How the term 'poverty' has changed

[Deeperthantheocean]

Just this really.

Poverty in my grandparents' age was 'be rich, a gangster, work hard or you die'.

This was so true, whole different era and real poverty from their times being born in the 1910s and the aftermath. Sadly my GF died so GM was alone bringing up 2 children and then adopting another as that's what what you did when members of the family were being abused. No benefits, only a council where you to practically beg for help and it was so looked down upon and gossip then was brutal.

So, a little 2 bedroom house, outhouse toilet, coal fire, no electricity. My GM worked all day and night... cleaning, making clothes and took in 2 male lodgers in the downstairs 'parlour', made breakfast and evening meals for them.

The 3 girls shared a double bed, GM got up at 4am every morning to bring in coal and make the fire before everyone else got up to go to work/ school. Then she went to work, physical cleaning work to the rich and snooty. The sad thing is she was she was so intelligent, gifted at creativity and music (she played the church organ with music she learnt from heart voluntarily) and sowed the most beautiful dresses. Also cakes.

Having rambled on a bit because this is deep to my heart hearing the stories, poverty was a case of just being able to survive, eat and have a roof. The DC were incredibly intelligent but had to to go to work aged 15 cand over all their wages for the family fund.

Poverty now has a different criteria, which of course it should as society has progressed. However aibu to compare the claim to poverty now to then? There is help, UC, recognition of SEN with DLa etc.

Sorry, but now those claiming poverty now wouldn't consider letting out a room, working all day and night, making clothes and baking just to survive.

Am I right? I wouldn't either as there has been so much to eradicate these hard times but I truly respect the hardship and feel so grateful for what we have now. Xx

Absolutely! I’ve seen posts on MN over the years asking about taking a lodger in or having a random male family member visit and this point is always raised, as it should be.

Absolutely true.
Children were sent to work at 9 at the end of the last century.
Zero benefits.
A 9 year old boy was sent to work in a brick factory, his mum wept as she wrapped up his sandwiches for lunch.

Desperate poverty. ''People of the abyss'' by Jack London describes it.
Awful industrial accidents where people were left seriously disabled and zero payouts and no ''pip''.

We don't know poverty like that now, thank goodness. {At least in the UK}

It has changed, but I think it's also to do with how poverty is defined.

The word 'poverty' is bandied about like some kind of buzz word these days, but often people are referring to relative poverty (i.e. earning a certain % less than average) rather than true poverty. Absolute poverty does exist in the UK, but not to the extent that the Guardian would have you believe.

Having travelled to a few less developed countries, I have seen what poverty looks like. Entire families with kids living on the side of a main road!

Yes when I hear the word “poverty” followed by stats 99 times out of 100 it’s talking about relative poverty

That's very true! ''Radio Rentals''
A TV was hundreds of pounds back when people earned very little.

www.radios-tv.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/img473.jpg

Absolutely agree you can make better bread if you do it yourself, but it’s going to cost 70-80p to heat the oven for it, and then ingredients on top - it’s hardly the biggest economy in the face of rental / housing costs. This is the thing - no amount of baking bread and hand stitching clothes is going to get someone out of poverty with cost of housing and heating so high.

Sorry, but now those claiming poverty now wouldn't consider letting out a room, working all day and night, making clothes and baking just to survive.

I don’t agree with this generalisation at all. 1 in 3 children are in poverty. This means they have food insecurity- so skipping meals. This means missing school due to lack of means to get to school, or no money to replace a bit of uniform, or no money for personal hygiene. Teachers are buying with their own money toothbrushes, shampoo, & food for children.

You can’t bake, when you have no electric or gas to cook with- there are millions of families that have disconnected from the energy grid because they don’t have the money to top up the prepayment meters.

Sewing clothes is an expensive hobby these days.

There are no spare rooms to put lodgers in and it is benefit fraud to have a lodger when UC is paying your rent. Most households in poverty are overcrowded, they have 3-4 children in one bedroom with adult(s) sleeping in the open living/kitchen area.

