians have shown in so many other contexts, women's household and caring work has not been counted as work.Footnote 38 While poor law authorities themselves provided aid in money, in-kind assistance, medical relief, as well as the workhouse, they focused almost exclusively on financial transactions and residence sharing as signs of familial support for elderly relatives. Yet even these aspects of women's contributions are hard to find in the records. Edward Higgs and others have demonstrated the tendency of nineteenth-century record keeping to undercount women's economic activities as a result of assumptions about male breadwinning and female dependency.Footnote 39 The Poor Law Application and Report Books seem to be another example of the need to situate statistical information in its historical context as regards gender.
The Liability of Sons
With increasing studies of the elderly's survival strategies, scholars have constructed a picture that portrays a “mixed economy” of welfare in England, in which the elderly relied on family, the state, mutual benefit societies, and private charity to make do.Footnote 40 The aged poor did their best to retain their independence, as Thane has demonstrated, “packaging together survival from a variety of sources,” including coresidence, sick clubs, poor law relief, charitable resources, and their own income and that of their wider families.Footnote 41 Richard Wall stresses that only recently has “it has become unusual for elderly persons to be supported both by a state pension and the earning of a younger adult.”Footnote 42 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact, those administering poor relief viewed state assistance for the elderly as supplemental, seeing the earnings of adult children to be the primary form of aid to parents who could no longer fully provide for their own needs. The income of the elderly Stourbridge Union applicants themselves was negligible: of those aged over fifty-five in my study who were receiving contributions from their children, only twenty reported their own earnings, ranging from nine pence to five shillings and nine pence a week. In three instances, the records show the combined incomes of the elderly applicant and his or her children—six shillings, twelve shillings, and eighteen shillings—small amounts that needed to sustain multiple family members. The lack of or low levels of earnings for the elderly Black Country applicants made assistance from children that much more vital.
Elderly Black Country poor law petitioners received monetary pensions more than any other type of relief, although some were granted medical aid, burial expenses for spouses, food, or linen. Some of the applicants also benefited from money from clubs or lodgers, and as expressed in the 1911 records, from old age pensions. Most elderly petitioners applied to the Poor Law half-yearly and were awarded their relief for a period of twenty-six weeks. Guardians and relieving officers required more frequent applications only from aged petitioners whose circumstances were seen as questionable, whereas younger applicants had much more frequent interactions with the poor law authorities and received much more in-kind aid. From 1871 to 1891, pensions of one shilling or one shilling sixpence were common for the aged, and these small amounts still appear through 1911. In fact, 80 percent of all awards to applicants whose adult children also contributed were two shillings or less a week, and only 1 percent received four shillings or more. While amounts of poor law relief varied little, the records demonstrate that contributions from children ranged from sixpence a week in the late nineteenth century to as much as sixteen shillings a week by 1911. These amounts, however, do not represent unchanging levels of assistance, as costs of living fluctuated significantly: the 1870s–90s was a period of price slumps, and the small pensions would have gone further than they did after 1900.Footnote 43 Trainor has written that “average annual outrelief payments per pauper rose during the period, especially after 1870 and when measured … in constant prices, though these levels remained below modest national averages.”Footnote 44 Nevertheless, the combination of support from children and the Poor Law would still have amounted to very little to live on for many of the petitioners. Barnsby's study of standards of living in the nineteenth-century Black Country refers to seven shillings a week as “starvation wages” throughout the period, even if the purchasing power of seven shillings changed over time.Footnote 45
