Hardship & Health Womens Lives

Hilary Graham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317866923
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

First published in 1993. There are around 16 million women in Britain aged 16 to 59. A total of 6 400 000 live in households with children under 16, representing 40 per cent of all women under retirement age (Employment Gazette, 1990). The vast majority of women living in households with children are mothers looking after their own offspring. Hardship and Health in Women's Lives explores the lives of these 6 million women. It is particularly concerned with their domestic lives, and with the responsibilities and routines that structure what they do at home.

Chapter 1
Information on Women's Lives

1.1 Introduction

This chapter considers the major sources of information on women’s lives:

official statistics

social surveys and

personal records

Official statistics refer to the information collected as people pass through the events and experiences in which the state takes a particular interest. Information is typically recorded by state agencies as a by-product of their involvement in people’s lives.

In contrast, social surveys are designed expressly for the purpose of data collection. The ten-yearly census aims to survey everyone; more typically, surveys are based on samples of individuals and households, with the findings from these samples generalised to the wider population.

Personal records are the ones that women make of their own lives, either simply for themselves or for others as well. Unlike official statistics and social surveys, these personal accounts are not filtered through the perspectives and procedures of outsiders.

Official statistics, social surveys and personal records are broad categories that overlap with each other. The dividing line between social surveys and personal records, in particular, is often a blurred one. None the less, the typology helps to illuminate the range of data that can be trawled by those seeking to understand more about the circumstances in which women care for children. The section below briefly reviews these three sources of data. As it indicates, official statistics and social surveys provide what are accepted as the facts about women’s domestic lives. Among the facts that they highlight are ones relating to inequality. It is official statistics and surveys which record how social divisions such as class and ‘race’ take shape in women’s experiences of health and family life.

Yet, although an essential resource, these sources of data provide a problematic base on which to build an understanding of women’s lives. Firstly, there is often a time-lag of several years between the collection and the publication of official statistics and survey data. Insights into women’s circumstances in the 1990s are grounded in information relating to the late 1980s. At a time when patterns are changing slowly, such a time-lag may not be a matter for concern. But the pace of economic and social change through the 1980s and 1990s means that even the most recently published data may well provide only an approximate guide to women's lives today. Secondly, and more importantly, official statistics and social surveys record women's lives in ways which women are increasingly challenging. The methods of data collection can exclude those groups most affected by inequality; at the same time, the measures used to define women's social position (their ‘race’ and class, for example) can mask dimensions which impact directly on their identities and experiences.

The third and fourth sections of the chapter look, in turn, at the questions of who is included and how their lives are represented in official statistics and surveys. In the process, the sections outline the classification systems used to define women’s social class, ethnic identity, marital status and their status as disabled or non-disabled women.

1.2 Sources of information

(i) Official statistics

The term ‘statistics’ derives from the German statistik or stateistics, a term which underlines the role of the state in the collection of social data (Shaw and Miles, 1979). There are two main mechanisms by which the state collects these data: through vital registration and through the returns made by welfare agencies.

Vital registration includes the recording of births, stillbirths, marriages, divorces and deaths. A task undertaken by the Church in eighteenth-century Britain, vital registration is now a civil and compulsory procedure conducted through the offices of the state (Scott, 1990). The data recorded include sex, place of birth and occupational details. A social class is assigned to children at birth registration on the basis of their father’s occupation. However, for babies born to unmarried women, the occupation of the father is normally only recorded if he is present at the registration of the birth. As a result, official statistics provide an incomplete guide to the class background of single mothers and their children (see Chapter 2).

The information collected by welfare agencies relate to the customers of their services. They tend, therefore, to record the absence rather than the presence of well-being. The statistics collected include information on benefit claimants, produced through the operation of the social security system, and on those officially recognised and registered as unemployed. Welfare agencies, too, provide much of the routinely gathered data on health. For example, there are systems for recording visits to the doctor and for the notification of infectious diseases. These systems include the voluntary reporting procedures for people infected by the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and for people with Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). The process of record-keeping is not initiated unless and until help is sought, with people’s conditions represented in categories which reflect professional perspectives and priorities rather than their own.

There are, however, sources of information which are not dependent on the intervention of state agencies. Social surveys represent the most significant of these alternative data sources.

