WOMEN MARRIAGE AND PAID WORK IN POSTWAR BRITAIN HELEN

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0 PATRIARCHAL TERRORISM TWO TYPES OF VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN

Women, Marriage and Paid Work in Post-war Britain

Helen McCarthy

Queen Mary University of London

In November 1969, the mass-market fortnightly magazine Woman’s Own published a special feature on women and work.^¹ Extra space was given by its authors to what they saw as the transformed situation of wives. ‘Not so long ago women were expected to choose either a job or marriage,’ they wrote. ‘Today the ambitious girl doesn’t see why she can’t have marriage and a career. A clear pattern has emerged: girls expect to leave school, spend the next few years training and working then leave to have a family.’^² Marriage was no longer the occasion for a young woman’s withdrawal from the formal economy never to return, as had been the assumed pattern in earlier decades of the twentieth century. Most wives continued to work up to the birth of their first child and would, as the magazine noted, resume paid employment once their children were older, ideally on a part-time basis and in jobs which fitted with school hours and holidays. Alongside an interview with a high-profile working wife - the Labour Cabinet minister Barbara Castle - and advice on how working mothers should deal with guilt, readers were directed to useful books aimed at married women returners, and encouraged to complete a quiz to find out what sort of jobs would suit them best.

The subject matter of the Woman’s Own feature was nothing new. The changing pattern of women’s working and family lives had been a theme for sociological study and popular debate ever since the employment rate of married women began to rise significantly in the late 1940s. According to census data (which almost certainly under-recorded women’s part-time, casual labour), 26% of married women were employed outside the home in 1951, 35% in 1961 and 49% by the early 1970s.^³ Much of this growth was amongst older women with school-aged or grown-up children, but the figures also included the increasing numbers of young wives who chose to continue working after marriage and up to the birth of their first child. Earlier marriages and smaller families meant that the average British woman would complete the main business of childbearing and rearing by the age of thirty-five or forty, leaving her twenty years or more of productive working life, a pattern commonly referred to as the ‘dual role’. Reflecting on these changes in their influential 1956 work, Women’s Two Roles, Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein concluded that the conflict women once experienced between paid work and family life could be safely consigned to the past: ‘No longer need women forgo the pleasures of one sphere in order to enjoy the satisfactions of the other,’ they wrote. ‘The best of both worlds has come within their grasp, if only they reach out for it.’^⁴

This new pattern in women’s lives appeared around the same time as another much commented-on social transformation appeared to be taking root, this time in the norms and expectations governing relations between husbands and wives. According to sociologists, psychologists and marriage guidance experts, 1950s Britain was witnessing a gradual but unmistakeable shift away from rigidly segregated and unequal conjugal roles and towards a more egalitarian model in which spouses pulled together as partners, making joint decisions and sharing increasingly home-centred lives.^⁵ This phenomenon was identifiable in the 1920s and 30s but became central to ‘normal’ family life in the affluent 1950s: full employment, improved housing and widening access to consumer goods made the working-class home, as Mark Abrams famously observed in 1959, a place that was ‘warm, comfortable and could provide its own fireside entertainment – in fact, pleasant to live in.’^⁶ The result, as many at the time saw it and many historians since, was the advent of a more family-orientated masculinity. Whilst women retained primary responsibility for care of home and children, they could now expect substantial assistance from their husbands who appeared more willing to help with housework and to play with their children.^⁷ Ferdynand Zweig thought British men had become gentler, domesticated, even ‘feminised’ by this home-centredness, whilst Peter Wilmott and Michael Young detected ‘a new kind of companionship between man and woman’ and a ‘nearer approach to equality’ amongst the young married couples they observed in 1950s Bethnal Green.^⁸

What was the relationship between these two phenomena in post-war Britain? Did the growth of married women’s work help to entrench the values of equality and mutuality in conjugal relations, whilst growing egalitarianism in marriage made it possible for some wives to seek paid work outside the home? Or, conversely, was married women’s work a destabilising force, which contributed to the unravelling of the companionate ideal in the 1970s? Feminists writing from within the Women’s Liberation Movement during the latter decade took a radical stance on these questions, arguing that mutuality was a myth peddled to women as a means of maintaining their oppression in the home. Whether or not a wife worked for pay made little difference to her situation, as her wages and prospects were poor and she continued to shoulder primary responsibility for housework and childcare, still viewed as her ‘natural’ domain. The position of the post-war working wife was thus more accurately described in terms of a double burden than the much-vaunted dual role.^⁹

Whilst typically offering more nuanced analyses, historians have more recently tended to concur with this view. Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield argued that women were encouraged to embrace paid work only insofar as it did not interfere with the prior claims of the family, a formula which fitted ‘comfortably with the concept of companionate marriage without upsetting the conventional distribution of economic and other power within marriage.’^¹⁰ Dolly Wilson has demonstrated how working-class wives exercised considerable agency by seeking jobs outside the home in a climate of opinion which - informed by culturally resonant psychoanalytic theories of ‘maternal deprivation’ - was hostile to mothers of young children taking paid employment. Yet the ubiquitous characterisation of their earnings as supplementary and intended only for ‘extras’, Wilson concludes, served to entrench further the stereotype of women as a secondary, inferior workforce, whose wages were non-essential to family survival.^¹¹

This article makes a different argument. It suggests that the debate over married women’s employment reveals important fractures in post-war assumptions about the rise of egalitarian, companionate marriage. Some voices, particularly those of sociologists, argued optimistically that the employment of wives strengthened marriage through the material security guaranteed by a second wage and by building greater commonality of interests between spouses. But much of the evidence they drew upon to make these claims, when read alongside popular press and magazine sources, points to a more complex picture. Working wives could imperil marital harmony because of the challenge they posed to men’s ‘traditional’ identity as providers and to the legitimacy and modernity of the full-time housewife-worker in the home, a model of more recent vintage rooted in the social-democratic and pro-natalist politics of the 1940s. It did make a difference whether or not a wife worked in this period: her wages did not free her wholly from economic dependency, but they nonetheless offered a small slice of financial autonomy and increased her power within the marriage relationship.

