Family In England Research Articles

A qualitative study exploring food insecurity amongst asylum seekers’ families in England

BackgroundThe cost-of-living crisis has exacerbated an already dire situation of poverty for many families seeking asylum in the UK. Food security is increasingly difficult to secure and integral to maintaining mental and physical health. This study aimed to explore and describe food insecurity amongst asylum-seeking families in Southampton, identify barriers to food security experienced, and how food security could be enabled for these families. MethodsWe aimed to recruit parents or parents-to-be seeking asylum (or recently received refugee status) to interview with the assistance of two local charities that support asylum seekers. Eight semi-structured interviews were conducted; four with stakeholders, who worked in the charities, and four with mothers seeking asylum. Issues around food insecurity and factors affecting the diet of these families were explored. The qualitative data were coded, and common themes were iteratively derived using thematic analysis. FindingsThe sample of asylum-seeking mothers included women from India, Central America, East Africa and Eastern Europe. Five key themes were constructed: lack of income, culturally inappropriate services in terms of food aid interventions, inaccessibility, lack of support and poor mental and physical health as a result. Within these themes, sub-themes of vulnerability, need for education, hunger, charity dependant, and isolation were also identified. The most prominent recurrent theme was that families seeking asylum couldn’t support themselves to have adequate nutrition due to the limited funds they received from the government and their restriction from working. This is exacerbated by issuing the limited money in weekly instalments, so families are forced to choose between necessities for their children like nappies and food. InterpretationInitiatives need to be introduced to tackle food insecurity in asylum seeker families. This could be done by increasing their money allowance to match inflation and giving money monthly rather than weekly instalments to allow families to budget, bulk buy and avoid living ‘hand to mouth’. Greater support and education should be given to families seeking asylum to ensure they can survive on limited means. FundingUniversity of Southampton.

A ‘grave miscarriage of justice’: marriage and divorce in Jewish immigrant families in England, 1870-1940

ABSTRACT This essay analyses disputed marriages/divorces involving Jewish immigrants to England between 1870 and 1940. English courts came to contradictory decisions in these cases due to the difference between religiously-based systems in Eastern Europe and Britain’s secular, centralised approach. The result was split decisions. In civil courts, magistrates upheld religious marriages by awarding maintenance to wives, but the same evidence proved insufficient in the criminal courts to convict for bigamy. Unfortunately, whatever the outcome, these cases fed into anti-alienist rhetoric at the turn of the twentieth century, associating ‘alien’ Jewish immigrants with wife desertion, criminal behaviour, and even polygamy.

Colonial trauma: Terrains of disappearance, traumatic reflexivity, and historicizing countertransference

AbstractThis article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo‐Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double‐nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.

Setting new benchmarks for the provision of careers support for home educating families: findings from action research

ABSTRACT The number of families in England choosing to withdraw their children from school has grown significantly since 2016. In this manuscript, we present findings from action research with purposefully sampled home educating young people (n = 9), parents/carers (n = 16), staff from Career Connect (n = 4), staff from schools and colleges (n = 4), staff from six local authorities (n = 14). We explore the reasons for withdrawing from school and subsequent access to Careers Education Information Advice and Guidance (CEIAG). We conclude that a growing number of families opt for home education as a short-term solution to broader challenges, often lacking awareness of the long-term consequences. National quality benchmarks for CEIAG provision in schools in England do not apply to provision outside of school. The near absence of professional careers support exacerbates other challenges of being outside of mainstream school and poses a major risk to the long-term life outcomes for those young people.

