Women's Problems

International Women's Day 2025

Good morning!

It’s International Women’s Day and this is a free post!

Last year, I talked about counting femicide. This year, something slightly different.

When Emma found herself pregnant for the sixth time, her options were limited. She had managed to sort out her ex-laws looking after the older kids, but found herself living in a dump with the little ones. Money, always a problem, was scarce and her cleaning jobs had dried up. Emma couldn’t just go to the doctors, so she got hold of some stuff via the black market to sort herself out. It was early on, she thought it would be fine.

But what Emma didn’t know, what she couldn’t know, was that her pregnancy was ectopic. It had implanted in her right fallopian tube. She took the medicine, which made her sick, and it made her uterus contract… and the ectopic burst.

Her friends and neighbours tried to help, but Emma was terrified of getting a doctor in, because she didn’t want anyone to know what she’d done. It was illegal. Her friend, guessing what had happened, tried to get a doctor to come to the house without saying what the problem was. He would not come. It did not occur to anyone to take her to hospital: every time they tried to move her, she fainted.

Her death was agonising and took almost twelve hours.

Her death orphaned five children.

As you may have guessed, this did not happen last week, but it could have.

It could have.

Emma died in June 1860.

She was born in Warboys in 1826, married in Pidley in 1845, widowed in 1854, remarried in 1857 and abandoned in 1859. After her second husband abandoned her, she went to Peterborough workhouse. Her older children, born in 1847, 1848 and 1850 went to live with her first husband’s family. Her younger children, born in 1852 and 1858, stayed with her. She left the workhouse in early 1860 after finding work as a cleaner in a pub. She met Edmund Wilson there, a younger man. They hit it off.

However, Emma was reliant on parish relief. She didn’t get much, she got four shillings in cash and twenty pounds of bread (around eleven loaves) per week to keep her and the two youngest children. Emma couldn’t openly live with a man without losing her relief. So, Edmund and Emma hit upon a plan to live together covertly, and Emma arranged to rent a house in Bodger’s Yard off Bridge Street. Bodger’s Yard was full of women like Emma, the abandoned and widowed, the very poor. The house was miniscule, one up, one down, one bed, shared privy in the yard. Edmund helped Emma move in at the end of May, and lived with her as her lodger. Edmund could not openly support Emma, because this would shift Edmund’s status from “lodger” to “spouse” in the eyes of the Union regardless of the legality of their relationship. So, he gave her two shillings a week, raising the household budget to six shillings.

Emma found out she was pregnant in early June, a week after moving in. She told a neighbour first, asking her if she thought tincture of steel would bring on a miscarriage. A week later, she told Edmund, told him how frightened she was, asked him what they were going to do. Edmund didn’t know. Why was Emma’s pregnancy such a problem? Well, when the Board of Guardians found out about it, they would stop her relief. No more cash, no more bread. Emma would be forced to return to the workhouse with her children, deliver her baby there and stay there until some miracle happened.

So why didn’t Emma just marry Edmund and be done with? Emma’s second husband abandoned her when their son was around one. He was a navvy, moving around for work was in his nature. Navvies could disappear, since their work camps tended to be shacks in the middle of nowhere. They were paid by gangers who didn’t have much interest in the antecedents of their employees. It was easy to give a fake name, easy to be lost to the eyes of the Poor Law who usually hunted husbands down to pay maintenance. Divorce was incredibly expensive and impossible for Emma anyway unless she could prove he had been adulterous and cruel.

Unless Emma could prove he was dead, she was not free to remarry.

The alternative was to run away with Edmund, but this would leave her older children behind. Emma was not prepared to do this.

Emma was stuck. She did what she thought was right, perhaps thinking she would be more careful in future. She covertly obtained some tincture of steel, a common treatment for anaemia, and prepared her bed for a miscarriage, lining it with old petticoats and blankets. Then she took the medicine and waited.

Ectopic pregnancy was not reliably diagnosable until early pregnancy scanning was introduced. Emma was around eight weeks pregnant, which is usually the time when an ectopic begins to make itself known, but aside from morning sickness, she had no warning signs. Even if she had, it would have made no difference. A ruptured ectopic is often fatal now: in 1860, it was always fatal.

If you were poor and needed medical attention in the nineteenth century, the poor law would pay for a doctor to see you. You had to be on the right list for this though, and Emma was not. So when her neighbour went to the doctor, he told the neighbour he couldn’t see her without a note from the relieving officer. And when Emma’s friend went to ask the relieving officer, he wasn’t in and she didn’t want to explain why Emma needed a medical order. Edmund was asked to fetch a doctor, but he was worried about landing Emma in the shit by being too close for a lodger…

So no doctor came. Emma was in agony. She passed out every time anyone tried to move her. The tincture of steel made her vomit. She had a little laudanum in her house and that was her sole relief as she bled out into her abdominal cavity.

We know all this because Emma’s death was reported to the coroner and he held a very thorough inquest including a post-mortem. Not all the details were reported in the press: the ectopic was described as a ‘fibroid’, and Edmund was squarely blamed for not fetching help.

She would have died regardless.

As women still do.

As women still do when they can’t afford help, or don’t know where to get it.

As women still do when they are denied timely access to healthcare.

As women still do when they are excluded from decisions about who gets help and who does not.

Ectopic pregnancy remains a leading cause of maternal mortality around the globe.

This did not happen last week.

Except it probably did.

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