Bread Winner

Bread Winner by Emma Griffin, published by Yale University Press, made me look at Victorian history with fresh eyes. It is a very well researched book: the notes, bibliography and index occupy a third of the book and will be most useful for anyone wanting to follow up the sources. Griffin has looked at over 600 auto-biographies written by people born between 1830 and 1903 and whose families were impoverished and working-class. She counts how many of these individuals then had fathers could be classified as absent, dead, useless or devoted. Ditto mothers. Were they ever / often desperately hungry or not? When did they cease going to school? And many other questions. Griffin then compares the percentages in the various groups and sometimes shows us unexpected results. Would you have realised that high wages could be a bad thing?

Although it is the general conclusions drawn from these statistics that are sometimes unexpected and really thought-provoking, I loved the illustrative examples mentioned by individuals. Some examples are Allan Taylor’s mother tying a rope around his waist and fixing it to the bed leg so that he couldn’t reach the fire whilst she went to work for the day. He was four years old. Robert Roberts’s mother would hurry from one room to another, asking “What do you want?... Bun? Banana? Either, neither, both?” Next time she passed through the room, he would answer and receive the desired goods – now that was efficient communication! One mother would say “It’s my week, this week” and would go boozing all week, leaving enough food for the week for her husband and two sons. Sauce for the goose?

In general, women’s wages were far less than men’s. This had several consequences: women needed men’s money in order to survive; and that imbalance kept men in a position of relative power over women. “After all, nothing kept women subordinate to men so effectively as depriving them of money of their own.” Griffin is very good on the symbiotic relationship between men and women: men brought money into the home and women converted it into meals and comfort. I have never read a non-fiction book with such lovely turns of phrase as Griffin sneaks into the text and I read the book carefully in order not to miss any. Other examples are “But we must not let the scatter of such comments across the autobiographies wrongfoot us.” And “… the endless round of domestic chores turned her life into a battle to be endured rather than something to enjoy.”

What struck me right between the eyes and then kicked me was that, if the Victorians had been enlightened enough to offer childcare on the scale it’s offered today, society would look vastly different (and vastly better) today. The lack of childcare facilities prevented women from occupying their rightful role in society and thus steering the development of that society. If women had been able to contribute to decision-making on a 50/50 basis, imagine what Britain would be like 100 years later.

Quibbles? Only two very minor ones, I think. Although Griffin states that she has resisted appeals to provide tables and graphs, they might have helped, rather than offering several percentages in one paragraph of text. The percentages are important because they drive the conclusions, but it requires concentration to juggle the four percentages cited in one long paragraph. Secondly, I’m not sure that the phrase “…like many women from the lower classes” (Griffin’s phrase, not a quotation) is appropriate in this century.

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"Bread Winner" is a detailed look at how the increasing male wages of the Victorian period didn't necessarily mean that the women and children in British working-class families also experienced more financial security. The author looked at autobiographies of both men and women during the period of the 1830s up to 1914, and she sometimes compared this to information gleaned from autobiographies written before the 1830s. She talked about different aspects of finances and life, summarizing information gleaned from these autobiographies and including a few quotes to give an idea of what specifically was said. She covered information about when women took paid work and what their wages were able to buy versus when men took paid work and their wage rates. She also talked about the importance of the unpaid work that women did at home, and how women were deliberately forced to depend on men's wages for financial security due to the unequal wage rates.

The author also talked about the various reasons for the male wages to be insufficient to support the family and statistical rates of these reasons occurring in the autobiographies. These ranged from the choice of the men to not share their full wages to injury or inconsistent work. She talked about how women worked out of the home or with her husband to supplement his wages or what they did to support the family when the husband was injured or abandoned them. She explored how working men were treated as special with increased respect and better food, and how children sometimes had to find other ways to get food when there wasn't enough money to feed everyone. She ended by talking about how children viewed their mother and their father in terms of how they fulfilled their roles more than with emotional words like "love." Overall, this is not an entertaining read, but it's very informative. I'd recommend it to anyone interested in how male/female roles and wages changed in England from the 1800s to the 1900s.