Family Britain, 1951-1957

by David Kynaston

  The other question, though, was what working women themselves actually thought and felt about the whole issue of paid work outside the home. ‘Women preferred to have casual, part-time work because that enabled them to put the needs of their children first,’ reckons Elizabeth Roberts on the basis of her 1990s oral history of Barrow, Lancaster and Preston. She goes on:

  Working women’s perceptions were that whereas it was acceptable – indeed desirable – to earn money on their own account, it was not ‘right’ to have a job which demanded long hours of work and the taking of responsibilities which would leave them too tired, both physically and emotionally, to care ‘properly’ for their families. Besides, who was to look after the children? There was inadequate childcare provision; but even had it been better, it is not certain that many women would have used it. It was assumed that children should be cared for within the family. No respondent complained about her low wages – particularly low when compared to those of her husband. Women’s wages were regarded as being for ‘extras’ while men’s wages were for essentials.

  Her conclusions are broadly consistent with the contemporary evidence. ‘The attitude of the married women to work was that they were glad to have the extra money,’ noted Lulie Shaw about her working-class London suburb, ‘but that they valued almost as much the “company at work” – they appeared to have no interest in work as such.’ John Smith in 1955 conducted fieldwork in the Peek Frean biscuit factory in Bermondsey. There he found that ‘what most of the women wanted was an opportunity to earn money to raise the standards of living of the family as a whole’, and that as long as there was ‘a steady flow of work which would enable them to make the best use of their limited hours in the factory’, then they were content, especially if it was piecework in ‘a really well-organized department’.

  Easily the most systematic, representative survey of attitudes was Mass-Observation’s in 1957. In it, 73 per cent of married women workers gave ‘financial reasons’ as their main motive for going out to work, though with the emphasis far less on dire necessity than on upgrading their standard of living, seen by most as making a direct contribution to the quality of their marriage and family life:

  It has made it possible to keep a good standard. (Teacher)

  Well, we’d have been very poor sometimes if I had not taken a job. I feel I’ve been a real help to my man. (Factory cleaner)

  We have been able to afford a nicer home because of my work; we can buy all sorts of extras or a holiday. (Filing clerk)

  Non-financial reasons given for going out to work included ‘need of mental stimulus’ (13 per cent), ‘enjoy it’ (7 per cent) and ‘need of social stimulus’ (6 per cent), with a cinema cleaner’s response possibly typical: ‘With all the children at school, there is not so much to do at home: it passes the morning.’

  M-O also interviewed full-time housewives, of whom 53 per cent said that they would not like a job, with ‘no one to look after the children’ easily the main reason given (52 per cent), followed by ‘health not good enough’ and ‘husband disapproves’ (10 per cent each). Of the other 47 per cent who did want a job, the overwhelming preference was for part-time work; and though ‘financial reasons’ were predictably top of the list (again, 73 per cent), some of the working-class respondents also expressed other wishes:

  I get fed up and morbid spending nearly all day alone; I feel it would keep me younger having a job. (48, one child)

  I’d enjoy it, I’d have more company and get taken out of myself. (30, two children)

  It would break the monotony. I’d see more of life and get to know more people. (35, three children)

  Oh, it would be smashing to get a break. To get away from this lot for an hour or two – it would be like heaven! (32, nine children)

  A middle-class woman agreed. ‘Getting away from the housework and the children just for a short time each day,’ said a 30-year-old with two children wistfully. ‘Everything is the same day after day. It would be so refreshing to get away.’40

