He’s buying you presents that he can’t afford . . . Would you (a) Accept his presents and say nothing? (b) Tell him you love him just as much without his presents? (c) Show anger at his wasteful extravagance?
You earn more money than he does . . . Would you (a) Offer to pay for both of you? (b) Go ‘dutch’? (c) Suggest some entertainment you know he’ll be able to afford?
He keeps comparing you unfavourably with other girls . . . Would you (a) Fume inwardly and say nothing? (b) Tell him sweetly to take out the girl he obviously prefers? (c) Make uncomplimentary remarks about him?
The correct answers were a, a, b, c and b. Full marks, and ‘you will be the perfect wife and deserve a perfect husband’; high marks, and ‘you will make some man very happy’; but a low score, and ‘you need more tolerance and a greater understanding of the man you love’.
The perfect partner was also the perfect homemaker, not least in the context of the enhanced prestige of the housewife in the eyes of the newly servantless middle class. It was a role played out above all in the kitchen. ‘A woman’s place?’ almost needlessly asked Woman’s Own. ‘Yes, it is! For it is the heart and centre of the meaning of home. The place where, day after day, you make with your hands the gifts of love.’ More generally, the vogue for domesticity was nurtured and spread across the land’s villages and small towns by Women’s Institutes – at the peak of their popularity, flower-arranging a particular speciality – while the strongly perceived need to pass on housewifery skills across the generations was summed up by a Bolton councillor, Mrs Heywood, pronouncing in 1953 on the importance of washday: ‘If the laundry goes out of the home, a child will have no training in house management.’33
An undeniable judgementalism was involved, typified by television ads for washing powder and the like unashamedly equating the moral worth of the wife with the whiteness of her husband’s shirts. Happily, for those afraid of falling short, help was at hand, especially as the range of consumer products rapidly expanded from the mid-1950s. The Good Housekeeping Institute was assiduous in its advice, with its compendious guide to The Happy Home (1955) including detailed chapters on ‘The Good Steward’, ‘Easier Housework’, ‘Home Laundrywork’, ‘Cooking Craft’ and ‘The Perfect Hostess’, and of course women’s magazines were suffused with practical tips and information. Here, the special emphasis was on making good the shopping and culinary skills that had been lost during the long years of austerity and shortages, a tutorial service exemplified by the ‘Wooden Spoon Club’ in Woman and ‘Cecile’s Cookery Class’ in Woman’s Weekly. ‘A very great part of a woman’s life is spent choosing, buying and preparing goods for her own and her family’s consumption,’ reflected Mary Grieve, editor of Woman all through the 1950s. ‘Success is as cheering and vitalising to her as it is to a man in his chosen career, failure as humiliating.’
A couple of gender stereotypes seem to have remained near-sacrosanct. One was male assumptions about – whatever her apparent intentions – female extravagance. ‘Do you like it, dear?’ the strip-cartoon character Gaye Gambol asked her husband, George, in the Sunday Express in January 1955 as she showed him her new dress. ‘Er . . . yes . . . but,’ replied George, before she blithely went on, against the background of a black cloud gathering over George’s long-suffering head: ‘I got it in the sales – it was reduced from £5 to £4 – I saved a pound. And I saved ten shillings on these shoes and nearly two pounds on all this dress material. You’re always saying that we must economise so I’m going shopping again tomorrow to save some more money.’ Arguably the matching female assumption was how the housewife’s control of the day-to-day domestic domain ultimately if covertly gave her the whip hand. ‘The woman of the house is the most important person in it,’ was how Woman’s Own put it in 1957. ‘Her husband may be stronger and cleverer than she is. He may be a business tycoon, or a genius or a famous personality. His wife may seem inferior to him in the more obvious ways – but there is one subtle way she can outdo him every time, and that is in her influence in the home . . .’34
Yet however exalted, a housewife did not exist on the same plane as a mother. Early in 1954, Oliver Willmott’s wife explained in his Parish Notes that whereas the members of their WI had ‘learnt to do many practical things’ and ‘seen demonstrations’ that had ‘helped us to improve our cooking, sewing, handicrafts, and the interior decorations of our houses’, the purpose of the Mothers’ Union was altogether more spiritual, being ‘a society of Christian women pledged to help one another in performing faithfully the duties they owe to their husbands, their children and their God’. She added that ‘we come to the monthly meeting of the M.U. to refresh our ideals, and to reaffirm the mother’s motto, which is “I serve” ’. The key cinematic text was Mandy – a 1952 Ealing drama (and Jane Asher’s screen debut) in which Phyllis Calvert played the endlessly devoted, endlessly warm mother of a deaf-mute daughter – but one figure above all was identified with the coming centre-stage of the idealised mother, a phenomenon no doubt in large part the inevitable legacy of the involuntary paternal disappearing act during much of the 1940s. This was the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who in the early 1950s relentlessly and brilliantly propagated his research findings about the crucial influence of mother-love on the formation of a child’s character and personality. Typical was his conclusion to a News Chronicle article (bluntly headed ‘The Mother Who Stays at Home Gives Her Children a Better Chance’) in 1952:
Babies need mothers because a child’s emotional development depends on his relationship with his mother in his very early years.