This analysis attests to Stephen Brooke’s compelling claim that gender was a key site for the articulation and contestation of wider changes to working-class family and community life in the 1950s. The looser identification between femininity and maternity afforded by smaller families and the growth in married women’s employment was, Brooke argues, a disruptive force which displaced pre-existing working-class identities rooted in idealised images of breadwinning husbands and home-centred wives.^¹² Whilst the analysis below centres its focus on power relations within marriage rather than class identities, it nonetheless concurs with Brooke’s characterisation of the period as one of instability and flux in gender roles and the family, rather than a ‘golden’ era of stability and consensus. It suggests that married women’s work contributed to this instability across social classes; in middle-class homes, a second income was not instrumental - as it was for many working-class couples - in allowing the family access to the consumer society, but it could, nonetheless, alter the dynamics of power between husbands and wives in important ways.

The article starts by outlining key changes in the female life course, moves on to explore the optimistic narratives spun by sociologists around the phenomenon of the working wife, before considering evidence of a range of more ambivalent responses to this emerging trend. The article concludes by suggesting that historians should give more weight to women’s paid work in their accounts of married and family life in the post-war decades.

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Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, married women left their homes and entered the formal economy whenever their families needed their earnings for survival. But by the early 1950s, British sociologists were commenting with increasing frequency on an apparently new trend in women’s work, linked to fundamental changes in the patterns of women’s lives. In their third social survey of York, Rowntree and Lavers discovered that one in ten wives of employed men went out to work, the majority doing so not to lift their families out of poverty but to enjoy a more comfortable standard of living. Furthermore, for a large minority paid work met ‘a desire to meet other people and thus to lead a less restricted life,’ a factor which had not been evident in their earlier surveys. This, the authors speculated, ‘is a sociological fact which may prove to be of significance.’^¹³ Subsequent studies confirmed this suspicion. In his Essays on the Welfare State, Richard Titmuss suggested that smaller families, greater longevity and growing affluence had placed women in a ‘new situation’:

With an expectation of another thirty-five to forty years of life at the age of forty, with the responsibilities of child upbringing nearly fulfilled, with so many more alternative ways of spending money, with new opportunities and outlets in the field of leisure, the question of the rights of women to an emotionally satisfying and independent life appears in a new guise.^¹⁴

Pearl Jephcott found that working-class wives in Bermondsey, south London, were pursuing exactly this kind of fuller life by engaging in part-time work at the local biscuit factory, Peek Frean. These ‘energetic and resourceful individuals,’ Jephcott observed, were motivated by a combination of material aspirations, social ambitions and psychological needs. There was the determination to ‘improve on the improvements’ offered by a booming economy and consumer society, ‘the pride and pleasure of having an income of one’s own,’ and the social and mental stimulation afforded by a break from the ‘uniform existence’ of the housebound wife and mother.^¹⁵ These themes were increasingly picked up in the popular press, with stories appearing from the early 1950s about wives on part-time shifts enjoying a ‘rest cure’ from housework, and headlines proclaiming Britain to be in the grip of a ‘domestic revolution’.^¹⁶ The publication of Judith Hubback’s study of graduate wives mothers, Wives Who Went to College, in 1957 triggered a lively media debate about part-time work for older women with professional training, an issue subsequently much discussed by organisations such as the Medical Women’s Federation and the British Federation of University Women.^¹⁷

Crucially, this emerging two-stage model for married women’s employment appeared to march in step with the new orthodoxy coalescing around the emotional needs of children. In his highly influential 1951 report for the World Health Organisation, subsequently reissued as Child Care and the Growth of Love in cheap paperback form, psychoanalyst John Bowlby argued that children needed the warm, continuous presence of their mothers in early life to ensure normal psychological development.^¹⁸ Although the report did not directly address the issue of mothers working outside the home on a regular basis, Bowlby’s ideas informed and lent ‘scientific’ respectability both to government policy on pre-school childcare and to a wider climate of censure towards working mothers with young children.^¹⁹ This was reflected in alarmist newspaper stories about ‘latchkey kids’ and prescriptive features in women’s magazines about the dangers of mothers going out to work.^²⁰ However, over the course of the decade, a clear consensus gained ground to the effect that mothers whose offspring had reached school age could seek paid work – ideally part-time and fitting in with school hours – without undue ‘risk’ to their children’s emotional development.

As post-war feminists like Myrdal and Klein were keen to emphasise, the majority of married women workers fell into this category. One study using data from the late 1940s found that less than 15% of all employed married women had children under the age of 5.^²¹ Audrey Hunt’s major 1965 survey of women’s employment indicated that this proportion had declined over the intervening years: only 9% of working women in her sample were responsible for children aged 0-4 (this included single mothers, so the proportion of married working women might have been even lower). Hunt’s survey underlined the continuing strength of opinion concerning the mothers of young children: nearly four fifths of all respondents thought that a mother with children below school-age should stay at home to look after them.^²²

