For Better or for Worse? The Dilemmas of Unmarried Motherhood in Mid‐Twentieth‐Century Popular British Film and Fiction

Abstract

This article investigates representations of unmarried motherhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s through readings of popular British film and fiction. These sources are used to illustrate contradictions and conflicts in the meanings afforded to unmarried motherhood and, in turn, to highlight how the unmarried mother was used as a motif for exploring post‐war normative boundaries around marriage, motherhood, and female sexuality. The article draws upon Raymond Williams’s idea of a ‘structure of feeling’ to make connections between these representations and issues and debates about the role and status of women and mothers more generally in post‐war Britain.

Notes

[1] For example, M. Glucksmann (2000) Cottons and Casuals: the gendered organisation of labour in time and space (Durham: Sociology Press); L. Heron (1985) Truth, Dare or Promise: girls growing up in the fifties (London: Virago); K. Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage: singleness in England, 1914–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press); D. Philips & I. Haywood (1998) Brave New Causes: women in British postwar fictions (London: Leicester University Press); E. Roberts (1995) Women and their Families: an oral history 1940–1970 (Oxford: Blackwell); C. Steedman (1986) Landscape for a Good Woman: a story of two lives (London: Virago); W. Webster (1998) Imagining Home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945–64 (London: UCL Press).

[2] Philips & Haywood, Brave New Causes, pp. 2–3.

[3] R. Williams (1961) The Long Revolution (London: Chatto & Windus); R. Williams & M. Orram (1954) Preface to Film (London: Film Drama).

[4] C. Geraghty (2000) British Cinema in the Fifties: gender, genre and the ‘new look’ (London: Routledge); C. Gledhill & G. Swanson (Eds) (1996) Nationalising Femininity: culture, sexuality and British cinema in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press); M. Landy (1991) British Genres: cinema and society, 1930–1960 (Princeton, Princeton University Press); L. Young (1996) Fear of the Dark: race, gender and sexuality in the cinema (London: Routledge).

[5] M. Bell‐Williams (2007) Gender and Modernity in Post‐War British Cinema: a case study of Young Wives’ Tale (1951), Women’s History Review, 16(2), pp. 227–243.

[6] See, for example, j. Dixon (1999) The Romance Fiction of Mills & Boon 1909–1990s (London: UCL Press). A. Ferrebe (2010) Elizabeth Taylor’s Uses of Romances: feminist feeling in 1950s English fiction, Literature and History, 19(1), pp. 50–64.

[7] N. Baker (1989) Happily Ever After? Women’s Fiction in Postwar Britain 1945–60 (London: Macmillan), p. 22

[8] For example, R. Hoggart’s (1957, 1969) The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin) has played a powerful part in our understanding and subsequent mythologising of post‐war family life and motherhood. And Michael Young & Peter Willmott (1957, 1966) Family and Kinship in East London (Harmondsworth: Penguin) has been similarly influential upon our views of the changes in post‐war marital relationships. The concentration by literary critics and cultural historians upon the work of the ‘Angry Young Men’ genre consolidated its reputation as a referent for the 1950s. Thus the play Look Back in Anger (London: Faber, 1957) and the novels Room at the Top (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957, 1959), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (London: Pan, 1958, 1960) and A Kind of Loving (London: Corgi, 1960, 1974) have been enormously potent in shaping our perception of the difficulties men experienced with post‐war family life. But these texts, and others classified as belonging to the same genre, represent only a fraction of literary works published in this period.

[9] Holden, The Shadow of Marriage.

[10] K. Barratt (1949) The Fault Undone (London: Herbert Jenkins); S. M. Edmunds (1952) Home Tomorrow (London: Heinemann) and N. C. James (1954) Over the Windmill (London: Hutchinson).

[11] For a fuller discussion of the representation of unmarried motherhood in post‐war popular fiction, see J. Fink (1997) Condemned or Condoned? Investigating the Problem of Unmarried Motherhood in England, 1945–60 (Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex).

