A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women by Martha Vicinus

Author:Martha Vicinus [Vicinus, Martha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780253202451
Google: ClgqAAAAYAAJ
Goodreads: 9004316
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1977-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

III

During the entire Victorian era no more than five to fifteen percent of the total population of England and Wales was middle or upper class in status.19 Thus the age-specific death rates for the general population (which we have already considered) were very nearly equivalent to rates for the working class during this period. But we cannot relate working-class mortality patterns to the social and economic conditions that influenced them in a straightforward fashion. The ordinary men and women of England and Wales lived and worked in a remarkable variety of circumstances. The Registrar General in his frequent studies of occupational mortality was able to show that for males longevity was not a simple function of social class. In fact, men employed in a rural setting almost always had lower death rates than those employed in a primarily urban setting. Agricultural laborers, poor as they were, had a more favorable mortality pattern than doctors or tradesmen who lived and worked in a large city like Manchester.20

But rural/urban contrasts were not so simple for women as they were for men. In the 1870’s some statisticians began to notice that those women aged fifteen to twenty-four, living in the outer ring of rural counties which surrounded London, had a death rate of 9.0 per thousand. But those women of the same ages who lived in London itself died at the rate of only 5.9 per thousand. The same unexpected rural/urban contrasts could also be found for women living in other parts of England. Statisticians concluded, without any confirming evidence, that some country girls who migrated to wicked, unhealthy cities found work but soon became ill. Thereupon they returned to their families in the country and died.21 In this way London and other cities were blamed for excess rural mortality.

It is just as probable that girls and young women living in the countryside were often genuinely worse off than those in the city. The most rural part of Great Britain was Ireland. When Robert Kennedy, Jr., examined Irish mortality data for the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries he found that rural Irish women still had a life expectancy at birth that was lower than it was for men.22 (The figures were twenty-nine years for women and thirty years for men.) But in Dublin urbanized Irish women had a life expectancy at birth of twenty-eight years; though lower than the figure for rural women, it was a full four years higher than the figure for men. Like most nineteenth-century cities, Dublin had overcrowded housing and poor sanitation facilities. Both conditions guaranteed that, irrespective of general levels of prosperity, proportionately more people would die from contagious diseases there than in the country. While this lowered life expectancy for both sexes, it is clear that Dublin’s men were much more adversely affected than Dublin’s women. In terms of age-specific death rates, once urban girls reached the age of sixteen they consistently had lower death rates than urban males; but rural women aged twenty-six to forty-five and

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