THE POOR AND MARRIAGE
So many strictures are made on the improvident marriages of the poor that
it is necessary to look at the matter from the point of view of the poor
themselves.
If the poor were not improvident, they would hardly dare to live their
lives at all. There is no security for them. Any work which they do
may stop at a week’s notice. Much work may be, and is, stopped with no
notice of any kind. The man is paid daily, and one evening he is paid as
usual, but told that he will not be needed again. Such a system breeds
improvidence; and if casual labour and daily paid labour are necessary
to society, then society must excuse the faults which are the obvious
outcome of such a system.
In the case of marriage, as things now are, the moment a man’s money
approaches a figure which seems to him a possible one he marries. For
the first year or even two years he may have less ready money but more
comfort. The wife keeps their one room clean and pleasant, and cooks,
none too well perhaps, but possibly with more attention to his special
needs than his former landlady did, or than his mother did, who had her
own husband as well as her other children to cater for. The wage may be
£1 a week. He gives the wife 18s. and retains 2s. for himself. The result
of her management may closely approach the following budget of two actual
young people who came within the investigation.
Mr. W., aged twenty, a toy-packer in City warehouse—wages 20s.; allows
18s. He has been married eighteen months, and when this budget was drawn
up a baby was expected any day. His wages were raised from 18s. a year
ago. His wife before marriage was a machinist on piece-work, and could
earn 10s. a week. She worked for six months after marriage, and paid for
most of the furniture in their one room; also she provided the coming
baby’s clothes. She is clean and thrifty, writes a good hand, and keeps
excellent accounts. She is nineteen.
Out of the 2s. retained by the husband, he pays 6d. a week into a
clothing club, and of course his 4d. is deducted for State Insurance.
With the rest “he does what he likes.” Sometimes he likes to give the
wife an extra penny for her housekeeping. The menu, from the list of
food purchases given on next page, appears to consist of a sufficiency
of bread, of meat, of potatoes, and perhaps of greens, as the husband’s
dinners eaten away from home probably include greens for him. Some cold
meat, with bread and butter and tea, would be provided for the evening
meal; bread, butter, and tea would be the invariable breakfast.
Date of budget, January 16, 1913:
s. d.
Rent (one good room upstairs; two
windows) 5 0
Burial insurance 0 3
Boot club 0 6
Coal (1 cwt. stove coal for foreign
stove, which stands out into the
room, and will be very dangerous
when the baby begins to crawl) 1 3
Gas 0 8
Soap 0 3
Oil 0 2
Matches 0 1½
-----
8 2½
Left for food 9s. 9½d.
s. d.
Six loaves 1 4½
Husband’s dinners (he is given 6d.
daily by his wife for his dinner,
which he eats away from home) 3 0
Meat 3 2½
½ lb. butter 0 6
1 lb. flour 0 1½
1 tin of milk 0 4
4 ozs. tea 0 4
1 lb. moist sugar 0 2
½ lb. dripping 0 3
8 lbs. potatoes 0 4
4 lbs. greens 0 2
-----
9 9½
An average per head of 4s. 10¾d. a week for food.
If the wages never rise, and if the family grows larger, the amounts
spent on burial insurance, soap, coal, gas, and, later on, rent will
increase, leaving less and less for food, with more people to feed on the
less amount. Extra bedding will eventually have to be bought, though the
parents will naturally put off that moment as long as possible. Should
the wage rise gradually to 24s., or even 25s., it would not all go upon
the general living. The man would naturally take a larger amount of
pocket-money, and out of the extra sum which he might allow the wife, he
would certainly expect better living. A “relish to his tea,” costing 2d.
a day, mounts up to 1s. a week, and a “rasher to his breakfast” costs
the same. So an increase of 2s. might be completely swallowed up in
extra food for the worker. And it would be really needed by him, as his
proportion of the money spent would tend to diminish with more mouths to
fill.
Another instance of a young couple starting on £1 a week is that of Mr.
H., who is twenty-two, and works in a brewery. Every third week he has
night work. He allows his wife his whole wage. There is one child of
six months. The wife is twenty. She worked in a polish factory until
marriage, when she was dismissed, with a small bonus, as the firm does
not employ married women. With the bonus she helped to furnish. She is an
excellent housewife, and keeps her room comfortable.
Date of budget, January 16, 1913 (see p. 150).
s. d.
Rent (one room, small; one window,
upstairs) 3 6
Husband’s fares 1 0
Husband’s pocket-money 1 0
State sickness insurance 0 4
Four weeks’ burial insurance (Mr. H.
had been ill on half pay, and
burial insurance had stood over) 1 0
Soap, soda 0 3½
1 cwt. coal 1 6
Gas 0 6
Wood 0 2
Newspaper 0 1
Boracic powder 0 1
Cotton 0 2
Needles 0 0½
Buttons 0 1
Paid off loan (5s. borrowed from a
brother during husband’s illness) 1 0
------
10 9
This leaves for food, 9s. 3d. between three people, or an
average of 3s. 1d. a head.
s. d.