I was born in the 90's and much of what you described here is also my childhood experience.

I didn't have my first winter coat or weather appropriate shoes until my early 20's, when I was out working and managed to save up enough to buy them myself.

I often went hungry as a child and it's only now that I'm married and earning well, I can finally afford to heat my house and have hot water running from the tap without restrictions.

These are still issues you're just looking at it wrong. Only had a coal fire... Coal was cheap (it's not now) and fire kick out a lot of heat. There's plenty of people in fuel poverty this year who have not been able to heat their homes at all due to inflated costs. Not all houses even have central heating and I've known a few in rentals using electric heaters. Condensation issues from being unable to hear their homes.

Overcrowding is still a huge issue too. People don't often come online and boast about it so you don't hear about it, but I grew up in a very poor area and it isn't uncommon for two families to be living together in a tiny 2 bed flat with multiple kids. Council waiting lists are longer than ever.

Lots of people in these situations work, some even work two jobs. People may have had less money back then but they also had less debt. We now work more hours for lower return, if you look at what wages could pay for 70 years ago Vs now particularly in things like education and buying property.

I see regular posts on here and other forums of people who can't access basic health care or even dentistry and are forced to live with dental pain and infections if they can't scrape together hundreds for a root canal. Thousands of they can't get an NHS dentist.

I go back to the city where I used to live and the poverty is everywhere. Dirty streets. Dirty people. It's grim. Nobody is happy. I see young people and I feel bad for their future there (or lack of). For most it will be a life of struggling that never ends. Even if they work hard, even if they are good people, even if they are talented or bright.

Things that were since considered good economy like making clothes are now very expensive. Repairs - fine. But buying the pattern to make a dress, the fabric, the machine to see it on and the X amount of hours to create the item means that it's financially a very poor investment. Especially with vinted, eBay, charity shops and even fast fashion and Primark making garments available for only a few pounds. The same is extended to things like baking. I baked a spiced apple toffee cake today, it cost a small fortune and I realised as put all the ingredients together why I rarely bake now. It's much more cost effective to buy something in from one of the bakeries or even supermarket bakery.

People are struggling just as much as they always have. There is much more pressure to hide it though. Social services would almost certainly become involved if a woman was sleeping in the same bed as two children one of which not even her own, particularly if this wasn't a temporary neasure. Rightfully so. We hopefully all want better for children, and them not to suffer like the generations before them and know feeling cold, being ashamed of their home or background, having access to more opportunities and better standards and safer living environments.

It's not really changed at all. In fact your romanticised picture of the past makes it sound like poor people used to deserve help but now they don't. Perhaps they aren't pulling up themselves by the bootstraps enough for your liking?

Yes because competition over who is or has been more impoverished is so effective at eradicating it. Instead of, I don't know, questioning why any poverty exists at all in this day and age? In the same timeline as literal billionaires.

And by your own logic, for some people in the world having a two bed house, enough food for breakfast every day and a coal fire would be incredible wealth, so what right did your grandparents have to claim poverty?

Without getting into the poor Olympics, having a spare room to rent out doesn't sound like poverty. The woman I worked with a few years ago who was living in a one bed flat with six children sounds like poverty. Or my upstairs neighbours who've been on a sofa bed for at least 15 years so their kid has the one bedroom.
They aren't in the poor house and everyone has indoor toilets but poverty sounds about right.

I think there are some interesting comparisons. I think it's pretty clear that poverty in the past could be absolutely horrific. The specter of the workhouse is one of the reasons people worked so damn hard, including the kids - they were highly motivated to survive because the possibility of going into the workhouse was so terrible.

One of the things that is very different that the OPs post highlights for me is that there were ways people could take action themselves. Letting out rooms, which my great grandparents did, cooking in their own kitchen, in my great grandparents generation there were still women and children making matchboxes at home, and some of my great grandparents were weavers working out of their home.

