Why I'd rather be an Edwardian lady

The life of a woman during the Edwardian era was restricted by more than just laceup corsets.

Lacking decent education and with few employment prospects, no contraception - which usually meant years of childbearing - and few rights over property or even access to her own children if she divorced, most women were left simply with one option: marriage, whether happy or not.

Yet despite these and a multitude of other drawbacks, one woman who spent three months living as an Edwardian lady has decided her life would have been better in the early years of the last century.

Anna Olliff-Cooper, 53, left her comfortable New Forest home and her job as a part-time casualty doctor to take part in the Channel 4 reality TV programme The Edwardian Country House, to be transported back 100 years to an era when Britain ruled the world, everyone knew their place - and a woman's was pretty much at the bottom of the heap.

So it comes as a surprise that in the sixth and final episode - to be shown on 28 May - Olliff-Cooper is in tears as she says goodbye to the staff. "For the first few weeks when I got back I grieved, I was very upset to come home," she says. "I absolutely would swap my life for back then." For three months, she had lived without modern toiletries or cosmetics - "There was no shampoo, so I didn't wash my hair for 11 weeks," she says - but compensation came from doing without other 21st century "lifestyle choices". No 6am start to family life, no stressful school run, no juggling work/children/husband/home priorities - and no exhausting drive to the out-of-town supermarket for the mammoth family shop.

Of course, Mrs Olliff-Cooper wasn't on her hands and knees scrubbing floors as a housemaid in the Upstairs, Downstairs-type experiment - she and her husband John, a 56-year-old businessman, and two sons, Jonty, 18, and Guy, 10, all took part in the programme as the upper-class family living in Manderston, a Scottish Borders home built in 1905.

"At home, we have nobody in the house to help; I do all the cooking, all the cleaning and the gardening," said Olliff-Cooper. "At Manderston, my lady's maid would come in at 7.30 with tea and toast, draw my bath and dress me for breakfast at 9.15. I get up much earlier than that normally, between 6 and 6.30. No wonder I preferred being an Edwardian."

But Olliff-Cooper claims that the lives of working women today are not so far removed from the Downstairs servants. "If you're a mother, you get up early when the first child wakes up, you work flat out all day, do housework in the evening, get the children to bed, make supper ... you're working just as hard as a servant would have done."

WHETHER the young women who took part in the series as servants would agree is arguable. Most of them - accustomed to nothing more strenuous than an aerobics class - were subjected to 120-hour weeks, five hours' sleep a night, one bath a week and no time off.

"Although in the programme the maids complained, these are girls who've never been married; they don't know what's going to hit them," says Olliff-Cooper.

"Servants didn't do their own washing or cooking. They had one job to do, and, yes, that was dull, but they didn't juggle. It's a bit like a man going out to work now; he has his cooking and cleaning done for him."

Despite electronic washing machines instead of a mangle, Dyson cleaners instead of a carpet beater, Olliff-Cooper reckons that women still don't find spare time for themselves. "I don't have more spare time as a result of labour-saving devices," she says. "When my sons were small, I didn't do anything for myself like sit down and read a book."

She doesn't deny that the Edwardian class system was stultifying - the lower servants were meant to be invisible and were instructed to avert their eyes if their employers passed them in a corridor. And as a doctor, Anna Olliff-Cooper certainly wouldn't wish for a return to an age when women often died in childbirth, when TB, rheumatic fever, diphtheria and scarlet fever were commonplace.

But she does wonder whether today's pressures have left most women so stressed out they have forgotten how to enjoy life. "I have a house that's too big, children at schools too far away ... At Manderston, I didn't have to do any shopping for three months, which was great, because it's not a pleasure any more. Huge out-of-town supermarkets were meant to make our lives easier, but they involve a long drive, and we end up buying more than we need."

Surely filling her days with niceties of etiquette, doing tapestry and changing her clothes five or six times could not make up for the loss of a high-flying medical career? "I would not miss my job now," she says emphatically. "I've been looking after other people - patients, my children, my husband - for 30 years. It was nice to have someone looking after me for a change."

Olliff-Cooper agrees that modern women can now go anywhere and do anything: we have education, contraception, choice. But by taking part in the Edwardian experiment, she has realised that, back then, there was more to life than today's rat race.

"Women shouldn't be ashamed to admit they cannot do everything," she says. "When we got home to motorway roadworks, I thought, I'm not doing the school run and sitting in traffic for four hours a day; Guy has always wanted to board, so I rang up the school there and then. I am not going to spend the rest of my life putting other people first. Self-sacrifice doesn't make women happy."

The rights gained by women in the past century are irrefutable, but in many ways we have exchanged one set of shackles for another. In the quest to "have it all", women are burdened with competing pressures: to work, manage the home, raise children and look young and beautiful. These conflicting demands can be every bit as constraining as a corset.

Britain in 2002 is a frenetic maze of motorways and shopping malls, in which older people are not respected, where all women juggle their priorities with little help from men, and even less thought for themselves. Anna Olliff-Cooper is in many ways the contemporary ideal - a successful doctor, mother and wife - yet even she yearns to escape the stress and vulgarity of modern life. Now that she feels less guilty about putting her feet up, perhaps she'll follow another Edwardian habit and tackle the servant issue - by employing a cleaner.

? The Edwardian Country House, Tuesday, 9pm, Channel 4.