The Other Woman and her Child: extra‐marital affairs and illegitimacy in twentieth‐century Britain

Abstract

This article investigates the numbers of ‘other women’ and their children up until the 1960s in Britain. It analyses ‘irregular and illicit unions’ in the records of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (now One Parent Families/Gingerbread), and explores evidence on these unions in the debates over the passage of the Divorce Acts of 1923 and 1937 as well as the Legitimacy Acts of 1926 and 1959. It suggests that the prevalence of illicit unions throughout the twentieth century and before allows us to question contemporary concerns about our supposed ‘divorcing society’ and the decline of family life in modern Britain.

Notes

[1] The research has been funded by ESRC grant number RES‐000‐23‐0545 and has been carried out by me as Research Fellow and Pat Thane as Principal Investigator. For a recent account of the history of adultery see Claire Langhamer (2006) Adultery in Post‐War England, History Workshop Journal, 62(1), pp. 87–115.

[2] Janet Fink (1997) Condemned or Condoned? Investigating the Problem of Unmarried Motherhood in England, 1945–60 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex), p. 7.

[3] Derek Gill (1977) Illegitimacy, Sexuality and the Status of Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

[4] See also Virginia Wimperis (1960) The Unmarried Mother and her Child (London: George Allen & Unwin), pp. 67–68.

[5] Charles Booth (1902) Life and Labour of the People in Britain: religious influences (London: Third Series), vol. 1, pp. 55–56.

[6] The Times, 12 November 1912 and 10 June 1920. Thanks to Adrian Bingham for the following references: News of the World, 27 February 1916; Daily Mirror, 1 December 1936; Sunday Pictorial, 19 June 1938; Star, 20 January 1948.

[7] Stephen Cretney (2003) Reform of the Victorian Divorce Law, in his Family Law in Twentieth‐Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 196–250.

[8] CD. 6478 (1912), para. 234.

[9] Langhamer, ‘Adultery in Post‐War England’, p. 94.

[10] Roderick Phillips (1988) Putting Asunder; A History of Divorce in Western Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

[11] Pamphlet, ‘The Divorce Law Reform Union’s Objects and Aims’, Papers of Helena Normanton, The Womens Library/7HLN/B/01. The Divorce Law Reform Union (DLRU) had been formed in 1906 with the initial aim of campaigning for the appointment of a royal commission to study the divorce law. After achieving this success they continued to campaign for an extension to the grounds of divorce and to press for legislation. Bills were introduced in Parliament in 1914, 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1923. See Gail Savage (1998) Erotic Stories and Public Decency: newspaper reporting of divorce proceedings in England, The Historical Journal, 41(2), pp. 511–528; and Cordelia Moyse (1996) Reform of Marriage and Divorce Law in England and Wales 1909–1937 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge). Gorell died in 1913 but his sons continued his campaign. The third Lord Gorell was elected President of the NCUMC in 1931. See also the Thirtieth Annual Report of the DLRU (1937, London), TWL/7HLN/B/01. Stephen Cretney states that all the DLRU’s records were destroyed during the Second World War although some were preserved in The Woman’s Library (TWL). The British Library (BL) also holds some copies of their Journal. At the time its membership was 300–400 members. By 1919 the membership had risen to 1700. Cretney, Family Law, pp. 206–215.

[12] Letter from Arthur Conan Doyle, President of the Divorce Law Reform Union, to The Times, 10 June 1920. Conan Doyle had hoped to leave his wife for another woman but was prevented from having to divorce her by his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1906. He married his lover of ten years, Jean Blyth Leckie, in 1907. Owen Dudley Edwards (2004–7), ODNB. The organisation cherry‐picked famous leaders to represent its cause. Thomas Hardy was appointed a Vice‐President because of the depictions of the hardship caused by the divorce laws in his novels. Cretney, Family Law, p. 216.

[13] Editorial and letters to The Times, 19 July 1909. Women’s Co‐operative Guild (1911) An Account of Evidence Given on Behalf of the Women’s Co‐operative Guild before the Royal Commission on Divorce (London), Appendix I. See also Oliver Ross McGregor (1957) Divorce in England (London: Heinemann); Caitriona Beaumont (2007) Moral Dilemmas and Women’s Rights: the attitude of the Mother’s Union and Catholic Women’s League to divorce, birth control and abortion in England, 1928–1939, Women’s History Review, 16(4), pp. 463–485; and Morris Finer & Oliver McGregor (1974) The History of the Obligation to Maintain, Report on One‐Parent Families, vol. 2 (London: HMSO), Appendix 5.

