Women, Marriage and Paid Work in Post-war Britain

ABSTRACT

This article explores the effects of the growth in married women's employment upon the dynamics of British marriages in the post-war period. Drawing on popular sociology, newspapers and women's magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, it shows how shifting patterns of women's labour, linked to longer term demographic and socio-economic trends, prompted considerable debate about the stability and future of marriage. Whilst some argued optimistically that the employment of wives strengthened marriage through the material security guaranteed by a second wage and by building greater commonality of interests between spouses, other sources point to a more complex picture. Working wives were seen to imperil marital harmony because of the challenge they posed to men's ‘traditional’ identity as providers and to the legitimacy and modernity of the full-time housewife-worker in the home. The article concludes that paid work made a significance difference to marital power relations in this period; women's wages did not free them wholly from economic dependency, but they nonetheless offered a small slice of financial autonomy and elevated wives' status within the marriage relationship. Paid work thus offers historians an analytical thread of continuity linking the 1950s to later decades of change in women's lives.

Notes on contributor

Helen McCarthy is Senior Lecturer at the School of History, Queen Mary University of London and the author of two books, The British People and the League of Nations (Manchester University Press, 2011) and Women of the World: the rise of the female diplomat (Bloomsbury, 2014). She is Deputy Director of the Mile End Institute, Queen Mary's centre for public policy, and currently serves as Managing Editor of the journal Twentieth Century British History. She is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and sits on the Public Policy Committee of the British Academy. Helen is currently working on a history of working motherhood in twentieth-century Britain.

Notes

1 Woman's Own was launched in 1932 to appeal to a mass, cross-class audience of young to middle-aged housewives and became the highest circulation woman's weekly in the 1950s, running into the millions. See Martin Pugh (2000) Women and the Women's Movement in Britain, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge), p. 211; Jill Greenfield & Chris Reid (1998) Women's Magazines and the Commercial Orchestration of Femininity in the 1930s: evidence from Woman's Own, Media History, 4, pp. 161–174.

2 ‘The Mystery of Being a Woman: going out to work’, in ‘Woman's Own Encyclopaedia, Part 6', Woman's Own (29 November 1969), p. 1.

3 Jane Lewis (1992) Women in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 65.

4 Alva Myrdal & Viola Klein, (1968 [1956]) Women's Two Roles: home and family (London: Routledge Kegan Paul), p. xvi.

5 Marcus Collins (2003) Modern Love: an intimate history of men and women in twentieth-century Britain (London: Atlantic Books); Simon Szreter & Kate Fisher (2010) Sex before the Sexual Revolution: intimate life in England, 1918–1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Clare Langhamer (2013) The English in Love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

6 Mark Abrams (1959) ‘The Home-Centred Society’, The Listener (26 November 1959), pp. 914–915. See also Claire Langhamer (2005) The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain, Journal of Contemporary History, 40, pp. 341–362.

7 Laura King (2015) Family Men: fatherhood and masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

8 Ferdynand Zweig (1961) The Worker in an Affluent Society: family life and industry (London: Heinemann); Michael Young & Peter Willmott (1957) Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge Kegan Paul), p. 30.

9 For the 1970s feminist critique, see Germaine Greer (1970) The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon & Kee); Ann Oakley (1974) Housewife (London: Allen Lane); Lee Comer (1974) Wedlocked Women (Leeds: Feminist Books).

10 Janet Finch & Penny Summerfield (1999) Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage, in Graham Allen (Ed.) The Sociology of the Family: a reader (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 20–21.

11 Dolly Wilson (2006) A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The good working mother in post-war Britain, Twentieth-Century British History, 17, pp. 206–229.

12 Stephen Brooke (2001) Gender and Working-Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s, Journal of Social History, 34, pp. 773–795.

13 B. Seebohm Rowntree & G. R. Lavers (1951) Poverty and the Welfare State: a third social survey of York dealing only with economic questions (London: Longmans, Green), p. 57.

14 Richard M. Titmuss (1958) Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ (London: Allen & Unwin), p. 102.

15 Pearl Jephcott, with Nancy Seear & John H. Smith (1962) Married Women Working (London: George Allen & Unwin), pp. 91, 102, 108.

16 Harold Hutchinson, ‘Four Hours in a Factory That Women Call a “Rest Cure”', Daily Mirror (8 March 1951), p. 7; Anne Edwards, ‘The Domestic Revolution', Daily Mirror (2 January 1956), p. 3.

17 Judith Hubback (1957) Wives Who Went to College (London: Heinemann), and (2003) From Dawn to Dusk: autobiography of Judith Hubback (Illinois: Chiron Publications), chs 11–12. Constance E. Arregger (Ed.) (1966) Graduate Women at Work: a study by a working party of the British Federation of University Women (Newcastle: Oriel Press). The MWF carried out a major survey on the careers of female medics in 1965. See Jean E. Lawrie, Muriel L. Newhouse & Patricia M. Elliott, ‘Working Capacity of Women Doctors', British Medical Journal (12 February 1966), pp. 409–412.

18 John Bowlby (1953) Child Care and the Growth of Love (London: Penguin).

19 Jane Lewis (2013) The Failure to Expand Childcare Provision and to Develop a Comprehensive Childcare Policy during the 1960s and 1970s, Twentieth Century British History, 24, pp. 249–274.