It's really different now. There are working poor of course, but usually they are in outside employment, and are in no position to do much on the side - the kinds of things earlier generations did to make ends meet, due to regulations of one kind or another. And then there are those who have learned to accept generational welfare, which is a learned behaviour - as much as no one likes to think social support for those in need would disincentivise work, there clearly seem to be people for whom this is the case and it is devastating. Both of these things to me suggest a kind of disempowerment where people may be materially or physically somewhat better off than many poor people in the past, but feel less able to affect their own situation.

What surprises me is how many people no longer DIY, garden, clean their homes, themselves, nor do they make do and mend, or save up for stuff as it can go on a card now for instant gratification.

I was staggered that when I was in the bike shop recently (buying a new helmet), two kids came in with bikes and paid them money (I think £10 each) to pump up the tyres and tighten the chain! Such simple stuff that is now on videos on You Tube (we had Richard's Bicycle Book back in the day!)

They didn’t have a spare room to rent out back then. You only have to have a look at the census to see how many people were rammed into tiny dwellings, you can’t even call them houses.
Many inner cities had tenements in some form, basically several stories of rooms rented out individually. A family of 10+ would be crammed into no more than one or two rooms. There is a column for number of rooms in some census records. Washing was done in the wash house shared by the whole tenement along with a couple of lavatories.

If you were lucky you went into service, with a room and meals thrown in. But you were expected to work, it was certainly not like Downton Abbey.

No health service, any money spare was for the men in the family, if they couldn’t work there was no money. But there was the workhouse if you fell on hard times. Hard labour for both men and women in exchange for a bed and a meal.

It was no coincidence that the speciality of gynaecology was born post NHS. Women lived with horrendous birth injuries, but with no money or specialist surgeons to carry out complex repairs they just managed.
I always used to wonder why some women in historical novels or commentaries spent their lives in bed or unable to leave home, they probably had birth injuries that meant they were unable to leave their house.

Poverty today has some of the same problems but is not comparable. My family moved every other generation to take advantage of work opportunities, they were skilled and intelligent finally moving up the social ladder with my parents generation having benefited from the grammar schools. My generation are all university educated, as are our children.

It saddens me that the door was slammed shut in the 70s with the demise of grammar schools. Although the last few years have opened up opportunities again, it is rapidly failing as a route out of poverty for many capable young people. Technology is rapidly replacing job opportunities, with a result of an increasingly shrinking workforce. Manufacturing and industry has almost become extinct, the jobs that supported the working classes have gone, replaced by the benefits system. It’s almost a 180 deg turn around. The “rich” ( those of us who earn enough money to pay tax but cannot claim benefits) tax payers supporting the unemployable or low paid poor. Whereas in the past the hardworking poor created the wealth of the rich. For some this may be an acceptable outcome but it’s not sustainable, although it is the basis of socialism. We have moved from one extreme to another.

One thing I’m certain of is that living in poverty now is different to poverty before the advent of the welfare state.

Like not having a proper coat to wear in bitterly cold weather,and having to make do with a knitted shawl.

I have done Jacobite re-enactment in Scottish winters and I can tell you that a knitted shawl over the layers of wool dress, shifts, petticoats, and stays is much warmer than jeans and a puffer jacket. You can even wear it popped on your head if extra chilly.

The clothes back then were warmer than they are now- it was the Little Ice Age from 1350 to 1850

Poverty today has some of the same problems but is not comparable.

Of course it’s comparable! Poverty is always defined in relation to how the elite of a society in that time and place live.

Otherwise we are going to end up saying only prehistoric Stone Age people wearing skins, eating berries and shitting under a tree knew poverty.

It was no coincidence that the speciality of gynaecology was born post NHS.
😆 gynaecology started a century before the NHS and midwives have been stitching up birth injuries centuries before that in the west.

The East had it even earlier…they could do c-sections where mum and baby survived by the 17th century.

It’s almost a 180 deg turn around. The “rich” ( those of us who earn enough money to pay tax but cannot claim benefits) tax payers supporting the unemployable or low paid poor. Whereas in the past the hardworking poor created the wealth of the rich.

