In Ralph Glasser's (20) Growing Up in the Gorbals, the author provides an account of his years growing up in a Jewish community during the 1920s in a Glasgow tenement, a working class region known as the "Gorbals." In a similar manner, in Bad Blood, Lorna Sage (6) provides an account of her childhood and adolescence growing up in 1950s rural Hanmer, Wales, a town she describes as a "dead-alive dump...a muck heap" where women are rigidly controlled by their husbands or fathers. In both of these societies we see that social roles for women were restricted primarily to the domestic sphere and in their roles as daughters, wives, and mothers.
Despite the restricted social roles on women, we see that Sage's family does not adhere to the norms of mainstream culture in Hanmer. Sage's grandfather, a vicar in the Anglican church, repeatedly commits infidelity. His wife has nothing but scorn for men and tries to thwart her husband at every turn. Sage's own mother; however, is submissive and girlish when her husband comes home from war. Sage herself will become pregnant at fifteen. Ultimately, Sage will overcome the restrictions on women's social roles and graduate, along with her teen husband, from Durham University. In Glasgow, we see that Glasser is able to overcome the limitations of ethnicity and poverty, but social roles for women remain restricted in comparison to Sage's story. This analysis will compare and contras these two works with respect to their illustration of restricted social roles available to women in the early twentieth century.
Both Sage and Glasser depict poverty-ridden, working class existence and its impact on development and opportunities for upward mobility. Glasgow or the Gorbals regions is "a place of grime and poverty" to Glasser (19), comments which mirror Sage's on Hanmer. Both authors also demonstrate how social, economic, educational and religious opportunities for women ...