A Woman’s Place, a neglected work of British women’s history?

In the mid 1970s when not a single general social history of twentieth century British women could be found, A Woman’s Place appeared as the first example of writing a “women- centred” history. But it was not duly appreciated in feminist circles when it was published. It was even absent from the most widely circulated feminist magazine at that time, Spare Rib, which had a regular book review in which authors were interviewed and their newly published books introduced. Women’s Report, a non-profitable short newsletter at that time, did write about it briefly:

A Woman’s Place shows how the image and lives of women have been manipulated, directly and indirectly during this century in accordance with the needs of a society at war, and then at peace. It concentrates on historical events (e.g. two world wars, changes in sex balance in the population) often beyond the control of women, which have contributed to the “social revolution.” Whilst providing some very useful information and using a variety of sources (diaries, parliamentary reports, films, literature and fashion) the later chapters on contemporary events are facile and often don’t ring true. With reservations good reading.¹³

“Facile and doesn’t ring true” about her report of Women’s Liberation movement accounted for why A Woman’s Place was neglected in radical feminist

13 Women’s Report, Dec. 1975.

circles. Ruth Adam’s comment on contemporary Women’s Lib in Britain had been:

Although the idea of the movement quickly caught on, and its name became part of the language overnight, it was not taken very seriously by the older feminist organisations, though most of them were careful not to “knock” it. It did not spread, gaining a mass of mixed supporters within months, as it had in the United States. This was partly because the standard requirements for sex equality – such as equal education, jobs, opportunities and legal rights – were already being looked after by home-grown organisations such as the National Council for Civil Liberties, the Birth Control Campaign, the Child Poverty Action Group; and in addition all three political parties were overtaken by the panic which had overtaken their predecessors when Women’s Suffrage was conceded; that female voters might support the party which offered most Women’s Rights ( a totally unfounded fear, on the evidence) and had appointed committees to decide on how discrimination was to be ended by Act of Parliament. Besides this, the principle of emotional hostility towards men, as a duty, seemed curiously out of date, sixty years after the suffragettes. It belonged to the beginning of the struggle for sex equality, when it had been necessary to work up a head of steam to start the sex war. But by the Seventies, the sex war was over and the details of the peace treaty were being worked out, and it was altogether too late to resurrect the old battle slogans. (208)

Ruth Adam’s judgment that the crux of “Women’s Lib” was “emotional hostility towards men as a duty,” which was “out of date,” was indeed categoric and disparaging to those women of a younger generation, many of them lesbians, who were still in the fever of revolution. Ruth Adam’s pessimistic view of women history provoked a cry of protest when it was published in America. Linda Pyke, a freelance writer, commented in Canadian Forum,

Immersing oneself in Ruth Adam’s A Woman’s Place, one is tempted to cry out “curiouser and curiouser” in despair not only of woman’s helplessness as presented by the author but also of Ms. Adam’s lack of profound analysis of the root causes of the manipulation and exploitation of woman, a manipulation begun

not in 1910 but in the time when men and women first evolved and cohabited.

Although it is the obvious aim of Ms. Adam to chronicle the history of the acquisition of women’s rights in Britain and her ever-changing role and lifestyle during the 1900’s, one ultimately feels dissatisfied with this volume. . . .

Is Ruth Adam a feminist? It would appear not. Her approach to her subject is factual and superficial; she does not begin to analyze or even acknowledge the complexities of masculine/feminine tension, aggression and hostility on the part of the male, passivity – even complicity – on the part of the female. Rape, the battered wife syndrome, prostitution, the exploitation of women in pornography, the “dirty joke” Ms. Adam does not deem worthy of discussion.

Certainly there is a sense of outrage evident as Ms. Adam wends her way through the decades but by the 1960s and 1970s one finds her bland and bored.

She refers to “Women’s Lib girls,” cites Betty Friedan as founder of the new movement but ignores altogether the scholarly contributions of de Beauvoir, Greer and Millett. Where once she listed all the early female MPs and their life histories, she does not even bother to reveal how many there are in 1975. She names no major feminists in Britain currently working for reform, and she suggests that women’s liberation as a movement is now passé. The legislation is there; the average woman is indifferent; and ultimately, Ruth Adam, after chronicling the struggle, sounds indifferent too.¹⁴

Linda Pyke’s opinion represented the younger feminists” dissatisfaction with Ruth Adam’s old-fashioned factual objective approach to women’s oppression in society – her specific socio-economic analysis that eschewed universalist, essentialist, psychological theories of male domination conspiracies. For them she seemed deliberately ignorant of the enterprise of their new feminist

“gendered” approach, an attempt to go to the root causes of women’s oppression and of the gendered power-relationship in every life – and in almost every aspect of life.

