A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  The balance of judgement is significant, because advocates of post-1945 social programmes, such as the NHS, used their view of the earlier situation as a basis for assessment. In practice, while no years are of course typical, those from 1931 to 1945, first the slump and Depression and then the Second World War, were scarcely typical. Instead, looking back to the 1920s, it is possible to point to a long-standing process of improvement. This process was a matter of general trends in health as well as the results of specific legislation.

  The Position of Women

  A similar conclusion can be advanced for the position of women. Modern standards of equality were still distant, even after women gained the vote in 1918, in part because the general notion of equality was still largely one of respect for separate functions and developments. Women’s special role was for long defined as that of running the home and family, and was used to justify their exclusion from other spheres. The ideology of separate spheres, in part stemming from a substantial body of medical and philosophical literature on the supposedly natural differences between men and women, was well established from the late eighteenth century.

  The rise during Queen Victoria’s reign (1837–1901) of science as a source of authority provided new life for such ideas. Older views of the intellectual superiority of men over women were given new vigour by men such as George Romanes (1848–94), who claimed that the greater brain size of men proved the point. In other ways, science, more specifically medicine, encouraged the idea of women as inferior by arguing that they were naturally hormonally unstable and potentially hysterical.

  At a more day-to-day level, women were less well treated in a myriad of ways, with these distinctions publicly endorsed in official, semi-official and private functions. In both public and private, women ate less well. For the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, the women and children of the town of Ashby de la Zouch sat down in the marketplace to a tea of sandwiches, bread and butter, and cake; while the men had earlier had a meal of roast beef, mutton, potatoes, plum pudding and beer, which had been prepared by women, as meals in general were.

  The world of work was also heavily biased against women, and more so than today. Women mostly moved into the low-skill, low-pay, arduous ‘sweated’ sector, and were generally worse treated than men, a practice in which the trade unions cooperated with the management. Both condemned the women woollen workers of Batley and Dewsbury for organizing themselves in a 1875 dispute. Definitions of skills, which affected pay, were controlled by men and favoured them; skilled women, such as the weavers of Preston or Bolton, were poorly recognized. In contrast, women in the pottery industry were able to maintain status and pay despite male opposition.

  A common form of work, indeed the largest category of female employment in Wales in 1911 (and in many other places), was domestic service. Household tasks, such as cleaning and drying clothes, involved much effort. It was possible in the hierarchy of service to gain promotion, but, in general, domestic service was unskilled and not a career. Wages were poor and pay was largely in kind, which made life very hard for those who wished to marry and leave service. The working conditions, however, were generally better and less hazardous than in the factories, where repetitive work for many hours was expected. Servants rarely, if ever, went without food.

  The absence of an effective social welfare system, and the low wages paid to most women, ensured that prostitution was the fate of many, and part-time prostitution was related to economic conditions. At Liverpool, where about 30,000 sailors were ashore at any one time, there were 538 brothels in 1846, and in 1857 there were at least 200 regular prostitutes under twelve. As was typical of the values of the age, women, not men, were blamed for the spread of venereal diseases which was seen as a threat not only to individual health but also to family purity and values, and to the health of society. Under the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, passed because of concern about the health of the armed forces, in garrison towns and ports women suspected of being prostitutes, but not men who also might have spread disease, were subjected to physical examination and detention, if infected. After an extended campaign, in which women acquired experience of acting as political leaders, in the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, the Acts were repealed in 1886.

  Social pressures and health problems interacted. There was an emphasis by both men and women on maternity, but very much within marriage; the marital prospects of unmarried mothers were low. Frequent childbirth was exhausting and many women died giving birth, ensuring that children were often brought up by stepmothers. Joseph Chamberlain’s first two wives died in childbirth, leaving him with responsibility for six children. Female pelvises were often distorted by rickets during malnourished childhoods, while there was no adequate training in midwifery. As a result, obstetric haemorrhages were poorly managed and often fatal. The situation greatly improved after the 1902 Midwives Act. Whether single or married, women suffered from the generally limited and primitive nature of contraceptive practices. Many single women resorted to abortion, which was treated as a crime and therefore was a ‘back street’ practice without regulation. This situation contributed to the extent to which abortion was greatly hazardous to health and frequently led to the woman’s death.

  Women were also affected by the strength of hierarchy and deference, not least in the number and treatment of servants. In his novel He Knew He Was Right (1868–9), Anthony Trollope (1815–82) depicted the debilitating pressure of personal service. The snobbish, religious and reactionary spinster Jemima Stanbury

  kept three maid-servants. … But it was not every young woman who could live with her. A rigidity as to hours, as to religious exercises, and as to dress, was exacted, under which many poor girls altogether broke down; but they who could stand this rigidity came to know that their places were very valuable.

