Stuck in a Book

I have well over a hundred Persephone Books, and the hit rate of successes is astonishingly high. There’s a reason that they have the devotion and respect of legions of readers. And so why had I left A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 by Ruth Adam neglected since I bought it 2008(!)? Even after reading – and loving – Adam’s memoir A House in the Country in 2020, I didn’t race to my shelves and devour more by her. More fool me! Because A Woman’s Place 1910-1975 is a remarkable, and incredibly readable, achievement.

Over the course of the book, Adam traces the most significant societal changes affecting (and effected by) women in the UK. We see the fight for suffrage, the impact of two world wars, changing attitudes to sex and so much more. Adam covers an astonishing range of topics – divorce, abortion, equal pay, employment law, female MPs – and does so with a level of research that would be impressive with the internet. I’ve no idea how she has so many statistics, as well as anecdotes and quotations from major historical figures.

She is so good at putting her finger on significant moments, and she balances her research with a total accessibility. You can tell she is a novelist, because characters (albeit real people) are so well-drawn and impress, inspire, frustrate, or move us in turn. I’m going to end up quoting an awful lot of this book – let’s start with one of the moments that she demonstrates as seismic in altering women’s lives:

The change from a large nineteenth-century family to the small twentieth-century one, as a social custom, took place with startling speed, so that mothers could be shocked or envious (probably both) at the difference between the life of their married daughters and their own past. The transformation was brough about – not by a Lysistrata-type political campaign or by a change of heart on the part of the male sex – but, like most of the landmarks in women’s emancipation, by a material fact: which in this case was the invention of convenient birth-control equipment.

And I’m going to immediately move onto another quotation, about nursing, as it’s a very representative example of Adam’s approach to social history:

The second-largest professional women’s group was that of the nurses, who were 78,000 strong in 1911. Their record in the women’s struggle for work-status was less single-minded and less successful than that of teachers. One reason was that, since Florence Nightingale, they had been brainwashed about making sacrifices for their vocation, 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 profession until it came to the point where they dare not refuse.

What makes it so representative? It’s partly because it combines a statistic with the stories of women behind the number – but it’s also a great example of the subjectivity she weaves into her history. She is unafraid of putting forward her own opinion, highlighting where people have acted poorly in history, or bringing out elements of the treatment of women that infuriate her. A Woman’s Place certainly isn’t dry. You can feel Adam’s passion throughout her record, and it makes for a much better book than if it had been otherwise.

To structure her book, Adam characterises decades by significant events and movements. It does mean that these get hermetically sealed within certain periods – so we see changing attitudes to sex in one chapter, or marriage in another, or the role of women in parliament in another, and so on. Naturally these are not things that begin and end within a decade, and you can find yourself thinking (in the middle of a section on divorce law, say) – what about the job market? It was a wise decision on Adam’s part to compartmentalise to an extent, so you just have to go with it.

While I knew a large amount of what Adam covers – as much of it overlaps with things I’ve studied in my own academic research – there was still an awful lot that was new to me. As one instance, I didn’t know about the way the suffrage movement turned their efforts fully to the war effort at the outbreak of the First World War – putting their original mission on hold in an instant. Adam describes Millicent Fawcett’s decision in a very evocative way: ‘Only the age-old obligation of women, to be self-effacing and self-sacrificing, to give up their own less important interests when a men’s crisis arose, still remained.’

Note that she says ‘obligation’ rather than ‘character’. This isn’t something that is inherent to Fawcett and her ilk – it is an expectation imposed on them, and to women throught this book. So much of this book is really a history of the way men have treated women – how their decisions and impositions either expanded or limited women’s lives. That’s not to do down the work women did to effect change (and a small group of men who battled alongside them) – just to comment that, sadly often, change happened when powerful men stopped being obstacles.

During the war, women’s lives changed dramatically: they were not only allowed to start working, but actually encouraged to. Adam turns her attention to the ways this worked, particularly on the question of equal pay. It’s a theme that recurs throughout A Woman’s Place – and I hope you’re prepared to be infuriated by the different, feeble reasons that powerful men gave to avoid passing equal pay legislation, and the similarly callous ways that they evaded paying it once legislation was passed. From the outset, though, two workplaces offered equal pay without quibble. I could have guessed for a week and I don’t think I’d have come up with the correct two:

The London bus conductresses were one of the only two groups of women workers who were given equal pay for equal work at once, without question. The others were the women welders, who had been trained by an organisation set up by the one-time London Society for Women’s Suffrage

Speaking of war, Adam says ‘a quick change of character has been demanded of them [women] every ten years or so of this century. Men are not required to be flexible in the same way.’ That seemed a rare misfire in A Woman’s Place. What greater ‘flexibility’ could be required then to be taken from your office job or factory and be told you have to start killing people in a foreign trench? There is no onus on A Woman’s Place to cover men’s 20th-century experiences, but – while I see what she’s getting at – this is quite a silly statement.

And the downside to a book that relishes in its subjectivity is, of course, that it might date horribly. Surprisingly little of substance has dated in the book since it’s 1975 publication – the two things that struck me were the assumption that there would be no minimum wage, and the other assumption that university education was free. But then there are paragraphs like this, about the high death count in the First World War leading to large numbers of unmarried women:

The war years, which had yielded such a rich harvest to the women struggling for sex equality, had cost them too much. All the gains in status and freedom and independence were, in the end, arid and tasteless without their men there to witness them. It meant that young women and girls had to face the prospect of forced virginity, and parents the long boredom of waiting for death without grandchildren to give any meaning to their old age.

This earned three pencilled exclamation marks in my margin! Women’s independence is ‘arid and tasteless’ without men?? Old people have no meaning in their life without grandchildren??? Yikes, Ruth Adam, yikes. I’ll charitably assume you are doing a bit of character work, here. (And let’s not get started on her statement that ‘The Lesbians’ – her capitals – were ‘partly a product of the mutilated society; that is, young women pairing together as a second-best because there were not enough men to go round.’)

But these are minor quibbles in a book that is an extraordinary achievement. I’d bought it, as I will buy any Persephone Book, but I hadn’t been particularly enthusiastic about actually reading it. If it weren’t for A Century of Books, A Woman’s Place could have lived on my shelves for many more years – but I’m so glad it didn’t. Ruth Adam combines an incredible amount of thorough research with a real gift for storytelling. Of course this book doesn’t tell the whole story of British women over the course of 65 years – how could it? – but it is a detailed, captivating portrait of a sizeable portion of that population. Or, to be more accurate, of the expectations they faced and the achievements they managed in the face of them. I’ll close with Adam’s final paragraph:

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 right to be seductively ‘feminine’ and three 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 others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.