Opinion on the obligations of wives towards their husbands was less clear-cut, but the positive effects on the quality of married life across social classes formed a major theme in debates about married women’s work. Advocates of the ‘dual role’ contended that standards of home comfort did not necessarily suffer when wives went out to work. For Myrdal and Klein, improved housing design, labour-saving appliances and the trend towards communal feeding in workplaces had made housewifery a less than full-time occupation and placed women without young children at risk of becoming bored and isolated. Husbands, they observed, inhabited a world of work which was utterly divorced from their wives’ housebound experience: ‘Moving from factory or office to his dormitory suburb, man changes as from one planet to another. He is awaited by a wife whose life is geared to an entirely different rhythm.’ Wives’ dependence on husbands as their main source of ‘emotional, intellectual and spiritual satisfaction’ was, in Myrdal and Klein’s view, dangerous for marital stability. ‘To rely for so much on any individual human relationship means straining it as far as, and sometimes beyond, the limit of its endurance.’^²³ Paid work for wives offered a way of relieving this pressure and might even, Myrdal and Klein suggested, strengthen men’s emotional investments in their homes. The gains in productivity facilitated by married women’s employment, they speculated, could result in a shorter working day for everyone, thus making male workers ‘full partners in the affairs of their families, instead of mere ‘visiteurs du soir’’.^²⁴

This core claim - that stronger marriages resulted when both spouses worked outside the home – appeared to be supported by considerable evidence. Shortly after the publication of Women’s Two Roles, Viola Klein conducted a survey into attitudes towards working wives, and found the employed married women in her sample to be overwhelmingly positive about the effects on their marriages. Unsurprisingly, larger household income was the advantage most commonly cited (64%), but number two was ‘increased mutual interest, more cooperation, harmony’ (16%), and other respondents referred to gaining more ‘satisfaction, interest’ (10%), to ‘helping[ing] each other in working together’ (3%) or generally being ‘happier’ (4%).^²⁵ Husbands with working wives were similarly positive. Almost half reported their unconditional approval of the general principle of married women working, and a further 17% approved in cases where there were no young children involved. Many endorsed the notion that outside jobs made wives more interesting companions. One 54-year old clerk thought ‘women who do not go out to work are narrow-minded, stodgy, uninteresting, miserable. Women who do are intelligent, can talk more interestingly, are more equal.’ A 40-year old skilled craftsman felt his wife ‘keeps younger because she’s interested in her work’, whilst for a civil servant whose wife had recently returned to work in middle-age: ‘It’s given us a fresh interest, almost as though we were starting again…She seems freer and she has other things to talk about which she didn’t have before.’^²⁶ Zweig’s interviews with married women factory operatives for his 1961 study of affluent workers produced similar sentiments. These wives felt better appreciated by their husbands now they were earning, referring frequently to ‘having wider interests, something to talk about’ and feeling better equipped to hold their own in conversations at home about work.^²⁷

The idea that working women made better, more interesting wives also began to surface in popular discourses of marriage and femininity, including those found in mass circulation women’s magazines. In May 1960, for example, the monthly glossy Modern Woman published a long piece by the Australian MP, Nancy Buttfield, in which she observed that the husband of today ‘needs more stimulation from his wife than she can possibly give if her interests are confined to what the grocer said and the price of meat. He needs to have serious discussions with her, which is impossible if she keeps her mental level on an adolescent line.’^²⁸ In a sidebar, 27-year-old model and mother of two Zoe Newton offered her wholehearted agreement with Mrs Buttfield:

I think that a wife who works makes the best possible companion to her husband because she mixes with other people in the course of her work. Too many housewives lead a lonely life, which can in time make them so obsessed by trifles that they become worriers, naggers and so out of touch that they can hardly talk about a single subject outside the trivial every day round of the home.^²⁹

Hunt’s 1965 survey indicated that this sentiment became increasingly commonplace over the following few years. Amongst the working women in her sample, more than two-thirds agreed with the statement: ‘Wives who go out to work make more interesting companions for their husbands.’ Perhaps surprisingly, even amongst non-working women the proportion in agreement was over 50%.^³⁰

Paid work for wives was not just believed to promote emotional and intellectual sympathy between spouses. Studies from the period also noted the difference that the material security of a second income could make in reducing domestic tensions and deepening the sense of conjugal partnership. The husbands of working wives in Klein’s survey discussed the financial advantages very much in these terms. A foreman in his early 60s thought his marriage was happier ‘being that you have more money and I do feel that married couples without enough money do have friction.’ A 54-year old labourer agreed: ‘It’s made a big difference…We have been able to do things, you see. We have saved and been able to buy this place.’^³¹ Zweig’s married women respondents confirmed this picture, with ‘He has less worry about money’ a common observation.^³² The sense of pulling together in a joint financial endeavour even began to surface in the romantic fiction that formed a regular part of the diet of women’s magazine readers. ‘Wife in a Million’ narrated the dilemma of Angela Thomas, a middle-class housewife with small children and money problems stemming from her husband’s modest salary as a junior manager in an engineering firm. Angela begins to earn money on the side by entertaining and cooking meals for an elderly Swedish couple, a job which she carefully conceals from her husband, Simon, to save his pride. Inevitably, Simon arrives home unexpectedly one evening and Angela’s deception is revealed. Harmony is, however, restored, when it transpires that Simon has, unbeknownst to his wife, also been earning extra cash by serving in a coffee bar instead of attending evening classes. Husband and wife are thus reconciled and united behind a shared objective: to augment their income so that they and their children might enjoy a higher standard of domestic comfort.^³³