[12] In women’s magazines and the wider press, for example, questions were being asked about the denial of motherhood to women who had not married. In 1947, the Rev. W. G. Hargrave Thomas was interviewed in Reveille regarding his views that women ought to be able to propose to men, and that unmarried women should be allowed to have children if they wished. This was not, he claimed, to advocate ‘loose living for silly young girls’ but because of his concerns for the numbers of single women in post‐war England. As he went on to explain, the elimination of absolute spinsterhood would lead to better health. ‘Many of the neuroses among women are due to sex‐repression’. Given the focus on teachers in these novels, it is interesting to note that he was especially concerned about the low marriage and childbearing figures among teachers.

[13] Janice A. Radway (1987) Reading the Romance: women, patriarchy and popular literature (London: Verso), p. 186.

[14] Alison Light (1984) ‘Returning to Manderley’: romance, fiction, female sexuality and class, Feminist Review, 16, pp. 7–25.

[15] Dixon, Romance Fiction of Mills and Boon, p. 11.

[16] Literary adaptations include An Inspector Calls (UK: Watergate Productions, 1954) and Esther Waters (UK: Wessex Film Productions, 1948). Holiday Camp (UK: Gainsborough Pictures, 1947) was a very popular comedy while another, She Didn’t Say No! (UK: GW Films, 1958), was dismissed by the critics. Miranda (UK: Sidney Box Productions, 1948), a comedy fantasy featuring a mermaid, explores the nature of heterosexual relationships in post‐war society. Social problem films include When the Bough Breaks (UK: Sidney Box Productions, 1947), Women of Twilight (UK: Romulus Films, 1952) and Sapphire (UK: Artna, 1957).

[17] Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 91.

[18] The reasons for this somewhat awkward strand in the film lie in the origins of the film’s script, a short story by Godfrey Winn. This centred on Esther Harman, a middle‐class spinster, who meets the man she loves during the Great War but he is blind and has no memory of their relationship. See R. Murphy (1989) Realism and Tinsel: cinema and society, 1939–48 (London: Routledge). It is Esther who confronts the moral disapproval of Valerie’s family and offers to provide a home for the young woman and her boyfriend.

[19] These films and their storylines were also creatively shaped and mediated by women. The Gainsborough films, Holiday Camp and When the Bough Breaks, were made after Sydney Box moved to the studio in 1946, taking his wife Muriel and sister Betty with him. Betty Box was the producer of When the Bough Breaks and Muriel Box was one of the collaborators on the screenplay. Holiday Camp was also partly scripted by Muriel Box. Women of Twilight (1952) was adapted from a play written by Sylvia Rayman, while she was working in a London snack bar, and unusually explored the socio‐economic rather than socio‐psychological dynamics of unmarried motherhood. See M. B. Gale (1996) West End Women: women and the London stage 1918–1962 (London: Routledge).

[20] Reading fiction and cinema‐going were popular leisure activities during this period. The total circulating loans of library books, for example, ‘have been estimated at 150 million a year for the late forties’. S. Laing (1983) The Production of Literature, in A. Sinfield (Ed.) Society and Literature 1945–1970 (New York: Holmes & Meier), pp. 139–140. Geraghty notes that ‘1946 turned out to be a boom year, with 4,500 cinemas and an annual attendance of 1,635 million visits from a population of 46 million. Attendance remained strong but not on this scale into the early 1950s’ (British Cinema in the Fifties, p. 5).

[21] D. Andrew (1998) History and Film, in J. Hill & P. C. Gibson (Eds) The Oxford Guide to Film Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 181.

[22] C. Smart (1996) provides an interesting analysis of debates about marriage and divorce in this period using the film Brief Encounter, which was released in 1945. See Good Wives and Moral Lives: marriage and divorce, 1937–51, in C. Gledhill & G. Swanson (Eds), Nationalising Femininity.

[23] C. Haste (1992) Rules of Desire: sex in Britain, World War One to present (London: Chatto & Windus).

[24] J. Finch & P. Summerfield (1991) Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage, 1945–59, in David Clark (Ed.) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change (London: Routledge), p. 11.