  Wilkie Collins, often a novelist of social issues, criticized the marriage laws in his novel Man and Wife (1870). Sexual hypocrisy, not least linked to the seduction of women, was also a theme of novels, as in Collins’ The New Magdalen (1873) and George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859). Arthur Wing Pinero wrote social dramas that focused on the difficult position of women, notably The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith (1895) and The Benefit of the Doubt (1895). In the powerful first of these, Paula Tanqueray commits suicide because of the social stigma created by the engagement of her seducer to her stepdaughter and her opposition to the match. Pinero also dealt with seduction in his controversial play The Profligate (1889).

  Rising pressure towards the end of the century for women to receive a fairer deal, and for women’s interests to be regarded as a separate question not to be answered by reference to the past, challenged conventional assumptions. The idea of the ‘new woman’ developed in the late nineteenth century as established gender roles were challenged.

  Yet, the practical impact of the idea is easily overstated, even for middle-class, let alone working-class, women. A potentially important change was the institution of divorce proceedings in England in 1857; in Scotland divorce was already legal and there were many divorces. Before the 1857 Act, divorce required a private Act of Parliament in England, a very difficult process open only to the wealthy, or a separation achieved through the ecclesiastical courts, which did not allow remarriage. Even after the Act, divorce still remained costly, and therefore not a possibility for the poor. As a result, former practices of ‘self-divorce’, such as the ‘wife selling’ described in Thomas Hardy’s novel The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), continued. Cohabitation was another option, although offering most women no economic security. Women suffered because marital desertions were generally a matter of men leaving, with the women bearing the burden of supporting the children: poverty made some men heedless of the potent and oft-repeated Victorian cult of the family and patriarchy.

  Higher education for women began at both Cambridge and Oxford, although they were not permitted to
take degrees for many years. At Aberdeen University, it was formally agreed in 1892 that women be admitted to all faculties, but none studied law or divinity, they were not offered equivalent teaching in medicine, and there was unequal access to the bursary competition. Women students took no positions of influence and the student newspaper, Alma Mater, was hostile, presenting them as unfeminine or flighty and foolish: the men clearly found it difficult to adjust to female students, although their numbers and influence increased, especially during the First World War. More generally, until the 1940s, female teachers had to leave the profession when they married.

  Moreover, the degree to which the journalist and novelist Eliza Linton (1822–98) could write, in works for women such as The Girl of the Period and Other Essays (1883), against the ‘new woman’ is an indication of the fears that were aroused. Far from being readily discredited, the separate spheres ideology displayed both resilience and adaptability, and was to continue to do so during the twentieth century. One of the major voluntary legacies of the Victorian age, the Mothers’ Union, an Anglican women’s organization founded in 1876 by Mary Sumner (1828–1921), a vicar’s wife, rapidly spread from being a parish body designed to support ‘the sanctity of marriage’ and a Christian family environment, to be first a diocesan organization (1885) and then a national one, with a central council, in 1895. By 1939, the Mothers’ Union had 538,000 members. Such developments are overly neglected as a result of the focus on the suffragette movement.

  The extensions of the franchise in the nineteenth century brought scant benefit to women. Female ratepayers had the vote for local government from 1869, but lacked the same role in national politics. From the early 1900s, a vociferous suffragette movement demanded the vote in parliamentary elections. The militant tactics of the Women’s Social and Political Union founded by Emmeline (1858–1928) and Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) in 1903 were designed to force public attention, although other feminist leaders, such as Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929), the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, advocated democratic, non-violent tactics. A different impression of the movement is created depending on which leader is emphasized. Suffrage Bills in 1910 and 1911 failed, in part due to a lack of government support, and suffragette violence attracted much publicity but proved counterproductive. So did the suffragettes’ Electoral Fighting Fund to support Labour candidates.

  The First World War transformed the situation, as it also changed much else. Female employment shot up, and new roles, many in industry, were performed by women, including the manufacture of munitions. Women also received higher wages, although they remained lower than men’s, and in factories women were controlled by male foremen.

  At the same time, the war led to an important change in social attitudes, including those towards women. As a result, in 1918 it was possible to extend the vote to women of thirty and over, as long as they were householders or wives of householders, occupants of property worth £5 annually, or graduates of British universities; for men the age was changed to twenty-one, but, in practice, with no such restrictions. It has been suggested that war work, and the extent to which women were shown to be capable of significant tasks, gained women the vote, although most of those who did such work were propertyless and under thirty and were thus not enfranchised in 1918. It has also been argued that (some) women got the vote in a defensive step to lessen the potentially radical consequences of universal male suffrage. Whatever the reason, and both probably played a role, the number of women who gained the vote in 1918 was larger than that proposed in most Bills supported by the suffragettes prior to the war.