Neither has A Woman’s Place been recognised since by professional feminist historians. For instance, in Jane Lewis’s “Women, Lost and Found: The

14 Linda Pyke, Canadian Forum 56 (June 1976): 36-38.

Impact of Feminism on History” in Men’s Studies Modified (1981), not a word is mentioned about A Woman’s Place in its several-pages-long survey of the pioneering women’s history written in the late 1960s and 1970s. It is also absent in June Purvis’s survey of the history of writing women’s history in “‘From Women Worthies’ to Post-Structuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain” in Women’s History Britain, 1850-1945 (1995), and even more surprisingly it is left out the bibliography of Sheila Rowbotham’s A Century of Women (1997). If Ruth Adam’s deflating remark on Women’s Lib had knocked herself out of favour with the feminist magazines after 1970s, it may be the case that Ruth Adam herself, being neither a noted historian nor a high-profile activist in any feminist organisation, was ignored because she was, now, an elderly outsider among younger feminist historians.

Another factor is that A Woman’s Place was written for the general reader and not for an academic audience. It had some obvious methodological faults, lacking a bibliography, scholarly apparatus of clear notes and coherent conclusion.

In addition, Linda Pyke found it insufficiently literary:

Astonishingly, there is no mention – not even fleeting – of early British advocates of reform; Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women,” published in 1792, is ignored as is the feminist stance of John Stuart Mill. Furthermore, the young women of 1910 were reading the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the novels of the Brontës, Jane Austen and George Eliot; and yet these female literary figures and their heroines, although providing certain role models, shaping the dreams and aspirations of the young, go completely unmentioned.

Throughout A Woman’s Place, one wonders at Ms. Adam’s criteria in choosing priorities: literature is a case in point. Novels about women are selected at random; women novelists are largely ignored. The most glaring omission: where is Virginia Woolf? . . .¹⁵

15 Ibid.

But of course for ordinary “working” women as opposed to intellectuals, Virginia Woolf had no pressing relevance.

Despite these flaws, A Woman’s Place was a remarkable, pioneering achievement in social history. Ruth Adam was the first writer to undertake the daunting task of writing a general history of British women in the Twentieth Century. A Woman’s Place was the first chronological textbook treatment that brought together very varied women’s issues and tried to interpret them analytically – however cursorily. It explored almost every aspect of women’s experience, of which more than half were beginning to be featured for the first time in Women’s Studies. Its use of contemporary photographs, cartoons, and magazine illustrations added an attractive, witty and perceptive visual comment on its main themes. The later researchers who deal with the same period could find her book a rich resource of reference and in some ways a model for representing women’s history.

Moreover, Ruth Adam’s writing strategy was impressive. There was an acute sense of irony, which any history of women certainly demands, for instance in the narration of the First World War and women’s fight for equal pay. There was also an intelligent objectivity in her selection, description and explanation of facts, which effectively documentated women’s oppression in male society without resorting to the dogmatic “Anti-patriarchal” cliché popular at the time.

As the philosopher Kathleen Nott appreciated in the Observer (7 Dec.1975:32):

In the current spate of books about women, Miss [sic] Adam’s contribution comes as a great relief. For once, facts have a long lead over opinion and emotion, and the psycho-analytical or subjective approach is completely excluded:

“woman” is a non-starter. . . .

Miss Adam’s eye for significant detail is very good as well as mildly sardonic. This, with a crisp, terse and workmanlike style, makes for commendably light reading, without weakening a serious purpose.

A Woman’s Place is a humane history in which men too are treated sympathetically as the victims of imperialist values and economic depression.

Arthur Marwick, a well-known historian, wrote in the preface to his Women at War 1914-1918 (1977): “ I would just like to comment that in reading Ruth Adam’s excellent, if all too brief, A Woman’s Place, 1910-1975 (1975), I was at least as much struck by the illumination this book casts on the role of men as it does on the role of women” (8).

