Flora W lost her mother to puerperal fever – a complication of childbirth – at the age of 12, and subsequently took on domestic and caring duties for her father and clutch of brothers in rural Cambridgeshire.
She married at 20, to a machine worker for a sugar refinery, moved to London and had two sons. A great favourite with children, as she would always have time for games rather than chores, she took in washing to put her children through college.
Later, she served as a councillor for one of the London boroughs, eventually being made one of the first female mayors of a London borough in the mid-1950s.
After her term finished, she served as alderman for the same borough, and had a block of flats named after her in the 1960s.
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What you are doing, documenting the lives of female family members whom history has left behind, is very admirable. Well done!
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Thank you. I am heartily sick of all the attention in genealogy going to the men, as with a patronym they are easier to follow, and women being relegated to an idea that they got married and had babies and that was it. This is my drive for a more balanced, equal, feminist genealogy.
But they’re not just my family, that’d be quite a thin sliver of the population and I’m trying to cover as broad a spectrum of women from different pathways and backgrounds as possible – I work as a genealogist, and these are women that I have found during my research.
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