If she neglects him when he is small there will be trouble afterwards.
So the mother who stays at home is giving her children a surer foundation for mental health than costly equipment and an expensive education can provide.
Research shows that the deprived children of today are the delinquents and neurotics of tomorrow.
The following spring there appeared his best-selling Penguin, Child Care and the Growth of Love, which comprised two self-explanatory parts, ‘Adverse Effects of Maternal Deprivation’ and ‘Prevention of Maternal Deprivation’. It was a message instantly and widely endorsed. ‘That every infant born into the world does need individual affection is not just sentiment, it is a cold scientific fact demonstrated by Dr John Bowlby in a way which leaves no room for argument,’ Anne Cuthbert declared in Housewife in September 1953, and her article’s title was even less ambiguous: ‘Nothing Takes the Place of a Mother’s Love’.
There is no better place for locating the expected norms of being a woman, certainly a middle-class woman, than Woman’s Hour, presented for much of the 1950s by either Jean Metcalfe or Marjorie Anderson. Mary Hardie’s ‘Diary’ was transmitted on 9 February 1955 – part-realistic, part-idealistic, and almost sublimely representative:
Oh and yesterday – yesterday was one of those days. It began with Richard all sniffy and sneezy so he had to stay home from school. It went on with shopping that took longer than usual and a friend who called in for a moment and stayed till lunchtime – so lunch was late and the housework was completely out of hand and the dusting still wasn’t done – and it ended with an attempt to make a cake with the children’s help. It’s no good – it’s always a mistake. This cake started off with every intention of being a Victoria sandwich. But just as the margarine was in the mixing bowl the ’phone rang. As I went to answer it Richard called out: ‘Shall we chop up the margarine with the spoon, Mummy?’ and I gaily said, ‘Yes, do, that’ll be a great help.’ When I got back to the kitchen the margarine was certainly chopped into small pieces – but it was on the table instead of in the bowl. The bag of flour had been most helpfully got out – there was flour on the floor, flour on the chairs and flour on the children – and a valiant attempt had been made to cream the margarine into the flour. I stood in the doorway, shocked into silence for once. ‘Stevie did it,’ said Richard in eager self-defence. And Stevie was certainly pretty well caught in the act. I was very
cross and shooed them back to their bricks and cars and railway. Then I went back to the kitchen and got out more margarine – the other would just have to be used for pastry – and (let me hope Ann Hardy [the programme’s culinary expert] doesn’t hear me) I put it in the oven just for a moment, just to soften a little. Then I felt ashamed of myself for being so cross with the children – after all they had been trying to help – so I went to tell them so. We had a very pleasant conversation on the principles of making a cake by the creaming method and in the general orgy of forgiveness, the margarine in the oven softened out and melted and practically sizzled. So the Victoria sandwich ended up as a Yorkshire parkin, because that’s the only thing in my repertoire where the recipe begins ‘Melt the margarine . . .’ It was quite good parkin.35
Contrary to subsequent mythology, the 1950s were not entirely bereft of ambitious, independent-minded women. Sheila van Damm was a leading long-distance rally driver before she retired in 1956 to run the Windmill Theatre; Margery Fish was liberated as a gardener after her husband’s death in 1947, digging up his concrete paths and giving the thyme and daisies their freedom, a process celebrated in her acclaimed 1956 book We Made a Garden; Rose Heilbron became a household name as one of the outstanding defence barristers of the era, specialising in high-profile murder trials; even Bethnal Green’s Beverley Sisters (Joy, Babs and Teddie) had a certain pink-and-white chutzpah. One determined woman, though, remained thwarted for most of the decade. In late 1954, having twice fought unwinnable seats in nearby Dartford, Margaret Thatcher sought to secure the Tory nomination for the eminently winnable Orpington. She failed – largely, it seems, because leading local Tories believed her candidacy would be incompatible with having two small children. A bitterly disappointed Thatcher wrote to Central Office in early 1955 that accordingly she would abandon ‘further thought of a parliamentary career for many years’.36
