ABSTRACT
The typical life experience of adult women in the recent past has included marriage and motherhood. Between 1871 and 1951, the percentage of women aged 35-44 who were married never fell below 74.6 per cent (a low reached after the First World War) and in 1951 reached a high of 82.1 per cent. In 1871 the average woman married at the age of 24 and subsequently gave birth to six children. She would also typically have experienced three or four years widowhood. By 1901, a woman at marriage would, on average, have been a year older, would have given birth to three or four children and would have experienced four years of widowhood; and the woman marrying in 1931 would have been roughly the same age, the number of her children would have dropped to two and the period of her widowhood would have increased to five years. These are ‘average’ experiences. They assume first and foremost that the woman survived infancy and childhood and reached her mid-twenties; life expectancy at birth for males and females was low in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due to the high infant-mortality rate. And, in looking at the typical experience, we mask important class and regional variations; for, example, the wife of a manual worker might expect a greater number of years of widowhood, due to her husband's greater occupational mortality risk. 1
