Even so, whatever the precise mix of social attitudes, divorce itself was still so much the exception that the psychological burden on the children of divorce remained considerable. ‘I was eight, relieved at a more peaceful homelife but very embarrassed about having divorced parents,’ Angela Hogg remembered more than 30 years later about the aftermath of her parents’ ‘very stormy’ marriage ending in 1955:
I shrivelled in history lessons about Henry VIII when his divorces were mentioned. After the divorce my brother, sister and I [living with their mother in Bristol] were handed over to my father on neutral territory – the White Tree roundabout – every third weekend. My father then lived in Birmingham but rented one room as a base. He cooked us meals on a one-ring stove but took us out to ‘places of interest’. Both parents married again. It was very hard to balance loyalties. In those days nobody ever thought of counselling the children or sorting out the huge problems of being adolescents in two households. We kept our agonies to ourselves and hardly dared discuss them with each other.
‘Things,’ she concluded with heartfelt relief about using the past tense, ‘were kept much more under the carpet in those days.’26
Outside the statistically insignificant world of the open-marriage leftish intelligentsia – A. J. Ayer, Anthony Crosland, Kingsley Amis – it is all but impossible to know the extent of extramarital affairs. Virtually the only guide we have is M-O’s 1949 ‘Little Kinsey’ survey, which asked its unrepresentatively liberal, middle-class National Panel and found that ‘one husband in four, compared with one wife in every five, admits to experience of sex relations outside marriage’. The historian of adultery, Claire Langhamer, suggests that ‘there was a very real public perception that extra-marital affairs were more common across social categories than had previously been the case’, but for most of the 1950s her only contemporary evidence is The Times in May 1954 reporting the fear of the prominent, morally upright Judge Denning that ‘we have unfortunately reached a position where adultery, or infidelity or misconduct, as soft-spoken folk call it, is considered to be a matter of little moment’.
That, though, is as much about attitudes as practices, and in terms of attitudes we do indeed know more. ‘Little Kinsey’ revealed that although there was in theory widespread condemnation of sex outside marriage (63 per cent of the street sample), people when it came to particular cases were, in Langhamer’s words, ‘unwilling to make judgements without an understanding of individual circumstances’. Soon afterwards, in Gorer’s survey, the majority of responses to the question of what a husband/wife should do if the other was found to be conducting an affair had ‘the implicit or explicit assumption that adultery should not terminate the marriage (if that can possibly be avoided) and does not justify the wronged spouse in adopting violent and aggressive behaviour’. A 30-year-old woman from St Helens advised: ‘First of all discuss it calmly with him, then do nothing but wait. Let the affair die a natural death and the man will return. In the meantime, she can buy some new clothes and have her hair permed, make herself as attractive as she can. Spend more on herself than on the house.’
This measure of tolerance seems to have become the norm, to judge by what Marian Raynham heard on Any Questions? in December 1954:
My goodness, I nearly exploded. One question was ‘whether one act of adultery should be a cause for divorce’. The ‘holy’ Archbishop Fisher said it shouldn’t, there was forgiveness, & the marriage could go on happily as before. This was in the paper the other day. Well, I’ll be blowed, not one of those specimens, including Mary Stocks, had the courage to take another view. What a revelation. The other three were Tom Driberg M.P., Nigel Balchin, Sir Godfrey [Llewellyn, a prominent Welsh Conservative]. Well, I’m shocked to the marrow. So married people are allowed a ration of one adultery, leaving the marriage as before. The other innocent party not minding a bit presumably . . .
There was less sympathy for the plight of the third party. ‘He is talking nonsense about divorcing her,’ bluntly replied ‘Mary Grant’ (running the Woman’s Own problems page) to a single woman who had been asked by her lover to wait for his divorce. ‘Stop seeing him.’27 The marriage, almost whatever the situation, came first and last.