This heightened sense of partnership was often signalled by a more equitable division of domestic labour in homes where both spouses worked, a phenomenon widely noted by post-war sociologists. This trend was not limited to households with working wives, but Willmott and Young, Zweig, Hubback and Jephcott all observed that husbands felt a stronger obligation to ‘help’ with housework and childcare where they were not the sole-earners.^³⁴ Zweig’s informants talked in terms of reciprocity and symmetry of roles: ‘He helps me out now since I came out’ ‘I wouldn’t come out if we were not sharing the housework’ ‘I help him out, so he helps me out, fifty-fifty.’^³⁵ In Bermondsey, Jephcott reported that husbands ‘did far more than lend a hand during a crisis, or than the occasional job of re-decorating or window-cleaning,’ citing one case where a man did the weekly wash and another who polished the lino whilst his wife ironed. In fact, all the ingredients which made for strong, harmonious marriages seemed to be in place in the homes of Bermondsey’s working wives. ‘Partnership between husband and wife was thought,’ Jephcott wrote, ‘to be growing closer and some people believed that married women’s employment, far from threatening good relations, helped to improve them.’ Respondents referred to the greater involvement of their husbands in housework and childcare, the mutual consultation that now took place over household expenditure, and of how ‘jointly building up an attractive, well-equipped home, and enjoying together the new pleasures of the Sunday car ride and the family holiday, all strengthened the common bond.’^³⁶

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Jephcott’s account thus painted a picture in which married women’s employment reinforced and, for some households, accelerated, a move towards the equality and mutuality which many believed was becoming normative within British marriages. In this reading, which, as we have seen, had purchase beyond the readers of sociological texts, working wives did not destabilise the partnership model but were, rather, extending its logic in ways that did not threaten prevailing sexual divisions. Wives earned money for ‘extras’, not for household survival; husbands ‘helped’ with housework and children but did not share the responsibility equally. The growth in married women’s work, it might be concluded from this, failed to undermine the conservative gender politics of the era centred on the notion of equal but differentiated spousal roles. ‘We should not be taken in,’ the feminist Ann Oakley wrote in 1974, ‘by surface appearances, nor by that pseudo-egalitarian phrase the ‘dual-career’ marriage.’ Working wives and full-time housewives, she and other feminist of the 1970s insisted, were imprisoned alike by ‘the ideology of non-interchangeability, of role-segregation, subscribed to by the married couple – the ideology of gender differentiation which is basic to marriage as an institution.’^³⁷

This second-wave feminist narrative, however, underestimates the meaning and significance that wage-earning could hold for married women. It was true that wives typically earned far less than their husbands and routinely described their wages as supplementary income - used to ‘improve on the improvements’ to borrow Jephcott’s phrase. But this did not mean that wives’ earnings posed no threat at all to the ideological legitimacy of the male breadwinner model. As Dolly Wilson has argued, the discourse of ‘extras’ may in fact have obscured the substantial contribution that wives’ earnings made to household income in this period.^³⁸ Audrey Hunt noted with some surprise that well over half of the working wives in her 1965 sample spent most of their income on general household expenditure, including rent. ‘If we take into account clothes for self and children,’ Hunt added, ‘it can be said that a very high proportion of the money earned by married women goes to improve the general standard of living of the family and not on luxuries.’^³⁹ In fact, the discourse, pervasive before the Second World War, which held that wives only entered the labour force out of economic necessity, never entirely disappeared, even in the affluent ‘fifties. The Daily Mirror published a long feature by the journalist and later Labour peer Alma Birk in 1956 in which she defended ‘paypacket mothers’ primarily on these grounds: in many cases, she wrote, ‘the family really needs the money. With rising prices, more housewives are finding it harder to make ends meet.’^⁴⁰ Reader Mrs B of Walthamstow concurred: ‘‘our rent is high, food prices are steep – so I MUST go to work.’^⁴¹

Even where wives’ earnings were evidently used to purchase items falling outside the category of essential household expenditure, one could question how far this left the basic power relations between male breadwinner and dependent spouse untouched. In her history of working-class women’s lives, Elizabeth Roberts argued that married women suffered a loss of economic status in this period because their skill at managing the household budget was deemed no longer crucial to family survival as it had been before the Second World War. This held true, Roberts argued, even for those earning small wages from part-time work.^⁴² But this interpretation, based on retrospective oral testimonies, ignores contemporary sources that reveal the pleasure and satisfaction that many married women derived from wage-earning, and the degree of autonomy which they gained as a consequence of controlling a separate income, however small. ‘You do feel nice when you get your bit of money on a Friday and know that you’ve earned it,’ was how the working wives of Bermondsey put it to Jephcott.^⁴³ Klein also noticed how many wives appreciated not having to ask their husbands for money if they wanted a haircut or a new dress, whilst Zweig’s informants sometimes turned the tables and spent their earnings on their husbands: ‘I am buying the car for him,’ one said. ‘I often give him a treat,’ said another.^⁴⁴ The earnings of middle-class wives were typically less important for securing the household access to consumer goods, but could be significant for helping to pay school fees, gardeners or private tutors, or for more generally legitimizing women’s activities outside the home.^⁴⁵ One respondent to Klein’s 1963 survey of women graduates described the voluntary work she had undertaken since marriage but noted that ‘a regular paid job has a better “status” in the family – ie it is taken seriously & not expected to give way to any family happenings (other than illness etc).’^⁴⁶

The material object of married women’s employment might have been frequently described in terms of ‘extras’, but for the home-centred, affluent working-class family – and the status-conscious middle-class one - this category was flexible and its perimeters unstable. As a justification for going out to work, a wife’s desire for a higher standard of living could become discursively entangled in the older, aforementioned language of ‘need’: homes ‘needed’ televisions; children ‘needed’ new clothes; families ‘needed’ holidays. In Klein’s words, ‘to the extent to which these and similar items of expenditure become part of people’s normal standard of living the ‘subsidiary’ income contributed by a wife’s earnings fulfils a need, even in a society such as ours in which primary poverty has practically vanished.’^⁴⁷ And yet, Klein noted, married women who withdrew from the labour-force in times of slump or recession, as in 1958-89, rarely registered as unemployed, whilst the view remained popular that a wife’s wages were ‘no more than supplementary to the main income provided by the breadwinner – a very welcome supplement no doubt, but one that at a pinch one can do without.’^⁴⁸