But while Kathleen Nott and Arthur Marwick affirmed Ruth Adam’s non-sexist factual approach, A Woman’s Place was condemned as “unfeminist,” as we have seen, by the Canadian Linda Pyke on account of Ruth Adam’s unwillingness to indict male oppression for its “manipulation and exploitation of women” ever since time began. Instead, Ruth Adam’s empirical study pioneered the approach based on the theoretical assumption, in Deborah Thom’s formulation, that women are not a unitary category, that women are not victims, tout court, that womanhood as a concept does not wholly determine their passive lives as opposed to they themselves intervening whenever possible.¹⁶ Nevertheless, Ruth Adam did insist on writing a gendered social history of twentieth-century Britain.

Therefore, instead of being an “either/orer” she was a “both/ander,” fully aware of

“the twin insights feminism has brought to history”¹⁷; – i.e. the study of what women have in common and of the differences between them. She tried with more than a little success to resolve the conflict in writing women’s history, that between writing “feminist history” and writing “the history of women”:

There remains a paradox at heart of the relationship between feminism and history – that to prioritize the simple, single divide of gender is to make visible the one feature of life that may systematically oppress women or, if celebrated as an alternative view of the hierarchy of power, disempower them in a world of common humanity. To talk of woman is to hide the individual woman or to reduce her to what is the lowest common denominator in her life and that of others. . . .

16 See Deborah Thom, “A Lop-sided View: Feminist History or the History of Women? Critical Feminism, ed. Kate Campbell (Buckmingham: Open UP, 1992) 47.

17 Ibid.

The tension remains between a history which raises the question of one fundamental difference between the two sexes and how that discourse works, and a history which looks at women and their differences – but only histories which allow for both will gain from the twin insights feminism has brought to history;

either alone will remain a little lop-sided.¹⁸

Ruth Adam’s factual approach to history unites these two tendencies. From a feminist angle, she emphasized the historical fact of women as constituting in part, a unitary category of victims under patriarchal structures – Male Government, Male Church, Male Trade Union, Male Employers; but as a social historian of ordinary women she also identified the “non-unitary” classes and professional differences between women and their very varied individual abilities to change their fortunes.

As time passes, A Woman’s Place reveals more and more of its value. Ruth Adam’s provocative insights into women’s questions open up a number of later critical research interests in topics such as women workers, anti-Bowlbyism, the cult of femininity in the 1950s, and lone-mothers. Her pessimistic view of twentieth-century women’s history and her discouraging judgment of Women’s Lib might have been irritating in its time. However, twenty years later, her judgment as to the causes of the slow change in women’s condition is still worth pondering.

Finally, Ruth Adam made women’s history publicly accessible and interesting to read:

[S]he has documented the changing status of women from 1910 to 1975 with humour, with evocative insight and with an unerring eye for the developments that mattered. . . .

What Mrs. Adam has done is to provide us with a readable, immaculately researched and presented study which should immediately take its place as a standard work on the subject. It should also provide much food for those who,

18 Deborah Thom, 48-49.

like myself, had not appreciated the extent to which the second-class citizenship had been an accepted status for women. . . . (Kate Philips, Church of England Newspaper 24 Oct. 1975)

If any woman, even at this later hour, finds herself wanting to read just one account of her sisters’ past struggles, then I recommend Mrs. Adam’s lucid and elegantly readable narrative. (Antonia Fraser, dustjacket on A Woman’s Place, American edition, Norton Press: 1977)

Ruth Adam describes the extraordinary story of women’s emancipation from the time of the suffragettes to contemporary Women’s Lib. Witty, intelligent and humane, she draws on a wealth of source material to illustrate what it has been like to be a woman since Victorian times. Her book is one which will bring the story to life for men and women of every generation.

(Dustjacket on A Woman’s Place, Reader’s Union Group of Book Clubs, Newton Abbot 1976)

Ruth Adam had successfully condensed women’s history into a book for the general reader without weakening her serious purpose of addressing women’s

recurrent dilemmas. Her hope must surely have been that her young feminist readers would learn from her interpretation of twentieth-century British women’s history (an interpretation that included both motherhood and professional work and fused materialist class analysis with social psychology) and so avoid, or remedy, at least some of their foremothers” mistakes.

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