9 loaves 1 10½
8 ozs. tea 0 8
2 lbs. moist sugar 0 4
1 tin of milk (a smaller tin than
Mrs. W.’s) 0 3½
½ lb. butter (slightly better
than Mrs. W.’s) 0 7
2 lbs. flour 0 3
8 lbs. potatoes 0 4
Vegetables 0 7
Salt, mustard, sauce 0 2½
Fruit 0 6
Fish 1 0
Bacon 0 4½
Mineral water (recommended by doctor
for Mr. H. during his illness) 0 3
Meat 2 0
-----
9 3
Owing to Mr. H. getting home to his meals, there is more elasticity in
this menu. Much less meat is eaten, and fish and bacon appear instead.
More bread, more tea, more vegetables are eaten, and fruit is added. The
usual breakfast is bread, butter, and tea; the dinner a small amount of
meat, with potatoes and vegetables; the evening meal, fish or bacon,
with potatoes, as well as the eternal bread, butter, and tea. All these
four young people are steady and intelligent. They have enough to eat,
but they are put to it for proper clothing already. The H.’s will have
to move sooner than the W.’s if their family increases, as their room,
though a pleasant one, is not above half the size of the other.
It is obvious that with both these young men marriage is, so far, both
pleasant and successful. It is worth the sacrifice in pocket-money which
it must entail upon them. Their working life is much the same as it was
during their bachelorhood, while their free time is more comfortable
and more interesting. Should they have waited to marry until later in
life, they would probably have lived no cheaper as bachelors, though the
money would have been spent differently, and they would have been less
wholesomely comfortable.
The young women’s lives are far more changed. They tell you that,
though they are a bit lonely at times, and miss the companionship of
the factory life and the money of their own to spend, and are rather
frightened at the swift approach of motherhood, “You get accustomed to
it,” and “It won’t be so lonely when the baby comes,” and “He’s very
handy when he’s at home.” The first baby is a source of great interest
and pleasure to both parents, especially if it is well managed and
does not cry at night, though one young father who was accustomed to
a restless baby said he “missed it ter’ble at night” when it was away
in hospital. It is different when the children multiply and the room
becomes crowded and food is less plentiful. Then the case of the man is
hard and unattractive; the amount of self-sacrifice demanded of him, if
he be at all tender-hearted towards his family, is outrageous. He must
never smoke, he must never take a glass of ale; he must walk to and from
his work in all weathers; he must have no recreations but the continual
mending of his children’s boots; he must neither read nor go to picture
palaces nor take holidays, if he is to do all that social reformers
expect of him when they theoretically parcel out his tiny income.
Needless to say, the poorly paid man is not so immeasurably superior to
the middle-class man in the matter of self-denial and self-control as he
seems expected to be. He does smoke, he does sometimes take a glass of
ale; he does, in fact, appropriate a proportion of the money he earns
to his own pleasure. It is not a large proportion as a rule, but it
upsets the nice calculations which are based upon the supposition that a
man earning 25s. a week spends every penny of it in the support of his
family. He is, most probably, a hard-working, steady, sober man; but he
may spend perhaps 2d. a day on beer, 1d. a day on tobacco, and 2d. a
day on tram fares, and that without being a monster of selfishness, or
wishing to deprive his children of their food. In most budgets he keeps
from 2s. to 2s. 6d. for himself, in some 5s. or 6s., and in some nothing.
He varies as his brethren vary in other classes. Sometimes he walks to
and from work; sometimes he pays his fares out of the money he keeps; and
sometimes he gets them paid out of the money with which he supplies his
wife.
Though fond of the children when they are there, this life of stress
and strain makes the women dread nothing so much as the conviction that
there is to be still another baby with its inevitable consequences—more
crowding, more illness, more worry, more work, and less food, less
strength, less time to manage with.
There are people who argue that marriage should be put off by the poor
until they have saved up enough to secure their economic independence,
and that it would not hurt young men on £1 a week to put off marriage
till they are thirty, they, meantime, saving hard during those ten years.
Should the poorly paid workman overcome his young impulse to marry the
moment his wage reaches £1 a week, and should he remain a bachelor until
thirty, it is quite certain that he would not marry at all. This may be
a good thing or a bad thing, but it would be so. A man who for ten years
had had the spending of 20s. a week—and it is a sum which is soon spent
without providing luxuries—would not, at thirty, when perhaps cold
reason would direct his impulse, feel inclined to share his £1 a week
with an uncertain number of other people. His present bent is towards
married life. It provides him for the first year or two with attention
to his comfort and with privacy and freedom for his personality, as well
as satisfying his natural craving for sex-relationship. Should he thwart
that impulse, he, being an average, normal man, will have to find other
ways of dealing with these desires of his. He is not likely to starve
every instinct for ten years in order, perhaps, to save a sum which might
bring in an income of a couple of shillings a week to add to his weekly
wage. He would know, by the time he was thirty, that even 22s. a week
does not guarantee a family against misery and want. The self-sacrifice
demanded of the father of even a small family on such an income would
appal him.
