College of Humanities and Social Sciences National Dong Hwa University
A Woman’s Place (1975):
A Pioneering Model of Writing Woman’s History
Shu-fen Tsai Department of English National Dong Hwa University
Abstract
This paper is to reevaluate a neglected but significant historical work, A Woman’s Place by Ruth Adam(1907-1977). Besides the early debates of writing women’s history raised in the late1970s and 1980s, major women’s issues resurfacing from the 1910s to 1970s, such as women and work, sex and sexual roles, education and welfare, birth control and illegitimacy, women’s professions and fashions, the feminisation of poverty, will be examined to illustrate the methodology and critical vistas initiated by Ruth Adam, whose insights of women’s movement proved influential to later British feminist historians.
Keywords: Bowlbyism, equal pay, femininity, feminisation of poverty, illegitimacy, lone mothers, pop culture, sexual liberation, women’s history, Women’s Lib
A Woman’s Place (1975):
A Pioneering Model of Writing Woman’s History
1. The Second Wave Women Movement and the Resurrection of Women History
In the heyday of the second wave of the American/British Women’s Movement, Ruth Adam1 published her last book, A Woman’s Place 1910-1975. The achievement of the second wave women movement was to reexamine every aspect of human civilisation through the lens of sexism. In the case of history, it was concluded that history had been written by men and for men; women were generally held to be absent from history and their contribution to society ignored under patriarchal values. Thus the objective of the “new” feminist historians was to restore women to history and history to women. 2 Hidden From History (1973) and Becoming Visible (1977) are two titles that reflect this dual purpose of recovering women’s past.3
Throughout the Seventies, there was a continuous discussion among feminist/women historians about the approaches and methodology of uncovering women’s history. What subjects should be looked at, how could they be researched, described, and explained?4 When Ruth Adam started to do research for A Woman’s Place in 1972, the historiography of women’s history was still in
1
Born a vicar’s daughter in Nottighamshire, Ruth Adam (1907-1977) was a prolific novelist, journalist, broadcaster, social policy reformer, and biographer. Her most noted works are I’m Not Complaining (1938), Beatrice Webb: A Life (1967) and A Woman’s Place (1975).
2
June Purvis, “From ‘Women Worthies’ to Poststructuralism? Debate and Controversy in Women’s History in Britain,” Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945, ed. June Purvis (London: UCL, 1995) 6.
3
Jane Lewis, “Women, Lost and Found: The Impact of Feminism on History,” Men’s Studies Modified, ed. Dale Spender (Oxford: Pergamon, 1981) 55.
4
See Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past (Oxford UP, 1979) and Bernice A. Carroll, ed., Liberating Women’s History (University of Illinois Press, 1976).
its embryonic stage. She was neither a professional historian, nor an activist of the second wave Women Movement. Nevertheless, her career as a novelist, a columnist of Women’s Pages and an interventionist in social policy had equipped her well for the task she had undertaken. A Woman’s Place, published in 1975, turned out to be a pioneering example of writing the social history of British women in the Twentieth Century.
A Woman’s Place was begun because of the impetus of the Women’s Liberation Movement, but it was also a reaction against it. Ruth Adam was already a grandmother when she accompanied her husband to America in 1969 and witnessed the development of Women’s Lib in America. At the age of 63 she had published the article “The New Feminism”(1970) on the Guardian’s Women’s Page, which “was the first serious study of the New Women’s Liberation Movement to appear in a British Newspaper.”5 Ruth Adam reported the rise of the NOW and was positive about their agenda:
The new feminism is taken seriously in the United States. The British attitude – that we’ve seen it all before – has no place there. . . .
NOW was founded in 1966 by Betty Friedan, in the wake of the uproar caused by her book The Feminine Mystique. . . .
NOW fights (with some success) for Abortion Law repeal, for day nurseries to enable women to work, organises sit-ins at “Men Only” restaurants and carries on a continual campaign against advertising which represents women as only good for sex or housewifery. The long-term objective of Women’s Liberation, as Mrs. Heide sees it, is equal partnership and an end to “game playing” between men and women. “This sex-role stereotyping is as bad for men and women. There is an awful expectation of any boy born into this culture. He’s got to live up to an enforced image of maleness. If he isn’t naturally aggressive, he’s terribly afraid that means he’s not really virile. Liberating women from their stereotyped role will also, in the end, liberate men.”6
5
Mary Stott, ed., Women Talking: An Anthology of the Guardian Women’s Page 1922-35.1957-71 (Pandora: London, 1987) 175-178.
6
She had attended the first enthusiastic Conference of Women’s Lib at the University of Pennsylvania. Since then, however, she felt that Women’s Lib had “become radical chic, an introspective and middle-class hobby that has achieved little.”7 Impatient of its personal, self-indulgent emotional emphasis, Ruth Adam set out to write a social history of ordinary women as a factual corrective to the emotionalism of Women’s Lib.
2. The Framework of A Woman’s Place and the Author’s View of Women’s Role in History
As in her novels, Ruth Adam’s narrative in A Woman’s Place conveys a flavour of events personally experienced. Being a distinctive combination of careful research and personal recollection, it documents the changing status of British women from 1910 up to the present. Though adopting no overriding theoretical frame to encompass the empirical data (as contemporary Marxist feminist writers did), the author provides an analytic, materialist perspective summed up in her concluding words:
This demand for women to change their colour, like chameleons, to fit the background of their period was one of the penalties of the speed at which their emancipation had been accomplished. Major changes in their state had taken place within the span of each generation, so that every twentieth-century mother, in turn, was amazed at the difference between her daughter’s life and her own.
A woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse; three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen, for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three
7
others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen, for not being eager to do so.
What Ruth Adam demonstrated throughout her book is that woman had to adopt whatever role the ebb and flow of economics and politics had deemed necessary for the good of Britain 1910-1975. A woman’s place was in the home sometimes. Women were welcome to be workers in the first and the second World Wars when they were desperately needed. And the social and moral code also changed accordingly to justify their contribution. When they were no longer needed but were a threat to men’s power and position, they were pushed back into the kitchen again. Ruth Adam showed how quickly women attained their rights when their labour was in demand. Sadly, it was always war which galvanized men to emancipatory action. Women won their rights to vote, to equal education, to work in certain trades, to be paid fairly (if not on a par with men), to have day care facilities and Family Allowances, only when they could no longer be ignored. However, the sixty-five years of the women’s movement, in Ruth Adam’s opinion, had only pushed women’s status and power a little way forward. Generally speaking, the traditional attitude of regarding women as dependants, and as second-class workers was still very much embedded in the social structure. Even in the more liberated 1970s, women remained primarily housewives and mothers and the worse-off majority.
“Changes in women’s lives,” Ruth Adam insisted, “can all be traced back to external, material facts; they are not brought about by women’s personal reactions and emotions”8(my italics). Ruth Adam’s approach to women’s history is both chronological, to emphasize the flux in the fortunes of women, and thematic, to highlight the social trends and disputes concerning women. Her terse and catchy titles and subheadings helped to condense the bulk of English history into a neat order that immediately gave the readers an overview of each historical period:
8
CONTENTS
1. A MEN’s WORLD
1.The Power and the Glory 2. Liberated Wives
3. The Superfluous Women 4. The Suffragettes
2.WHEN THE BOYS WERE FAR AWAY
1. Men Who March Away 2. The Munitions-Girls 3. The Land-Girls 4. The V.A.D.s
5. The Unmarried Mothers 3. THE BOYS COME HOME
1. Into Parliament 2. Back to the Kitchen 3. Case for Unequal Pay 4. THE SEX REVOLUTION
1. The Mutilated Society 2. The Amazons 3. The Women M.P.s 5. DEPRESSION 1. Unemployed Breadwinners 2. Pin-money Wives 3. Marriage—the Perpetual Honeymoon 4. Divorce 5. Peace Ballot 6. WOMEN IN UNIFORM 1. Evacuation 2. Conscription 3. Planning Utopia 4. Whose Children? 7. WIVES AND MOTHERS AGAIN
1.Woman’s Place in the Home 2. Broken Homes
3. Failed Marriages
4. Affluent Working Wives 8. EMANCIPATION
1. The Teenagers 2. Abortion
3.The Churches and the Permissive Society 4. Equal Education 5. Equal Pay 9. WOMEN ALONE
1. The Polygamous Society 2. Fatherless Families 3. Unrationed Sex 4. Women’s Lib References
Index
The text is enlivened with illustrations, such as half tones from the Hulton Picture library, cartoons from Punch, propaganda posters from the Imperial War Museum and photos borrowed from private owners, etc., which also effectively conveyed the historical change in women’s roles. Ruth Adam drew on a wealth of very varied source material: auto/biographies, diaries, fashion, plays, novels, memoirs, popular literature (such as women’s magazines), news articles, and government reports. Its snappy, journalistic style, and humorous understated, yet trenchant commentary made her story of twentieth-century British Women both a fascinating story to read and a social experience that asked for deeper reflection.
A Woman’s Place starts with the story of the British men’s world as a prelude to women’s history. Ruth Adam’s first chapter is entitled “A Man’s World.” Its first subtitle, “The Power and the Glory,” exemplifies how the recent past had been gender-determined:
There were too many women in Britain, as her great days of power and wealth drew towards their close. At the beginning of the reign of King George V, it was taken for granted that the birth of a daughter must be a disappointment, in any walk of life, because men were in short supply and it was a men’s world. All the colour and romance of having an Empire – the beautiful uniforms which made women look as drab as peahens by comparison, the marching processions with their blood-stirring music and throbbing drums, and the great ships riding the storms – belonged to men. (9)
The pride of being born a man had cut across class lines:
Even the humblest British male who held no place in the service of the Empire thought of himself as part of it. The shabby, round-shouldered city clerk, who never rose any higher than stepping into the dead man’s shoes of the next one up, nevertheless had no doubt that he was a member of the ruling race and the natural superior of the 344 million natives who were also the subjects of King George. The unemployed miner, squatting on his haunches at a street corner in Durham, could always tell himself that if things didn”t take a turn for the better, he would go out and try his luck in the colonies. The black sheep expelled from his public school had the consolation of knowing there were traditional refuges for his kind, where they could redeem themselves by roughing it, out there in the wide open spaces. The Empire gave men an identity, a silent pride in being British, a patriotism passing the love of women. (10)
In contrast women were excluded from imperialist glory. The only status and credit left to them was to be “the producers” of sons. Yet even if women were mothers of sons, the middle-and upper-class boys were taken from “the
emasculating influence of their mothers,” and made into “men” in the homosexual educational system of the pure male world.
In comparison to the British Imperial male world of infinite possibility, of power and pride, the female world then was one of restriction, of powerless dependence and the fear of being redundant. Ruth Adam described what the pre-1914 girlhood was like with feminist sympathy and indignation:
The fact that there was a large majority [of women] in the population – 1,327,000 in 1911 – coloured the whole outlook of a girl from early childhood onwards. Her first nursery card-game – in which there was no winner, only a loser left humiliatingly unpartnered – was “Old Maid.” From then on, she was
kept in order by the fear of ultimate rejection by the male. Elizabeth Delafield
(later the famous Provincial Lady diarist) says of her pre-1914 girlhood that she “could never remember a time when she had not known that a woman’s failure or
success in life depended entirely on whether or not she succeeded in getting a husband. It was not even a question of marrying well, though mothers with pretty and attractive daughters naturally hoped for that. But any husband at all was better than none . . .”