The normative pressures around women and work were considerable. ‘No two women have exactly the same capacities and I would never interfere with the right of the minority to prefer outside work,’ conceded Evelyn Home, Woman’s trusted counsellor for millions of women, in 1951. She went on: ‘But it is safe to say that most women, once they have a family, are more contented and doing better work in the home than they could find outside it.’ So too that same year Woman’s Weekly, with graphic running subtitles to a short story about a mother eventually renouncing her hateful work: ‘Home-making is the most useful of all the talents. To make a man feel happy and comfortable and to make a child feel cherished. No Woman’s Work is more important than these.’ Of course, women’s magazines knew that many women did work, but the prescribed life-pattern they tended to assume and foster was (in the words of Stephanie Spencer) ‘school, job, job and marriage, child care and full-time domesticity followed perhaps by later return to part-time (and, rarely, full-time) employment’.
The status of female paid work remained low – no overall equal-pay legislation, average female wages running at only 59 per cent to those of men – and the prevailing assumption was that women worked for ‘pin money’, not a living wage in its own right. Neither the Labour Party nor the trade unions (both of them very male-dominated) pushed at all hard to increase the status of female work, while as for men in general, Elizabeth Roberts found in her extensive oral history of north-west England an adamantine twofold conviction: that a husband’s wages should be higher than his wife’s; and that a man should be able to support his family off his own bat. Mass-Observation in 1957 interviewed 644 married men in a nationwide survey, among whom only 23 per cent, with a bias towards the better-off, expressed unqualified approval of married women going out to work. ‘A woman’s place is in the home,’ was the blunt reason given by 79 per cent of those who were against married women having jobs, and a few expanded:
When a woman goes out to work, the home soon falls apart. (Tin plate worker, 39)
If the husband brings home a fairly good wage, then the wife should be made to stay at home. The trouble is some women don’t know how to handle money and in that way never have enough. (Coal miner, 43)
Working women are one of the main causes of child delinquency. (Engineer, 47)
If I wanted just a housekeeper I would have got one without having to marry her. Her place is at home with the kids. She gets plenty [ie money] to keep her at home in any case. (Miner, 44)
One married woman who had abruptly stopped working a couple of years earlier was the actress Valerie Hobson, on the instructions of her politician husband, John Profumo.37
Separate capacities and potential were entrenched from an early age. ‘What a pretty doll,’ says Janet in a Janet and John learn-to-read book. ‘One day I will go in a big ship,’ says her brother John. Or take Enid Blyton’s Five Get Into Trouble: ‘“Dick! I’ll make your bed,” cried Anne, shocked to see it made in such a hurried way.’ In The Education of Girls (1948), John Newsom, Chief Education Officer for Hertfordshire, had set out his views, declaring that ‘the future of women’s education lies not in attempting to iron out their differences from men, to reduce them to neuters, but to teach girls how to grow into women and to relearn the graces which so many have forgotten in the last thirty years’. To judge by Mary Evans’s memoir about attending a girls’ grammar school from 1956, the reality was not so far different:
The responsibilities of the housewife and the mother were given full credit by the staff and ‘making a home’ was an ideal which was accorded full status by a staff that was largely unmarried. So having a ‘working’ mother was regarded as slightly peculiar, and rather eccentric . . . When the school debated the issue that ‘A Woman’s Place is in the Home’ the school decided that this was certainly the case.