‘I am not a teacher!’ The challenges of enacting home schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic among low-income families of primary-aged children

ABSTRACT This paper examines the policy enactments of education and care during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the unique challenges facing low-income families in England as they sought to navigate this exceptional period of time. The global pandemic was a challenging time for all families as all but key worker parents/carers of primary school age children (5–11) were forced to become their child’s educator. But the effects were experienced very differently by diverse socio-economic groups. Taking an interpretive approach based on the auto-biographical reflections of six low-income families located in the Greater London area, we carried out online family interviews using zoom to examine the problems created by government policy guidance in England during 2020–2021. The interviews were semi-structured to ensure space and coverage for the participants to share their unique experiences. Using policy-enactment theory, we add to existing knowledge of the impact of COVID-19 on low-income families by analysing the effects of enacting care and education on daily life, rhythms and routines. The intersections between gender and social class are also explored to show the disproportionate impact on women.

The Missing Generation: Grandparents and Agency in Early Modern England

AbstractGrandparents have been largely overlooked in the otherwise rich historiography of the family in early modern England. This article shows how many were able to play significant roles in family life, in both emotional and practical terms. Some forged close bonds with their young grandchildren, or took them in for a period to relieve hard‐pressed parents, while others were willing to raise and educate the orphaned. Some also provided moral or religious guidance, assuming responsibilities conventionally assigned to godparents, and in some cases even challenging parental decisions of which they disapproved. Grandchildren were almost always remembered in wills, with testators also careful to protect the interests of any potentially at risk. The article then turns to explore the role of grandparents acting as welfare providers, whether voluntarily or through a court order, for grandchildren left as orphans or born to unmarried mothers. It assesses the often contentious issue of grandparents’ moral and legal responsibilities under the parish relief system established by the Poor Law in 1601, and disputes between the paternal and maternal kin. Finally, the article touches briefly on grandparents as repositories of information, whose memories and experience could be of value to their community as well as to their own families.

Digital–environmental habitus of families in England in times of pandemic

This article uses adopts a revised version of the concept of techno-environmental habitus to investigate and make sense of the differentiation among digital technology users’ attitudes towards the environment in England. Digital–environmental habitus refers to the combination of structural determinants (existing background) and the metabolised increased use of digital technologies in people’s everyday life that also interacts with individual environmental attitudes. The results of a national survey among English parents between 20 and 55 years suggest that parents’ education levels, gender, age and income play a role in increasing their awareness about the environmental-friendly use of digital technologies. This study shows that the digital–environmental habitus of parents in England is layered according to the combination of existing socioeconomic traits and individual capacity and willingness to adapt to a drastic increase in both the use of digital technologies (due to the social distancing imposed by the pandemic) and environmental degradation.

Law, Emotions and Infidelity: A Case Study of the Cholmondeley Family in Eighteenth-Century England

Law, Emotions and Infidelity: A Case Study of the Cholmondeley Family in Eighteenth-Century England

Hypertension differentially impacts cognition in men and women in early midlife.

The current study aimed to understand how sex differences in the timing of hypertension onset contribute to early midlife risk for cognitive decline that may differ by sex and whether sex-dependent advantages in normotensive populations are influenced by the presence of hypertension. One hundred and ninety-five adults aged 45-55 from the New England Family Study underwent neuropsychological testing to assess attention, executive function, and memory. Physician-diagnosed hypertension status was self-reported via questionnaire. Mid-adulthood hypertension was associated with worse performance on measures of attention and memory, but the cognitive domains impacted varied by sex. Hypertension was associated with only attention in men, whereas in women it was associated with attention and associative and working memory. Sex differences in midlife cognitive performance found in normotensive adults were attenuated in those with hypertension. Our results underscore the importance of accounting for sex when assessing the impact of hypertension on midlife cognition that could be indicative of later decline and risk for cognitive impairment and dementia, given hypertension is an independent risk factor.

