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Family Life on a pound a week.
The Fabian Women’s group were involved in the Suffragette Movement, they provided pamphlet’s and how women struggled to cope on below poverty wages. Mrs Maud-Pember Reeves in 1914 Fabian pamphlet, It asked the question ‘how does a lambert family with four children live on a pound a week. Reeves and her co-author Charlotte Wilson from 1909 called on forty two families in Lambeth in order to interview them about their everyday life.
Three pages of fabian pamphlet live on a pound a week
They recorded their findings in note- books, which contained information of income, weekly expenditure; such as rents, foods and fuel. The Fabian women deliberately avoided the poorest families, because they wanted to show how the general standard of living among ordinary manual workers was below a level which could support good health or nutrition.’
Other investigators followed after Rowntree’s publication of a Study of a Town Life. In 1905 Mann carried out a survey in a rural village in Bedfordshire. Bowley and Burnett- Hurst published ‘Livelihood and poverty’ in 1915 which covered five towns; Reading, Northampton, Warrington, Stanley and Bolton. Alfred Edward Carver carried out a similar survey of forty working class household diets in Birmingham in 1911.
Rowntree's approach to determining the standard of living emphasised food as the predominant factor. He put forward that a family's basic dietary standard and the associated costs could classify them as being in either "poverty" or "primary poverty." Rowntree's calculations encompassed costs for food, housing rent, and household sundries, with sundries including clothing, rent, light, and fuel.
Using the data provided by both Rowntree and Shergold, which showcased the weekly expenditure required for a moderate family's standard of living, I am now able to formulate my own "basket of goods." This basket will serve as a metric to evaluate whether a family falls into “poverty” or “primary poverty” in the working class. For this assessment, I have initially gathered the 1881 census records for 14 districts in Birmingham, comprising approximately 112 streets.
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