Homes, food and domesticity: rethinking the housewife in twentieth century Britain

This forum was inspired by the Women’s History Network (WHN) Annual Conference held online in September 2021. Its theme, ‘Homes, Food and Farms’, reflected the significant contribution made by women’s history to expanding debates within these areas of research. The conference came after eighteen months of trials and tribulations for historians of women and women historians caused by the Covid pandemic, as they navigated restricted access to historical archives and the challenges of online teaching. Many even tried to undertake academic research alongside homeschooling children.¹ Given these circumstances, it was wonderful to see approximately fifty scholars showcasing their work-in-progress at the conference; many of the strongest papers sought to interrogate and expand our understanding of ideas around homes, domestic life and labour. In this forum, we bring together five examples of this research, which explore the complex inter-relationships between homes, housewives and domesticity. They have been chosen not to provide a definitive survey of the academic scholarship in the field, but rather to stimulate further debate and discussion.

In the serendipity of conference engagement in 2021, the majority of the papers at the WHN Conference were British in focus, with a large proportion focused on the twentieth century. This is reflected in the five articles that follow. As what it means—ideologically, politically, and pragmatically—to be a housewife has been constantly shifted, reinterpreted and contested, and both the discursive formation and the lived experience of domesticity are geographically, culturally, and historically specific, there is much to be gained from such an approach, which interrogates domesticity through localised case studies. We acknowledge, however, that there is significant scope for further research to build on this ‘case study’ approach in different geographic areas, or with a focus on different time periods.

In Britain in the last fifty years, the concerns of women’s history have often been intertwined with those of other academic disciplines, and with the wider women’s movement.² This has assisted the themes explored in this forum, of homes, housewives and domesticity, to become legitimate areas of research. The influence of left-wing political thinking on both second-wave feminism and women’s history led to an early emphasis on domestic labour and class. In 1972 Selma James launched the ‘wages for housework’ campaign, with a pamphlet entitled Women, the Unions and Work at the National Women’s Liberation Conference, held that year in Manchester. Two years later, the sociologist Ann Oakley published both her groundbreaking Housewife and The Sociology of Housework.³ An interest in the history of housewives’ lives was boosted in 1978 when Virago Press reprinted material collected in the early twentieth century by the Women’s Co-operative Guild, first Life As We Have Known It followed by Maternity: Letters from Working Women.⁴ These collections of working women’s memories and letters charted how everyday experiences of domestic life and labour were shaped by poverty and class. Likewise, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850, drew attention to the significance of both gender relations and the ideal of family life for the middle classes during industrialisation in Britain.⁵ Yet arguably housewifery and domesticity remained marginalised from mainstream academic history.

As the twentieth century drew to a close and the twenty-first century began, the political activism of housewives, and organisations for domestically-orientated women increasingly received attention from historians such as Maggie Andrews, Caitríona Beaumont, Karen Hunt, Gillian Scott and Pat Thane.⁶ Attention was also paid to the historically specific moments when the home, housewives and domesticity gained prominence, practically or politically. The work of a number of historians including Susan Grayzel, Karen Hunt, Jennifer Purcell, Sonya Rose and Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, considered the politics of homes and housewives in wartime.⁷ Simultaneously the cultural turn in women’s history led to an increasing emphasis on the ideals and ideas of domesticity in research by Judy Giles, Nicola Humble, Claire Langhamer and Deborah Sugg Ryan.⁸ Significantly, the work of Wendy Webster emphasised the need for a more intersectional approach to the understanding the cultural constructions of the homes, housewives and domesticity; one which recognised the significance of race as well as class.⁹ The emphasis on cultural history was also strengthened by research which interrogated how homes, housewives and domesticity were discursively constructed in print and broadcast media.¹⁰

During the Covid pandemic, most notably in the ‘lockdowns’ of 2020 and early 2021, the home and domesticity once again became imbued with ideological significance and a site of numerous practical challenges. Those with domestic responsibilities grappled with difficulties created by shortages of foods and household items such as toilet paper, and queueing to enter shops. As people increasingly worked from home, the fluidity and elasticity of boundaries, roles, functions and meanings of the home and domesticity was were brought into sharp relief. The porous borders between the public and private spheres were highlighted in multiple, sometimes amusing, ways. Nightly news programmes featured clips of professionals being grilled on serious issues by television presenters, earnestly responding only to be interrupted by small children asking for biscuits.¹¹ However, despite such moments of levity, for many women with caring responsibilities, the challenges wrought by homeschooling had a detrimental impact on their careers. Within academia, the sometimes insurmountable challenges of merging domestic work with intellectual work had a negative impact on research outputs, and many disciplines experienced a drop in submissions to academic journals by female scholars.¹²

Perhaps a more positive legacy of the Covid pandemic may be renewed intellectual engagement with the home and domesticity and their antecedents; evidenced in the recent special edition of Women’s History Review, ‘Challenging domesticity in Britain, 1890–1990’.¹³ In this, Charlotte Wildman and Eloise Moss demonstrated both the necessity for a more transnational approach to domesticity and suggested there is a need to move away from ‘aspirational ideals of domesticity to explore the multiple roles and contradictory meanings of domestic space’.¹⁴ The articles which follow in this Forum similarly demonstrate that different aspects of domestic life or housewifery are often very specific to time and, importantly, place. Sue Bailey’s article, for example, highlights the different versions of domesticity and home life which developed in Britain after the Second World War, following increased migration.