Just over half the female population had a husband, just over a tenth had had one and lost him, through death or divorce. Spinsters were referred to, officially, as “the superfluous women” though the bachelor majority out in the colonies were never referred to as “the superfluous men.” (13; my italics)
That trenchant opening on the contrasting male and female worlds was of fundamental significance to feminist historiography. It demonstrated the historical truth that gender cut across all the existing variables and should be considered first. Women, so often restricted to a separate sphere from and by men, should be studied in their own terms and from their own viewpoint.
In Ruth Adam’s second chapter, “When the Boys March Away,” she showed how men of all walks of life at that time greeted the outbreak of war with “an outburst of religious ecstasy.” Then she added:
Only the women were out of it. There was nothing for them to do while the men queued outside the recruiting offices and drilled in the square and marched about the countryside singing ribald men-only versions of patriotic songs. There was no exhilaration, no sense of starting a new and adventurous life for women. They were as untouched by it as a teetotaller at a champagne party, as they glumly considered what the war would do to their home and family. (39)
But ironically and tragically at that time women also shared men’s values and wanted desperately to be part of their world (40-43).
4. Women’s Issues in A Woman’s Place
A Woman’s Place was the first historical work to give a factual and critical survey of the development of multiple women’s issues in twentieth-century Britain: marriage and family life, divorce, sex and sexual roles, education and welfare, birth control and illegitimacy, women’s professions and fashions.She treated these topics recurrently throughout the work as they resurfaced each decade.
I. Women at Work
In my opinion the strongest part of A Woman’s Place is the history of women’s work. Many of the stories of women’s professions to which she was testifying, such as domestic service, nursing, teaching, typing, the first women directors in the BBC, appeared now for the first time as “women’s history.”9
9
In a letter to her sister, Miss M.F. King (21 Jan. 1973), Ruth Adam wrote: “I have done a fair amount of preparation for my Chapter I of Girl of the Period (1910-14) and it is extraordinary how things keep on coming back to me as I look them up – about the way maids started, taking a little job near home, when they left school, at pocket-money price and then their first real service job somewhere like our house. This week I went to the NUT to see what they”d got about the rise in power and status of women teachers between 1910 and 1970 and they were thrilled, said no-one had ever covered that ground, and they keep on ringing me up to say they’ve thought of
Ruth Adam had remarkable insight into the cause and effect of women workers’ inferior status. Equally impressive was her record of women workers as the victims both of male prejudices and of external change. She told of the horrible conditions for working class girls who went into three major occupations: sweated labour in the home, factory work or domestic service. The working-class women in factories worked longer hours in worse conditions than the average male industrial worker with wages lower than males, who themselves had barely enough to live on. Ruth Adam quoted D. L. Woolmer: “Their [factory-girls] highest matrimonial ambition is to marry a coster and share his open-air life”(22).
The aristocracy of women’s professions at that time was teaching. From her personal experience, Ruth Adam recorded the feminist influence of the high school mistress on her pupils (24). She explained that the cause of sex-biased division of teaching jobs was the end of the old Victorian pupil-teacher system:
But the clever working-class daughter whose family was willing to forego her wages for five years, after they had a right to expect them, could become a mistress, which made her a member of the middle class. For sixty years, the way in had been through the pupil-teacher system, with a maintenance grant. (It was the only way to freedom which Hardy’s Jude the Obscure could think for his intelligent, penniless “sue”.) But in 1907 this convenient system was stopped; and the recruit to training had to stay on at school until 17 or 18 and then go on to college, helped by Bursar grants. The immediate effect was a startling decrease in entrants, because this meant no earning real wages until about the age of 21. . . . It did far more damage to working-class girls than boys, because the parent who might be willing to make this considerable sacrifice for a boy felt differently about making it for a daughter, who would be of marriageable age by the time she qualified and so might well only have a year or two in the profession to compensate their effort. In fact this extra obstacle put the girl’s chances back again into the old sex-discrimination rut. Parents fell back on the old excuse that a girl’s career was temporary and not a very serious matter, since she would
something else. What I can’t find out – or haven’t so far, is the position of the more upper-class teacher, the kind who taught us at High School, and how many of them could really afford to live on their own? Most female jobs right up to mid-twenties needed a father or husband to provide the roof over her head” (my italics).