[14] Markham Papers 1/13, LSE cited in Hilary Land, Jane Lewis & Kathleen Kiernan (1998) Lone Motherhood in Twentieth‐Century Britain: from footnote to front page (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 74.

[15] Women’s Co‐Operative Guild (1911) An Account of Evidence, Appendix II, p. 50.

[16] Wimperis, The Unmarried Mother, p. 29.

[17] McGregor (1957) Divorce, p. 30 and Jane Lewis (2001) Marriage, in Ina Zweinger‐Bargielowska (Ed.) Women in Twentieth‐Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson), p. 72.

[18] Annual Report, National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (hereafter NCUMC), TWL/5OPF/, 1923, p. 11.

[19] For other cases of women falling pregnant after relationships with married soldiers see Case 989 and 992, NCUMC Log Book 1918–20, TWL/5OPF/2/1/3/2a.

[20] See also Case 1012, 1020 and 1023, TWL/5OPF/2/1/3/2a.

[21] The Times, 16 December 1922. See also Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas’, p. 426.

[22] Official Report (House of Commons), 7 May 1920, col. 2395–2452. See also Charles Oman’s contribution to the debate in Official Report (House of Commons), 27 June 1924, col. 848–849. See also Helena Normanton (1927) The New Legitimacy Act, Good Housekeeping, August, p. 72. Chamberlain was a Vice‐President of the NCUMC from 1922, he became President in 1929 and became a Vice‐President again from 1931 to 1940. He helped with fundraising throughout his involvement.

[23] NCUMC Committee of Management Minutes, 13 July 1921, TWL/5/OPF/2/1/1/1c.

[24] See also Cretney, Family Law, pp. 216–217.

[25] The Times, 28 June 1924 and House of Commons debates, 27 June 1924, col. 855–857.

[26] House of Commons debates, 15 June 1923, col. 876.

[27] House of Commons debates, 15 June 1923, col. 871–872. See also debates in the House of Commons, 27 June 1924, col. 823–884.

[28] House of Commons debates, 15 June 1923, col. 876.

[29] House of Commons debates, 27 June 1924, cols 823–884, The Times, 28 June 1924.

[30] The Times, 16 June 1923. 2nd Reading of Bill, 15 June 1923.

[31] See articles on the Lords’ Amendment in Evening Standard, 18 July 1924 and Manchester Guardian, 26 January 1923, clippings in TNA/HO/45/12259/405558.

[32] Editorial in The Times, 27 November 1922.

[33] House of Commons debates, 27 June 1924, col. 857.

[34] House of Commons debates 27 June 1924, col. 862–863.

[35] House of Lords debates, 25 March 1926, col. 800–806; 27 April 1926, col. 935–950 and 22 June 1926, col. 318–327.

[36] Cretney, Family Law, pp. 550–551.

[37] As Joynson Hicks labelled the Bill in order to describe how it had been before the House for five or six years in succession. House of Lords debates, 22 June 1926, col. 318.

[38] See the 2nd and 3rd Readings of the Bill, Hansard, HMSO, 1926.

[39] Oliver Ross McGregor, Louis Blom‐Cooper & Colin Gibson (1970) Separated Spouses: a study of the matrimonial jurisdiction of magistrates’ courts (London: Gerald Duckworth), p.175, Table III.

[40] Cretney, Family Law, p. 552.

[41] Ibid., p. 229.

[42] Wimperis, The Unmarried Mother, pp. 65–75.

[43] 3% were divorced and 1% widowed. Moral Welfare: A Quarterly Review, October 1950, pp. 23–28.

[44] Ibid., January 1954, pp. 12–19. Joy suggested that the Married Women’s Association (MWA) dealt with 18,000 cases a year, 13,000 of which were concerned with the births of illegitimate children.

[45] Leontine Young (1954) Out of Wedlock: a study of the problems of the unmarried mother and her child (London: McGraw Hill). Kiernan et al. discuss this literature in depth in ch. 4 of Lone Motherhood. Donald Gough (1966) Understanding Unmarried Mothers (London: NCUMC). See also Kiernan et al., Lone Motherhood, pp. 104–105.

[46] NCUMC Annual General Meeting and Extraordinary General Meeting, 20 November 1958, TWL/5OPF/1/4/2. E. K. Macdonald (1956) Follow‐Up of Illegitimate Children, Medical Officer, XCVI, pp. 361–365. Barbara Thompson (1956) Social Study of Illegitimate Maternities, British Journal of Preventive and Social Medicine, 10, pp. 75–87. See also Wimperis’s (1960) references to these studies in The Unmarried Mother, pp. 68–71.

[47] Caroline Cholmondely, Norah Cogan & Eva Learner (n.d.) Psyhco‐Social Characteristics of Illegitimate Pregnancy in England. Wellcome Library, SA/ALR/220.