The role of the built environment in the trajectories of cognitive ability and mental health across early and middle childhood: Results from a street audit tool in a general-population birth cohort

The research exploring the association between the built environment and children's mental health and cognitive abilities has produced mixed results. This may be due to the inconsistency in the approach taken to describe the built environment. This study, using data from the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), a large general-population birth cohort, considered simultaneously several measures to describe it when the participant child was 3 years old, including neighbourhood disorder (assessed by an MCS interviewer by direct observation of several physical and social aspects of the immediate neighbourhood), area green space, air pollution, urbanicity and neighbourhood socio-economic disadvantage. It then explored its role in the trajectory of mental health (measured with the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire-SDQ) and cognitive ability (measured with the British Ability Scales-BAS) across ages 3–11 years in 4454 children of stayer families in England. Using growth curve modelling we found that neighbourhood disorder was associated with emotional symptoms and conduct problems at age 3 and with the trajectory of cognitive ability from ages 3 to 11. These associations were robust to controls for quality of the indoor housing environment and parental mental health and socio-economic status. Neither green space nor air pollution had any effect on our outcomes. Our findings shed light on the importance of specific aspects of the built environment for mental health and cognition during childhood. They also highlight the value of using direct observation of the immediate neighbourhood.

Pox and parents: educational choices in the light of smallpox epidemics in seventeenth-century England

ABSTRACT This study offers a microhistory by exploring the impact regular smallpox outbreaks had on the lives of gentry families in seventeenth-century England. It particularly focuses on the question as in what way smallpox influenced upbringing and educational decisions and draws on a collection of personal letters of the Clarke family (1667–1710), mainly correspondence between Mary (neé Jepp) (approx. 1655/7–1705) and her husband Edward Clarke I of Chipley (1650–1710), Somerset, and their children. Personal letters contain various information about infectious diseases, such as symptoms, care, and medical treatment. It is argued that the constant threat of epidemics of smallpox influenced the upbringing and education of children with regard to personnel, for example tutors or governesses, places, schools, and institutions, and the duration of studies.

Evaluation of the impact of the MECSH programme in England: A mixed methods study

The Maternal Early Childhood Sustained Home-visiting (MECSH) programme is a proven, structured intervention from pregnancy or up to 8 weeks after the infant comes home until child age 2, delivered to universal partnership plus or targeted families on each health visitor's caseload. The aim of the study was to show how the MECSH programme, developed in Australia, impacts families in England. The study employed mixed methods including: client demographic data gathered by record audit; parent report data; health visitor focus group; and written testimonies from health visitors and clients. A small comparative study was conducted in one site. The programme reached a diverse range of families. Programme parent-reported measures met quality standards and were higher than in control sites. Health visitors and clients perceived multiple positive parent and child impacts. These positive results support the ongoing implementation of MECSH in England, and warrant further study in a population level trial.

“They will have an abundance”

Abstract Investigating the short period between 1840 and 1842, I explore the immediate causes and specific expressions of Mary Ann Evans’s apostasy within the context of her family and larger religious culture in England. Seemingly overnight, Mary Ann moved decisively from the intense evangelical affiliation of more than a decade as well as the familial Anglican identity of her entire life to critical freethinking. The intellectual tussle of the times was not inevitably weighted toward the loss of faith; many thinkers found habitable places that supported rational, scientific, and tolerant perspectives among a broad array of Christian communities. Mary Ann Evans’s decision cannot simply be read as an account of “progress.” I suggest that the transformation was the first of a set of life-changing decisions that she tended to describe in terms of sacrifice, but also in terms less native to her: those of freedom and relief for a mind gifted by abundant understanding.

Lives of the Sisters of Syon Abbey ca 1415–1539: Patterns of Vocation from the Syon Martiloge and Other Records

Eileen Power’s work on medieval English nunneries laid the foundation for modern scholarship. This paper explores patterns of vocation in the lives of the sisters of Syon Abbey, a major national institution founded by Henry V in 1415. The paper is part of my Syon Abbey Prosopography Project, which traced c. 600 sisters, brothers and patrons c.1400-1600. Their geographical origins show how the royal dynasties of Lancaster, York and Tudor wove their regional affinities into a national elite, contributing to the emergence of the Tudor state. Nuns from loyal families served their royal masters through prayer. Early recruits came from Sweden, and from gentry and merchant families in England’s wealthiest regions: the Midlands, East Anglia, the South West and London. A few aristocratic nuns were effectively political prisoners who entered Syon following family treason. Later recruits came from courtier families settled in counties around London. ‘Syon families’ were loyal to church and crown for generations and were at the heart of opposition to the English Reformation. Although Syon was dissolved in 1539, the sisters defiantly continued to follow the Birgittine Rule in small groups, some in exile. Collectively their lives tell the story of Syon Abbey’s early centuries.