probably get married. The result was that this, the largest section of teaching, was flooded by uncertificated teachers, and the great majority of them were female, 37,000 compared with 4,000 uncertificated men. Even at this very humble level, untrained men got more than trained women, and a (trained) Assistant Master got £4 a year more than a fully qualified Headmistress, as a prize for belonging to the right sex. Elementary school-teaching now settled into the familiar division of jobs in which both sexes were employed; that is, the trained, first-class better-paid workers were predominantly male, while the untrained, underpaid, second-class workers were predominantly female. (26)
The second-largest professional women’s group was nursing. Ruth Adam criticised its self-damaging tradition:
Their record in the women’s struggle for work-status was less single-minded and less successful than that of the teachers. One reason was that, since Florence Nightingale, they had been brainwashed about making sacrifices for their vocations, such as putting up with long hours, low pay and dismal working conditions, which was extremely convenient for their employers. The other, less creditable, reason was because the leaders of the profession wasted a lot of time and energy on in-fighting, mostly on the subject of class distinctions, when they should have been united against an all-male government which refused to give them even the standing of a recognised professional until it came to the point where they dared not refuse. (27)
“ The internal argument in nursing was between two kinds of nurse – working-class girls who had to be trained for two to four years to receive a certificate and became one year staff nurses at a poorly paid wage, and young lady-pupils, who paid £1 a week to learn and were given a certificate at the end of a year.” In the second chapter about the First World War Ruth Adam quoted Vera Brittain’s memory of being a V.A.D to show how the professional nurses took their revenge on helpless middle-class girls who got trapped in hospital. And when at last in 1919, nursing was officially recognised as a profession, some of the General Nursing Council felt free to make the Register select and the entrance
difficult enough to get the Amateur V.A.D. out of the way. Ruth Adam deplored this dire fact of self-exploitation in the nursing profession:
The bitter truth was that in the only profession run by women almost entirely for women, the girl beginners were exploited in a way which would have provided wonderful ammunition for the Women’s Movement if only it had been arranged by men. Probationers were then underpaid, overworked, unskilled labourers of the hospitals-scrubbing, cleaning brass, serving meals - in return for their training. Without them, the “voluntary” hospitals could not have balanced their budgets. Probably the only reason why this cynical exploitation of the girls’ willingness lasted on until the next war was in sight was because there was no yardstick of a male breadwinner wage against which to measure the nurse’s pay. . . . (80)
Women teachers were the most active group in fighting for equal pay. Still, like other women’s professions, they never got anywhere until the outbreak of war. The division of male and female professions and the tradition of women as under-paid second-class workers was broken for the first time during the First World War. The Great War marked the beginning of a new stage for British women workers, of which the most representative was “The Munition-Girls.” Ruth Adam was the first historian to classify the four stages of women’s war-work development 1914-1918; first, women were called back to their customary industry (food, textiles, clothing); secondly came the “substitution” of women for men in the occupations traditionally regarded as male, such as tramway conductor, lift attendants, police, etc. The third stage was the entry into munition work and the practice of “Dilution.” The fourth stage was the substitution of women for men “at manual work heavier than anything women workers had yet attempted.” She revealed how the scheme of “Dilution of labour” was strongly objected to by men – Lloyd George himself was shouted down in a union meeting.
Ruth Adam also reported the fear of male workers when women proved themselves to be not merely as capable as men but in many cases better. And though women workers still did not get equal pay, it was the first time since the industrial revolution that women earned a breadwinner’s wage,
In spite of the cheese-paring and the cheating and the rising cost of living, this was still a heady experience for women workers. For the first time, women in industry were getting breadwinners” wages – enough money to support themselves wholly, and enough for someone else. They could hardly believe it was true. The projectile girls, for instance, could earn £3 4s 2d a week. It was not only five times as much as the wage they were used to, but despite war-time prices it would buy a really comfortable quantity of good food, which was a thing they did not expect, even in peace-time. In their canteens, “two Zepps in a cloud” (sausages and mash) cost 2 1/2d, mince and mash 2d and beans 1d. A woman worker, giving evidence to an official inspector of factories, told him, that she worked from 7 a.m. to 8.30 p.m. and on Sundays from 8 to 5; that she spent two hours daily travelling to and from work and was supporting an invalid husband and six children under twelve, but that she felt better than she ever had done in her life because with her wages they could all have as much as they wanted to eat every day. Sickness among women workers diminished sharply at this time and they experienced, in spite of everything, a new sense of well-being. When under-nourishment and hunger has been a regular part of your home life as long as you can remember, it takes a long time to exhaust the pleasure of there being enough to go round all the time. (49)
This section illuminated how equal pay and economic independence could be the key to women’s liberation. Munition girls, even the unmarried mothers among them “found themselves so much valued, as workers, that their health and welfare became the anxious concern of the authorities”(50). Ruth Adam was also perceptive enough to quote Lloyd George’s saying: “it was a strange irony that the making of weapons of destruction should afford the occasion to humanise industry”(51).
After the war, however, women were pushed back to where they had been before the war. When “the boys came home,” the media immediately changed their tune to push women, as she unsentimentally but accurately put it, “Back to the Kitchen”:
Since the middle of 1915 they had been gallant workers, for whom no praise could be too fulsome; admired, with affectionate amusement for “playing the man” like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. But now the masquerade was over; it was time to hang up the doublet and hose behind the kitchen door and get back to skirts and aprons, to keep an eye on the clock so that the breadwinner’s hot tea could be slapped down in front of him the second he got in. The newspapers began to refer to women who did not go back voluntarily to their personal-relationship roles (domesticated wife, stay-at-home mother and dutiful daughter) as “limpets” who would not be prised off their war-time job even when the rightful owner came back to resume it. (72-73)
More than a million women workers were made unemployed. Some of them were discharged from the job they had done before the war.
