Feelings, Women and Work in the Long 1950s

ABSTRACT

The emotional and occupational cultures of Britain underwent significant shifts during the long 1950s. This article explores the intersection between the two, using a range of social survey material––including Mass Observation sources––to explore feelings about paid work, the impact of paid employment on emotional well-being, and the management of feelings in the workplace. It suggests that women workers were consistently constructed as both inherently emotional, and therefore unsuited for the higher occupational ranks, and as talented emotional workers able to perform unremunerated emotional labour. Whilst paid employment has often been presented as the antidote to domestic discontent, experiential evidence suggests that it also often involved the migration of private emotion work into the public domain.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Hester Barron, Stephen Brooke, Lucy Robinson and her co-editors for their extremely helpful comments on this article. The extracts from Mass Observation are reproduced courtesy of the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive.

Notes on contributor

Claire Langhamer is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Sussex. Her publications include Women's Leisure in England, 1920–1960 (Manchester University Press, 2000) and The English in Love: the intimate story of an emotional revolution (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Notes

1 Mass Observation asked its panel of volunteer writers ‘How do you feel about your job at present?’ Mass Observation Archive (hereafter, MOA), directive for October/ November 1947. DR 3811, Married man with children.

2 Lucy Delap (2011) Knowing Their Place: domestic service in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Alison Light (2008) Mrs Woolf and the Servants (London: Penguin); Judy Giles (2004) The Parlour and the Suburb: domestic identities, class, femininity and modernity (Oxford: Berg); Carolyn Steedman (2009) Labours Lost: domestic service and the making of modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Selina Todd (2009) Domestic Service and Class Relations in Britain 1900–1950, Past and Present, 203, pp. 181–204.

3 See for example Sally Alexander (2000) Men's Fears and Women's Work: responses to unemployment in London between the wars, Gender and History, 12(2), pp. 401–425.

4 Matthew Thomson (2013) Lost Freedom: the landscape of the child and the British post-war settlement (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 13. Here he is of course invoking Raymond Williams.

5 Here I follow Jan Plamper in using ‘feeling’ as a synonym for emotion. Jan Plamper (2015) The History of Emotions: an introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). This is certainly how the two terms were deployed contemporaneously.

6 Amy Bell (2009) Landscapes of Fear: Wartime London, 1939–1945’, Journal of British Studies, 48(1), pp. 153–175.

7 Lyrics from the song ‘We'll Meet Again’ (Ross Parker & Hughie Charles, 1939).

8 For a discussion of stoicism and heroism in women's memories of the war see Penny Summerfield (1998) Reconstructing Women's Wartime Lives: discourse and subjectivity in oral histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press).

9 William Crofts (1986) The Attlee Government's Pursuit of Women, History Today, 36(8), pp. 29–35.

10 Picture Post, 26 July 1947, p. 5. See also Picture Post, 23 August 1947, p. 5.

11 http://www.britishpathe.com/video/domestic-workers-required-in-hospitals (1946); http://www.britishpathe.com/video/trailer-teaching (1948); http://www.britishpathe.com/video/women-must-work/query/advertising (1947). On the shortage of nurses see ‘Will the Nurse Get A New Deal At Last?’ Picture Post, 27 September 1947, pp. 8–9.

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

13 Wendy Webster (1998) Imagining Home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945–64 (London: UCL Press), p. xii.

14 Wall Street Journal quoted in Sara Horrell (2007) The Household and the Labour Market, in Nicholas Crafts, Ian Gazeley & Andrew Newall (Eds) Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press). For comparison, the figures were 10% in 1911 and 71% in 1990: Horrell, ‘The Household’, p. 118.

15 Alva Myrdal & Viola Klein (1956) Women's Two Roles: home and work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). The double burden was not, of course, an invention of the mid-twentieth century.

16 Arthur McIvor (2013) Working Lives: work in Britain since 1945 (London: Palgrave), p. 75.

17 Joanna Bourke (2006) Fear: a cultural history (London: Virago); Simon May (2011) Love: a history (New Haven & London: Yale University Press); Barbara Rosenwein (1998) Anger's Past: the social uses of an emotion in the Middle Ages (New York: Cornell University Press).

18 Barbara H. Rosenwein (2006) Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), p. 2.

19 Benno Gammerl (2012) Emotional Styles: concepts and challenges, Rethinking History: the journal of theory and practice, 16(2), p. 164.

20 Arlie Russell Hochschild (2012 [1983]), The Managed Heart: commercialization of human feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press).

21 Ibid. p. 7.

22 Ibid. p. 147.

23 Stephen Brooke (2001) Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain during the 1950s, Journal of Social History, 34(4), pp. 773–795, p. 774.

24 Claire Langhamer (2012) ‘The Live Dynamic Whole of Feeling and Behaviour': capital punishment and the politics of emotion, 1945–1957, Journal of British Studies, 51(2), pp. 416–441; Adrian Bingham (2009) Family Newspapers? Sex, private life and the British popular press 1918–1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. 97; Nikolas Rose (1996) Inventing Ourselves: psychology, power and personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); (1999) Governing the Soul: the shaping of the private self (London: Routledge). See also Mathew Thomson (2006) Psychological Subjects: identity, culture and health in twentieth-century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

25 Everywoman, October 1959, p. 17.

26 On post-war social science see Mike Savage (2011) Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: the politics of method (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

27 For a history of Mass Observation see James Hinton (2013) The Mass Observers: a history, 1937–1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

28 MOA, directive, January 1944.

29 Mass Observation Project (hereafter MOP), directive for summer 1983. The broadcaster hoped the responses would help in planning a series with the provisional title, ‘Will we work tomorrow?’

