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Women's voices

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Margaret’s legacy: women’s voices

 

If you ask a bookshop to find titles by Margaret Llewelyn Davies they will only come up with two, and you may be disappointed to discover that she was the editor rather than the author. But this is actually what makes them special. In these two collections, Guildswomen tell us about their lives in their own words – and those words are dynamite.

 

Before she published these, Margaret had already done something similar. Invited to give evidence to a Royal Commission on divorce law reform, she had written to Guildswomen and presented their responses verbatim to the Commission. Their shocking testimony exposed women’s suffering and contained direct accounts of domestic abuse, including rape within marriage, at a time when this went largely unspoken and unrecognised. And while the Guild later published the evidence in a pamphlet, it does not appear to have had a lasting impact, reflecting a prevailing culture of silence.

 

With the maternity campaign a few years later, the response was different. Once again, Margaret gathered letters from Guildswomen, and she used them to great effect in lobbying for maternity services. In September 1915 she published 160, along with her own hard-hitting introduction.  Tapping into wartime anxiety about high infant mortality and the health of Britain’s future soldiers, ‘Maternity, Letters from Working Women’ proved a runaway success. Two editions quickly sold out to glowing reviews, ranging from The Times: ‘A book of notable interest and of singular distinction’  to the socialist Labour Leader: ‘The authentic voice of our working women mothers, imparting to the world … a knowledge of their suffering’.

 

The letters bring that suffering to vivid life. Unable to afford adequate maternity treatment, many women developed serious illnesses, often exacerbated by frequent pregnancies. One in four reported the death of a child before its first birthday, and there were frequent miscarriages.

 

'For fifteen years I was in a very poor state of health owing to continual pregnancy. As soon as I was over one trouble, it was all started over again…. I have had four children and ten miscarriages, three before the first child, each of them between three and four months.'

 

Lack of money was a key factor.  Even when heavily pregnant, women were often forced to fit in casual work on top of their regular heavy household routine, in order to scrape together a little money for an unskilled midwife or a single visit from a doctor.  And when the money would not stretch to feed a family, the mother came last: some were even so malnourished that they could not breastfeed.

 

‘I can say truthfully my children have died from my worrying how to make two ends meet and also insufficient food. A woman with little wage has to go without a great deal at those times [ie around birth]), as we must give our husbands sufficient food or we should have them home and not able to work .’

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Margaret published the second book, ‘Life as we have known it’, in 1931, ten years after she retired. Writing to a friend, she explained: ‘I should like people to see what they [Guildswomen]  have gone through, and how they have built up a new life for themselves, and how much the ‘bringing of them out’ has meant in their lives’.   

 

With an introductory letter by Virginia Woolf, the book consisted of letters and reminiscences from older Guild activists, who had come through from poor backgrounds to take on prominent positions in the Guild and other public life. 

 

Again, there are some shocking examples. From the age of eight Mrs Burrows worked 14 hour days in the fields, in all weathers, in a gang of children supervised by a man with a whip. So, when she was twelve, ‘it seemed like Heaven to me when I was  … put to work in the factory.’  Another example is Mrs Layton, who became a prominent Guildswoman, speaking out in a wartime deputation to the Government about maternity services. She had started work at ten, childminding for twelve hours a day. Later, with an ailing husband, she struggled to take in washing while pregnant and nearly died as a result. 'No one outside the door knew how often I was hungry or how I had to scheme to get my husband nourishment’.

 

But the stories are often inspiring, and the writers’ unquenchable spirits shine through.  They pay tribute to the Guild, which as one woman explained, ‘kindled’ her ‘latent sparks’ and made them ‘burn more brightly’.

The feminist publisher Virago rediscovered and republished both books in the 1970s and again in 2012 (when ‘Maternity’ was retitled ‘No-one but a woman knows’). Both are still in print.  This brief summary cannot possibly do them justice. Not only are they powerful in themselves, but they provide a channel for working class women to speak in their own right. As one commentator has observed, the letter writers are, and feel themselves to be,  ‘subjects of discourse rather than its objects, and … agents of social change rather than victims …’ *  The fact that we can read their remarkable testimony today is not by any means Margaret’s only legacy – but it is undoubtedly an important part.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

* Tilghman, C. , ‘Biography’  26:4 (2003), pp583-6

‘No-one but a woman knows, stories of motherhood before the war’, ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Virago, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84408-802-7

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‘Life as we have known it’, ed. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Virago, 2012, ISBN 978-1-84408-801-0

©2021 Ruth Cohen

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