“We Might be Trusted”: Female Poor Law Guardians and the Development of the New Poor Law: The Case of Bolton, England, 1880–1906

Abstract

This article uses the only surviving working diary of an English female Poor Law guardian in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to explore two interrelated bodies of historiography. First, it engages with an historiography of the New Poor Law which has by and large seen the late nineteenth century as a period of atrophication. Second, it engages with a literature on female Poor Law guardians which has on balance questioned their achievements and seen such women as subject to all sorts of conflict and discrimination. The article argues that both perspectives may be questioned where we focus on local Poor Law policies and local women. Using the example of Bolton, in England, it is argued that the boards of Poor Law unions were riven by fracture lines more important than gender. Within this context, women of relatively high social status were able to manipulate the Poor Law agenda to make substantial changes to the policy and fabric of the late Victorian Poor Law. Rather than conflict, we often see a warm appreciation of the pioneering work of female Poor Law guardians.