William Stimpson and the Golden Age of American Natural History

This biography of Williams Stimpson is much more than the history of a zoologist of the nineteenth century. The author's decades of research have given us a volume that goes beyond the facts of Stimpson's life but also gives insight into life in the mid-1800s and the beginning of the major scientific communities of the United States.Stimpson's professional career only lasted about twenty years until his death from tuberculosis at forty. He was born in a fairly affluent family in New England, where he had the opportunity to receive a higher education. His father steered his education toward business, but Stimpson also took courses in Latin, which prepared him for his future career in science.Stimpson's career path was influenced by two great naturalists of the day: Augustus A. Gould, who provided Stimpson a copy of his Report on Invertebrata of Massachusetts at Stimpson's request and became a mentor until Gould's death, and Louis Agassiz, a leading naturalist who introduced Stimpson to offshore dredging for marine life. Stimpson converted his father's basement into an aquarium of sorts where he observed mollusks and their life cycle. The author notes that Stimpson was one of the first to create the right mix of plants and animals to form a self-regulating ecosystem in an aquarium.Stimpson first published his observations and discoveries at seventeen years of age and joined societies that exposed him to others in the scientific community. This led to a two-year apprenticeship with Agassiz. Stimpson learned much of his taxonomy and zoological practices from Agassiz, but found Agassiz had difficulty recognizing his former students as equals. Vasile explores the difficulties Stimpson had with his early mentor throughout the book.The author spends several chapters chronicling Stimpson's early adventures as a field naturalist on exploration vessels in the Pacific. He collected multiple specimens, made new discoveries, and published and edited journals. Stimpson became a defender of the American scientific community, which was often looked down upon as inferior by the more established European scientists.In the mid to late 1850s Stimpson found himself living in Washington, DC, working to classify the growing collections of the Smithsonian Institution. While in Washington, Stimpson became a founding member of a gentlemen's social club called the Megatherium Club. With the Civil War looming large in the nation's capital, Stimpson also struggled to publish a major volume on mollusks, which would have included many of his own illustrations.During the Civil War, Stimpson worked on classifying the invertebrates in Agassiz's museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and made his only trip to Europe. Stimpson also began courting Ann Louis Gordon, whom he married. Together, they had a son and later boy and girl twins. He spent his honeymoon doing field work in New Jersey.In 1865, Stimpson was hired to what he thought was a temporary assignment to replace his friend and colleague Robert Kennicott, the curator of the Chicago Academy of Sciences. He took the position while a pregnant Ann stayed behind in Maryland with her parents. Many of his former ties, especially with the Smithsonian, allowed him to greatly expand the specimens of the academy.In the final chapters, the author shows how the last few years of Stimpson's life brought many tragedies. First, a fire at the Smithsonian destroyed many of his unpublished papers and materials. Both his friend, Robert Kennicott, and his early mentor, Alexander Gould, passed away. A fire at the academy damaged many museum pieces and much of his unpublished book on mollusks. Finally, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 completely destroyed the building and contents of the Chicago Academy of Sciences, including what remained of Stimpson's material for the mollusk book. The following year, after many episodes of sickness, he died from tuberculosis.Ronald Scott Vasile has assembled a wonderful biography of William Stimpson that is both scholarly and an entertaining read. The book includes an appendix of Stimpson's taxonomic work, notes on each chapter, a bibliography, references, and other source material. The author has indexed the work both by subject and name. This book will be an excellent resource to anyone interested in Stimpson, his work, his contemporaries, and life in the mid to late 1800s.