Women workers in the Second World War had a similar fate, except that they did not have the excitement of getting ample wages like the munition girls, and some of them were allowed to stay in some new professions. The campaign for equal pay in both wars, as Ruth Adam explains, did not advance very far because of stubborn male prejudice. Basically women’s view about themselves and their role in society did not change much even after the revolutionary change in women’s conditions during the two wars. As for the reason why that should have been, Ruth Adam cited the argument between Lady Rhondda and Margaret Macarthur about the wholesale dismissal of women workers after the Great War. For her it was the split between feminists themselves, between Equality Feminists and Social Feminists, due to class difference, that was responsible:
It was the middle-class rebels who had led the struggle for the vote, and now it was the teachers and the lawyers and the business-women who went on fighting to keep at least some part of the ground they had won from the men during the war. At trade-union level, traditional roles were still binding. In spite of the fact that during the war they had seen through the men’s lofty claim that a man’s job was so skilled and difficult that no woman could possibly attempt it, they did not attach a great deal of importance to that. . . . (73)
Ruth Adam went on to quote Ray Strachey’s view that their [the working-class women’s] failure to fight for their right to work was due to the fact that “The theory of a man’s work and woman’s work was quite firmly entrenched in their minds and they did not try to upset it. All this novelty and change was a war thing”(74). When the war was over, hundreds of thousands of [working-class] women fell out of work without complaint. By 1921 when unemployment started to hit society, women resigned and went back to their traditional jobs. “According to the 1921 census, the greater number of women were again in only a very few occupations, just as they had been before the war.”
Ruth Adam’s analysis of women’s wartime work has influenced several later social historians, for instance: Arthur Marwick’s Women At War (1977); Gail Braybon’s Women Workers in the First World War (1981) 10 ; Penny Summerfield’s Women Workers in the Second World War (1984). While Arthur Marwick argued that the First World War helped to crumble the fortress of male prejudice, Braybon and Summerfield shared Ruth Adam’s perception that traditional views of women workers remained consistent during the war, especially among working class women themselves, who regarded the war-time change merely as a temporary novelty.
II Sexuality and the Female Image in Pop Literature and Fashion
Another valuable contribution made by A Woman’s Place was as a guide to first- hand research resources in women’s history. Pioneering in cultural and media history, Ruth Adam quoted anecdotes, popular poems, newspaper cuttings, cartoons, girls and women’s magazines, sex pamphlets, films, plays, novels and fads and fashions, to evoke the spirit of the time. Perhaps the best example of this approach was her treatment of the dramatic change of women’s role in the 1920s, described in a celebratory tone in Chapter 4: The Sexual Revolution (1920-1929).11 Ruth Adam said from her own experience: “The transformation between
10
Gail Braybon also recognised the truth of Ruth Adam’s explanation about the split response within feminists and the entrenched attitude of working-class workers towards their traditonal role (199-200).
11
Ruth Adam quoted Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex; The Sheik by the pop romance writer, Edith Maude Hull; Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay; Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness;
girls’ clothes in the Twenties and what their mothers had worn was so astonishing that it was a constant reminder, to the wearers themselves, of how women’s fortunes had changed” (97). The slip and elastic belt replaced the petticoat and the corset and the Amazons of the nineteen-twenties smoked cigarettes in public, drank beer, and called each other unisexual names. Even the women’s magazine, Good Housekeeping, advocated a liberal view about a wife’s share in housework in March 1924: “We are on the threshhold of a great feminine awakening . . . There should be no drudgery in the home . . . the time spent on housework can be enormously reduced in every home without any loss of comfort” (98).
The twenties’ liberalism towards women, above all towards professional women, went out of fashion at surprising speed in the Depression. Ruth Adam illustrated how the BBC, which had been praised by The Women’s Leader in 1931 for being the most liberal institution where married women were not debarred from applying for jobs, took advantage of the Thirties’ campaign against “pin-money wives” to kick out women leaders from its top ranks. Fashion and women’s image again changed with the change in social expectations of women. In the section entitled “Marriage – the Perpetual Honeymoon,” Ruth exemplified how the propaganda machine worked to coax women to go back home and stay there. In the Thirties, there was a string of new magazines appealing directly to women, which “within a few years had a combined sale of probably two million copies a month” (126), Ruth Adam commented acidly on the range from:
the shilling magazines (Homes and Garden and Ideal Home) suggesting expensive settings for gracious upper-class married love; to the new sixpenny ones for middle class women; My Home, Modern Woman, Woman and Home,
Wife and Home, Mother; all with much the same formula; all much alike except
to the regular subscriber to whom her own was cosily familiar, with each of its pundits her own personal guide, philosopher and friend. They all rammed home the same messages; that a man’s enduring love was the only important thing in the whole of a woman’s life; and that if you did not find the whole absorbing
world of shopping, cooking, knitting and bringing up children sufficient to
Sunday Express and the popular girls’ magazines, The School Friend and The Schoolgirls’ Own, to illustrate women’s liberation in several aspects of life.
occupy your time and talents, it could only be because there was something the matter with you. The Amazon of the Twenties who, only a few short years ago,
had been praised for her sexless achievements and her refusal to be tied down to fussing about her appearance and her house, had now become a monster. . . . (127; my italics)
“Fashions went back to hampering women’s movements, with longer skirts . . . long flowing sleeves, wide shoulders and slender hips . . . Curls and elaborate coiffures came back; so did hats, perched over one eye” (128). There were lengthy and wearisome discussions about how to keep yourself attractive to your husband. Throughout the Thirties there were hundreds of thousands of public displays by the Women’s League of Health and Beauty of “calisthenics, bared-armed, bare-legged, at Olympia, in the Wembley Stadium, beside the lake in Hyde Park or in their village hall”(128).
Then during the Second World War, the housewives who had stuck to the job of looking after children and housechores went out of fashion again. Women’s dresses were in austere and masculine lines until the end of the Second World War. Afterwards there came another back-to-the-kitchen movement in the 1950s, and the dress fashion returned to tight slender bodices, narrow wasp waist, long fluffy skirts, full hips and rounded out bosoms.
Although she neglected arts, radio and television programmes (even though her husband had been a Director of the BBC radio and television), Ruth Adam was impressive as a social historian in incorporating the diversity of fiction and popular media into her text to reflect the historical changes in women’s roles.