Most of the support given by children to their older parents was in money, rent payment, and lodging. The records show little evidence of other types of family contribution. It appears that assistance from adult children considered liable was taken as a sign of an applicant's respectability and indeed enhanced a petition for poor law relief. In the parish of Cakemore in 1891, John H. and his wife Elizabeth, both seventy-five and infirm, had several sons in their forties assisting them, yet they received a pension of three shillings weekly poor law relief.Footnote 46 The fifty-eight-year-old Edward L. of Kingswinford applied in June 1911, noting that his wife had left him to go Scotland. His case indicates that one married son “helps his parents considerably.” Edward was granted two shillings a week for sixteen weeks.Footnote 47 Some cases are more ambiguous. Edward S., for example, applied with his wife for assistance in May 1891. He was seventy years old and defined as not able because he suffered from rheumatism. Edward applied for money and was initially granted four shillings a week, but only for a four-week period. He applied again when his award ran out, but was denied relief this time because the relieving officer ascertained that he was “now supported by his sons.” Edward returned to apply in September, asking for a renewal of relief. On his first application, he was denied; but on 17 September 1891, after being “under observation” by the relieving officer, he was granted assistance in kind. A week later, on further application, he was awarded three shillings for two weeks, as well as assistance in kind. It is unclear if his sons continued to contribute.Footnote 48
Of the 557 applicants whose petitions indicated that they had children contributing to their maintenance, only eleven were offered the workhouse, seven had to be further investigated by the relieving officer, nineteen received no assistance, and five cases were unclear. This means that over 92 percent of applicants with adult children contributing had their petitions granted, and the vast majority of these received monetary relief: almost 89 percent. The punitive aspects of poor law officials’ authority regarding intergenerational relationships appear to have been brought into play when liable relatives were not fulfilling the expectation of support.
The Application and Report Books make very clear that poor law authorities anticipated that sons would assist their elderly parents. There were certain mitigating circumstances, however, the most prevalent being the needs of a son's own children or his own family's poverty. As Thane has shown, “Obligations downwards to children did come before those upwards to parents.”Footnote 49 Yet Thane seems not to distinguish between the assistance given to parents by married sons and that given by married daughters, not commenting on the fact that poor law authorities placed little pressure on daughters.Footnote 50 The gender ideology behind the Poor Law negated the possibility of married daughters’ liability while simultaneously stressing a link between employment and filial responsibility for sons.
It is, to be sure, very difficult to assess the work histories and family relationships of adult daughters in the Application and Report Books—a point I will address shortly. We can, however, see the ways that ideas about family structured expectations about liability for sons. Unmarried sons did not have the excuse of supporting children on their own (not one unmarried man with dependent children applied, compared with fifty-seven unmarried female applicants with children). It appears that unmarried sons were pressured into assisting parents more often than their married brothers, and married sons without children were expected to help more than those with children. The case of Elizabeth T., with which this article opened, reveals the potential disadvantage of having a noncontributing, unmarried son. The relieving officer was explicit in his assessment that Elizabeth's son “ought to do a little,” refused her application for medical and monetary relief, and assigned her to the workhouse, perhaps as a way of coercing her son into contributing.Footnote 51 William J., a seventy-year-old widowed puddler, also applied for relief in 1871; the fact that he had a single son also seemingly told against his application, and William was assigned to the workhouse.Footnote 52 When single sons did contribute, it seems to have helped their parents’ claims for aid. An unmarried son was expected to express his masculine independence by financially maintaining his parents, since he had no wife or children for whom to fulfill the role of provider.
Poor law authorities obviously tied masculine responsibility to provision, but as Thane notes, there was a hierarchy of maintenance in which children came before parents. As the applications suggest, it was acceptable not to maintain parents if it was difficult to maintain children. The ninety-two-year-old widower James A. of Cradley had five sons, all of them nailmakers, and all of them with families, which apparently relieved them of liability on James's application in 1891.Footnote 53 Also from Cradley and applying in 1891, Frederick F., a seventy-seven-year-old widower, had two noncontributing sons, one a forty-seven-year-old chainmaker with six children, another, thirty-six, with eight children. Frederick was awarded two shillings for twenty-seven weeks.Footnote 54 Lucy P., a sixty-year-old nearly blind widow from Brettell Lane, applied in March 1911. The relieving officer's notes indicate that Lucy had one unemployed married son who could not contribute as he had to support a child. Lucy was granted two shillings for twenty-six weeks.Footnote 55 In none of these cases does the record make clear whether the applicants had any daughters.