[48] Langhamer, ‘Adultery’, p. 110 and Martin P. M. Richards & B. Jane Elliott (1991) Sex and Marriage in the 1960s and 1970s, in David Clark (Ed.) Marriage and Domestic Life and Social Change: writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne (1944–88) (London: Routledge), pp. 42, 44, 47, 48.

[49] Diane Richardson (1993) Women, Motherhood and Childrearing (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 45; John Bowlby (1952) Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva: World Health Organisation).

[50] A Gallup Poll in 1951 identified 65% of people in favour of divorce if both couples were agreed. See Langhamer, ‘Adultery’, pp. 95–97.

[51] Eustace Chesser (1956) The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman (London: Taylor Garnet Evans); (1946, 1957) Love and Marriage: how to make the most of your life together (London: Pan Books), and (1958) Women: a popular edition of the Chesser Report (London: Jarrolds). Chesser was also a Vice‐President of the Married Women’s Association; see Helena Normanton’s papers, TWL/7HLN/B/01.

[52] Letter from the Marriage Law Reform Union (hereafter MLRU) to the The Times, 10 February 1948. Eustace Chesser was a member of the Union. See also a letter to The Times, 6 July 1950.

[53] Letter to The Times, 9 March 1951. Pamphlet stating the aims of the MLRU in TWL/CMW/B/9‐22. They were committed to the revision of the 1926 Legitimacy Act and the needs of illegitimate children.

[54] ‘Are These Marriages’, pamphlet of the Marriage Law Reform Society, TWL/5MCW/B/9‐22.

[55] Report of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce 1951–55 (1968, 1956) (London: HMSO), p. 359, Table 2.

[56] Cretney, Family Law, p. 323.

[57] Elizabeth Wilson (1980) Only Halfway to Paradise: women in postwar Britain: 1945–1968 (London: Tavistock), p. 73. In 1952 the MLRS had 1400 members, who were mostly victims of the divorce law. The DLRU membership had dropped to about 100. See Cretney, Family Law, pp. 334–335.

[58] See her letters to The Times, 21 March 1951, 18 April 1951, 21 April 1951. She also used the popular press to drum up support for her Bill. See Cretney, Family Law, p. 810.

[59] The Times, 21 May 1952. These letters have been lodged with her private papers in the National Library of Wales.

[60] The Mothers’ Union had heavily influenced the Minority Commissioners of the 1912 Report against reform of the divorce law; see Cretney, Family Law, p. 212. It continued its campaign against reform until the 1970s when it finally admitted divorced women as members of its organisation. For the opposition of Catholic women’s organisations to early divorce reform see Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas’. Letters written by Dora Russell, Chair of the Married Women’s Association to The Times, 14 July 1950 and Ena Steel, General Secretary of the Church of England Moral Welfare Council, The Times, 9 March 1951. J. L. C. Hart, God’s Law of Marriage (c 1954) published by the Mothers’ Union and cited in McGregor, Divorce, p. 109.

[61] Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas’.

[62] Catherine Blackford (1996) Ideas, Structures and Practices of Feminism 1939–1964 (Ph.D. thesis, University of East London,), p. 147 and TWL/Married Women’s Association/5MWA/2.

[63] Joyce Freeguard (2005) Women of the 1950s Stand Up and Be Counted (Ph.D. thesis, University of Sussex), p. 33, ch. 6.

[64] See her article on Separation and Maintenance Orders in Good Housekeeping, April 1926, pp.70–71, 108 and on the Legitimacy Act, Good Housekeeping, August 1927.

[65] Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise; Blackford, ‘Ideas, Structures’; Freeguard, Women of the 1950s.

[66] The Women’s Library/Council of Married Women/B/1‐8.

[67] News Chronicle, 16 March 1951. During the 1920s she had been involved in the passage of the Divorce Act 1923 and 1937. Normanton suggested to the Commission that wives should be guaranteed an ‘agreed allocation’ of money rather than equal rights to all the resources in the household and an equal partnership that the MWA had long campaigned for. Freeguard, Women of the 1950s, pp. 34–36, 138. She retired from the Bar in 1950. See her preface to the Memorandum of Evidence presented to the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, TWL/7HLN/B105, pp. 1–2.

[68] Edith Summerskill (1967) The Married Women’s Association, in her A Woman’s World (London: Heinemann), ch. 14 and Blackford, ‘Ideas, Structures’, p. 54.

[69] Summerskill, ‘The Married Women’s Association’, and Blackford, ‘Ideas, Structures’, pp. 91–94, 223.

