The only way we know many of those women born in the 1880s is from stiff, unreal old studio photos. Unless they were privileged or exceptional, most women vanished from the record. Their lives often can’t be reconstructed beyond a few dates – their births and deaths, when their children were born – and maybe a recipe for drop scones or oxtail soup.
The events of my grandmother’s life – drawn from family stories and research – are as I’ve told them here. But I’ve had to imagine my way into what she felt and thought about them, and no doubt I’ve got that wrong in all sorts of ways. It’s only two generations ago, but Dolly’s world seems a foreign country. In the old photos those women in their impossible clothes seem like another species, their lives unimaginable.
But those women are our foremothers. Their stories are our history. Those mostly silent, mostly unrecorded women are where we come from. If we’d been born when they were, our lives would have been theirs. At any time before the present (and continuing now in many parts of the world), if you were born