The records reveal the moral as well as economic framework through which relieving officers regarded adult sons with reference to intergenerational support. The elderly widower Michael S. was receiving one shilling and sixpence a week in September 1871, but he applied for brandy, being ill. Although the relieving officer noted that “one son ought to help him”—implying that he had others who might be in less of a position to do so—Michael was still granted brandy and mutton to assist him through his extra burden of sickness.Footnote 56 Relieving officers paid close attention to the work histories of sons, registering, for example, an ability to help “when working” but not otherwise.Footnote 57 Being on strike, however, might have been viewed as morally irresponsible if a man had parents to support. In 1901, for example, Sarah S., a seventy-four-year-old widow, lived with her daughter and had one married son with no children who helped her. Three other sons were all colliers on strike in Yorkshire. Sarah was offered the workhouse.Footnote 58
The applications make obvious the precarious existence of these families across the generations. The case of John W. is illustrative: he was a seventy-nine-year-old widower, applying for monetary relief in 1901, being aged and infirm. He had four sons. One, a fifty-two-year-old spikemaker with one child, was ill himself, although he provided his father with a home. His second son, also a spikemaker, had no children but suffered from an arm injury, and his wife was sick. Another son, a laborer, had five children and does not appear to have helped his father at all. John's thirty-six-year-old son, a rivet maker with three children, seems to have been in the best shape, earning twenty shillings a week and able to assist his father.Footnote 59 The fact that all this information is available to us through these records demonstrates the significance poor law authorities attached to family liability. The detailed information, however, is strictly limited to sons.
The Invisibility of Daughters
The records make it very difficult to situate adult daughters in their familial contexts—adult being defined by the Poor Law as aged sixteen and over. The Application and Report Books are quite unsystematic in indicating the existence of adult daughters unless they were directly contributing to the maintenance of their parents. Even here, however, the records seem incomplete, and descriptions of sons’ circumstances are much more detailed. For example, the relieving officer noted upon the application of Edward R. and his wife Mary Ann, both in their late seventies, that they had a fifty-one-year-old son with three children, who was a tailor in Yorkshire; another son, a forty-seven-year-old pikeman with two children, who gave his parents two shillings a week; and a thirty-seven-year-old son, a coal miner with five children. As for daughters, the record simply indicates that two daughters paid the applicants’ rent of three shillings sixpence.Footnote 60 Here, even in a case of adult daughters explicitly maintaining their parents, we learn nothing of their ages, occupations, or marital status, although I presume they were single or widowed.
While daughters were clearly expected to care for their parents, it does not seem as if authorities placed pressures upon them to provide financially. The adult children listed in the poor law records are those assumed liable to support their parents, and accepting the data at face value, one would think that sons far outnumbered daughters in Stourbridge Union families. Eighty-three percent of the over 2,600 adult children mentioned in the applications are sons (2,177 sons to 458 daughters), at a time when women outnumbered men in the English population.Footnote 61 In some parishes, the absence of daughters is more striking than others. The first day of the quarter beginning 27 March 1891, in the parish of Kingswinford, the relieving officer recorded 267 adult sons as potential sources of assistance and only one adult daughter.Footnote 62 Taking one example, Sarah N.'s 1891 poor law application registers only her son, a laborer with four children.Footnote 63 The census of 1881, however, shows that, in addition to her son, Sarah had three daughters, who in 1891 would have been in their mid-to-late twenties.Footnote 64 The Stourbridge Union Board of Guardians Minute Book of 1891 mentions seven cases where adult children were summoned to pay for the support of parents receiving outdoor relief or being maintained in the workhouse; all were sons.Footnote 65 Similarly, the 1911 book of the Stourbridge Union House Committee, which was in charge of workhouse affairs, only refers to sons who needed to be tracked down to support parents in the workhouse. The language seems clear: on 24 February, “Mr. Thompson [a relieving officer] was directed to report as to the ability of the sons of Mrs. [T.] to contribute towards her maintenance”; on 30 June, it was “recommended that the sons of John [A.] be ordered to contribute to his maintenance in workhouse”; on 6 October, “Stephen [E.] was ordered to leave the House with a view to getting his sons to find him a home”; and on 15 December, “Mr. Woodall [a relieving officer] was directed to report as to the ability of the son of Jane [D.] to contribute towards her maintenance.”Footnote 66 Of course it is possible that the children of these workhouse inmates were all male, but my suspicions remain.