(ii) Social surveys

Social surveys cover a broad spectrum of research, including both large-scale national surveys and small-scale local studies. Surveys vary, too, in their methods of data collection, Some studies use methods which encourage women to construct their own agenda and speak in their own terms, whereas others use set questions and fixed-choice answers to collect information in a standardised form from everyone. Within the diversity, two types of survey are particularly important sources of information on the domestic circumstances of families. These are the national surveys, which measure patterns over time, and the one-off studies, which give snapshot pictures of life at particular times and places.

The national surveys include the continuous surveys which collect information on an annual basis from a different sample of individuals in private households. Important examples are the General Household Survey, the Family Expenditure Survey and the Labour Force Survey.

The General Household Survey (GHS) is a multipurpose survey including health and health behaviour among its range of topics (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1991a). It deals only with Britain; the equivalent survey in Northern Ireland is the Continuous Household Survey. These two surveys are the only continuing sources of health information that are not based on general practitioner and hospital records. The GHS relies, instead, ‘on people’s self-assessments of their health condition’.

While people do the assessing, they do so within boundaries set by the researcher. The survey asks about short-term (acute) illness, which is defined as an illness that has involved cutting down on everyday activities, either at the present time or in the recent past. It also asks about longer term (chronic) health difficulties and about people's assessments of their general health over the previous year (see Chapter 9). The GHS also gives periodic coverage of issues not covered on a regular basis. The 1985 survey, for example, included a set of questions designed to identify people who were involved in helping an older, disabled or sick person. The answers provided the first national data set on the provision of informal care in Britain (Green, 1988).

The Family Expenditure Survey (FES) covers the United Kingdom and focuses on household income from earnings, benefits and investments, as well as household spending on such items as housing, food and fuel (Central Statistical Office, 1991). The FES provides the key source of government data on low income, published as tables of households below average income (House of Commons, 1991; Department of Social Security, 1992b).

Like the FES, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) is based on private households in the United Kingdom (Office of Population Censuses and Surveys, 1991b). While its name may suggest otherwise, it is an essential resource for those seeking to understand more about women’s domestic lives. It is currently the most important source of statistical information on the ethnic composition of Britain, informing analyses of family composition and household structure in Britain’s majority and minority ethnic populations (Raskey, 1989a; 1990).

Alongside the continuous surveys are a diverse array of one-off studies. They include some important large-scale national surveys, such as the 1985 Health and Lifestyle Survey (HALS) and the series of government surveys of disability carried out in the mid-1980s (Martin et al., 1988; Bone and Meltzer, 1989; Blaxter, 1990). Most one-off studies, however, are focused around particular localities, networks or identities.

There are, for example, the locally based studies conducted under the aegis of local authorities. These include the surveys funded by local councils and district health authorities which map the health and employment experiences of local communities (Duffy and Lincoln, 1990; City of Liverpool, 1991). The seam of literature on caring and poverty, too, is based largely on studies conducted in particular localities, as is the research concerned with how ‘race’ affects women’s daily lives (Stone, 1983; Warrier, 1988; Bhachu, 1991; Phoenix, 1991). Most of these studies are located in London and the home counties; some, however, are based in other parts of the United Kingdom (for example, Evason, 1980; Bradshaw and Holmes, 1989; Eyles and Donovan, 1990).

Other one-off studies are less closely tied to a geographical area. Instead, they draw on women’s networks and shared identities to build their samples. For example, a study of 200 women with spinal injuries relied on the membership lists of the Spinal Injuries Association for its sampling frame (Morris, 1989). In a similar way, a study of step parents made contact with informants through the National Stepfamily Association (Hughes, 1991). Networking through shared identities has provided an important resource for self-surveys. In these surveys, the researchers are also the respondents, designing and conducting the study by and for themselves. One example is Learning the Hard Way, a book which welds together the accounts of a group of women who met through an access course. The book records their experiences of education and everyday life (Taking Liberties Collective, 1989).