III The Decline of Feminism, the 1950s’ Cult of Femininity and Bowlbyism
A Woman’s Place is a social history of ordinary women, in which the feminist movement appears only occasionally as a marginal force fighting an uphill battle. Almost the only women worthies Ruth Adam acknowledged as a formidable
group in changing women’s status were the Suffragists and the Suffragettes.12 Even though women were partly enfranchised after the First World War, the feminist movement had been on the wane ever since. A feminist voice and example do appear in A Woman’s Place – often as a conscientious reminder of women’s plight – they are seen to have had a weak influence on women in general. As regards to the nineteen-twenties” sexual revolution, Ruth Adam quotes the comment of Maude Royden [one of the most distinguished suffragists] on D.H. Lawrence’s love code: “The demand for imperfect development in women and the abandonment of self-control in the intoxicating sense of being mastered belonged alike to the pathological side of sex”(90; my italics). Ruth Adam articulated the division between the feminists and the younger generation of women, thus: “This attitude to sex was one of the deviations from pure feminism which most worried the old guard who had fought for women’ s equality and dignity. . . . But to the girls who had been in Junior School at the time when the suffragettes were being “mastered by a prison doctor forcing a feeding-tube into them, Maude Royden’s protest sounded prim and old-fashioned and fuddy-duddy” (90). Ruth Adam here anticipated Sheila Jeffrey’s critical reappraisal of the Sexual Revolution by some twenty years.
In the 1930s and 1940s feminist issues were, of course, crowded off the stage in a series of global social and political upheavals. In the period after the Second World War, both feminism and the sex war were considered out of date. Most of the younger women went back to the kitchen more than willingly. Ruth Adam explained this retreat by the generality of working women:
The young wife who had spent her girlhood as a conscript or a directed worker asked nothing better than the kind of routine which her mother had found so frustrating and imprisoning. . . . the generation of girls who had never thought of going out to work as a mark of the emancipated woman, since they could be sent to prison for failing to do so, were unmoved by these old-fashioned feminist
12
A Woman’s Place does give a brief mention of some outstanding women and their various contributions, such as Annie Besant, Margaret Bondfield, Bessie Braddock, Vera Brittain, Elaine Burton, Josephine Butler, Barbara Castle, Lady Diana Cooper, Dr. Elsie Inglis, Amy Johnson, Dame Anne Loughlin, Mary Macarthur, Eleanor Rathbone, and Ellen Wilkinson.
sentiments. To them [women], Labour M.P.s who lectured them about wearing “sensible” clothing, suitable for productive work, were the same breed as the women officers who had shouted them out of doorways where they were having a good-night kiss, and sent them back to camp . . . .
[After the war] they did not have to listen to lectures about hard work and freedom any more, but could think about being feminine and glamorous. (161)
Even the wives who had been to college now willingly gave up their right to work and stayed at home, proud of being full time housewives. For Ruth Adam, this was a regressive backlash by educated women against the feminist movement. It was caused in part by some intellectual theories of educationalists and psychologists, among whom the most influential was Dr. John Bowlby. Conscientious young mothers who drank in the new theories became afraid to leave the baby at all in case it suffered maternal deprivation” (165). Ruth Adam had become very sceptical concerning the Bowlby perspective, saying that it was a regression: “any mother before them who had been in the financial group able to allow girls to become learned had taken care to pay someone else to mind the baby” (166). To counter Bowlbyism, Ruth Adam approvingly quoted the anthropologist Margaret Mead, one of the leading feminists of the period, who said that the growing insistence that “child and biological mother must never be separated is a new and subtle form of anti-feminism in which men – under the guise of exalting the importance of maternity – are tying women more tightly to their bottle-feeding and baby-carriages”(166). Ruth Adam also cited the feminists Alva Myrdal and Vera Klein that “this sentimental cult of domestic virtues is the cheapest method at society’s disposal of keeping women quiet without seriously considering their grievances or improving their position. . . . an ancient device for keeping women from making a choice between, or of combining, the two possible roles of home-maker and worker”(166-67). Ruth Adam’s criticism of the cult of Homemaking and Motherhood à la Bowlby, which had clarified and strengthened in her over the years, anticipated later critical works concerning 1950s’ “feminism as femininity” – for instance, Elizabeth Wilson’s Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain 1945-68 (1980), and Denise Riley’s War in the Nursery (1983).
IV Equal Pay, Maternal Welfare & the State, Illegitimacy
Ruth Adam neither spoke the language of sexual antagonism nor held with the over-generalized simplification “women=victim and men=oppressor,” so familiar in 1970s feminism. In A Woman’s Place, the male suppression of women was exposed most nakedly through the undisputable specific socio-economic historical facts in equal pay disputes and in the blocking of women from men’s occupations during the two wars. More recently when the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1970, to be fully in effect by 29 Dec. 1975, she revealed that some thrifty employers still used all kinds of means to sabotage equal pay, “One in ten managements of companies were said to have claimed that the introduction of equal pay had been blocked by the attitudes of male trade unionists. . . “ (195). However Ruth Adam treated this gendered oppression less as a male conspiracy than as an economically determined fact of capitalist life – exploitative of both sexes.