This apparent paradox spoke to a more general ambiguity over the earnings of wives, and to the dissonance that could exist between official understandings of married women as a second-tier workforce and private knowledge of their economic significance within households. To return to Roberts’ claim, it is difficult to see how a woman who bought her husband a car, sent her children to private schools or made it possible for the family to holiday abroad had less status in her household than her interwar counterpart. It was this private knowledge, Zweig thought, which produced ambivalence amongst the husbands, even as they willingly rolled up their sleeves and washed the dishes whilst their wives were at work: ‘On the one hand the man wants to keep his wife at home. His status, prestige, his comfort, the proper care of children are involved in this. On the other hand he wants the extra money and the extra money can smooth out many of his troubles.’^⁴⁹ A similarly ambivalent note crept into some of the husbands’ testimonies of in Klein’s Working Wives survey. Klein noted that many were anxious to explain their apparent failure to provide for their families on a single wage by invoking, like Mrs B of Walthamstow, rising living costs, using phrases such as ‘nowadays’, ‘these days’ or ‘present-day circumstances.’ Klein concluded that such rationalisations helped to ‘sugar the pill’ of the earning wife, ‘since it shifts the responsibility from their own shoulders to more impersonal factors.’^⁵⁰

Some men, nevertheless, were evidently unable or unwilling to entertain such rationalisations, even as married women’s work became widespread. There is no shortage of evidence for the cultural resilience of beliefs about a husband’s duty to ‘keep’ his wife on a single, bread-winning wage in the post-war period. This was the reason most commonly cited in surveys by men who opposed married women’s employment on principle. It was mentioned by almost four fifths of disapproving husbands in Klein’s 1957 sample, whilst another 6% felt that ‘a man shouldn’t marry unless he can support a wife.’^⁵¹ The data suggest that a significant proportion of wives also adhered to this traditional model of the husband as sole provider, and even those with more tolerant views regarded paid work as normative for husbands but only ever optional for wives: very few of Hunt’s informants, for instance, thought married women, even if childless, ‘ought’ to work as a duty to the community.^⁵² Yet as the pattern of paid work beyond marriage became increasingly well-established, a wife’s desire for employment inevitably produced marital tensions where husbands clung to their principled opposition. Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher’s oral history of mid-century marriage instance two cases of this from different social classes. ‘Doreen’, a bricklayer’s wife, wanted to return to teaching domestic science but her husband wouldn’t have it: he ‘wanted to be proud and keep me, you see’. ‘Antonia’, married to a chartered accountant recalled her husband’s opposition when she raised the possibility of getting a job: ‘he was absolutely against it because to him men’s wives – if your wife worked that was a signal of failure – that you were not doing very well.’^⁵³ Some wives ignored their husbands and got themselves jobs regardless. 1 in 5 of the working wives in Klein’s survey claimed to have husbands who positively disapproved of their outside job. Hunt’s 1965 survey found the proportion to be 1 in 6.

The addition of a second income could be troubling for marital stability in other ways, too. Some observers invoked the well-established, pre-war discourse of the ‘bad’ working-class husband whose wage-earning wife was shameful proof of his inability, or unwillingness, to provide properly for his family. The Labour MP Jean Mann voiced concern in the monthly organ of the Marriage Guidance Council in 1955 about husbands who used their wives’ earnings as justification for handing over a smaller housekeeping allowance, or, worst still, whose meanness over their pay-packets was the main cause for wives seeking paid work in the first place.^⁵⁴ More generally, the popular narratives cited earlier about happy working wives were often counterweighted by much gloomier testimonies from married women who disliked ‘having’ to work. A large feature in the Daily Mirror in 1956, for example, asked five ‘part-time mothers’ to explain why they had sought jobs outside the home. Three of the five gave largely positive accounts: a 45-year old store executive was ‘happier working and having what I want’; a 24-year old salesgirl similarly liked ‘being around people and I am happier working’; a 30-year old ‘clippie’ thought her children were ‘more self-reliant’ and was ‘so used to the money now I just don’t want to give it up’. But the other two were more ambivalent: a 32-year old factory hand said she would prefer not to work but would ‘feel I was letting the children down if they couldn’t have the things they need, and my husband’s salary isn’t enough.’ A 28-year old food packer was more blunt: her 75-hour working week was ‘an economic necessity’ and she would ‘stop work if I could’.^⁵⁵

***

It is difficult to estimate what proportion of married women workers were, like these two wives, in the labour-force reluctantly, or indeed to recover more generally women’s often complicated feelings about paid work.^⁵⁶ Post-war surveys acknowledged that many widows and divorcees worked under economic pressure, alongside unmarried mothers who similarly lacked the support of a male breadwinner. But for the wives of employed men – that is, living in ‘normal’ family circumstances - the overriding assumption was that paid work represented a positive choice, pursued to meet material aspirations, psychological needs or both, and supported by cooperative husbands. Sociologists linked this, as we have seen, to the wider ‘democratisation’ of marriage and family relations in this period, a trend which they regarded with characteristic optimism and believed would become only more pronounced and hegemonic in a technologically–advanced and self-consciously ‘modern’ society like Britain.^⁵⁷ The apparent resilience of ‘traditional’ views, about, for instance, a woman’s duty to devote herself to the home and a man’s duty to ‘keep’ her, was just that: a legacy bequeathed by an earlier stage of societal development, a cultural ‘lag’ which would in time correct itself. Willmott and Young’s Family and Kinship in East London offers an exemplar of this explanatory model. The patriarch who appeared in the field-notes of Victorian social investigators, ‘sharing with his wife neither responsibility nor affection,’ still existed in Bethnal Green in the 1950s, they noted, but he was a dying breed. The home-centred husband who preferred to potter in the garden with his wife than carouse in the pub with his mates represented the future.^⁵⁸