On the whole, women like us don’t write books. If we do, they don’t get published. In this book we’ve included the writings of 57 women. . . . Some of us are married, a few of us live with the women who are our lovers. All but a few of us have children. Many of us are single parents with nobody very much to help us look after our children. Some of us have lost our children, to adoption agencies, to social services, or to ex-husbands. Some of us have direct experience of sexual abuse, alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence and prostitution. We are the women that books get written about.¹

As the traditions of identity based studies and self-surveys remind us, not all survey data come in the form of tables and statistics. One-off surveys are a rich source of qualitative data, where women describe their lives in their own terms. Their first hand accounts merge into the third type of information identified at the beginning of the chapter. These are the personal records compiled and collected by women other than for the purposes of research.

(iii) Personal records

‘Personal documents’ is the term frequently used to describe how people record their lives in a material form: in letters and diaries, pictures and photographs, in books and on tape (Plummer, 1983). But there are also the histories communicated orally, telling it like it is through stories and songs.

How then to express such a complex journey as ours – continuous and discontinuous, collective and individual? . . . Writing . . . details the things that make us what we are. Since these are numerous, many forms of writing are represented in this anthology. Poems, short stories, essays, autobiographical and polemical pieces have been chosen by the contributors to express their experience and views. Writing itself is complex, hard to grasp in some forms, more manageable in others, while different idioms lend themselves more readily to the reflection of different facets of reality. How else could a book such as this be?²

These diverse expressions of experience are rarely accorded the same status as government statistics and survey data. This is because data collection in Britain, as elsewhere, is guided by a particular view of what counts as scientific knowledge. It is numerical information derived from large numbers of people and recorded in categories defined by the researcher that is most likely to be accorded the status of scientific knowledge. Personal records rarely measure up to these standards, based, as they are, on individuals recording their lives in their own way. They do not produce the large data sets and the statistically significant findings which are the hallmark of scientific research. But, unlike official statistics and much survey data, personal records are produced outside the gaze of official record keepers and data gatherers. They have an existence which is independent of the activities of outsiders. They thus provide a record of communities where daily life has gone unresearched.

Personal records have played an important part in feminist writing, providing a way of ‘learning from the history we live’ (Lyman, 1981, p.55). They have resourced, particularly, the histories of groups that have found their lives obscured both within mainstream research and within feminist perspectives. Thus, autobiographical accounts have figured centrally in lesbian histories (McEwen and O’Sullivan, 1988; Hall Carpenter Archives, 1989). They have figured, too, in the work of Black women writers. Here, personal records have tracked changes and diversity among Black women, describing the conflicting commitments and different priorities which shape their lives (Bryan et al., 1985; Grewal et al., 1988).

Within the disability movements, too, women are asserting the importance of recording life as it is lived. Creating a fund of knowledge and a body of artistic work is seen as a first stage in the long process of reclaiming identities constructed and controlled by the non-disabled world (Browne et al., 1985; Feminist Art News, 1989). This literature on disability is being extended by personal testimonies that record women’s experiences of learning about and living with their HIV-positive status (O’Sullivan and Thomson, 1992).

Our history is hidden from us, as are role-models to whom we can relate. Because the presentation of our experience is constructed by non-disabled people, most of the recording of the lives of disabled people is done in a way which is deeply alienating to us. . . . Once we have found a language to describe our experience, from our point of view rather than that of the non-disabled society, we can assert the experience of disability in our terms. ³

Personal testimonies and reflections on experience have figured centrally in the so-called new social movements, which include feminism, the struggles against racism, and the lesbian and disability movements. Personal records provide a way for women to understand themselves and to challenge the perspectives of others. However, records which capture subjective understand ings do not provide an unproblematic resource from which to build perspectives on women’s lives. There are problems about inclusion and representation, about who speaks on behalf of whom. As a number of contemporary anthologies make clear, Black, lesbian and disabled women do not speak with one voice (Browne et al., 1985; Grewal et al., 1988; Hall Carpenter Archives, 1989). The accumulation of many stories and multiple voices provides on...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Information on Women's Lives
• 2 Settling Down
• 3 Finding a Home
• 4 Being a Mother
• 5 Caring for Children
• 6 Working for Pay
• 7 Finding the Money
• 8 Making Ends Meet
• 9 Keeping Going
• 10 Children's Health
• 11 Concluding Comments
• References
• Index