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

not just poverty, the definition of what is a 'good life' has changed dramatically too.
you see it all the time here and in the media, rose-glasses about the times when the average family could survive on one wage. But it was just that, surviving, with occasional treats. There were very few households in the, what 1920s, 1950s, even 1970s that lived an equivalent lifestyle to that of your average middle class family today, with frequent meals out and takeaways, monthly haircuts, nails and botox, new kitchen every 10 years, dishwasher and tumble dryer, holidays abroad every year, multiple activities for kids, then supporting them through uni, each child with a bedroom of their own and at least 2 cars per household, gym memberships, multiple TVs, phones, etc. They might have been able to afford a house on that one wage, but otherwise you are not comparing lifestyles like for like.

The other thing is people making generalisations about '100 years ago' but it's not necessarily that long ago.

My gran/mum didn't have an indoor toilet until the late 1960s, for example, and they wouldn't have considered themselves in poverty, just normal working class.
I was born in 1990 and was the first person in my family to stay in school after 16, let alone go to uni. My grandparents had their first holiday abroad when they were 50, my parents were in their early 20s, (and those were package deals to spain) whereas me and my siblings grew up going abroad, including long haul like disneyland, every year. My gran didn't have a bed of her own until she got married, whereas I didn't even have to share a bedroom.

In many ways both my grandparents and parents were better off financially than me by the time they were in their 50s to now - grandparents were retired age 50, parents aged 60, mortgages paid off, guaranteed state and workplace pensions, etc. But they didn't have anywhere near the luxuries I had growing up/as a young adult.

I'm never sure, when people look back and say 'things were better then' (let alone 'life was easier') what 'things' they are referring to, and whom exactly they were better for?

Not sure I'd say Botox is an improvement.

In fact I'm not sure if all the tat of modern life is an improvement. A few things are real, objective improvements, but most don't actually make people happier than they were in the past.

My partner shared a bed as a child with their sibling. That was in the sixties.

It's better quality, but unless you buy flour in bulk ( and actually use it ), you are really only saving very small amounts. Amounts that mean nothing when compared to the cost of housing.

My ex husband's two younger brothers had to share a bed until he left home to go to university and one of them got his room. That was in the late 70s. Their house had a coal fire in the living room and the kitchen - no other heating. They didn't have a fridge - just a cold slab in the pantry.

I also don't think these people are factoring the cost of running the oven. If I threw bread in the oven every week I'd definitely see a rise in bills (I live of grid and buy bottled gas for the oven so I notice quickly if my usage changes). It is also time and labour intensive. It needs kneeding for ages, sitting for hours. Lots of clean up and dirty bowls. If you don't have heating you may only be having the hot water on for very small bursts and creating excessive gluey washing up bowls isn't ideal either.

I'm all for people baking bread if they want to but there's phrases like 'the best thing since sliced bread' and entire industries, local bakery's to Warburton's, making bread because people have rarely had time to do it at home. ... Also if you go at like 6pm to the supermarket bakery they have stacks and stacks for 10p each that you can buy and freeze lol 😂 waste not!

You can't really compare then to now. Not with the increase of technology and the cheap products and food available to buy. E.g. A cheap loaf of bread costs 42p. Lots of families can't even afford the equipment to bake. By the time they've bought the ingredients, a big bowl to mix it in, a loaf tin, and heated the oven up... They could have bought several loaves of bread. And that's before factoring in the cost of inspections needed to sell food, and insurance etc. Baking isn't an easy money maker these days.
It's the same with making clothes. In order pay yourself a liveable wage you're looking at £20+ for a pair of leggings. Most people will just buy some from the high street for a fraction of the price

My grandparents brought up ten children in a tumbledown three bedroomed cottage. They only got an inside toilet in the early 80s. My gran went on one holiday in her life, paid for by her daughters. They had no central heating, just an old range that smoked like hell, and had no phone, never mind a mobile.

They had over forty grandchildren. We all live in nice houses with all mod cons, most have several cars, phones, computers etc. Its quite a leap in two generations. I really hope things don't go backwards again in the following generations.