[25] M. Ferguson (1983) Forever Feminine: women’s magazines and the cult of femininity (London: Heinemann), p. 44. C. White (1970) argued that advertising within women’s magazines during these years played a significant role in reinforcing these ideals, suggesting that ‘success as a woman, wife and mother could be purchased for the price of a jar of cold cream, a bottle of cough syrup or a packet of instant cake mix’. See Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph), p. 158.

[26] James, Over the Windmill, pp. 36–37.

[27] Edmunds, Home Tomorrow, p. 61.

[28] B. Turner & T. Rennell (1995) When Daddy Came Home: how family life changed forever in 1945 (London: Hutchinson).

[29] Barratt, The Fault Undone, p. 135.

[30] Ibid., p. 191.

[31] Ibid., p. 198.

[32] Ibid., p. 150.

[33] J. Fink (2000) Natural Mothers, Putative Fathers, and Innocent Children: the definition and regulation of parental relationships outside marriage, 1945–1959, Journal of Family History, 25(2), pp. 178–195.

[34] Barratt, The Fault Undone, p. 13.

[35] Edmunds, Home Tomorrow, p. 101.

[36] James, Over the Windmill, p. 171.

[37] James, Over the Windmill, p. 94.

[38] Edmunds, Home Tomorrow, p. 61.

[39] See W. Beveridge (1942) Social Insurance and Allied Services (London: HMSO); Royal Commission on Population Report (1949) (London: HMSO); Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce Report, 1951–1955 (1956) (London: HMSO).

[40] This envy reflects another aspect of adoption in this period. The 1952–53 Annual Report of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child noted, ‘The shortage of babies available for adoption has given rise to a situation whereby some societies are actively hunting for babies to place, rather than waiting an approach from the mother and welfare worker requesting that adoption plans be made’.

[41] J. Bowlby (1953) Child Care and the Growth of Love (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 14.

[42] H. Hendrick (2003) Child Welfare: historical dimensions and contemporary debate (Bristol: Policy Press).

[43] Hansard, 470, Col. 1611, Adoption of Children Bill (December, 1949).

[44] Hansard, 466, Col. 680.

[45] Hansard, 470, Col. 1608.

[46] K. Kidd (2003) Women of Twilight, in I. Mackillop & N. Sinyard (Eds) British Cinema of the 1950s: a celebration (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

[47] Barratt, The Fault Undone, p. 230.

[48] Edmunds, Home Tomorrow, p. 255.

[49] For an exploration of the ways in which discourses of self‐sacrificing motherhood influenced the representation of unmarried motherhood, see Janet Fink & Katherine Holden (1999) Pictures from the Margins of Marriage: representations of spinsters and single mothers in the mid‐Victorian novel, inter‐war Hollywood melodrama and British film of the 1950s and 1960s, Gender and History, 1(2), pp. 233–255.

[50] Elizabeth Wilson (1980) notes that ‘Even after the huge falling off during the war, there were in 1951 still 750,000 women in domestic service, but by 1961 this number had fallen again to a mere 200,000’. Halfway to Paradise (London: Tavistock), pp. 23–24.

[51] G. Lewis & J. Fink (2004) ‘All that Heaven Allows’: the worker citizen in the post‐war welfare state, in G. Lewis (Ed.) Citizenship: personal lives and social policy (Bristol, The Policy Press). See also P. Addison (1995) Now the War is Over: a social history of Britain, 1945–51 (London: Pimlico Press).

[52] A comprehensive discussion of housing and lone mothers can be found in H. Land, K. Kiernan & J. Lewis (1998) Lone Motherhood in Twentieth‐Century Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press).

[53] S. Rayman (1951) Women of Twilight (An All‐Woman Play) (London: Evan Bros), piii.

[54] N. Auerbach (1982) Woman and the Demon: the life of a Victorian myth (London: Harvard University Press), p. 150.

[55] See J. Fink (2009) The Responsibilities of Looking and Seeing: broken homes and troubled childhoods in 1950s cinema, Cinemascope (online), 13 (Year 5, July–December); K. Holden (2007) The Shadow of Marriage; C. Langhamer (2006) Adultery in Post‐War England, History Workshop Journal, 62(1), pp. 86–115.