As for higher education, growing steadily if not yet spectacularly, by 1958 female students still comprised only 24 per cent of the whole university intake, exactly the same as back in 1920. Moreover, studies of women graduates through the twentieth century have shown that by the 1950s they were rejecting the marriage-and-motherhood model far less than previous generations. ‘She must avoid both the rocks of aggressive insistence on her status and also the mud-flats of self-deprecation,’ reflected Judith Hubback on ‘the educated wife of today’ at the end of her 1957 survey Wives Who Went to College. ‘She must be both feminine and masculine, but not lean too far one way or the other.’ So much depended on the husband – but ‘with his love, his trust and his help she will do great things’.
A few key figures flesh out the bigger picture. Between 1951 and 1957 the proportion of married women in the total female workforce rose appreciably from 43 to 49 per cent. Most of these new jobs for married women were part-time, particularly in manufacturing industry, which was operating at virtually full capacity. Among married women as a whole, those in paid employment rose from 26 per cent in 1951 to 35 per cent by 1961 – still a minority, but significantly less conspicuously (or pejoratively) so.38
Whether full-time or part-time, whether for the married or the unmarried, the sort of work realistically available remained on the whole extraordinarily limited. Lulie Shaw, in her case study of a working-class London suburb in the early 1950s, found that ‘the range of occupations for the women was even narrower than for the men’, with more married women being ‘employed in laundry work than in any other single occupation’, followed by ‘clerical and office work, then domestic work, then packing or assembly jobs in light engineering, food, cosmetics or patent medicine factories’. At Alfred Herbert’s (the well-known machine-tool firm in Coventry), a study by Ken Grainger observes, ‘none of those women who were recruited and trained as semi-skilled machinists to substitute for scarce (white) male labour – either during the war or in the early 1950s – ever gained skilled status’, with Grainger adding that ‘a similar group of men could not have been treated in this way without provoking serious unrest in the factory’. The 1950s was also the apogee of the all-female typing pool, including the one in Holborn unfondly recalled by Anne Henderson:
> It was a bit like being at school: there’d be about twelve girls in the pool, all sitting in rows with their typewriter on a desk in front of them. And the supervisor would be sitting in front of you like a schoolteacher would. It was very strict. You couldn’t talk to the girl sitting next to you; you couldn’t smoke and you couldn’t eat. You would go up and collect your work in a folder, take it back to your desk, type it, take it back to the supervisor and then she would check it. If it was no good you’d have to collect it and do your mistakes. If that happened we’d all sort of moan and groan and pull faces. It was very boring work.
And of course, at any sort of elevated level, whether in most professions or in industry or in politics or even in large parts of the welfare state, the presence of a woman still tended to be a rarity.
Inevitably, the marked rise in the number of married women (often with children) deciding to work caused considerable hand-wringing. Take the telling stance of Picture Post, which had once campaigned for more and better day nurseries. Now, in January 1956, it ran an article by Venetia Murray called ‘The Children of Women Who Work’ that not only prominently quoted the Bowlby-following child expert Doctor Ronald MacKeith (‘for a mother of a child under five to have to leave her baby is a tragedy that can have disastrous consequences’), but included several typically striking photographs of sad-looking children, including a toddler sitting forlornly behind the bars of a cot, with the emotive caption, ‘The Child Whose Home Life, On Many Days Of The Week, Begins At Five-Thirty In The Evening’. Murray highlighted a nursery situated in a Lancashire cotton mill and paid for by the mill itself in order to attract and keep female labour: ‘The sight of those desolate baby faces waiting for their mothers at the end of the day was heartbreaking. The sudden blazing delight when she came in, collected him over the counter, hugged him and took him away – this seemed proof enough that Doctor MacKeith is right.’ And Murray asked: ‘Could you, would you, should you take the chance with your child’s future that he might be wrong?’39
Family Britain, 1951-1957 Page 69