As second-wave feminists and subsequent historians have recognised, sociological knowledge played an important role in shaping post-war understandings of ‘normal’ marriage and family life, and provided a framework and language through which contemporaries could make sense of - and feel less anxious about - complex processes of social change, including the growth of married women’s work.^⁵⁹ But, nonetheless, the optimistic narrative of the democratised family was not all-powerful. The popular press might report with interest the findings of Klein’s Working Wives survey or Jephcott’s Bermondsey study, but it inevitably also made space for perspectives that contested the reassuring narrative of progress which those authors extrapolated from their data. Writing about Klein’s survey in the Daily Express in 1960, the journalist Sally Vincent roundly rejected the picture it painted of marital harmony. Herself a young working wife, Vincent confided that she found the subject ‘a bit of a tear-jerker,’ and predicted trouble ahead for marriages where ‘the masculine-feminine ratio of the couple gets mixed up’. The wife, Vincent wrote, inevitably ‘becomes scornful of a husband who can’t improve their status without her pay-packet,’ whilst mutual resentment was assured as over time the man ‘watches his supremacy dwindle.’^⁶⁰

Women’s magazines were similarly multivalent on the question of two-income marriages. Only pages on from Buttfield’s spirited defence of working wives in May 1960, readers of Modern Woman were offered a far more pessimistic view from regular columnist Ann Temple:

Somewhere in this particular pattern of marriage there seems to be a psychological factor that is subtly and secretly destructive. Far too often the marriage breaks up. It appears to work in the exciting and eventful early years but as soon as the children grow up everything suddenly disintegrates. It is noticeable that the children marry very early. The husband goes his way too – into divorce and another marriage. The wife is left on her own – out on a limb.^⁶¹

These mixed messages were evident in light fiction as well. In January 1957, Woman’s Own published a story about Kate, a young wife and mother who has recently resumed her previous career as a ballet-dancer, a decision tolerated by husband Greg, who fears his wife is frustrated by full-time home-making and hopes that ‘it might even improve the relations between them if she did what she seemed to want to do.’ However, unlike the short story cited earlier, this was not an advertisement for the emotional benefits of dual-income marriages. Kate’s son Toby is devastated by his mother’s absence and runs away, prompting Kate to renounce her career and reveal to Greg that she had only taken it up again ‘because she thought it was the thing about her that made him love her. “I haven’t cared a jot about dancing ever since I married you,”’ she declares, returning to full-time housewifery and restoring marital harmony and domestic order in the process.^⁶²

It is hard to fit these counter-narratives into the ‘cultural lag’ model: that is, to explain them as representing a residuum of old-fashioned attitudes which, whilst still present in the 1950s and 60s, were very definitely on the way out. Sally Vincent was a glamorous twenty-two-year old when she wrote the Daily Express piece; ‘Kate’ was twenty-seven, ‘sparkling and vivid.’ The attractions of full-time housewifery to British women after the Second World War did not stem solely, or even primarily, from women’s adherence to the sentimental or moral precept that her ‘duty’ was to her home and family. As Denise Riley has shown, the confluence of social-democratic welfarism and anxieties about the falling birth rate in the late 1940s secured the enthronement, both at the level of social policy and in public moral rhetoric, of the category of the ‘mother-worker’ in the home.^⁶³ This apparently progressive but deeply functionalist formulation, which elevated women’s unpaid domestic work to parity of esteem with men’s waged work through family allowances and other ‘family’ welfare services, lost most of its pro-natalist baggage in the 1950s. Instead it became folded into the similarly ‘progressive’ narratives of companionate marriage and home-centred, materially secure, family life. Now a relationship rather than an institution, marriage seemed to offer the promise of emotional intimacy, sexual satisfaction and domestic comfort; it was a means of experiencing modernity, not turning away from it.^⁶⁴

In other words, the wife who worked outside the home was not a disturbing figure because she was ‘modern’. Rather, the growth of married women’s work was a disruptive force because it complicated the pleasing ideological symmetry of the similarly ‘modern’ full-time housewife who laboured in her comfortable, well-equipped home as equal partner to her husband who laboured outside it. The viability of the ‘dual role’ model promoted by Myrdal and Klein rested on their assertion that housework was not in fact equal in status to waged work, and they floated the possibility that many women took longer than necessary over it ‘in order to ally their feelings of frustration by providing evidence that they are fully occupied and indispensable.’^⁶⁵ Housewives were not, they argued, the autonomous homemakers glorified in ‘press and propaganda,’ but rather ‘a discontented class’ trapped in an isolated, housebound existence.^⁶⁶ Second-wave feminists would take up the housewife’s isolation as a central theme in their later critiques of the sexual division of labour, but it is important to recognise that advocates of married women’s employment had challenged the functionalist orthodoxy regarding gender role specialisation, albeit in less radical form, as early as the mid-1950s.

There was, furthermore, the tension created by the basic economic fact that, for many couples, only a second income could secure the comforts of a ‘modern’ home, which in turn required wives to spend more time outside it. This was rarely acknowledged in the adverts depicting ‘ideal homes’ that dominated the pages of women’s magazines and women’s sections of newspapers in this period. These almost exclusively addressed readers as though they were full-time housewives; close reading of a sample of issues of Woman’s Own from 1956, 1957 and 1959 produced only one example which broke with this rule: an advert for Stork margarine which asked readers ‘which wife are you? Are you a wife with a job to do during the day, as well as having a house to run? Or are you at home all day with a family to cook for in the evening?’^⁶⁷ A long feature on ‘Guilty Wives’ in Modern Woman in 1961 went so far as to reflect openly on this paradox, noting how advertisers regarded working wives as a target market for frozen food, instant coffee, fridges and washing machines, but chose to downplay the time-saving aspect in the messages they projected about their products. Women, it was observed, did not like to think they were ‘cutting corners on duties which were fundamentally those of a loving wife and mother.’^⁶⁸ Yet, as the post-war sociological studies prove, this commercially-willed fiction was at odds with the private knowledge shared by many married couples about the role that a second income played in allowing their family access to the consumer culture of the affluent society.^⁶⁹