What about premarital sex? Again, hard evidence is patchy, although we know from Eustace Chesser’s extensive cohort-based survey (conducted in 1954 and somewhat skewed towards the middle class) that it was probably becoming more common during the first half of the century, 19 per cent of women born before 1904 reporting having had premarital sex, compared with 43 per cent born between 1924 and 1934, with generally those from wealthier backgrounds more likely to have had it. And again, attitudes are easier to ascertain. Gorer found that 52 per cent were opposed to premarital sexual experience for young men and 63 per cent for young women, adding the telling gloss that ‘whether pre-marital experience is advocated or reprobated, the effect on the future marriage is the preponderating consideration’; while when Chesser asked single women under the age of 21, 89 per cent said that for the success of their future marriage it was ‘important or fairly important’ that they did not have premarital intercourse, with 78 per cent wanting that stricture to apply to their future husbands also. On the reasonable assumption that more than 11 per cent of women and 22 per cent of men were having premarital sex by the 1950s, there was clearly something of a gulf between aspiration and reality, not least in the context of the continuing taboo about the loss of female virginity.
This taboo came through markedly in some of the responses to Gorer from unmarried men:
I, when I marry, want a pure girl, so the least I can do is to be the same myself. (20, North London)
I think all women should be married in white and can’t do so if she has had sexual exp. with men. (19, Liverpool)
Would not like my future wife to have had sexual experience with other persons prior to our marriage. Matter of principle also. (21, Lincolnshire)
I think it is wrong for anybody to gain experience at the expense of somebody else. I should hate to think somebody had tried married life out on my wife to be. (23, Tilbury)
Women’s magazines agreed, with ‘Mary Grant’ assiduously pushing the idea of the female chaperone for any girl worried about being induced to go too far. Moreover, for any girl who had gone too far, the cult of virginity was such that this could effectively mean the end of choice in terms of deciding on a husband. ‘When we ’ad rows,’ somewhat ruefully recalled a working-class woman from Birmingham some 40 years after marrying in 1957, ‘well I used to think “well I can’t fall out with ’im because – or break up with ’im – because I’ve ’ad sex, I’d be used goods for somebody else.” ’28
For most couples, of course, there was always the question of birth control – at a time when the size of the family was changing significantly. Archbishop Fisher may have told the Mothers’ Union in 1952 that ‘a family only truly begins with three children’, but as a young father in a rundown outer London borough unsentimentally informed an enquiring sociologist at about the same time, ‘Our parents had too many children: we want to give ours a good start in life, so we shan’t have more than we can afford.’ Chesser in 1956 confirmed the trend – ‘A family of four or more children is now regarded as large’ – and Gallup the following spring, asking about the ideal size of family, found that two children was easily the most popular. It was no coincidence, presumably, that matters of contraception were at last moving into the mainstream: almost every week a new family planning clinic opened, while in November 1955 Iain Macleod’s well-publicised visit, as Minister of Health, to the Family Planning Association ended almost overnight the media’s reluctance to discuss the whole subject. But there was still a long way to go. Many parts of the country did not have clinics, while new clinics were often viewed with considerable suspicion. Moreover, as Kate Fisher stresses in her study of birth control, widespread ignorance persisted, especially on the part of women. As for method, a subsequent survey of two working-class cohorts who h
ad got married in the 1950s found the following about their early married lives: 37 per cent mainly using condoms (for which there was no British Standard until 1964); 33 per cent mainly relying on withdrawal; 15 per cent mainly using female methods such as diaphragms or IUDs; 12 per cent not worrying about contraception; and 3 per cent other. Quite apart from no single method being wholly reliable, there were other practical concerns. ‘Shaped like a doll’s bowler hat, with a hard rim of black rubber,’ was how Phyllis Willmott unfondly remembered the Dutch cap. ‘When I put it in I felt like a stuffed chicken.’29