The one place where daughters appear to predominate as liable relatives is in providing homes for their elderly parents. Here, however, we have an overt case of the ways that gendered assumptions about provision shaped the records. Overall, the application books list 462 relatives as providing homes for the applicants. While in ninety-seven cases, the applicant was noted to be living with a son, sixty-seven daughters were recorded as giving a parent a home. However, eighty-nine sons-in-law were identified in this capacity, while only one daughter-in-law appeared in a similar position. Ann C., a seventy-four-year-old widow, for example, was noted to be living with her son-in-law. The relieving officer also recorded that she had a son, a nailmaker in bad health. Nowhere do we see the existence of daughters.Footnote 67 These are difficult numbers to assess precisely. The Application and Report Books generally do not include the names of sons-in-law, so finding corresponding household structures in the census records is not obvious. A general assessment of the census of 1881, however, confirms my assumption that when parents lived with married daughters, they were registered as in-laws—for example, as mothers-in-law rather than mothers. In these cases, coresidential parents had their primary relationships defined in terms of a daughter's husband, rather than the daughter herself. Most of the eighty-nine daughters erased by the recording of sons-in-law in the applications probably were not dead or absent, but rather simply covered over by ideas about male breadwinning and provision. Married daughters did in fact contribute to their parents’ maintenance through residence, but sons-in-law were seen to take responsibility because the home “belonged” to the husband. Although the numbers are much smaller, this pattern is repeated with siblings, where eleven brothers-in-law provided a home, compared with no sisters-in-law. Other relatives’ supplying of a place to live for an applicant was for the most part ungendered. Mothers and fathers equally afforded homes for their children, as did brothers and sisters for their siblings, and grandfathers and grandmothers for grandchildren.Footnote 68 When men were available as potential providers, poor law authorities structured intergenerational maintenance around the assumption of that potential, ignoring particularly married daughters’ contributions. Married daughters were granted no identity as workers or earners.
Single adult daughters, by contrast, do appear in the records as potential providers, although certainly not as frequently as adult sons. When an unmarried daughter was earning wages, the relieving officer registered her income, and sometimes her occupation as well, in the application. For example, Mary Ann G., a fifty-three-year-old widow with three dependent children in 1901, had a daughter considered liable to contribute. She was a single, nineteen-year-old brickyard hand, who lived with her mother and contributed six shillings weekly. Mary Ann had three sons as well, two of whom were clearly married with children, and therefore seemingly less liable than the unmarried daughter.Footnote 69
In some ways, the infrequency with which relieving officers included single daughters as liable relatives is surprising. While this pattern certainly adheres to the poor law emphasis on male provision, it seems to contradict poor law policy regarding single women in other ways. As Lees and Thane, among others, have shown, part of the crusade against outrelief in the 1870s included a new emphasis on single women's “duty to work.”Footnote 70 For the first time, a group of women was to be treated like men with reference to assumptions about work. This, however, apparently did not translate into like treatment with regard to family maintenance. While single women might have been expected to support themselves independently of state assistance, it was still men whose breadwinning was targeted to maintain families. This expectation had material as well as ideological backing, for women's wages could barely sustain the women themselves, let alone families. Of the women between sixteen and fifty-five in my study whose wages were recorded in the Application and Report Books,Footnote 71 only 3 percent earned more than seven shillings a week (“starvation wages,” according to BarnsbyFootnote 72), and only 8 percent more than six shillings. The median weekly wage was four shillings, with 26 percent earning two shillings or less a week.