Researching the history of homes, housewives and domesticity is in many ways problematic. Women’s lives in the private space of the home are often even more hidden from history than women’s involvement in the public sphere. In many archival sources the voices of ordinary women are often only found as ‘snippets and traces’.¹⁵ Collectively, these articles draw on a range of sources; Ruth Cohen, Anna Muggeridge, Lyndsey Jenkins and Sue Bailey rely heavily on the formal records created by organisations, such as minutes of meetings. Sue Bailey also uses video recordings, while Sue Zeleny Bishop draws upon newly-collected oral histories. Thus, in all articles the voice of ‘the housewife’ is filtered, whether through an organisation, or through time as memories are recalled often many years later. Nevertheless, together these articles all suggest significant movement between the personal and private, the public, the political, and the professional in the lives of the women discussed.

Ruth Cohen explores the Women’s Co-operative Guild’s campaign for divorce law reform in the years leading up to the First World War. The Guild was described as a trade union for married housewives, and membership tended to come from the so-called ‘respectable’ working-class. Yet despite this, many of its members had direct experience of hardship and poverty which they harnessed in their campaigning. Guildswomen are perhaps best remembered today for their campaigns around maternity provision, Cohen here shines a light on their equally significant role in the campaign to reform the divorce laws in Britain. As she demonstrates, the Guildswomen’s own testimonies, based on their own experiences of and views on marriage and separation, were used by the Guild’s General Secretary Margaret Llewelyn Davies at the Royal Commission on Divorce Reform in 1910 to argue for major changes to the divorce laws. In these testimonies—at times shocking in what they reveal about the married lives of working-class women at the turn of the century— Guildswomen’s own personal experiences are used to campaign for political change, and draw into the public sphere an issue that was, at the time, deeply private.

Second, Anna Muggeridge’s article explores the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) in the Second World War, with a particular focus on the Housewives’ Section of the WVS. Her article concentrates on the branches of the organisation in the Black Country, an industrial region of the West Midlands. She argues that the WVS enabled housewives in this area to move into public life, making visible, and recognising the value of, their domestic labour in the context of war. In so doing, she argues that the very practical and pragmatic work of the organisation in some ways served to politicise local members. The significance of locality and place is particularly important here, as she demonstrates that the organisation, at least in the Black Country, had a far higher proportion of working-class members than has traditionally been assumed.

Following on, Lyndsey Jenkins examines the ‘politics of housewifery’ within the British Labour party in the immediate post-war period. Jenkins draws on the records of the party’s Annual Women’s Conference to explore how women activists within the party constructed and challenged what a politics of housewifery might mean for Labour, both in government and in opposition. In so doing, Jenkins demonstrates the broad range of domestic issues with which Labour women engaged as part of their political activism, within and outside the home. Her work is a significant intervention in reconceiving who ‘the housewife’ might be at a moment when voices and organisations on the right began to dominate, pointing both to the existence of a form of ‘left-wing housewifery’ in post-war Britain, and the failure of the wider Labour party to fully engage with this.

Next, Sue Bailey examines the professionalisation of home economics between the 1950s and the 1980s. Her article explores the training and employment history of professional home economists in the electricity industry, who initially began promoting small electrical products for use in the kitchen, and later had a role in the development and evaluation of both new devices and home economics courses. It draws upon both a case study of the Polytechnic of North London’s home economics syllabuses and an oral history of Jenny Webb, a leading home economist in the electricity industry. Bailey demonstrates the important role these women played in both the professionalisation and scientification of domestic food production and energy usage, within the context of increased female participation in further and higher education.

Finally, Sue Zeleny Bishop uses recently collected oral histories to explore how women in intercultural relationships in later twentieth century Leicester used food as a means of creating and maintaining multicultural households. As her article demonstrates, the deeply personal decisions these women took regarding foodways within the home offers a fresh, new perspective on thinking about ‘multicultural Britain’, and how we might measure its success. In contemporary Leicester, it was women in intercultural relationships who retained control over what food was served, even where their male partners had introduced them to and often continued to cook cuisines from their own cultures. These women had a significant role to play in enacting the public discourses of ‘multiculturalism’ through their personal and private practices in their own homes.

