We need to talk about Margaret
A love letter to the working women of the past
Hello. I’m writing this with one eye on my kids, the youngest is currently feeding a plastic pizza to the other. It’s hour four of “entertaining the children” and I’m one polite request away from putting myself in time-out.
And yet, despite the dreary pretend, the emotional labour, the career hits, the stitches, the literal bleeding… I did have some level of maternity rights and leave. Because women before me didn’t.
And one woman who made sure the world knew about that was Margaret Llewelyn Davies.
Margaret wasn’t a mum herself. But she spent decades gathering the real, unpolished stories of the ones who were. In 1915, she published Maternity: Letters from Working Women - a book full of first-hand accounts from mothers who laboured in every sense of the word.
A group of exhausted women with ink stained fingers telling the world what it actually meant to give birth with nothing to eat and even less in cash to your name.
“I got up too soon after confinement, and it has left me with a weakness that I suffer from now… it is more knowledge and help that women need.”
BTW - She’s talking about permanent pelvic injury. But make it Victorian. And no NHS. And zero postpartum physio.
Another wrote:
“I have always had to do my own work up to the last… I do hope we get the £7 10s., and then there will be many who will not suffer as poor women have done in the past.”
You could almost mistake it for hope. But I feel like it is mostly resignation.
And this one:
“Much of the suffering entailed in maternity would be got rid of if women married with some knowledge of what lay before them… It is not the women’s fault that they are ignorant.”
Not the women’s fault. Let’s say that again. Not the women’s fault.
These women didn’t get “maternity leave.” They got “maternity please-just-don’t-fire-me.” They gave birth and went straight back to factory floors, to scrubbing, to nursing other people’s babies while bleeding from their own delivery.
And yet, they wrote.
They put pen to paper. In the middle of all that labour and loss and love and leaking, they wrote.
And Margaret Llewelyn Davies listened. She gathered hundreds of their letters and published them. And suddenly, middle-class politicians couldn’t pretend not to know anymore. The book was a bestseller. And it changed things. Not overnight, but enough.
“The child is the asset of the nation, and the mother the backbone. Therefore, I think the nation should help to feed and keep that mother, and so help to strengthen the nation…”
This was a working-class mum. No PR firm. No Instagram. Just a backbone worn down by birth, raising a generation that would one day shape a welfare state.
Why am I sharing this?
Because I needed to remind myself.
The small rest bite we fight for now is built on the exhaustion of women who never got it.
The leave we demand today exists because others were denied it.
The right to speak out is ours only because they refused to stay silent.
We keep fighting - because silence was never an option, and progress is never enough.
So to them:
To the women who gave birth on cold floors.
Who went back to work six days later.
Who stitched together lives with barely a thread.
Who wrote for us.
This one’s for you.
Thank you.
This is beautiful x