The hardworking poor still create the wealth of the rich! That’s not changed. Look at income inequality and wealth inequality. Do you think Bezos would have got rich without exploiting Amazon workers?

I’m not sure that Stone Age man had a particularly polarised society hierarchy. I suspect one stone house was pretty much the same as another. They were probably a far better society to live amongst. If you didn’t pull your weight you were probably kicked out of the community.
I think you have to advance a little further in history to the Egyptians and romans to look at elitism in action.

Hm not really. Archaeological digs have found grave goods that denote social hierarchies from the Neolithic on up. You are romanticising it too. It’s not about pull your weight or get kicked out, these were not egalitarian societies.

Obviously, as we go through time, the standard of living goes up for everyone. That’s why you don’t compare poverty from years ago to poverty of today, you define poverty by comparing the lives of the poor to the lives of the elites in the same time and place.

I think people find meaning in comparing the poverty their parents grew up with to the poverty they see around them today. My mother grew up in the depression in the American South. Her mum had four children and was widowed when my mum was 3 months old. They ate squirrels which her brothers managed to shoot, and one summer my mother had no clothes, so her mother made her a dress out of an old flour sack, cutting holes for head and arms. It was ok for a couple of months because she wasn't in school.

My mother was very compassionate, and understood poverty and the struggles of immigrants in particular, but she did often notice ways in which her family had been resourceful, and that they had often been contented with much less than what modern society makes people expect and need.

To be honest sounds fairly standard for the era OP. Everyone had coal fires including the wealthy, lots of people were very lucky to have an outside toilet to themselves, vs a shared block ones situated behind terraces. My Gran could recall tap dancing up and down the ones out the back of hers to scare her neighbour 😁. She also grew up very 'poor', but she built her way up from being a young shop girl, to becoming a boutique manager. She also learned to drive.

My house which was built around 80yrs ago also still has an outdoor toilet by the way (obviously an indoor bathroom too), plus a coal shed. My mum attended grammar school and still left at 15 to get a job. Also extremely common for the time. You can't contrast between now and then, it's a completely different kettle of fish, and everyone was in the same boat in regards to no central heating, double glazing, and no TV.

I would almost describe myself as 'in poverty' now. I work three jobs, one full time, one night shifts and one cleaning job in the early mornings- I still can't afford to provide myself with three (home cooked, from scratch) meals a day- I go without so my family don't have to.

I rent, so therefore can't sublet a room, my rent is over a grand a month, my council tax is £200pm. That's without bills, basic necessities such as a phone bill and transport (transport of which I have cut down to the bare minimum, I take two trains and a 20 minute walk to work- there are no jobs closer to home that wouldn't mean taking a pay cut).

My partner works for the emergency services and earns less than I do. He saves lives and puts his life at risk each day, to earn pennies.

This past month, I couldn't afford to purchase sanitary products for myself- doing so would mean taking money out of the food pot.

I wouldn't blatantly describe myself as in poverty, as there are many thousands of people worse off than me, and although I go without, I manage just fine; however I find your comments outdated, and frankly blind to the current financial climate.

I spent part of my childhood in a tenement building with my sibling and parents. We lived in two rooms, only the kitchen sink, and a toilet shared with three other families. I knew families living in the same kind of situation with 4 or 5 kids.

But families these days are living in one room in homeless accommodation and a shared bathroom.

The point is poverty is a relative term, compared to what the 'average' person/family can expect at any particular point in time. For example having a smart phone does not make you not 'in poverty', as to exist and engage in today's society, to have a smart phone is a basic part of that, whether you agree with it or not. My parents can't get their head around that, as they view the so-called poor people of today, having the amenities and opportunities they didn't have - and I'm talking toilet paper, indoor loos, big TVs, further education - as not being poor. My Mum, who is relatively liberal, can't get her head around "this so called period poverty" when her and her sister had to stuff newspaper in their pants in the 1950s and 60s. Quite rightly, as society evolves, our expectations of our life and comfort does also, but that does mean what people view as poverty, in a subjective way, inevitably changes between generations.