Interestingly, daughters classified by the Poor Law as dependents, meaning under the age of sixteen, are much more identifiable in the Application and Report Books than those sixteen and over. An applicant was required to name all dependents, and when a dependent daughter was employed, relieving officers recorded her earnings and occupation as contributing to the family economy. For example, fifty-eight-year-old Joseph D. and his wife Maria had two children, a seventeen-year-old son working as a collier and earning four shillings a week and a thirteen-year-old daughter earning one shilling sixpence as a nurse.Footnote 73 Eliza Y., a fifty-nine-year-old domestic, applied in July 1901. Her two adult sons, one a soldier in South Africa, the other a chainmaker with eight children, were unable to contribute to her maintenance. A fourteen-year-old daughter, however, was recorded to be a blower for chainmakers earning seven shillings a week toward the family economy.Footnote 74 Here we have the details that are often missing for adult daughters. Thus gender is seemingly less salient in examining the work histories and contributions of children under sixteen, as the earnings of both sons and daughters were expected to be part of wider family survival strategies. These were children considered dependent on their parents, and yet, in this way, dependent daughters were actually more “liable” to help their parents before they reached independence. The gender ideologies that shaped the structure of the Application and Report Books created documents in which the contributions of girls over fifteen and women were covered up.
Conclusions
This analysis of the ways that poor law theory and practice approached intergenerational relationships suggests that poor law authorities neglected and downplayed women's roles in family maintenance. Both women's caregiving and monetary contributions were subsumed under assumptions about male breadwinning and liability. If family was structured around mutual obligations, the official relationships between daughters and their parents were significantly minimized. While the Poor Law increasingly emphasized that women—and especially single women—had a duty to work, this work was not really understood as breadwinning, which implicitly contained a notion of family liability. Wage earning for women thus had different meanings than wage earning for men. Materially, women's low wages often precluded any large financial support for relatives, but the evidence suggests that women did indeed contribute to maintaining their families. Gender assumptions influenced the records in such a way as to minimize or even erase women's support.
Similarly, the Poor Law's emphasis on the gendered nature of dependency is clear in that women, while more prevalent than men as applicants for relief, were far less marked as potential contributors to their families’ survival. The relationship between women's greater dependency and men's greater ability to provide, however, was more ideological construction than material reality in the Black Country. Although families were pressured to structure themselves around a male breadwinner, and women were conceptualized predominantly in their subordinate relationships to men, in this period men suffered from un- and underemployment with the collapse of Black Country staple industries, compromising any easy equations among gender, work, and provision. Breadwinning was tied to the responsibilities of providing a home and supporting a family; while these responsibilities would be sources of pride for men with steady work, they would be heavy burdens to those struggling to maintain regular employment.
Focusing on the issue of gender and intergenerational support highlights the multiple meanings of dependency with regard to the Poor Law. Legal definitions of dependency framed relationships between family members, prescribing an able-bodied adult male who would provide for dependent children, wives, and elderly parents. Single adult women with elderly fathers were simultaneously dependent as daughters and independent if providing financial assistance (however masked) to their parents. Married women's legal and customary dependency not only covered over the ways that they might act as independent providers for elderly parents but wiped out their independent identity in the poor law records. While the Poor Law recognized adult independence at the age of sixteen, legally dependent children assisted in the maintenance of dependent elderly parents or grandparents. Poor law authorities placed the pressure of full-time independence solely on adult able-bodied men, whose construction as breadwinners made them highly visible to officials seeking to find ways to cut back state assistance. The fate of elderly parents frequently rested on the willingness of sons to provide, on poor law authorities’ ability to force sons to contribute, and on the often invisible assistance supplied by daughters.
The ideal of the male breadwinner and the family wage evident in the poor law provision of assistance to the aged poor foreshadowed the development of welfare policies in the first half of the twentieth century and into the postwar welfare state. The pressures on men to be “liable” for family survival were encoded in the unemployment insurance plans developing throughout this period. Married women, as Susan Pedersen among others has shown, had a very hard time claiming status as workers, and their benefits were always in relation to their husbands: “the British welfare state institutionalized the very relations of dependence it took as normative.”Footnote 75 More research is needed to examine more explicitly the relationships among gender, the Poor Law, and broader welfare ideologies in this and other contexts.