There was one great, oppressive shadow, seldom openly spoken about. ‘Abortion was the awful spectre for girls,’ recalled Penelope Lively. ‘Each of us knew someone to whom the worst had happened, with accompanying whispered horror stories about backstreet addresses and £100 in a brown envelope.’ Some 12,000 abortions a year were performed legally, on the grounds that terminating a pregnancy would prevent the woman from ‘being a mental and physical wreck’, but the great majority were not, leading directly each year to some 70 or more registered deaths from dangerously conducted criminal abortions. There still prevailed, according to Barbara Brookes, historian of abortion, ‘an atmosphere of secrecy and shame’, though it does seem that public opinion was slowly moving in a more liberal direction. Not only did a newspaper poll in 1956 find majority support for abortions by doctors ‘at the request of the mother-to-be’, but there was an increasingly low rate of conviction for professional abortionists. Were there any real-life Vera Drakes? Jennifer Worth, an East End midwife during the 1950s, took issue in 2005 with Mike Leigh’s depiction of a heroine acting on principle and never taking payment. ‘I very much doubt that this was ever the case,’ she asserted. ‘From everything we heard, abortionists were in it for the money (the going rate was between one and two guineas). I never heard of one who was conducting a philanthropic practice.’ Significantly, she added: ‘It was not their fault they were medically untrained; the legislation was to blame. Fatalities among women undergoing an abortion were high, but they were far higher among women who tried to do it themselves, unaided.’30
Illegitimacy rates were low through the 1950s, running most years at or below 5 per cent, or in the mid-1950s around 33,000 illegitimate babies a year. Of those babies, a little under half (about 13,000 a year) were given up for adoption. Why? A report in 1950 about the Church of England’s moral-welfare work in London is suggestive of some of the acute practical difficulties faced by unmarried mothers:
Few people realise how seldom an affiliation order is made against the father of an illegitimate child. Many girls have insufficient evidence on which to apply for a summons. In other instances they have lost touch with the man and are unable to give an address at which he can be found. Workers find a general unwillingness on the part of the mother to take action, especially in cases where the man concerned is married. She, and very often members of her family too, dread the publicity of a Magistrate’s Court. What is due to the child is forgotten or passed over in the confusion caused by other people’s interests and emotions . . .
The Worker’s chief difficulty lies in finding accommodation for the mother who wishes to keep her baby. Often the girl who beforehand has felt adoption to be the only solution to her problem entirely changes her mind when the baby is born. More Hostel accommodation is needed for mothers who can go out to work, and leave the children safely cared for during the day . . . Sometimes the best type of mother, after a great struggle, turns to adoption in the end as a means of gaining security for her child.
Many young, unmarried mothers lacked the skills for adequately paid employment; landlords seldom welcomed such tenants; and it was not until the late 1970s that council waiting lists were opened up to unmarried mothers. Also, there was often pressure from mother-and-baby homes, mainly run by welfare societies of a religious character and from where some 15 per cent of illegitimate births took place. ‘It was presented as in the best interest of the unsupported child to lose the stigma of illegitimacy and to have a stable upbringing with two adopted parents: the homeless child for the childless home,’ notes Gillian Clark in her study of mother-and-baby homes. ‘It was a telling argument for a girl ill-equipped to support them both.’
Above all, there was the stigma itself – a stigma that unmarried mothers felt not only from their immediate families (especially their fathers), but from society at large. A flavour comes through in the response of Daily Mirror readers in October 1953 to another reader’s suggestion that it was ‘high time’ that ‘unmarried mothers had some status in this country’:
Why should unmarried mothers be given ‘status’? It is a pity that they do not think of the status they give to their children when they choose to defy the moral conventions, the backbone of family life, and live with other women’s husbands. (Mother, Stroud)
My husband knows that, if he left me to set up with some fancy piece, I would do all I could to make her name smell, so that, even if vanity blinded her, her neighbours would see her as a shameless thing. Once she was left unprotected I would swoop down and grab everything I could get, even if it meant that her children were left on the rates. (Mrs D., Portsmouth)
Unmarried mothers must always remain without ‘status’ so that they may serve as a good warning to young girls. (‘Happily Married’, Bolton)31
Marriage was an integral part – arguably the integral part – of the 1950s deal. It was not a deal open to those who, deliberately or otherwise, appeared to be circumventing the terms and conditions.