Book Review: An Elite Family in Early Modern England: The Temples of Stowe and Burton Bassett 1570–1656 by O’Day, Rosemary

Book Review: <i>An Elite Family in Early Modern England: The Temples of Stowe and Burton Bassett 1570–1656</i> by O’Day, Rosemary

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee

Queer Precursors: Same-Sex Desire in Charles Prentiss’s The American Bee Helen Hunt (bio) In 1797, a recent Harvard graduate named Charles Prentiss published what might be the first collection of American short stories: The American Bee: A Collection of Entertaining Histories, Selected from Different Authors and Calculated for Amusement and Instruction. Taken together, the stories in The American Bee endorse an antiauthoritarian outlook promoting women’s self-determination, sexual and otherwise, and encouraging men to resist the tyranny that underlies patriarchal ideals. Two texts in this already radical collection, one with American authorship, celebrate decidedly queer bonds for both men and women. While a modern reader might expect that such a collection would not have had a mainstream literary readership, Prentiss specifically marketed the works he published to the friends he had made during his time at Harvard. He must have believed that the antiauthoritarian message of The American Bee would appeal to this network of educated, like-minded, elite young men scattered across New England and the mid-Atlantic. Surprisingly, The American Bee’s queer stories seem to have occupied the center, not the neglected margins, of New England literary culture as Prentiss imagined it. Prentiss’s privileged family history is another reason a reader might be surprised to see antipatriarchal and queer themes featured in his work. He grew up in a New England family that had gained enough prominence for C. J. F Binney to write its biography in 1852.1 His father was a minister, and his brother-in-law was a New Hampshire congressman. Charles graduated from Harvard in 1795 and that same year married Sophia Gardner of Leominster, herself a minister’s daughter from a well-connected family, and they settled there. Prentis turned down a career in law to pursue life as an author, editor, [End Page 1] and publisher of both literary and political works. He published The American Bee early in his career, in 1797, right after he and his brother stopped printing the Rural Repositor, of which, according to Binney, “about one hundred of his old college friends were subscribers, as he was a favorite with them.’”2 Prentiss only remained in New England for a short time; in 1799, he moved to Georgetown, after which he worked in Baltimore until he left to tour Europe in 1804. After his return, he worked as a printer and author in Virginia, Maryland, DC, and Massachusetts. He died in 1820 at age forty-six.3 Turning down a legal career to become an itinerant printer was a risky choice that meant Prentiss traded stability and prestige for financial risk and social obscurity. Many printers faced bankruptcy after the Revolutionary War, and most magazines lasted for just a few years. Consequently, Prentiss must have had an excellent reason to take this chance; his decision testifies to his personal investment in literature, as he consciously worked to ensure that US belles lettres made space for women’s sexual self-determination and same-sex relationships as alternatives to heterosexual marriage. While Prentiss’s family history has attracted scholarly attention, his literary productions have not. The American Bee is rarely read; it is never mentioned in histories of US fiction; and it is the subject of only one scholarly article.4 It is a surprisingly accessible text, since a transcription is available for free through the Evans Early American Imprints Text Creation Partnership, and the Evans Digital Edition and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online houses facsimile pages. Nonetheless, The American Bee has suffered the same neglect as nearly all of the short fiction published before 1820 and of the many compilations of stories published after that, even though “between 1820 and 1845, compilations containing huge amounts of short fiction formed twenty-nine percent of the literary market.”5 As Jared Gardner demonstrates, the emphasis on a unique American vernacular style has privileged individual genius and exceptional Americanness in a way that systematically detracts from the transatlantic tradition of the periodical and has led to the critical neglect of magazines and the short fiction that populates their pages.6 The American Bee certainly participates in this transatlantic exchange in a way that troubles a simple...

