Unwell Women by Elinor Cleghorn

Author:Elinor Cleghorn [Cleghorn, Elinor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2021-06-08T00:00:00+00:00

13

DUTIFUL AND DISCIPLINED

In 1933, in a small terraced house in County Durham, a thirty-two-year-old woman had just given birth to her seventh child. Like most of the women her age who lived on her street, she was married to a coal miner. The colliery owners provided accommodation for workers and their families, in houses just like hers, in mining towns and pit villages across the north of England. Thankfully, her husband had kept his job in the mine after the recession, but the little housekeeping money had to stretch. She now had nine mouths to feed. Every day at 4:00 a.m., she rose while her family slumbered to weave mats, which she swapped with her neighbors for clothes. Then there was bread to bake, a vegetable garden to tend, and coals to haul from the outhouse. Until 10:00 p.m., sometimes even midnight, she cooked, cleaned, and cared. Her husband was kind, considerate, and devoted to her, but he had to work. She did everything she could to make sure her children were well fed, and healthy.

Her own health, however, had been deteriorating for years. Her shoulders ached from nerve inflammation. Her kidneys were damaged by the Bright’s disease she suffered as a child, causing constant headaches, nausea, and digestive troubles. On the advice of the colliery doctor, she had had her teeth pulled to cure her gum disease. Since her last pregnancy, she had recurring cystitis, and her lower-right abdomen throbbed continuously. The doctor had prescribed medicine for “ovarian trouble,” and she prayed this would work so that she wouldn’t have to go to the hospital for surgery. Who would look after the children? When the local “health visitor,” a midwife who attended nursing mothers, babies, and children under five, came to check on her, she was amazed at her “indomitable pluck.” Although the woman had been “delicate all her life,” she was “extremely careful to preserve . . . whatever strength and health remains for her.”

This woman, and many like her, was one of 1,250 participants in a study led by the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee (WHEC) into “the incidence and nature of general ill-health among working-class women.” Made up of eleven nonpolitical representatives of women’s organizations across England and Wales, the committee wanted to reveal the hidden truth about the illnesses, diseases, disabilities, and life circumstances of working-class women across the country. “The woman only comes onto the map of public conscience,” declared WHEC member Margery Spring Rice, “when she is performing the bodily function of producing a child.” Outside reproduction, women like the thirty-two-year-old from Durham escaped medical “vigilance”; the pain and suffering they bore every day, as they struggled to make ends meet, slipped unnoticed into the cracks of ignorance and inequality.

Throughout the 1920s, women’s bodies became the focus of public and governmental attention for the most tragic reason. One in 250 “live births” resulted in a mother’s death. In 1932, a committee appointed by the Ministry of Health (MOH) to examine maternal mortality and morbidity published its final report.

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