30 MOP, directive, summer 1997.

31 On working with Mass Observation see Annebella Pollen (2013) Research Methodology in Mass Observation Past and Present: ‘Scientifically, about as valuable as a chimpanzee's tea party at the zoo’?, History Workshop Journal, 75(1), pp. 213–235.

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

33 Myrdal & Klein, Women's Two Roles, p. 154.

34 Judith Hubback (1957) Wives Who Went to College (London: William Heinemann), p. 159.

35 McIvor, Working Lives, p. 24.

36 Dolly Smith Wilson (2006) A New Look at the Affluent Worker: the good working mother in post-war Britain, Twentieth Century British History, 17(2), pp. 206–229.

37 Ferdynand Zweig (1952) Women's Life and Labour (London: Victor Gollancz), p. 170.

38 Ibid. p. 32.

39 Ibid. p. 179.

40 Viola Klein (1957) Working Wives: a study of facts and opinions concerning the gainful employment of married women in Britain (London: Institute of Personnel Management), pp. 55–56.

41 Leonora Eyles (1947) Unmarried but Happy (London: Victor Gollancz), p. 41.

42 Ibid. p. 41.

43 Ibid. p. 43.

44 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 2254: woman born in 1901.

45 On the politics of postwar housewifery see James Hinton (1994) Militant Housewives: the British Housewives’ League and the Attlee Government, History Workshop Journal, 38(1), pp. 129–156.

46 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 3116: woman born in 1900.

47 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 1635: woman born in 1915.

48 MOA, directive, October/ November 1947. DR 4166: woman (date of birth not given).

49 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 4293: woman (date of birth not given).

50 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 3576: woman born in 1911.

51 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 1570: woman (date of birth not given).

52 See Penny Summerfield (2004) Culture and Composure: creating narratives of the gendered self in oral history interviews, Cultural and Social History, 1(1), pp. 65–93.

53 MOP, directive, summer 1983, DR D167: woman born in 1915.

54 MOP, directive, summer 1983, DR D167: woman born in 1915.

55 MOP, directive, summer 1997, DR A1733: woman born in 1928.

56 See Michal Shapira (2013) The War Within: psychoanalysis, total war, and the making of the democratic self in postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 112–137.

57 On fatherhood see Laura King (2015) Family Men: fatherhood and masculinity in Britain, 1914–1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); Julie-Marie Strange (2015) Fatherhood and the British Working Class, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

58 MOP, directive, summer 1983, DR A8: woman born in 1929.

59 MOP, directive, summer 1983, DR C138: woman born in 1944. On stress and ‘nerves’ at work see Jill Kirby (2014) Troubled by Life: the experience of stress in twentieth-century Britain (PhD dissertation, Sussex University).

60 MOP, directive, summer 1983, DR G226: woman born in 1941.

61 Zweig, Women's Life and Labour, p. 170.

62 MOP, directive, summer 1997, DR B2611: woman born in 1927.

63 Hubback, Wives Who Went to College, p. 47.

64 MOA, directive, October/November 1947, DR 3545: woman born in 1917.

65 Daily Mail, 21 July 1954, p. 4.

66 Daily Mail, 25 April 1955, p. 6.

67 Michael Roper (1994) Masculinity and the British Organization Man since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

68 Woman's Realm, 4 July 1959, p. 77.

69 Woman's Realm, 12 December 1959, p. 48.

70 Woman's Illustrated, 23 August 1952, p. 21.

71 Homechat, 10 November 1951, p. 46.

72 Daily Mirror, 30 June 1955, pp. 10–11.

73 Rosalie Silverstone (1976) Office Work for Women: an historical review, Business History, 18(1), pp. 98–110, p. 109.

74 Rosemary Pringle (1998) Secretaries Talk: sexuality, power and work (London: Verso). Domestic service remained, however, an important area of work for migrant women, first through the European Volunteer Worker schemes in the late 1940s and later via the commercial agencies which provided workers for private homes: Gerry Holloway (2005) Women and Work in Britain since 1840 (London: Routledge), pp. 204–205.

75 Daily Mirror, 26 January 1952, p. 2.

76 Woman and Home, November 1954, p. 41.

77 MOP, directive, summer 1997, DR G1041: woman born in 1925.

78 MOP, directive, summer 1997, DR N1592: woman born in 1931.

79 Daily Mirror, 3 April, 1957, p. 11.

80 Quoted in Louise A. Jackson (2006) Women Police: gender, welfare and surveillance in the twentieth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press), p. 1.

81 Zweig, Women's Life and Labour, pp. 87–88.

82 Nancy Seear, Veronica Roberts & John Brock (1964) A Career for Women in Industry? (London: Oliver & Boyd), p. 92.

83 Zweig, Women's Life and Labour, p. 91.

84 Ibid. p. 92.

85 H. E. Dale (1941) The Higher Civil Service of Great Britain (London: Oxford University Press), p. 126.

86 Referring to Dale's description, Hochschild (The Managed Heart, p. 172) argues that: ‘Working women are to working men as junior clerks are to permanent secretaries. Between executive and secretary, doctor and nurse, psychiatrist and social worker; dentist and dental assistant, a power difference is reflected as a gender difference. The “doctrine of feelings” is another double standard between the two sexes.'