She Was Aye Workin': Memories of Tenement Women in Edinburgh and Glasgow

Personal space was non-existent in the tenement housing of Glasgow and Edinburgh; a tenement child's first place of rest was often in a chest of drawers, and similarly, the kitchen table provided the dead with a final resting place before burial. The majority of working-class families were crowded into one-room sin-gle-end and two-room room-and-kitchen tenement housing for most of the nineteenth century; as recent as 1951 half of all Glaswegians still lived in houses with only one or two rooms, and a shared toilet in the stair. The shortage of space dictated cleaning and cooking rotas, facilities for bathing, storage of personal belongings, and sleeping arrangements, all of which inevitably created a loss of privacy. Such close proximity to family members over the life course demanded much from the individual, in both logistical as well as psychological terms. An identity based on the role of the individual was less significant than that of collective familial roles. Furthermore, the organisation of family life was largely the culmination of a co-operative effort, arguably driven by the female members of the household. Indeed, for the entirety of her life, a tenement woman's sphere was almost entirely confined to the management of her family and home. Not surprisingly, reminiscences of tenement living resonate with a tremendous sense of claustrophobia.

A compilation of oral histories conducted for the People's Story in Edinburgh and the People's Palace in Glasgow, She Was Aye Workin': Memories of Tenement Women in Edinburgh and Glasgow is composed almost entirely of the reminiscences taken from over sixty contributors. Quite specific remembrances are articulated verbatim. These testimonies of life in tenement housing provide a gendered perspective, not unlike those found in other oral history projects conducted over the past twenty years, such as Uncharted Lives: Extracts from Scottish Women's Experiences by the Glasgow Women's Studies Group (1983), A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940 by Elizabeth Roberts (1984), and Up Oor Close: Memories of Domestic Life in Glasgow Tenements 1910-1945 by Jean Faley (1990). Indeed, this text is best seen as a counterpart to Jean Faley's Up Oor Close. Unlike Faley, however, Helen Clark and Elizabeth Carnegie provide an 'unvarnished' narrative of tenement women in early twenti-eth-century Edinburgh and Glasgow. Incorporating themes over a woman's lifetime, they frankly address personal aspects of womanhood and women's particular roles in the tenements. Their selected narratives of the largely female experiences of tenement life promote the feminist thesis that women in particular were subsumed into the domestic sphere. The central theme of a woman's place in the home is most insightfully represented in the chapters on marriage and work.

Various accounts provide illuminating, albeit contradictory, insights into the minutiae of everyday life and the prevalent contemporary attitudes towards domesticity and married life in particular. Specific details pertaining to preparation for marriage, expectations from married life, child-rearing, finances, schedules, and housekeeping duties robustly substantiate the fact that a tenement woman 'was aye workin'. ('She used tae be up at the crack o' dawn, she was never in bed before twelve at night. She made oor clothes, she knitted our jumpers, she had a huge washing. Everything had to be done the hard way...'.) What is also made evident is that these women were literally anchored to a 'life in one room' for long periods during their lives. Hence very few references are provided to their adult roles in public, other than within the neighbourhood in the interest of managing and maintaining the household. One could suggest that these women experienced the majority of their lives in a sphere of their own.The notion of a separate sphere for women is important to explore within the narrow context of working-class tenement households such as those referred to in the text. Although flawed in terms of general application, the separate sphere model is useful in two areas of inquiry concerning the memories represented here. First, were men as uninvolved in their roles as husbands and fathers as the writers would suggest? Such polarised views of men as either abusive, unreliable or absent altogether indicates a schism between men and women in these scenarios. This clearly cannot be generalised. Second, how did the perceptions of the lack of personal space vary between the genders? For instance, one man casually refers to living in his mother's home for the first seven years of his marriage, whereas a woman recalls: 'In a single end I just felt totally closed in'. The nuance of the gendered experience of proximity remains to be more overtly analysed. Concepts such as the dearth of personal space and disengagement are manifestly related to power and status differentials. Albeit unexplored, these dichotomies are further magnified by the authors' individuated approach to the material.

The source of strength in an oral history project such as this is also vulnerable to its inherent weaknesses. The structure, allowing the participants' collective voice to be represented in toto, is problematic. Although it is immeasurably important to the modern social historian to use oral histories, these are yet in the form of selective raw material. By allowing the memories of women's experiences to predominate the text, the authors neglect to incorporate their evidence into a disciplined historical context. Their analysis is used almost exclusively as a means to integrate their numerous case studies, rather than to analyse the content as such. The work as a whole does not benefit from current gender theory: a feminist interpretation can only be presumed by what was included and excluded respectively. Specifically, many questions remain unasked concerning the long-term social problem of tenement housing as well as the history of the family in Scotland. Nevertheless, the material as such is an important record of the personal experiences of life in tenement housing.

The role of oral history in historiography continues to be debated among a small sector of academia. It would be fruitless simply to reiterate their arguments, but the spirit of their concerns is worth addressing at this juncture. By its very nature, the quality of information obtained from contributors is quite vulnerable to the passing of time, memory, various agendas, and, of course, the fact that some material cannot be substantiated. With these problems in mind, Helen Clark and Elizabeth Carnegie have been thorough in their inclusion of variable answers, which clearly reflect a more open-ended approach to the subject. Their sensitivity to their contributors' unique perspectives is also evident: they give voice to important topics that typically remain confined to the privacy of the family. It must be said that older people in more recent oral history projects have confirmed the content of She Was Aye Workin'. In conclusion, one must regard this text as an important endeavour to preserve Scottish urban history, and provide the historian with undeniably rich material.