  Society was changing, and in 1928 women achieved equal suffrage, and thus comprised a majority of the electorate. The changing position of women was not restricted to work and the vote. New opportunities were related to increased mobility and independence, and included a decline in control and influence over young women by their elders, male and female. As a consequence, there was a new sexual climate. Chaperonage became less comprehensive and effective, and styles of courtship became much freer. As an aspect of the disruption of the war and of the freer sexual climate that it led to, the percentage of illegitimate births rose to 6 in 1918.

  Furthermore, there was a greater interest in the informed public discussion of sex. The British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology was founded in 1914, and, with Marie Stopes’ (1880–1958) influential Married Love published in 1918, there was an emphasis on mutual desire as a basis for sex, and thus for marriage.

  Moreover, society was less deferential in the 1920s than hitherto, and there was more of a cult of youth and novelty, although not as great as was to be the case in the 1960s. With relatively low rates of juvenile unemployment, the young were able to choose jobs, and did not need to be as deferential at work as hitherto. With far higher disposable income than in the 1900s, the young also had their own leisure choices, especially the cinema and dance halls. There were 11,000 dance halls in Britain by the mid-1920s, a form of entertainment that had begun only after the First World War and one that reflected and encouraged the appeal of popular music, which was greatly influenced by American developments. It was no longer a case of the young following the leisure preferences of their parents.

  Having gained the vote, the women’s movement continued to be active, pressing for the removal of bars on female activity and for equality through society. Under the leadership of Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946), the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship sought by parliamentary lobbying, rather than the Pankhursts’ militant tactics, to gain legislative goals, such as welfare benefits for married women. Women were allowed to enter the legal profession and become JPs in 1918. Socially, women benefited from less discrimination than before the war, and there was less segregation, with the sexes mixing more freely, both before and after marriage.

  Yet, women continued to suffer discrimination in most fields: the jobs they were expected to do and the tasks allocated to them in these jobs. Thus, women police were introduced during the First World War, but, for long, they were largely required to deal with women and children, rather than with the bulk of crime. Women teachers had to resign when they married. Moreover, many women workers were still ‘sweated’ workers, working in harsh conditions and for little pay, for example in textile manufacturing. Furthermore, the new ideology of domesticity that emerged in the inter-war period affected attitudes towards women workers.

  Religion

  A key element of change was provided by the declining public role of religion. To a Victorian, it would have been surprising to discuss sport or leisure, medicine or gender, before religion, but the latter was less prominent in public life than had been the case a century earlier. As Britain became a more industrial and urban society, it also became a more secular one. Religion lost its central role in everyday life and memory, and church attendance began to decline: developments that were to become more marked during the twentieth century.

  The 1820s saw the dismantling of much of the legal privilege of Establishment (official status as the state Church) for the Anglican Church in England, Wales and Ireland, and the Presbyterian church in Scotland (the Church of Scotland). Thereafter, these churches experienced challenges from a number of directions: from social and economic change, from other faiths, from government, from intellectual challenges, and from growing disbelief. The first led to major population changes, particularly the expansion of the industrial cities, which stretched existing church provision. In many cases, there were insufficient church buildings, or the mission of the churches did not strike a response with people who were adapting to a rapidly altering society.

  Nevertheless, industrialization was also linked to religious revival in some areas. Indeed, there was a powerful movement of reform, with committed clerics seeking to make Christian teaching more accessible. ‘Slum priests’ took the Church’s message to the urban poor. More generally, Anglican church interiors were rebuilt in order to replace box pews, which b
elonged to families, with rows of identical, open pews, most of which were rent-free and open to all.

  Britain remained very much a Christian country, although, since Catholic emancipation in 1829, it had largely ceased to be a confessional state as far as the law was concerned. Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe became important in the late nineteenth century, leading to an upsurge in anti-Semitism, but the Jews largely settled in major urban centres, especially London, the vast bulk of the population remained Christian, and most subscribed at the very least to the formal requirements of Christian living.

  The Church of England encountered particular difficulties in winning adherents in those parts of the country that were developing fastest. The rise of Dissent (Protestant Nonconformity) in numbers and respectability was a problem, especially in Wales and northern England. The re-emergence of ‘public’ Catholicism, with the re-establishment of the Catholic hierarchy in England in 1850, and in Scotland in 1878, caused tension which was accentuated by massive Irish immigration. There were anti-Catholic riots in Stockport in 1852, and violence on Merseyside in 1850–1. Between 1850 and 1910, 1,173 Catholic churches were opened in England and Wales, the largest number in London and Lancashire. ‘Unbelief’ also gained respectability through the development of Darwinism: Charles Darwin’s (1809–82) theory of evolution made a major impact on public discussion not only of science but also of religion and society.

  The changing role of government also challenged the Established Churches. The role of the parish in education and social welfare declined in favour of new government agencies such as school boards. Municipal and county government was better able than the Churches to channel and implement the aspirations of society for reform and control.