A growing number of women are now entering the funeral profession, according to an article that appeared in The Guardian last year.
Although the National Association of Funeral Directors doesn’t publish statistics on the gender of its members, their spokesperson Dominic Maguire said that “there is an increasing number of women working in funeral services compared with 10 or 20 years ago – many of them are younger women.”
Historic Roots
At first glance it may seem strange to imagine a female undertaker walking in front of the hearse at a funeral, but in fact women have always played a key role in our rituals for commemorating the deceased.
We tend to take a very male-oriented view of the funeral profession, usually imagining that a male undertaker looks after the body before handing it over to a male priest for the funeral, but this wasn’t always the case (both roles, of course, can now be performed by women, at least as far as the Anglican Church is concerned). Before the funeral profession had really developed as an industry, when it was still common for the body to be laid out at home for the wake, women often played an important role in dressing and preparing the deceased for visitors, and leading the family commemorations.
This was particularly the case in Russia, where – according to the author Catherine Merridale in her book Night of Stone – children “played funerals as readily as they played house, and little girls assisted the old women in the laying out of corpses”.
However, by the Victorian period funerals were considered unsuitable occasions for women, and their role in saying a final farewell to loved ones became more circumscribed. Far from taking part in burying people, middle- and upper-class women were often forbidden from attending funerals at all, even for their close relatives, albeit that they were supposed to dress in mourning clothes for a protracted period after the death had taken place.
Britain’s youngest woman funeral director
As funeral homes are usually family businesses, it has been traditional for sons to inherit them from their fathers. However, a growing number of undertakers are now encouraging their daughters to join the trade, with some even changing the name above the shop to include “& daughter(s)”.
One example of this is Michael G. Ryan Son & Daughters, an independent, family-run funeral director based in Newport. Unusually, two of founder Michael Ryan’s daughters have entered the profession, both at a remarkably young age.
His younger daughter, Rachael Ryan, became Britain’s youngest female undertaker at the age of just sixteen; this prompted the BBC to make a documentary following her progress (“Britain’s Youngest Undertaker”), which was broadcast on BBC3 last November.
Meanwhile his older daughter, Louise Ryan, who became a female undertaker at 18, was given her own article in The Sun.
Given the way that many other professions which were once heavily male-dominated (advertising, law, medicine etc.) have become far more open to women in recent decades, it seems likely the number of female undertakers will continue to rise in the years ahead.