The young couple who marry and live contentedly on 20s. a week are
usually members of families of at least four or five persons, and have
struggled through their childhood on their share of an income which may
have been anything from 20s. to 25s. or 26s. a week. Their standard of
comfort is disastrously low, and they do not for the first year or two
realise that even two or three children will develop into a burden which
is too great for their strength. It is not the greater number of children
alone: it is the greater cost of accommodating, feeding, and clothing
boys and girls as they get older which increases the strain. Moreover,
the separation of interests soon begins to show itself. The husband goes
to the same work—hard, long, and monotonous—but at least a change from
the growing discomfort of the home. He gets accustomed to seeing his
wife slave, and she gets accustomed to seeing him appear and disappear
on his daily round of work, which gradually appeals less and less to her
imagination, till, at thirty, she hardly knows what his duties are—so
overwhelmed is she in the flood of her own most absorbing duties and
economies. Her economies interfere with his comfort, and are irksome to
him; so he gets out of touch with her point of view. He cannot see why
the cooking should be less satisfactory than it used to be, and says so.
She knows she needs a new saucepan, but cannot possibly afford to buy
one, and says so. He makes his wife the same allowance, and expects the
same amount of food. She has more mouths to fill, and grows impatient
because he does not understand that, though their first baby did not
seem to make much difference, a boy of three, plus a baby, makes the old
problem into quite a new one.
One of her questions is the balance between rent and food, which is of
enormous importance. Yet she never can feel certain that she has found
the right solution. Shall they all live in one room? Or shall they take
two basement rooms at an equally low rent, but spend more on gas and
coal, and suffer more from damp and cold? Or shall they take two rooms
above stairs and take the extra rent out of the food? Her own appetite
may not be very large, so she decides perhaps on the two better rooms
upstairs. She may decide wisely, as we think, but the sacrifice in food
is not to be ignored in its results on the health of the children.
Another of her problems is, How is she to keep her husband, the
bread-winner, in full efficiency out of the few shillings she can spend
on food, and at the same time satisfy the appetites of the children? She
decides to feed him sufficiently and to make what is over do for herself
and the children. This is not considered and thought-out self-sacrifice
on her part. It is the pressure of circumstances. The wage-earner must
be fed. The arrangement made between husband and wife in cases where the
man’s work is at a distance—that 6d. a day, or 3s. a week, should be
allowed by her for his dinners—may have begun, as in the case already
quoted, before any children had appeared, and may continue when there
are six children. Even if the wage has increased, and if, instead of
20s., the worker is getting 23s. or 24s., he probably keeps an extra
shilling for himself. Instead of allowing his wife 18s. a week, he
allows her 20s. or 21s. If she has several children, the father’s weekly
3s. for dinner is far harder to compass than when she managed for two
only on 18s. Rent, instead of being from 3s. 6d. to 5s. for one “good”
upstairs room, amounts to from 6s. to 7s. for two upstairs rooms, or,
if house-room be sacrificed to food, rent may be 5s. 6d. for two deadly
basement rooms. Insurance has mounted from 3d. a week to 9d. a week.
Gas which was 6d. is now 1s., on account of the extra cooking. Soap and
other cleaning materials have increased in quantity, and therefore in
expense from 2d. to 5½d. Clothing is a problem for which very few weekly
figures are available. It must be covered by payments to clothing and
boot clubs, or each article must be bought when needed. In any case the
expense is greater and the amount of money available for food grows
less. The unvarying amount paid for the bread-winner’s necessary daily
food becomes a greater proportion of the food bill, and leaves all the
increasing deficit to be met out of the food of the mother and children.
It is unavoidable that it should be so; nobody wastes time thinking about
it; but the fact that it is so forces the mother to take a different
point of view from that of the father. So each of them gradually grows to
understand the other less.
Both parents are probably devoted to the children. The husband, who is
sick of his wife’s complaints, and can’t be bothered with her story of
how she has no boots to wear, listens with sympathy and understanding
to her tale of woe about Tommy having no boots to his feet. The boy who
cannot speak at three years of age, or the girl who is deficient in
weight, in height, and in wits, often is the father’s special pet, for
whom he will sacrifice both food and sleep, while the mother’s whole life
is spent in a dreary effort to do her best for them all round.
Much has been said and written, and much more will be said and written,
on the question of the poor and large families. We wrangle as to whether
their numerous children are an improvidence and an insult to the
community, or whether, on the contrary, the poorest class is the only
class which, in that respect, does its duty to the nation. One thing is
quite certain, and it is that it would be as unthinkable as impossible to
bring compulsion to bear on the poor because they are poor. For those who
deplore large families in the case of poor people, it must be a comfort
to remember a fact which experience shews us, that as poverty decreases,
and as the standard of comfort rises, so does the size of the family
diminish. Should we be able to conquer the problem of poverty, we should
automatically solve the problem of the excessively large family.