***

All these contradictions and complications make it impossible to regard the growth in married women’s employment as producing merely the ‘surface appearance’ of change in post-war gender relations. Second-wave feminists minimised the challenge that married women’s paid work posed to the ideal of egalitarian, companionate marriage because doing so strengthened their own claims about the need for a radical transformation of sexual divisions in both the home and workplace. There can be no doubt that the 1950s and 1960s perpetuated these divisions in the sense that housework and childcare continued to be regarded - as it had been in earlier periods - the ‘natural’ domain of the wife, regardless of whether or not she had an outside job. But to acknowledge this continuity is not to conclude that the growth in married women’s employment therefore had no effect on gender relations. As Laura King’s recent exploration of men’s experiences of fatherhood over the same period reveals, small and subtle shifts in behaviour and sensibility can be as significant, arguably more so, than dramatic turning points or major discontinuities in accounts of social change.^⁷⁰

As the analysis above has revealed, contemporaries overwhelmingly agreed that wives who earned had more power in the home than those who didn’t, although they disagreed on the implications of this for the stability of marriage. Some argued that ‘modern’ conjugal relations, rooted in the values of equality and mutuality, were strengthened when wives went out to work. Others were more pessimistic, viewing the addition of a second income as a threat to domestic harmony. In practice, the growth in married women’s work affected every household differently, making broad generalisations difficult. But it seems clear that this emerging trend had important long-term consequences, by helping to establish the employment of wives both as a social norm across social classes and the key to freeing women - at least to some degree - from economic and psychological dependency in marriage. These themes became central to feminist debates in the 1970s and 80s about the value of women’s waged and unwaged work, and about the isolation of the housewife tied to the home. They also became increasingly pertinent to the lives of ordinary women in those decades, who were significantly more likely than their post-war counterparts to experience divorce, separation, lone parenthood or the unemployment of the family’s male breadwinner. Paid work thus offers historians an analytical thread which links the 1950s to later periods of change in British women’s lives and a productive point of departure for revisiting narratives of the rise and apparent demise of the companionate marriage ideal.

1 Woman’s Own was launched in 1932 to appeal to a mass, cross-class audience of young to middle-aged housewives and became the highest circulation woman’s weekly in the 1950s, running into the millions. See Martin Pugh (2000) Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain (London, 2^nd ed: Routledge), p. 211; Jill Greenfield and Chris Reid (1998) ‘Women’s magazines and the commercial orchestration of femininity in the 1930s: evidence from Woman’s Own’ Media History 4, pp. 161-74

2 ‘The Mystery of Being a Woman: Going out to work’ in ‘Woman’s Own Encyclopaedia, Part 6’, Woman’s Own, 29^th November 1969, p1.

3 Jane Lewis (1992) Women in Britain since 1945 (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 65

4 Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, (1968 [1956]) Women’s Two Roles: Home and Family (London: Routledge Kegan Paul), p. xvi

5 Marcus Collins (2003) Modern Love: An Intimate History of Men and Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Atlantic Books); Simon Szreter and Kate Fisher (2010) Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England, 1918-1963 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Clare Langhamer (2013) The English in Love: The Intimate Story of an Emotional Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

6 Mark Abrams (1959) ‘The Home-Centred Society’ The Listener, 26^th November 1959, pp. 914-5. See also Claire Langhamer (2005) ‘The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain’ Journal of Contemporary History 40, pp. 341-362

7 Laura King (2015) Family Men: Fatherhood and masculinity in Britain, 1914-1960 (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

8 Ferdynand Zweig (1961) The Worker in an Affluent Society: Family Life and Industry (London: Heinemann); Michael Young and Peter Willmott (1957) Family and Kinship in East London (London: Routledge Kegan Paul), p. 30.

9 For the 1970s feminist critique, see Germaine Greer (1970) The Female Eunuch (London: MacGibbon & Kee); Ann Oakley (1974) Housewife (London: Allen Lane); Lee Comer (1974) Wedlocked Women (Leeds: Feminist Books)

10 Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield, ‘Social Reconstruction and the Emergence of Companionate Marriage’ in Graham Allen (Ed.) (1999), The Sociology of the Family: A Reader (Oxford: Blackwell), pp. 20-1.

11 Dolly Wilson (2006) ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’ Twentieth-Century British History, 17, pp. 206-229

12 Stephen Brooke (2001) ‘Gender and working-class identity in Britain during the 1950s’ Journal of Social History 34, 2001, pp. 773-795

13 B Seebohm Rowntree and GR Lavers (1951) Poverty and the Welfare State: a third social survey of York dealing only with economic questions (London: Longmans, Green), p. 57

14 Richard M Titmuss (1958) Essays on ‘the Welfare State’ (London: Allen and Unwin), p. 102

15 Pearl Jephcott, with Nancy Seear and John H Smith (1962) Married Women Working (London: George Allen & Unwin), p. 91, 102, 108.

16 Harold Hutchinson, ‘Four Hours in a factory that women call a ‘rest cure’ Daily Mirror 8^th March 1951, p. 7; Anne Edwards, ‘The Domestic Revolution’ Daily Mirror, 2^nd Jan 1956, p. 3.