Taken together, these very specific case studies demonstrate how what it meant to be a ‘housewife’ was stretched, challenged and reworked at different moments and in different places within twentieth century Britain. They explore the various ways in which the boundaries between the personal, the public, the political and the professional became increasingly fluid within the domestic sphere, at this time.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maggie Andrews

Maggie Andrews is emeritus professor of Cultural History at the University of Worcester. Her work covers the social and cultural history of twentieth century Britain and a key focus of her research is domesticity and femininity. She is the author of a range of publications including a feminist history of the Women's Institute movement, The Acceptable Face of Feminism (Lawrence and Wishart, 2015), Domesticating the Airwaves, (Continuum, 2012) and Women and Evacuation in the Second World War Femininity, Domesticity and Motherhood, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019).

Janis Lomas

Janis Lomas is an Independent Researcher and previously worked as a Social and Women's Historian at the University of Birmingham. She has written several books with Maggie Andrews including Widows: Poverty, Power and Politics (History Press, 2020); Hidden Heroines: the Forgotten Suffragettes (Robert Hale, 2018); and A History of Women in 100 Objects (History Press, 2018).

Anna Muggeridge

Anna Muggeridge is Lecturer in History at the University of Worcester. Her work explores women’s political activism at the local level. Her doctorate examined women’s activism in the Black Country and she is currently researching a history of women in local government in interwar England and Wales.

Notes

1 See, for example, Sarah Crook’s important analysis of the challenges of balancing parenting during the pandemic: Sarah Crook, ‘Parenting During the Covid-19 Pandemic of 2020: Academia, Labour and Care Work’, Women’s History Review 29, (2020): 1226–38.

2 For a recent, helpful overview of this historiography, see: June Purvis, ‘‘A Glass Half Full’? Women's history in the UK’, Women’s History Review 27 (2018): 88–108.

3 Ann Oakley, Housewife (London: Penguin, 1974); The Sociology of Housework (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).

4 Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working-Women (London: Virago, 1978);

Life as We Have Known It: The Voices of Working-Class Women (London: Virago Modern Classics Edition, 2012).

5 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987).

6 See for example Maggie Andrews, The Acceptable Face of Feminism: The Women’s Institute as a Social Movement (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1998 and 2015); Caitríona Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens: Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); Karen Hunt, ‘Negotiating the Boundaries of the Domestic: British Socialist Women and the Politics of Consumption’, Women's History Review 9 (2000): 389–410; Gillian Scott, Feminism, Femininity and the Politics of Working Women: The Women's Co-Operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London: Routledge, 2005); Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

7 See for example Susan Grayzel, Women's Identities at War: Gender, Motherhood, and Politics in Britain and France During the First World War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Karen Hunt, ‘A Heroine at Home: The Housewife on the First World War Home Front’, in The Home Front in Britain: Images, Myths and Forgotten Experiences Since 1914, eds. Maggie Andrews and Janis Lomas (London: Palgrave, 2013), 73–91; Jennifer Purcell, Domestic Soldiers: Six Women's Lives in the Second World War (London: Constable, 2011); Sonya O. Rose, Which People's War?: National Identity and Citizenship in Britain, 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska, Austerity in Britain: Rationing, Controls, and Consumption, 1939–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

8 See for example: Nicola Humble, The Feminine Middlebrow Novel, 1920s to 1950s: Class, Domesticity, and Bohemianism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (London: Berg, 2004); Clare Langhamer, ‘The Meaning of Home in Post-War Britain’, Journal of Contemporary History 40 (2005), 341–63; Deborah Sugg Ryan, Ideal Homes, 1918–39: Domestic Design and Suburban Modernism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018).

9 Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, Race and National Identity 1945–64 (London: Routledge, 1998).

10 See for example Janet Floyd and Laurel Forster, The Recipe Reader: Narratives, Contexts, Traditions (London: Routledge, 2003); Stacy Gillis and Joanne Hollows, Feminism, Domesticity and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 2009); Maggie Andrews, Domesticating the Airwaves: Broadcasting, Domesticity and Femininity (London: Continuum, 2012).

11 Emine Saner, ‘Deborah Haynes's Son Charlie Went on TV to Ask for 'Two Biscuits'. Did He Ever Get Them?’ Guardian, December 17, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/dec/17/deborah-haynes-son-charlie-went-on-tv-to-ask-for-two-biscuits-did-he-ever-get-them (accessed September 26, 2023).

12 Crook, ‘Parenting During the Pandemic’, 1232; see also Jocalyn Clark, ‘How Pandemic Publishing Struck a Blow to the Visibility of Women’s Expertise’, The British Medical Journal 381 (2023): 778 https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj.p788.short

13 Charlotte Wildman and Eloise Moss, ‘Challenging Domesticity in Britain, 1890–1990’, Women’s History Review 32 (2023): 445–54.

14 Wildman and Moss, ‘Challenging Domesticity’, 446.

15 Maggie Andrews, ‘Worcestershire’s Women: Local Studies and the Gender Politics of the First World War and its Legacy’, History 104 (2020): 851–70.