Family Murder Mystery (Part 4): Theresa Semken

Updated: Oct 10, 2022

Theresa Agnes Semken also grew up in a world that was changing fast for women. Born on Dec. 11, 1890, her first decade of life watched the Victorian era fade into the Edwardian era, and the 1800s open into the new century of the 1900s.

The times were tumultuous for women, bound to strict gender roles and expectations, in which men and women existed in “separate spheres”, according to Oxford Open Learning, which meant that “a man’s place was in the world of economics and business while a woman was a trophy of the home.” Lower income women could work, yet only one third of women worked throughout the 19th century. Upper middle class women were to be the perfect wife and mother, tending to the home and children while her husband worked, the “angel of the house”.

Image by Prawny from Pixabay

According to an article by Ignatius Nsaidzedze, “An Overview of Feminism in the Victorian Period (1982-1901)”, women were completely at the mercy or lackthereof of her husband. The theory of separate spheres depended on deeming all women as nurturing, sacrificial, altruistic, pure, and pious. Men were assertive, materialistic, competitive. Of course, we know now that this concept of putting women into their places simply gave men no other responsibility outside of their day jobs while their wives provided the emotional and physical unpaid labour of running a home and caring for the children. She also had to be sexually submissive to her husband, without birth control, and continue the cycle of bearing and birthing and caring for children.

“Michael Hale, who was Chief Justice in England during the seventeenth century said a husband could not be guilty of raping his wife ‘for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife had given up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract,’” Nsaidzedze writes. He also points out that the U.S. didn’t pass its first marital rape law until 1979. A simple Google search reveals that even Canada didn’t pass its first marital rape law until 1983.

While having no rights over her body, she was also financially dependent on her husband, had no recourse for divorce or child custody, couldn’t make a will, keep money she earned, and relinquished all personal and property wealth to her husband.

By the 1850s, tides were turning when the feminist movement began its upheaval, focusing on education, work, rights regarding property, sex, marriage, divorce, and voting. In 1870, the Married Women’s Property Act was passed.

According to the UK Parliament website: “This allowed any money which a woman earned to be treated as her own property, and not her husband's. Further campaigning resulted in an extension of this law in 1882 to allow married women to have complete personal control over all of their property.”

In 1922, husbands and wives were allowed to inherit each other’s property with the Law of Property Act. Legislation in 1926 gave women equal rights as men to “hold and dispose of” property.

The Matrimonial Causes Act passed in 1857, founding the grounds for which a woman could file for divorce: adultery that had to be accompanied by life-threatening cruelty and desertion. Men could file for divorce solely for adultery. This changed in 1923, which have wives the right to divorce on grounds of adultery alone. The 1937 law extended those grounds to include unlawful desertion for over three years, cruelty, incurable insanity, sodomy, and incest.

Women won the right to vote in 1918 with the Representation of the People Act, which allowed women over the age of 30 with who met a property qualification to vote. The Equal Franchise Act in 1928 handed the right to vote to women over the age of 21, giving them the same voting rights as men.

Through all this, Queen Victoria, the monarch of the time, called feminism a “wicked folly of women’s rights”, according to Nsaidzedze’s article. During her reign, she was the epitome of what the Victorian era expected of women. She had nine children and became the shining example of domestic bliss and a woman’s “place” as an angel of the home.

Naturally, all of this would have had a profound impact on the young girls growing up in this era. Even then, Theresa still grew up in what seemed to be another typical family of the Victorian era.

Her father, John or Johann Semken, was a German immigrant, listed on the 1891 census as a gas stoker. These men worked in gasworks or gas houses, which were industrial plants which produced flammable gas for lighting in towns and cities. Some gasholder structures still exist in England today. The Historic England Blog does a fantastic piece written about gasholders, which I will link to at the end of this post.

As a gas stoker, John would have spent his long days over a fire in one of these places. Arduous, hot, and dangerous work, no doubt.

His wife, Rosalie (maiden name Summerfield) was not employed and stayed home with their six kids, listed oldest to youngest: Herman (1884), Caroline Rosalie (1889), Theresa Agnes (1890), Lousia Veronica Florence Govia (1894), Lilian Elizabeth (1896), Jessica H.M. (1898), and Elaine Kathleen Patricia (1901).

1901 Census (Ancestry.ca)

Rosalie didn’t have employment listed on a census until 1901, when she too worked in the gasholds. Herman, who would have been 17, is listed as a porter at a factory.

In the 1911 census, Theresa was 20-years-old and working as a bag repairer. Rosalie changed jobs in that decade to work at a secondhand furniture place, and both Louisa and Lilian, 16 and 15, worked as confectionery packers.

This was not one of those upper-middle class families in which the wife stayed home and could afford to fit into the stereotype of the era’s perfect woman. She went to work shortly after giving birth to her last child. This inability to clamber out of poverty would plague Theresa throughout her life, I learned through family stories and later records.

1911 Census (Ancestry.ca)

Theresa’s years before and upon meeting Frederick are as blurry as his. They married May 29, 1915. No employment is listed for Theresa on their marriage certificate, and her father’s profession is noted as a gas stoker still. Again, the details on how she met Frederick are lost to time, and wedding photos, or any photos of them together, cease to exist to my knowledge.

She was a decade his junior, perhaps looking for a way out of her family’s money problems. This was, after all, an age where women were still highly dependent on men to provide for them. Was it a marriage of convenience, hence why Frederick tried to hide it from his father, or did his church-devoted parents perhaps frown upon the marriage to younger, poorer woman? Did they ever accept her?

In 1915, on their marriage certificate, Frederick is listed as being in the Seaman Merchant Service. Remember, marriage prevented him from being conscripted into the first World War until May 1916. Their first child, a son also named Frederick, was born April 8, 1916, not long before Frederick Sr might have been summoned to the war efforts.

There is a chance he didn’t go still, as I cannot find any records on either Ancestry or the National Archives that indicate he left England to help with the war efforts, so it’s possible he stayed behind and helped from home. Seaman merchants were the backbone to keeping Great Britain armed and operating during the war, supplying the military with ammunition, arms, raw material, food, and transporting soldiers overseas. And since, according to Imperial War Museums, these were civilian cargo ships and the term “Merchant Navy” wasn’t granted by King George V until after World War I, it’s simply possible that no records exist of Frederick’s activity in the war.

If Frederick spent a lot of time at sea, which he likely did, at the start of his marriage to Theresa, then she would have been raising her first child essentially alone. The pressures of being a new wife and mother, and being on her own a lot, would have felt immense.

What was their marriage like, from what I can piece together? How did a young, 24-year-old bride and mother adapt to life with a man who spent much of his life at sea? Did bitterness fester within her because of i? Did they adjust, or did the time he spent out at sea separate them emotionally the way the vast ocean did physically?

Did Theresa see the sharp orange glint of the sun on the horizon at the dusk of his life before he did? And did Frederick sail straight into his own fate?

Without knowing her attitudes towards marriage and children, it’s hard to tell how she would have felt about her new station in life. And without travelling back in time, I don’t know how they truly felt about each other.

Regardless, I’ll explore all this in the next post, delving as far as I can into their marriage, their children, and what led up to the days before his death. I’ll dedicate a post on its own to his death - there is a lot of information to go into that one. As always, thanks for being along on this journey.