17 Judith Hubback (1957) Wives Who Went to College (London: Heinemann), and (2003) From Dawn to Dusk: Autobiography of Judith Hubback (Illinois: Chiron Publications), chs. 11-12. Constance E Arregger (Ed.) (1966) Graduate Women at Work: A Study by a Working Party of the British Federation of University Women (Newcastle: Oriel Press). The MWF carried out a major survey on the careers of female medics in 1965. See Jean E Lawrie, Muriel L Newhouse and Patricia M Elliott, ‘Working Capacity of Women Doctors’ British Medical Journal, 12^th Feb 1966, pp. 409-412

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

19 Jane Lewis (2013) ‘The Failure to expand childcare provision and to develop a comprehensive childcare policy during the 1960s and 1970s’ Twentieth Century British History 24, pp. 249-274

20 See, for instance, ‘You can’t be a part-time mother’ in Modern Woman, December 1960, pp. 60-61, 88-90; ‘Crime begins at primary school’ Daily Mirror, 6^th May 1963, p. 7

21 RK Kelsall and Sheila Mitchell (1959)‘Married women and employment’ Population Studies 13, pp. 19-33.

22 Audrey Hunt (1968) A Survey of Women’s Employment (London: HMSO), p. 87, p. 189.

23 Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, p. 27, p. 147

24 ibid., p. 192.

25 Viola Klein (1960) Working Wives: The Survey of Facts and Opinions Concerning the Gainful Employment of Married Women in Britain (London: Institute of Personnel Management), p. 45. The fieldwork was completed in the autumn of 1957.

26 Ibid., pp. 56-7

27 Zweig, The Worker, p. 177, 178.

28 ‘I refuse to be just a housewife’ Modern Woman, May 1960, p. 42. Modern Woman was launched in 1925 and had a largely middle-class readership between the wars.

29 Ibid., p. 40.

30 Hunt, Survey, p. 189.

31 Klein, Working Wives, pp. 57-8

32 Zweig, The Worker, p177.

33 ‘Wife in a Million’ by Elizabeth Beresford, Woman’s Own, 17^th January 1959, pp. 9, 38, 40 & 45

34 King also finds evidence of this attitude in oral history testimonies from the period, see Family Men, p. 180.

35 Zweig, Worker, p. 176.

36 Jephcott et al, Married Women Working, p. 171.

37 Oakley, Housewife, p. 237.

38 Wilson, ‘The Good Working Mother’

39 Hunt, Survey, pp. 132-3

40 Alma Birk, ‘The problem of the LATCHKEY KIDS’ Daily Mirror, 17^th February 1956, p. 9. (Italics in original)

41 Daily Mirror, 18^th February 1956, p. 2

42 Elizabeth Roberts (1995) Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940-1970 (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 126.

43 Jephcott et al, Married Women Working, p. 108.

44 Zweig, The Worker, p. 177.

45 This was more often the case amongst wives with lower-earning husbands, where a second salary would not push household income over the threshold for higher taxation or make them ineligible for state-funded scholarships for university. The punitive effects of the tax system on married women’s earnings in higher-income families was a common cause for complaint in professional women’s circles, as noted by Hubback in Wives Who Went to College.

46 ‘Patterns in Womanpower: A Study of the relations of family responsibilities to discontinuity of study and work experience in professional women’ survey, 1963. The questionnaire responses are preserved in Viola Klein’s papers at the University of Reading, Box 27, no. 479. The respondent was teaching part-time at a Further Education College.

47 Viola Klein (1965) Britain’s Married Women Workers (London: Routledge Kegan Paul) p. 39.

48 Ibid.

49 Zweig, The Worker, pp. 44-45.

50 Klein, Working Wives, p. 54

51 Ibid., p. 52.

52 Hunt, Survey, pp. 180-1

53 Szreter and Fisher, Sex, p. 205, 206. See also King, Family Men, p. 158-9

54 Jean Mann (1955) ‘Should married women go out to work? The Penalties and the Awards’ Marriage Guidance, 1, pp. 3-5.

55 ‘The Domestic Revolution’

56 For a sensitive discussion of this issue based on the testimonies of women war workers, see Penny Summerfield (1998) Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press), pp. 1-42

57 Angela Davis (2009) ‘A critical perspective on British social surveys and community studies and their accounts of married life c. 1945-1970’, Cultural and Social History, 6, pp. 47-64.

58 Wilmott and Young, Family and Kinship, p. 19. See also Ronald Fletcher (1962) The Family and Marriage in Britain: An Analysis and Moral Assessment (London: Penguin)

59 Finch and Summerfield, ‘Social reconstruction’; Collins, Modern Love, p. 195

60 Sally Vincent, ‘Warning Light to Wives!’ Daily Express, 6^th January 1960, p. 6. Vincent quickly divorced her then husband and later had an affair with the radical psychiatrist RD Laing. See obituary of Sally Vincent by Deborah Orr, Guardian, 1^st January 2014.

61 Ann Temple, ‘This Question of Working Wives…Is it such a good idea?’ Modern Woman, May 1960, p. 79.

62 ‘Wrong Kind of Mother’ by Ethel Edison Gordon, Woman’s Own, 10^th January 1957, pp. 13-4, 16, 18, 21.

63 Denise Riley (1983) War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (London: Virago).

64 Judy Giles has written about the home as a feminized site of modernity in the first half of the twentieth century. See Judy Giles (2004) The Parlour and the Suburb: domestic identities, class, femininity and modernity (Oxford: Berg).

65 Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, p. 37.

66 Ibid., p. 10.

67 Woman’s Own, August 2^nd 1956, p. 51.

68 Eleanor Harvey, ‘Guilty Wives’ Modern Woman, April 1961, p. 55.

69 In their famous study of ‘affluent workers’ in Luton in the early 1960s, Goldthorpe et al found that nearly all the wives without pre-school age children were in employment. John H Goldthorpe, David Lockwood, Frank Bechhofer, and Jennifer Platt (1969) The Affluent Worker in the Class Structure (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 98.

70 King, Family Men, p. 15.

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