The bitter truth that women were victimised in a men’s world had also been seen in the State’s reluctance to improve women’s condition. Although women were defined primarily as wives and mothers, the interests and welfare of mothers were often neglected or even sacrificed. The Thirties” Depression was a bad time for men who were provided for by the State. But it was a worse time for women. Ruth Adam cited devastating statistics to demonstrate the plight of working-class mothers then:
The worst gaps in the Health Insurance system were those affecting mothers and children. Wives were not provided for at all, except at the actual time of child-bearing. . . . Maternal mortality was 19% higher in the county boroughs with heavy unemployment than in those with little. In 1935-37, the National Birthday Trust Fund conducted an experiment in a depressed area with two groups of pregnant women. One, comprising 10,384 women, was given special food during pregnancy, at a cost of 13s 4d per week per woman. The other (18,854 women) was not. Maternal mortality in the first group was 1.63; in the second 6.05. (114)
When the government had to cut its budget for the dole, they started a campaign against “pin-money wives” and knocked married women off the dole despite the fact that many of them had dependants. It is not until the Second World War that the health of expectant mothers was looked after by the State (139-142).
Again Ruth Adam let the statistics tell their own tale. During the Second World War when the State desperately needed women’s labour power, there was a debate in Parliament on “who was to mind the baby, while the mother was on work of national importance?”(147). Out of necessity crèhes and public nurseries were set up to free mothers to join war work. “By the end of 1943 there were 1,450 nurseries under local authorities, with places for 65,000 children; and more than double that number of under-fives had been given places in elementary or nursery schools; while by 1945 one child in three was being fed at school, in place of one child in 30 at the beginning of the war”(147). But the war-time measures to meet the needs of women workers started to disappear when the men were demobilised: “firms who had organised shifts to suit women now stopped doing so and many war-time nurseries were closed down. By 1947, the number of married women in gainful employment had shrunk to 18%” (163).
“The 18% of married women working in 1947 rose to 33% by 1957, and by 1961 more than half of all women in paid employment were married” (175). Disapproval of working mothers developed into the most-talked-of moral issue of the day (177). There was a popular conviction that working mothers were to blame for the rise of juvenile delinquency and that everything would be cured by the mother giving up her job. Ruth Adam commented with feminist acerbity:
The National Council of Women found no proof of this cause-and-effect sequence, and Simon Yudkin with Anthea Holme, who made a study of Working
Mothers and Their Children, pointed out mildly that “the criticism that mothers
of young children who go out to work are neglecting them and causing them serious harm is based only on prejudice and not on evidence.” They also pointed out that Dr. John Bowlby theories of maternal deprivation had “been distorted to apply to situations which they did not cover and which Bowlby’s himself specifically excluded. . . . His arguments and conclusions were derived almost
exclusively from studies of children who were completely separated from their families, often in institutions.” In any case, he himself had modified his original strict advice to mothers to stay on the job, and by 1958 was willing to allow that “it is an excellent plan to accustom babies and small children to be cared for now and then by someone else – father, for instance or grannie or some other relation or neighbour.” None of this, however, prevented government departments who
wanted to dodge having to provide day-nurseries and nursery-schools from
bringing up what they claimed was Bowlby’s veto on mothers of small children going out to work at all, as a reason why such amenities would be socially and psychologically a bad thing. (178; my italics)
The “permissive” 1960s, Ruth Adam observed from her standpoint as a worried grandmother, seeing it as the age of teenagers, the girls among them conned by “sexual liberation.” One social problem of “the teenage daughters” who enjoyed the unprecedented sexual freedom was the high rate of illegitimacy. “One in twenty of all births was illegitimate, one in six brides pregnant on her wedding-day (one in four when brides were under twenty-one) . . .”(181). With the Children’s Department set up after the war and society’s acceptance of adoption, the girl could get her baby adopted without trouble. However, the Bowlby approach then often encouraged the girl to keep her own baby, which, as Ruth Adam suggested heatedly, was not practical at all:
The girl was therefore asked to stay with the baby for six weeks and to breast-feed it if possible. . . .
The process of allowing the mother to become attached to the baby and then taking it away from her, and refusing to let her know where it had gone, had in fact originally been invented by the husband of Chaucer’s “Patient Griselda” when he was trying to find out how far you can torment a young woman before she reaches breaking-point. Its effect on the unmarried mother of the Sixties was that she would decide she could not part with the baby permanently, though she had no prospect of providing it with a home. . . . So a courageous girl, encouraged by her social worker, would set out to keep the baby herself. But the economics of the permissive society were still geared to the male-breadwinner
system. The female sized income – as the unmarried mother quickly found out – would not even run to a roof over the baby’s head. Landladies feared and hated such tenants, not only because of the diapers and the baby’s crying but because there was no male protector to pay up the back rent in the end. Sex equality had not yet reached the unmarried father, and affiliation orders were ludicrously ineffective. . . . The end was, almost invariably, that sooner or later the baby joined the 84,000 children now in public care. (185-186)
V. Lone Mothers and the Feminisation of Poverty
Ruth Adam’s final chapter “WOMAN ALONE” (1970 Onwards) brought together all the current problems women were then experiencing and still do in modern British society under her two subtitles: “Polygamy” and “The Fatherless Families.” She began:
By the beginning of the Seventies, a new kind of polygamy had been accepted in Britain. Its main problem was that no plans had been made for persons practising it to be able to afford it, since the economy had always been geared to monogamy.
