PhD research

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Jasmin Bath

Studying Single Motherhood in Times of Turmoil

Jasmin Bath (Clare College)

I am currently a second-year doctoral candidate investigating the lives of poor single mothers in New York City between 1827 and 1857. Research on poor single mothers, in an era before comprehensive health care and welfare support, is now particularly relevant, as we begin to comprehend how poor working people survive in times of upheaval and turmoil. The ongoing pandemic has meant that many families have seen the loss of breadwinner wages–whether through unemployment, disease, or death–and yet rent still needs to be paid, and children still need to be feed.

During the period I study, many poor mothers experienced some degree of single motherhood. Whether due to underemployment, unemployment, a father’s physical abandonment of his children, and/or death, poor mothers had to become economically independent from their husbands.  These mothers, then, were ‘single’ because they were responsible for supporting their dependents. They were forced to be independent economic agents, despite influential cultural and legal ideas which emphasised a mother’s dependence on her husband for subsistence.  Poor single mothers, therefore, were both culturally dependent on male patriarchs, and economically independent from them. These women had to occupy a mindset of (in)dependence to ensure the survival of themselves, and their children.

My research is very much informed by own experiences. I grew up in Dagenham, East London. It is perhaps most well-known as the home of the British Fords Factory, which saw, in 1968, female sewing machinists engage in a strike as they called for demands of equal pay with men. However, deindustrialisation, poor infrastructure and limited resources has meant that poverty is a common experience for many. I am also the child of a working-class mother who raised her first four children without the support of a male breadwinner. Most of my childhood was filled with stories about how my mother, who could not read until I was two-years old, made sure that my siblings always had food and a warm home. Although my research explores the lives of women who lived over 150 years ago, their survival and struggle in a turbulent economy still has important resonance today.

My doctoral research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Clare College. I am also the first Badger Scholar in American History, named in honour of Professor Anthony Badger, who spent much of his career trying to expand access to higher education and promote the study of American history in Britain by British students. As a neurodiverse, working-class scholar, I am incredibly grateful that I get to contribute to this legacy, and illustrate that neither your postcode nor your accent should be a barrier to your success.

In January 2022, I was awarded funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, The Faculty of History, University of Cambridge, and British American Nineteenth Century Historians (BrANCH), for a 6-week archival trip to New York City in the spring of 2022. This means that after a year of COVID-19 related delays I can finally start my archival research! During my archival trip, I hope to do extensive research in the New York Municipal Archives, the New-York Historical Society, and the New York Public Library in order to reconstruct the lives of poor single mothers.

To write a history of nineteenth century single motherhood, I need to piece together smaller evidentiary fragments to reconstruct their experiences. These women often lived in the gaps between more familiar stories, their lives obscured by both patriarchal record-keeping practices that devalued their experiences and their own efforts to evade the notice of legal officials and almshouses. Invisibility could be a survival strategy, but it poses a challenge for the historian. This makes intense archival digging the only means of recovering the lives of historical protagonists left to the margins of history.

Jasmin Bath is a doctoral candidate at Clare College. Her research on the economic survival strategies of poor single mothers in antebellum New York City is supervised by Professor Nicholas Guyatt.