Emma Griffin On Working Class Life In Victorian Britain | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘As well as the pressures that were placed on women by this single earner system, it needs to be recognized there were also a lot of pressures placed on men. What kind of stresses were they under? Or as the response, as being responsible for feeding an entire family?’
‘Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really easy to, if you like read enough autobiographies, it's really easy to become quite anti men, because over and over, you have the same story being told where the father has quite a good job. But he prefers drinking to providing for the family and the family live in poverty whilst he's off down at the pub. And it's really easy to come off quite hostile.
But actually, when you scrape away at the men’s stories, because when you read the men’s stories as well, in these sources, you realize actually that it's a very difficult set up for them, as well. Very often, because the home is so powerfully coded as a female space and as a space for children. Quite a few of the autobiographers talk about how things like their father didn't really belong in the family. He didn't really know how to speak to the children. He didn't really have a place in the family. That there was like marital disharmony. So he's out at the pub all the time.
You know, I think this kind of very divided home, it could be quite neg, you know, it could be quite a hostile place for men and you end up in this very vicious circle where he's kind of ejected from the family, he starts drinking, the children hate him even more, the family hate him even more. So he starts drinking even more. Your classic negative spiral.
They also found a lot of these men are doing really difficult jobs. Just really heavy labor, really long hours. It's really draining. Sometimes the work is really scary, like mining. I mean, it's very, and it can be very traumatizing, kind of traumatic experiences whilst they're at work. It could be very dangerous work. And again, you see them saying things I want to, I turn to drink because it was really warming and it gave me courage and it made me feel better. So I think life is just really difficult for working people at this time.
And I think it's also important to emphasize that not every family is breaking down. Lots of men are putting up with these really difficult working conditions and they're sharing their wages with their wife and everything is good. And so I tried to give space to describe how families do work and how they can function. It's just very apparent that it's not functioning in really quite, you know, we're not talking about 1% or 3%. I’m talking about 15, 20%. A really large minority of families where it's not working very well.’…
‘Work was really important in shaping masculine identities and being seen as a way to graduate from being a boy into a man.’…
‘You see this very clearly in the autobiographies of boys. So, you know, boys start off like girls. They’re unimportant people in the family, they're the last people to be fed, they don't get good quality food or meat, they wear clothes that are secondhand cap, you know, hand me downs from their older siblings. And then at some point, boys start to go to work and are first of all not earning very much money, they're very quickly they start to earn more and more.
And they'll often describe this moment in their childhood or they'll be in their teens by now, where they start to earn more than they need to give to their mother in order to earn their own keep… work above all, I mean, work and masculinity are so closely inter-tied. A man gets status, first and foremost in his family that’s nobody, no family, family finds it very difficult to respect a father and breadwinner, if he's not working, and he's not bringing in the money.
But also with respect to all their male peers. There's so much male friendship that takes place around the workplace. So men are getting almost, you know, they're getting their money, they're getting their identity, they're getting their friendships from the workplace. And sometimes that's dovetail when it works really well, it’s dovetailed with family relationships as well. But sometimes it's just the work really that's providing them with their identity and the family is a much more conflicted and divided place."