  Marriage and its accompanying responsibilities – these were things almost everyone had a view about. ‘From twenty-six years’ experience of truly perfect marriage,’ Mrs H. of Nantwich wrote to the Sunday Pictorial in February 1954, ‘I say the way to keep a man happy and contented is to satisfy his main needs – his love-life, his meals, his home comforts.’ Next week Mrs E. C. of Stepney exploded: ‘The letter made me mad. Has she ever thought of those wives who go out to work? Why should the husband always be the one to be kept happy? Isn’t a woman who has had a healthy, hard day’s work entitled to feel tired and not up to sex-life?’ Or take the reaction in September 1955 to a recent letter in Woman’s Own on the issue of whether wives should work, with readers’ opinions ‘about equally divided under two headings: “Yes, within reason” and “Not in any circumstances” ’. Mrs V. Norman of New Malden represented the ‘Yes’ camp: ‘The most cherished addition to our home is our baby son, now growing up a placid, happy little soul. This is partly because I am not a harassed housewife, thanks to my labour-saving devices – none of which we would have been able to afford had I left my job when we were first married.’ Mrs J. Parker of Troon headed the opposition. ‘The wife comes home from a day at the office, tired and easily upset – and then there’s a house to clean and meals to cook,’ she wrote. ‘In that state, quarrels easily flare up and small misunderstandings seem more serious than they are.’ Miss Y. H. of Birmingham agreed: ‘If a man cannot support a wife, he doesn’t deserve one. I don’t mind cooking, sewing and cleaning for him – so long as the place he asks me to do it in isn’t too small – but I will not go out and work for him, too.’

  Inevitably it was a debate shadowed by the question of guilt. ‘A whole generation of (mainly middle-class) British mothers was made to feel guilty about “separation anxiety”,’ Ann Dally declared unforgivingly in 1990 after Bowlby’s death. ‘Though educated and trained, they stayed at home for many years, some happily but many basically unhappily.’ It was not just a new conventional wisdom that married working women had to contend with, but deeply entrenched cultural assumptions, particularly in somewhere like Wales, with an economy dominated by heavy industry and, before the 1960s, only about a quarter of all women of working age being in paid employment, most of them single women. ‘If you went out to work they used to say, “Oh well, they can’t be doing for the children,” and it did used to make you feel very guilty,’ recalled Esme Williams, who in the 1950s had started work in a light manufacturing concern near Merthyr Tydfil. ‘If you went out to work you didn’t think you were a good mother. A mother’s place was in the home, you shouldn’t go out to work.’

  What would be the attitude of the next generation of married women? Eustace Chesser’s 1954 survey asked 160 unmarried under-21s, and 324 unmarried between the ages of 21 and 30, in both cases finding that only 10 per cent would want to work after they had married and had children. The following year, replies to a Woman’s Own questionnaire revealed that, among unmarried young women, more than four-fifths intended to be a full-time homemaker after the birth of their first child, although the great majority envisaged working after marriage but before children. And in 1956 a survey by Joyce Joseph of 600 adolescent girls, attending a range of schools in the home counties and the West Country, found 61 per cent planning to work after marriage, but 50 per cent not anticipating a return to work even after their children were old enough to be left.

  The girls were also asked to write autobiographical essays as if looking back at the end of their lives. The issue of work after marriage featured in most of them, though of course in different ways:

  I was thrilled to be married but a little anxious as I wanted to keep on with my career. All the people at work thought that I should stay at home, but I was restless and wanted to be out.

  I was married and I carried on another year at the library, but as I wanted a family I left.

  During the time my children were at primary and grammar school I stayed a
t home because I considered I was of more use to them and that a mother’s place is at home, especially when children are at the secondary school age, because the strain of school work at A level demands smooth running in the house.

  My husband had a good job with good pay so there was no need for me to go out to work. I always believed that a woman’s place is in the home, unless it is necessary for her to go out to work.

  My daughter now got married, but unlike myself continued with her work for quite some time after marriage.

  ‘From the attitudes to work and marriage which emerged in this inquiry,’ concluded Joseph, ‘most of these girls are not thinking in terms of carrying on in a vocation throughout their married lives, but rather in terms of home-making as their vocation, and full-time or part-time work outside the home as a secondary interest. These girls see their future role primarily as “Mum” . . .’ But it could be Mum quite happily without Dad, to judge by a couple of the girls’ scenarios:

  I was left Alan’s money and the house and settled down to an easy life, no work, and no worries to bother with.

