‘I didn’t feel like my own person’: paid work in women’s narratives of self and working motherhood, 1950–1980

ABSTRACT

Paid work was important to women’s identity formation in post war Britain, especially as they returned to work after having children. The changed economic and social climate in Britain after 1945 expanded the employment and education opportunities available to some women. Class and material conditions guided women’s reasons for returning to work. They increasingly did so part-time, and in lower skilled jobs than before they had children. Understanding the self that women construct must be situated within the circumstances of women’s lives and the social and economic structures in force at that moment of returning.

KEYWORDS:

• Women
• work
• motherhood
• working-class
• self
• oral history

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interview 044/416.

2. Langhamer, “Love, Selfhood and Authenticity,” 278.

3. Abrams, “Liberating the Female Self,” 18.

4. Thane, “Family, Life, and Normality,” 206.

5. Langhamer, “Feelings, Women and Work,” 79.

6. Abrams, “Liberating the Female Self,” 20 and 35.

7. Worth, “Tale of Female Liberation?” 1.

8. Skeggs, Formations of Class, 74.

9. Ibid.

10. Gillies, Marginalised Mothers, 71.

11. Ibid., 76.

12. Census England and Wales 1961, Household Composition Table 41; and Census England and Wales 1981, Household and Family Composition, Table 21.

13. Census England and Wales 1961, Household Composition, Table 41; Census Great Britain 1991, Household and Family Composition, Tables 11 and 19.

14. Gavron, Captive Wife, 117; Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, 83; and Jephcott, Married Women Working, 100–1.

15. Gavron, Captive Wife, 126.

16. Ibid., 121.

17. McCarthy, “Women, Marriage, Paid Work,” 26; Smith Wilson, “New Look,” 100–1; Davis, Modern Motherhood; and Brooke, “Gender and Working-Class Identity,” 774.

18. Roberts, Women and Families, 139.

19. Smith Wilson, “New Look,” 207.

20. Vincent and Ball, Childcare, Choice and Class, 72.

21. Skeggs, Formations of Class, 162.

22. Abrams, Oral History Theory, 33.

23. Murphy, “I Conformed.”

24. Johnson and Zaidi, “Work over the Life-Course,” Figure 5.2, 104.

25. Ibid., 104.

26. Skeggs, Formations of Class, 84.

27. McIvor, Working Lives, 97.

28. Braun, Vincent and Ball, ‘‘I’m so Much More,” 538.

29. Breitenbach, “A Comparative Study,” 68.

30. McIvor, Working Lives, 77.

31. Census of Scotland 1951, Vol. IV, Occupations and Industries, Table 8; Census of Scotland 1971, Economic Activity County Leaflets, Part II Tayside Planning Sub-Region, Table 1 and Part III, Glasgow Planning Sub-Region, Table 1; Census of England and Wales 1951, Occupation Tables, Table 20; and Census of England and Wales 1971, Economic Activity County Leaflets, Northumberland Table 1 and Lancashire Table 1.

32. Census of Scotland 1951, Vol. IV, Occupations and Industries, Table 6; and Census of Scotland 1971, Economic Activity County Tables, Dundee, Table 1.

33. Census of England and Wales 1951, Occupation Tables, Table 20; and Census of England and Wales 1971, Country Report Lancashire, Table 1.

34. Val, “The Emergence of the Post-Industrial Economy,” 62–3.

35. Census of Scotland 1951, Vol. IV, Occupations and Industries, Table 6; and Census of Scotland 1971, Economic Activity County Tables, Glasgow City, Table 1.

36. Census of England and Wales 1951, Vol. IV Occupation Tables, Table 20; and Census of England and Wales 1971, Country Report Northumberland, Table 1.

37. See note 33 above.

38. Johnson and Zaidi, “Work over the Life-Course,” 105.

39. Worth, “Tale of Female Liberation?” 3.

40. Interview 005/368.

41. Ibid.

42. Interview 006/369.

43. Interview 032/404.

44. Interview 001/360.

45. Abrams et al., “Aspiration, Agency,” 18. Abrams, Hazley, Wright and Kearns demonstrate that this was a result of the transition to new towns, rather than a symptom of the housing itself, whilst emphasising that most women had positive recollections of their new homes.

46. Interview 003/363/4.

47. Jackson and Bartie, “Children of the City,” 104.

48. Interview 034/406.

49. Interview 041/413.

50. Thane, “Family, Life and Normality,” 203.

51. Bowden and Offer, “Household Appliances,” 734.

52. Oakley, Sociology of Housework.

53. Willmott and Young, Family and Kinship, 149–53.

54. Abrams et al., “Aspiration, Agency,” 596–7.

55. Hazley et al., “Locating the Tenant’s Voice,” 8.

56. Roberts, Women and Families, 128.

57. Haggett, “Desperate Housewives,” 54.

58. Jephcott, Married Women Working, 106.

59. Gavron, Captive Wife, 151.

60. Braun, Vincent and Ball, “I’m so Much More,” 535.

61. Markus and Nurius, “Possible Selves,” 954–69.

62. See note 48 above.

63. Ibid.

64. Mannay, “Achieving Respectable Motherhood?” 161.

65. Abrams, “Liberating the Female Self,” 16.

66. Stephenson and Brown, “View from the Workplace,” 7–28.

67. Braun, Vincent and Ball, “I’m so Much More,” 538.

68. Oakley, Housewife, 88–9.

69. Jennings, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls, 50.

70. Interview 029/401.

71. Ibid.

72. Interview 046/418.

73. Interview 023/395.

74. Interview 009/372.

75. See note 42 above.

76. McCloskey, “Paid Work,” 171.

77. Todd, The People, 209.

78. Roberts, Women and Families, 235; and Smith Wilson, “A New Look,” 229.

79. Brooke, “Gender and Working Class Identity,” 774.

80. Smith Wilson, “A New Look.”

81. Kay cited in Wright, “Juteopolis and After,” 134.

82. See Clark and Carnegie, She was Aye Working.

83. Mannay, “Achieving Respectable Motherhood?” 159. Mannay has shown that working-class women’s identities in Wales were characterised by the archetypical ‘Welsh Mam’, who is hardworking, pious and clean in her mothering and housewifery.

84. Interview 036/408.

85. Brannen, “Childhood Across the Generations,” 419.

86. Duncan and Edwards cited in Gillies, Marginalised Mothers, 45.

87. Worth and Paterson, “How is She Going to Manage?”

88. Gillies, Marginalised Mothers, 63.

89. Ibid., 210.

90. Interview 043/415.

91. Interview 027/399.

92. Abrams, “Liberating the Female Self,” 20–21.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Carnegie Trust for the Universities of Scotland PhD Scholarship between 2010 and 2013 and by a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellowship 2017–2019.

Notes on contributors

Laura Paterson

Laura Paterson is a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow. She is writing a monograph on working-class women and work in the post-war decades.