This 100% affordable luxury means you can only ever really sacrifice on essentials to see a big difference - people go without heating because you'll save hundreds even missing a few days per week over winter but all the advice is "give up coffee/avocado" as if we're living in the old time zone

Oh yes, and they didn't have a phone either. They lived there because my ex's mum co owned it as it was left to her and her four brothers when her mother died. My ex's dad had left his job through ill health. Then her brothers wanted to sell the house so they got a council house. She was thrilled to have central heating and hot water.

The poorest people in this country are still among the richest in the world, that's how poverty has changed.

Also to add...Poverty in my grandparents' age was 'be rich, a gangster, work hard or you die'. @Deeperthantheocean

Is a bit ridiculous because poverty in the past meant some would be in poor houses. Alot in jails. Deportation to Australia. Orphans in the empire schemes. Mental asylums. (Poor people rarely controlled their environments)

Your grandmother was apart of what was known as "the working poor" very far removed from the piss poor community & would have given her right arm to have access to the current provisions that are designed to help people like her out of poverty altogether

Her life was made more difficult by a lack of social mobility & debates/disputes around taxes, support, education.

I agree - in particular, this idea that you can "make and mend" your way out of poverty assumes that a person is poor because they don't have work, and therefore have time. These days, you can be in full time employment, and therefore have no time, and still not be able to afford a place to live.

100 years ago if you lived in poverty you were very, very slim. As was every one of your children.
Now if you live in 'poverty' you get interviewed on TV saying you miss meals to feed your children whilst being at least a size 18.
Poverty has definitely changed.

I'm not sure they are cheaper, it's just that everyone has them.

It's not that new a phenomenon, Orwell talks about this in The Road to Wigan Pier.

"Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you."

"They have neither turned revolutionary nor lost their self-respect; merely they have kept their tempers and settled down to make the best of things on a fish-and-chip standard."

Food poverty has changed because the available food now is high in calories and low in nutrition, rather than the other way round. Plus, work is less manual and people in poverty are time poor so exercise is a lixury. And so it's easy to be size 18 and very poor.

Now poverty is defined as earning less than some percentage of average wage, in Victorian times and earlier if you were really poor you had literally nothing and were dying of hunger and cold and begging for a crust. Beggars now would laugh in your face if you offered them a crust of bread. Expectations are hugely different.

I think OP's point isn't "benefits scroungers should open their homes to random men" but rather "even poor people today are lucky to not be forced into considering that as an option, thanks to UC etc"

I think it’s good that poverty has changed and that we have the benefits system as a safety net so that a lot fewer are in absolute poverty. I agree that expectations have changed. Some people have become more reliant on benefits and expect the state to provide everything and solve all their problems. I think some need to become less reliant and start taking responsibility themselves. Benefits should be used as a safety net. Childcare is a big barrier for some though which needs to be sorted out, in previous generations it was more acceptable to leave younger kids at home and go out to work at any hour, that is quite rightly unacceptable now. But childcare is expensive, even with the UC contributions or the funded hours it can still be a huge expense. We pay £1200 a month even with 15 funded hours, and will pay £850 a month once 30 hours kicks in.

I often hear people say how can people struggle for money yet have TV subscription services....I pay about £10 a month for a subscription so £120 a year. If I gave that up for the whole year, the money saved would pay for one day in nursery if I had a small DC who needed childcare. It would be a pointless saving.

They're cheaper compared to things like housing. I think that's where the real shift has been.

Lifestyle expectations are off the charts.

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.

A parlour??

Your grandmother sounds positively wealthy compared to mine (also 1910s births). Neither set of grandparents took in lodgers for a very practical reason: my mother’s parents raised her and her siblings in a grotty single end (one room) inner city tenement. My father’s parents were comparatively more well off - they raised their five kids in a room and kitchen (two rooms total) tenement flat. Obviously both properties were rentals as they didn’t have a bean to their names.

The idea of living in a HOUSE and being able to survive, however straightened the circumstances, on a single income, would have been pie in the sky to both families. I think your grandmother sounded relatively well off for the times. A lot of people today couldn’t afford the rent on a small house even with two salaries.

Apparently I was taken to my great-uncle's house as a baby to watch the Coronation of QE2 but I don't remember anything much about it.

Years later I was fascinated by his TV because it had doors !

We never had a TV/fridge/washing machine until many years later.