20 See, for instance, ‘You Can't Be a Part-Time Mother’ in Modern Woman, December 1960, pp. 60–61, 88–90; ‘Crime Begins at Primary School', Daily Mirror (6 May 1963), p. 7.

21 R. K. Kelsall & Sheila Mitchell (1959) Married Women and Employment, Population Studies, 13, pp. 19–33.

22 Audrey Hunt (1968) A Survey of Women's Employment (London: HMSO), pp. 87, 189.

23 Myrdal & Klein, Women's Two Roles, pp. 27, 147.

24 Ibid., p. 192.

25 Viola Klein (1960) Working Wives: the Survey of Facts and Opinions Concerning the Gainful Employment of Married Women in Britain (London: Institute of Personnel Management), p. 45. The fieldwork was completed in the autumn of 1957.

26 Ibid., pp. 56–57.

27 Zweig, The Worker, pp. 177, 178.

28 ‘I Refuse to be Just a Housewife', Modern Woman, May 1960, p. 42. Modern Woman was launched in 1925 and had a largely middle-class readership between the wars.

29 Ibid., p. 40.

30 Hunt, Survey, p. 189.

31 Klein, Working Wives, pp. 57–58.

32 Zweig, The Worker, p. 177.

33 ‘Wife in a Million’ by Elizabeth Beresford, Woman's Own (17 January 1959), pp. 9, 38, 40 & 45.

34 King also finds evidence of this attitude in oral history testimonies from the period; see Family Men, p. 180.

35 Zweig, The Worker, p. 176.

36 Jephcott et al., Married Women Working, p. 171.

37 Oakley, Housewife, p. 237.

38 Wilson, ‘The Good Working Mother'.

39 Hunt, Survey, pp. 132–133.

40 Alma Birk, ‘The Problem of the LATCHKEY KIDS', Daily Mirror (17 February 1956), p. 9. (Italics in original.)

41 Daily Mirror (18 February 1956), p. 2.

42 Elizabeth Roberts (1995) Women and Families: an oral history, 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 126.

43 Jephcott et al., Married Women Working, p. 108.

44 Zweig, The Worker, p. 177.

45 This was more often the case amongst wives with lower-earning husbands, where a second salary would not push household income over the threshold for higher taxation or make them ineligible for state-funded scholarships for university. The punitive effects of the tax system on married women's earnings in higher-income families was a common cause for complaint in professional women's circles, as noted by Hubback in Wives Who Went to College.

46 ‘Patterns in Womanpower: a study of the relations of family responsibilities to discontinuity of study and work experience in professional women’ survey, 1963. The questionnaire responses are preserved in Viola Klein's papers at the University of Reading, Box 27, no. 479. The respondent was teaching part-time at a further education college.

47 Viola Klein (1965) Britain's Married Women Workers (London: Routledge Kegan Paul), p. 39.

48 Ibid.

49 Zweig, The Worker, pp. 44–45.

50 Klein, Working Wives, p. 54.

51 Ibid., p. 52.

52 Hunt, Survey, pp. 180–181.

53 Szreter & Fisher, Sex, pp. 205, 206. See also King, Family Men, pp. 158–159.

54 Jean Mann (1955) Should Married Women Go out to Work? The Penalties and the Awards, Marriage Guidance, 1, pp. 3–5.

55 Edwards, ‘The Domestic Revolution'.

56 For a sensitive discussion of this issue based on the testimonies of women war workers, see Penny Summerfield (1998) Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 1–42.

57 Angela Davis (2009) A Critical Perspective on British Social Surveys and Community Studies and Their Accounts of Married Life c. 1945–1970, Cultural and Social History, 6, pp. 47–64.

58 Wilmott & Young, Family and Kinship, p. 19. See also Ronald Fletcher (1962) The Family and Marriage in Britain: an analysis and moral assessment (London: Penguin).

59 Finch & Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction’; Collins, Modern Love, p. 195.

60 Sally Vincent, ‘Warning Light to Wives!’, Daily Express (6 January 1960), p. 6. Vincent quickly divorced her then husband and later had an affair with the radical psychiatrist R. D. Laing. See obituary of Sally Vincent by Deborah Orr, Guardian (1 January 2014).

61 Ann Temple, ‘This Question of Working Wives … Is it Such a Good Idea?’, Modern Woman, May 1960, p. 79.

62 ‘Wrong Kind of Mother’ by Ethel Edison Gordon, Woman's Own (10 January 1957), pp. 13–14, 16, 18, 21.

63 Denise Riley (1983) War in the Nursery: theories of the child and mother (London: Virago).

64 Judy Giles has written about the home as a feminised site of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. See Judy Giles (2004) The Parlour and the Suburb: domestic identities, class, femininity and modernity (Oxford: Berg).

65 Myrdal & Klein, Women's Two Roles, p. 37.

66 Ibid., p. 10.

67 Woman's Own (2 August 1956), p. 51.

68 Eleanor Harvey, ‘Guilty Wives', Modern Woman, April 1961, p. 55.

69 In their famous study of ‘affluent workers’ in Luton in the early 1960s, Goldthorpe et al. found that nearly all the wives without pre-school-age children were in employment. John H. Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer & Jennifer Platt (1969) The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 98.

70 King, Family Men, p. 15.