Separating History and Fiction

Separating History and Fiction

The three-legged pot and the lasting impact of the Gukurahundi: Shona Ndebele inter-tribal families in England

This qualitative study explores the lived experiences of Shona/Ndebele inter-tribal families in England, the challenges they face, and their responses to these. The findings show that the atrocities of the Gukurahundi continue to cast their shadow on some of these families. Disapproval of the marriage from one or both sides of the couple's parents leads to the couple's parents' subsequent lack of interest in the children born in these families. This is then extended to the wider family. Gender imbalances, culture shock and communication difficulties were other challenges faced by such couples. Couples learned to compromise and bring their cultures together, for example through cooking. The three-legged pot' metaphor was used by older women to teach younger, mainly Ndebele, women to accept male infidelity. This study will inform practitioners working with such couples as well as other mixed couples, especially those originating from areas of conflict.

Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War by Krista Vane-Tempest

Reviewed by: Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War by Krista Vane-Tempest Kirsty Harris (bio) Krista Vane-Tempest, Edith Blake’s War: The Only Australian Nurse Killed in Action During the First World War (Sydney: New South Publishing, 2021). ISBN: 978-1-7422-37398 (PB). B&W illustrations. xii + 353 pp. Reading a biography written by the subject’s family member can sometimes be an arduous duty with scant regard for fact or writing skills. Krista Vane-Tempest’s book about her great aunt is a welcome contrast. It is a pleasure to read, with careful contextualisation that will appeal to those interested in medical, nursing, and military history. Edith Blake was born in Sydney in 1885, and trained at the Coast Hospital in Little Bay, New South Wales, graduating in 1912. She enlisted with the British Army in April 1915 because 128 nurses who had applied to join the Australian Army Nursing Service were transferred by the Australian government to serve with the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service Reserve (QAIMNSR). Thus, this story has a level of importance above many histories written about Australian First World War nurses as Edith Blake was not a member of the Australian Imperial Force but one of more than 260 Australian nurses serving with the British. Blake, via Vane-Tempest, provides a curious window into a different world. The book contains delightful vignettes as Blake was an observer of people as well as activities while she nursed both on land and at sea. The excerpts from her diaries and letters are full of descriptions of Australian soldiers and nurses, reflecting a keen sense of her own nationality in a working world full of British people and systems. It reveals the strong camaraderie between nurses and doctors at their training hospital and is, in part, a history of the Coast Hospital nurses at this time; Blake’s sister Queen began training at the Coast Hospital while Blake was at war. [End Page 199] As well as recording her tourist activities and contact with family in England, Blake was a great recorder of ‘awful tragedies’ and often commented in her letters about ships being sunk or torpedoed, perhaps prescient of her later fate. As her writing sheds light on life and loss at sea, it situates the medical war at sea in the British historical narrative. She amply describes life aboard ship and brings voyages to life, in some instances providing great detail such as when describing hospital ship policies and how to deal with submarine attacks. There is valuable material in Blake’s 1915 diary and her 136 surviving letters, which build on existing knowledge and fill gaps for researchers. Life as a QA nurse, as QAIMNSR nurses were often called, differed in many aspects to that of a nurse serving with the Australian Army Nursing Service. Importantly, Australian QA nurses were in demand as they would work ‘hands-on’ at patients’ bedsides and in theatre, whereas QA nurses from many other countries supervised, spending their time at the ward desk. Blake’s service ended abruptly in February 1918 when the hospital ship on which she served, Glenart Castle, was torpedoed by a German submarine and sank, leading to her death by drowning. Herein lies the premise of the book: that Blake was the only Australian First World War nurse to die on ‘active service’. This assertion is questionable. It is known that Winifred Starling from Sydney, who trained at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and was also a member of the QAIMNSR, died by drowning while nursing on the SS Leinster which was torpedoed in the Irish Sea in 1918. Likewise, Welsh born Margaret Dorothy Roberts went to the war from Australia to serve with the QAIMNSR. She drowned when the ship Osmanieh was sunk by mines in the Mediterranean Sea near Alexandria, Egypt in 1917. There may well be others. A feature of the book is its Australian-centric nature. For example, Blake was employed in Egypt in a British hospital in support of British troops that were fighting on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The book does not concern itself with...