  I was forty when my husband was killed in a plane crash. I was broken-hearted but it could not be helped. Now I went to a lot more dances, I was hardly home at night.41

  ‘You did a lot of visiting to relations,’ John Kerridge recalled about his childhood in Wood Green, north London, in the early 1950s. ‘But you didn’t have a choice. “Sunday afternoon, you’re coming with us to see gran,” and that was it.’ Even though the conventional wisdom by this time was that industrialisation and urbanisation had already gone a long way towards killing off the extended family, there was evidence that it still had some life left in it. ‘They dislike the idea of separation from their old home because mother is there and she is the one they still turn to for comfort and companionship,’ noted John Barron Mays about young wives in nuclear families in inner-city Liverpool, while across the Pennines in Featherstone, not only did ‘a typical housewife see a good deal of her kinsfolk’ but there was also, according to Norman Dennis et al in their Coal Is Our Life study, a particularly strong, life-long attachment between miners and their mothers, ‘visiting them regularly and helping them when they can’ as well as ‘in this single case’ being ‘able to speak of love without embarrassment’. So too in Lulie Shaw’s working-class London suburb, where two-thirds of her 101 nuclear families lived within easy walking distance of near relatives. ‘The grandmothers, especially the maternal grandmother, played an important part in the lives of many of the families,’ she added, and in general she found the kinship network operating an extensive system of mutual help.

  No observer or sociologist was more preoccupied with the extended family than Michael Young. ‘It is quite clear that in our part of London there are very few immediate [ie nuclear] families standing on their own,’ he explained in November 1955 to the National Council of Family Casework Agencies about the research in Bethnal Green that he and his colleagues (principally Peter Willmott and Peter Townsend) were doing at the Institute of Community Studies. As a vivid but typical example, he cited a widow in her sixties, living alone save for dog and budgie:

  She is infirm and rarely goes out. A married daughter lives two minutes’ walk away with her five children. One grandson does her shopping, another collects and returns the washing which is done by another married daughter living ten minutes’ walk away. A young grandson often stays a night with his grandmother. The widow cooks lunch for one of her daughters and two of her grandchildren, and all four sit down together for the meal. The grandchildren do all kinds of odd jobs; they fetch her papers, chop firewood and take the dog out. The second daughter collects the pension every Friday and her mother spends every Sunday in her home. One son keeps a stall in the market, brings vegetables every morning and gives his mother 10s a week. He lives five minutes’ walk away with his wife and child. A second married son lives in Norwich and that is where the widow spends a fortnight’s holiday every summer. Fifteen relatives are seen at least once a week, several of them every day.

  Crucially, Young went on, ‘the Extended Family Welfare Association’, as he only half-jokingly called it, benefited all generations:

  The extended family, far from giving help merely to old people, is an agency of mutual aid for the exchange of reciprocal services. The wife, for example, has to go out to work to make up the rent money; after they come back from school the children go round to have their tea at Grannie’s. The wife is ill in bed; Grannie comes in to do the cooking and look after the home. The wife has to go to the Out-Patients’ Department; she leaves her young children with a sister. She runs out of money on a Thursday – she borrows from a brother and pays it back the following night after she has had her housekeeping allowance. For material help, for advice on all sorts of questions and for emotional comfort, she turns to her relatives.

  In sum, the extended family was ‘a source of aid and comfort’ – a source, Young emphasised, that it was time that the framers of social and housing policy belatedly recognised.