[70] For her support on abortion see her (1967) Life Peeress: some House of Lords debates: abortion law, in her A Woman’s World, ch. 19. Her support of birth control and legislation on abortion was motivated here by evidence on maternal mortality caused by illegal abortions; see John Stewart (2004–7) ODNB.

[71] John Stewart (2004–7) ODNB.

[72] Summerskill (1967) Single Women and Married Women, in her A Woman’s World. Ironically, these women had long been identified with a tendency to fall pregnant with illegitimate children.

[73] Beaumont, ‘Moral Dilemmas’, p. 468.

[74] Ibid., pp. 463–485.

[75] Women’s Co‐operative Guild (1911) An Account of Evidence (London), reprinted in Anna Martin (Ed.) (1980) Working Women and Divorce: the married working woman (London: Garland), and for their later evidence see McGregor, Divorce p. 142.

[76] Cretney, Family Law, pp. 330–345.

[77] The Marriage Law Reform Society amalgamated with the Divorce Law Reform Union in 1956.

[78] Robert Pinker (2004–6) ODNB and McGregor et al., Separated Spouses. Blom‐Cooper was a barrister and Director of the Legal Research Institute at Bedford College. See Cretney, Family Law, p. 781.

[79] McGregor, Divorce, p. 193.

[80] Cretney, Family Law, pp. 341–342.

[81] McGregor, Divorce, p. 52. Subsequent to his criticisms it became widely accepted that any future study of the family needed input from the social services. See Cretney, Family Law, p. 343.

[82] McGregor et al., Separated Spouses, pp. 130–132.

[83] McGregor, Divorce, pp. 39 and 157. See also N. Carrier & G. Rowntree (1958) The Resort to Divorce in England and Wales, 1858–1957, Population Studies, XI, 3, pp. 188–233.

[84] McGregor, Divorce, pp. 52–55 and Barbara Whootton (1955) Holiness or Happiness, The Twentieth Century, November, p. 415 and Ronald Fletcher (1973 [1962]) The Family and Marriage in England: an analysis and moral assessment, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin), pp. 15–16.

[85] McGregor et al., Separated Spouses, pp. 136–137.

[86] Moyse, ‘Reform of Marriage’, pp. 17, 20, 24, 25.

[87] House of Commons, 30 January 1959, col. 1403–1472.

[88] Report of the Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce, 1180, p. 304 and House of Lords, 30 January 1959, col. 1418; 2 July 1959, col. 64–714; 21 July 1959, col. 301–354.

[89] TNA/HO/291/134, 1959. See The Times, 6, 30, 31 January, 2, 26, 29, May, 17 June, 3, 4, 9, 13, 16, 17, 18, 20, 22, 23 July 1959.

[90] The Times, 6 January 1959.

[91] NCUMC, Committee of Management Minutes, TWL/5OPF/2/1/1/1h, 22 April 1959.

[92] Letter written to The Times (signed also by Blanche Lucas and Louis Blom‐Cooper) 16 July 1959.

[93] The Times, 13 July 1959. The wrangling over the drafting of the Bill was crucial to the final product. See TNA/LCO/6895, and Cretney, Family Law, p. 553.

[94] The Times, 22 July 1959.

[95] Hugh Lucas‐Tooth, Conservative MP, House of Commons debates, 28 July 1959, col. 457. See also, TNA/HO 291/134, Legitimacy Bill 1959. Lucas‐Tooth later became a member of the Committee on the Law of Succession in Relation to Illegitimate Persons which reported in 1966.

[96] NCUMC Annual Report 1958–59, TWL/5OPF/10/1a, p. 19 and 1959–60, p. 19 and Committee of Management Minutes, TWL/5OPF/2/1/1/1h, 24 September 1958–23 September 1959.

[97] Janet Fink (2000) Natural Mothers, Putative Fathers and Innocent Children: The definition and regulation of parental relationships outside marriage, in England 1945–1959, Journal of Family History, 25, pp. 178–1995.

[98] Law Commission Report (1982) Illegitimacy (London: HMSO), para. 2.2.

[99] Office of Population, Censuses and Surveys (1987) Birth Statistics: Historical Series 1837–1983 (London: HMSO), Table 12.5, Series FM1, no. 13, cited in Hilary Land & Jane Lewis (1997) The Emergence of Lone Motherhood as a Problem in Late Twentieth Century Britain (STICERD, LSE, London), p. 7.

[100] Law Commission Report (1982) Illegitimacy (London: HMSO), para. 2.2.

[101] House of Lords debates, 28 July 1959, col. 459.

[102] The Times, 13, 23 July 1959.

[103] TNA/LCO 2/6895‐6898, Legitimacy Bill 1959.