In 1955 the readers of Woman’s Own voted for their favourite radio voice. The winner was a family favourite. ‘For me,’ Nan Wigham from Durham wrote in, ‘Jean Metcalfe’s voice depicts all the qualities I think every woman ought to have. Sincerity, humour, understanding, reliability and tact.’ So much was now being demanded of what Simone de Beauvoir ironically called The Second Sex (English edition in 1953). Woman as embodiment of femininity, woman as dutiful, good-companion wife, woman as ingenious, cost-effective, uncomplaining homemaker, woman as strict yet infinitely loving mother – it was a daunting, home-centred, fourfold role.
‘How to Dress to Please Men’ was the expressive title of a series in Everywoman in the early 1950s, with a special emphasis on personal grooming (‘He likes you to be soft and silky’). Other women’s magazines relentlessly pushed the ideal – indeed the indispensability – of feminine physical attractiveness. ‘She won’t get far without polishing up her good points and disguising her bad ones so that he’s completely befogged by glamour!’ advised Woman’s Own in 1951. ‘It’s at this stage that the romantic compliments are paid and the diamond engagement rings get shopped for!’ Operating at an elite level above the mass-circulation magazines, there were two particular cynosures of beauty and elegance. Barbara Goalen, the British mannequin of the era until her retirement in 1954, was recalled for how ‘her haughty demeanour, delicate bone-structure and wasp waist came to represent the height of glamour’, while for older women the great exemplar was Margot Smyly, who in the pages of Vogue assumed the persona of ‘Mrs Exeter’, remembered as a ‘chic matron’ and ‘a very feminine social being in her luncheon suits, cocktail dresses and well-wielded fur stole’. One shrewd observer, who had long ago reconciled herself to the cultivation of non-physical charms, found the whole phenomenon altogether too much. ‘On T.V.,’ reflected Barbara Pym in 1955, ‘I thought that women have never been more terrifying than they are now – the curled head (“Italian style”), the paint and jewellery, the exposed bosom – no wonder men turn to other men sometimes.’32
For wives, there were competing messages. Officially this was the dawning age of the companionate, shared-interests, no-separate-spheres marriage – as ordained in 1949 by the Royal Commission on Population, with its manifest approval for the by now increased emphasis on ‘the wife’s role as companion to her husband as well as a producer of children’, as given cinematic wifely flesh by the stylish, witty Kay Kendall in three mid-1950s come
dies, Genevieve, The Constant Husband and Simon and Laura. Yet equally powerful, arguably more powerful, was the discourse stressing that good companions did not mean equal companions. ‘Don’t try to be the boss,’ warned Monica Dickens in her Woman’s Own column in 1955 as she attacked ‘the slightly abnormal woman who wants to have her cake and eat it’. In other words: ‘She wants a man to give her love, companionship, a home, children, and the wherewithal to support life comfortably; but she cannot bring herself to let her man be the head of the household.’ It was the same in the marriage bed, at least as laid down by Dr Mary Macaulay’s The Art of Marriage, first published in 1952 and subsequently as a Penguin. Not only was ‘the success of the erotic side of the marriage chiefly the husband’s responsibility’, but it was ‘a shocking thing’ to hear of a wife refusing her husband’s sexual advances, in that ‘such an attitude would be impossible in any woman to whom loving and giving were synonymous’.
Sex was conspicuously – if predictably – off the agenda when Woman’s Own in 1955 asked ‘Are You a Perfect Partner?’ and put some leading questions:
Some weeks after you suggest an idea, he offers it afresh as his own . . . Would you (a) Let it go and say nothing? (b) Remind him that it was your idea originally? (c) Accuse him of having a terrible memory?
He loves animals and wants to get a dog, you are not so keen . . . Would you (a) Give in because it’s what he wants? (b) Argue against it? (c) Forbid it?
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 68