  Inevitably, and not wholly ignored by Young in his talk, there was potentially a darker side. Selfish, exploitative motives for helping kin, a sense of obligation breeding a festering resentment, the all-powerful grandmother as an oppressive, even malignant figure – all these, along with more positive elements, come out in Elizabeth Roberts’s oral history. Moreover, whether for good or ill, the inexorable trend was away from the large extended family. Women were having fewer children, and Gorer’s detailed evidence revealed that by the early 1950s the break-up of the extended family was already well advanced in the south of England, hastened by dispersal and the motor car, if not yet in the Midlands or the north. In short, the small, nuclear family represented the future – a future predicated on two core relationships: husbands and wives; parents and children.42

  Realism as well as romance determined most choices of spouse. ‘In half an hour, it was over,’ wrote Picture Post’s Brian Dowling in a 1952 account of an East End white wedding. ‘The children, till then under everyone’s feet, had been awed into cherub-behaviour. There had been no tears, nor any great jubilation. The register was signed. The wedding was a fact.’ Natalie Higgins, in her groundbreaking study of working-class marriage in mid-twentieth-century England (based on interviews in the 1990s with people from Birmingham and Hull who had got married in the 1930s and 1950s), argues that ‘the qualities women looked for most in potential husbands were commitment to work and to their role as provider’, adding that ‘respondents often described the men that were to become their husbands with the words “clean,” “decent” and “hard-working” and they valued men that were not “pushy” in sexual terms’. Tellingly, Higgins is struck by ‘how many women enjoyed dancing above all else before they married, and yet eventually chose as a lifetime partner a man who could not or would not dance, and this included women who met their future husbands at dances’. Her overall thesis is broadly consistent with Eustace Chesser’s 1954 survey, showing that for single women it was physical strength rather than good looks that was important in the choice of a future husband, preferably allied to a similar sense of humour. Harder to be sure about are the spousal criteria for men, although Higgins’s view is that during the courting process they more consciously fell in love, a love that often included a strong element of sexual attraction. Nevertheless, when Gorer in 1950/51 asked men to nominate the most important qualities a wife should have, relatively few (even among the single men) mentioned beauty or good looks; instead the winning criterion was the thoroughly unromantic ‘good housekeeper’. In short, marriage was a contract, a well-understood lifetime arrangement based on mutual interest.

  At the heart of that mutual interest was usually a very traditional division of labour: the husband as breadwinner, the wife as homemaker, even if she was in part-time paid work. ‘While he is at work she should complete her day’s work – washing, ironing, cleaning or whatever it may be – and she must have ready for him a good meal,’ explained
Norman Dennis et al about the ‘very consciously accepted’ compact in the Yorkshire mining town of Featherstone. As a fairly standard display of anger if that compact was broken, they cited the husband who ‘when presented with “fish and chips” from the nearby shop on returning from work, threw them into the fire’, telling her that it was her job to cook a proper meal, not (in his words) ‘a kid’s supper on the street corner’.

  For husbands generally in the 1950s, their side of the deal involved a particular strain, in the context of full employment and plenty of overtime work being readily available for both skilled and unskilled men. ‘Some of the men conveyed in their interviews,’ notes Higgins, ‘almost a compulsion to work to the point of exhaustion, in the process often neglecting their wives and growing families.’ She quotes the poignant recollections of ‘Joe Dixon’, a textile worker in Hull who had married in 1951:

  Didn’t ’ave much sex, you know, because I worked and worked, I grafted an’ grafted, I did all the overtime, an’ I warn’t at ’ome much even when I got, when we got the ’ouse, I worked an’ worked an’ I din’t see much of me two sons, ’cos I was allers at work, ’cos I even got a night job, and you’d be amazed the hours I did, ’cos I thought ‘well, I’ve got to make a life fer them, an’ this is it, if it kills me I, I will work’.

  Higgins plausibly speculates that an influence on the more driven 1950s male interviewees – compared to her more fatalistic 1930s male cohort – may have been ‘a new and positive feeling that the images of family homes portrayed at the cinema, on television and in advertisements was not anywhere near as unattainable as they had been for their parents’ generation’.43