The machinery of polygamy was divorce, separation, single motherhood and unofficial unions. In all these variations the male was still held responsible for the support of women with whom he [currently] had sexual intercourse, at least until some other man took over the responsibility. (196)
Ruth Adam had reservations about the Divorce Reform Act of 1969. “The new feminists of the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement were pleased with it, visualising its benefits chiefly in terms of an abused wife escaping from her male-chauvinist pig.” But she added: “The Church of England was uneasy about deserted wives left with a family to bring up; and Lady Summerskill called the provisions for divorcing a wife against her will the ‘Casanova’s Charter’. . .”(197). The divorce law in many cases worked against women. Many of the divorce cases brought since the Fifties, had been by middle-aged men at the peak of their careers
changing their partners for younger ones. Usually the former wife was economically dependent on her husband. Divorce put women into a financial dilemma as the Finer Report admitted:
the married woman, who separates from her husband . . . remains entitled to claim a retirement pension on her husband’s insurance . . . A divorced woman, however, loses some of these rights, . . . [If her husband is in an occupational scheme], one of the consequences of divorce can be that a woman loses her prospective right to a widow’s pension . . . in the event of her ex-husband’s death. And since a middle-aged, middle-class widow of today is not likely to be insured under the state scheme herself (though her successor may well be) she will be left unprovided-for when her ex-husband dies. The Finer Committee admitted despairingly that they could not at present see any solution to this particular problem. (198; my italics)
Wives in the second marriages were badly affected also. Very often they complained about having to share their own and their husbands’ income with his first wife. Ruth Adam also discussed a still worse result of the new socially accepted freedom to swap partners: the growing number of lone mothers with children whose fathers were alive but not living with the family. Lone mothers were still worse off than the wife, mistress or widow of a man because they had difficulty getting money from the father to which they were morally and legally entitled. Ruth quoted Dennis Marsden’s discovery that a fatherless household was worse off at every level: “Over half of . . . fatherless families were living in overcrowded accommodation, and 40% of them without the four standard amenities checked in a census (hot and cold water on tap, W.C. and fixed bath). Half the mothers never ate breakfast and a sixth of them had no mid-day meal either. . .”(202).
The last resort of lone mothers was Supplementary Benefit – money distributed by the State to those who had not enough to live on. Ruth Adam spelt out the reality of the feminisation of poverty:
Sixty-eight per cent of those receiving it were women. They included single women not eligible for full National Insurance benefits, unsupported mothers, wives of men claiming supplementary benefit, prisoners’ wives, divorced and separated women, widows and women pensioners.
It was less frustrating to apply for Supplementary Benefit than to go on appealing to the man who had left you. As the Finer Committee pointed out: “One might say of these women that their rights as citizens are much more valuable to them than their rights as dependents. . . . Therefore, in 1974, half of all fatherless families, other than widows’ families, depended on supplementary benefit, less than a third on the mother’s earnings, and only one in eight on maintenance payments. (202-203)
However, the woman’s right to Supplementary Benefit would be curtailed if she were found to have a male cohabitant, whom the State assumed must support her.
Thus already in 1975 Ruth Adam perceived that the rapid changes in marital and sexual behaviour that included ever lower age of sexual initiation and marriage, and fast increasing divorce and illegitimacy rates, in fact were not beneficial to women because British women still lacked the economic autonomy of men. In saying this she anticipated the unresolved chaos of the Child Support Agency and social analyses of the 1980s and 1990s that have gone still deeper into the topic of women, marriage, divorce, citizenship, and an inadequate Welfare State. For instance, Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s A Lesser Life The Myth of Women’s Liberation in America (1987), Sheila Jeffreys’s Anti-climax: a Feminist Perspective on the Sexual Revolution (1990), Jane Lewis’s Women in Britain since 1945 (1992) and David Clark’s Marriage, Domestic life and Social Change (1991).
VI. Women’s Lib
The cause of the feminisation of poverty was the result of engrained sex discrimination in almost every level of social life – combined with sexual liberation for the male. Women in Britain had gained equal rights in politics,
divorce, education and finally equal pay. However, Ruth Adam wrote: “Equal pay for equal work was not going to solve this [women’s poverty]; because the chain of sex poverty started with the second-best job belonging to women”(209) and also because of the long custom that marriage and family always came first for women before career. This pattern affected everything, from training for a job to getting a retirement pension. And the discrimination process had started while the victim was still a little schoolgirl, for instance by directing her towards subjects which were more useful in second-rank jobs than top-rank ones. The anti-discrimination bill of 1973 and The White Paper on Equality for Women of 1974 were meant to end this chain-reaction of sexual discrimination.
Ruth Adam agreed with the Women’s Lib’s tenet that “rebelling against the institution of marriage made a difference”(211), nevertheless, she doubted whether Women’s Lib could change the old role of woman as homemaker; and above all, as mother.
[I]t was now an obligatory joke, at every social level, to ask genially if the wife had joined Women’s Lib when a meal was not ready as expected. But it was the wife whom they really needed to convert because (unless she was young, middle-class and radical) she was – and is – basically unwilling to disclaim responsibility for the housework, partly from the expert’s irritable conviction that no one does the job properly except oneself; partly guilt about going out to work at all, but mostly because she enjoys the role; being the unchallenged mistress of the house, whose return is eagerly awaited because then food and warmth and order will be forthcoming. Sitting in a union meeting, listening to aphorisms about the social and economic value of serving the conveyor-belt, is not an irresistible alternative.
It is also going to take a long time for the Women’s Lib girls to convince her that her willingness to look after her own children, instead of agitating for twenty-four-hour nurseries, has got to be conquered if women are to be set free.
(211; my italics)
Ruth Adam’s observation of the basic obstacles to women’s liberation proved insightful. In Out of the Doll’s House (1988), Angela Holdsworth makes the same conclusion about women’s role over ten years later: “Traditional values still
hold strong, even in households which do not conform to them. In 1987, British Social Attitudes reported that in homes where mothers worked full-time, three-quarters of them thought that the mother of a child under five should stay at home and nearly as many believed mothers should not work at all. The gulf between what they say they want and what they actually do is enormous”(38).
5. 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
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
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
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
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
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.
Works Cited
Adam, Ruth. A Woman’s Place. London: Chatto & Windus, 1975.
