1. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 72.
2. See, for example, Pat Thane, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop 6 (1978): 32. The Poor Law’s punitive attitude toward unmarried mothers and their children eased over the course of the century.
3. Jane Humphries, “Female-Headed Households in Early Industrial Britain: the Vanguard of the Proletariat?” Labour History Review 63, no. 1 (1998): 49;
4. see also Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Thane, “Women and the Poor Law.”
5. “Guardians Loan Relief,” Dudley Herald, April 9, 1921, 2; Iris Minor, “Working-Class Women and Matrimonial Law Reform, 1890–1914,” in Ideology and the Labour Movement, ed. David E. Martin and David Rubenstein (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 105;