Abstract
The period immediately following the Second World War, especially the decade of the 1950s, produced an image of Woman almost as enduring — and in my opinion as mistaken — as that powerful image of the Victorian lady palely reclining on her couch, smelling-salts held delicately to her nostrils. The postwar British woman was more robust than her Victorian grandmother, but she was still the Angel in the House. A slightly battered angel it is true, one that during the war years had been seen in sensible overalls and unglamourous headscarf at the factory and on the land doing men’s jobs, but now that ‘normality’ was restored, an angel who wished to return to her proper sphere, the home. Whether this image reflected the reality or not is another matter. The war, which had taken women out of their homes, was over, and as the postwar reconstruction began, there was an intensification of official and media debate over the place women should occupy in the brave new world that was envisaged. During the war, government agencies, backed by newspapers, magazines, propaganda films and radio, had explored the way that the traditional sexual divisions of labour could be altered by using a combination of exhortation and the presentation of images of women doing jobs normally done by men.
Women were wanting to escape the net just as men were climbing back into it.1
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Notes and References
Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise. Women in Postwar Britain: 1945–1968 (London: Tavistock Publications, 1980) p. 69.
The Labour government was elected in 1945 in the first postwar election. The Socialists had already declared their total support for the Beveridge Plan and for the establishment of a welfare state that would take care of the needs of its population from birth to old age. Despite Mrs Thatcher’s claim that ‘socialism is now dead’, many institutions now taken for granted began at this time.
Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women’s Two Roles. Home and Work (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968. First published 1956).
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (London: Gollancz, 1965).
Marilyn French, The Women’s Room (London: Deutsch, 1978).
There are two excellent surveys of British women’s magazines which cover the postwar period: Cynthia L. White’s Women’s Magazines 1693–1968 (London: Michael Joseph, 1970);
and Marjorie Ferguson’s Forever Feminine. Women’s Magazines and the Cult of Femininity (London: Heinemann, 1983). In addition, I looked at the 1945, 1950 and 1955 issues of Woman’s Own, Good Housekeeping and Every woman, the 1950 and 1955 issues of Vanity Fair and the first year’s issues of She in 1955.
Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 2.
Elizabeth Wilson’s book, Only Halfway to Paradise, is a key book to read about this period, though she has largely confined herself to the same parameters set in most discussions of the era, i.e. women as wives and mothers.
Shortages of many commodities continued for a long time after the war and rationing of food did not officially end until 1954. Bread rationing, in fact, was introduced after the war.
John Westergaard and Henrietta Resler, Class in a Capitalist Society (London: Heinemann, 1975). Quoted in Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 41
Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, p. 182.
There was a survey by the AEU in 1945 of the views of 2000 women working in factories, which showed that two-thirds of them expressed a wish to go on working. Myrdal and Klein, Women s Two Roles, p. 155.
White, Women’s Magazines, p. 135.
Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p.47.
Myrdal and Klein, Women’s Two Roles, p. 154.
Report of the Special Committee on Higher Technology Education, Chairman, Lord Eustace Percy (London: HMSO, 1945).
Report of the Committee Appointed by Lord President of the Council Entitled “Scientific Manpower”, Chairman, Sir Alan Barlow, Bart, (London: HMSO, 1946).
15–18. Report of the Advisory Council for Education in England, Vol. 1 (Report), Chairman, Sir Geoffrey Crowther (London: HMSO, 1959). The Crowther Report uses only masculine nouns and pronouns when discussing the science curriculum: ‘The boy embarks on a chain of discovery … he begins to assume responsibility for his own education … a boy can be introduced into one or two areas which throw light on the achievement of man and the nature of the world he lives in …’ etc. (from chapter 25, pp. 257–75). Girls, on the other hand, show a ‘passionate interest’ in ‘living things’, therefore ‘It is not for nothing that biology is the main science taught to girls, as physics and chemistry are to boys.’ This particular application of the ‘Equal but Different’ theory has resulted in Biology becoming a devalued subject in schools. Even where girls were demonstrably stronger, in English and literature, a blatant attempt was made to devalue this superiority. The Crowther Report stated that ‘analytical and introspective interest in the widest sense … is not found in most girls at the beginning of the secondary course’ (p. 112). According to the Report, ‘Too many girls’ reading interests are needlessly left fixed for life within the covers of a hopelessly unreal romantic love novel. Often enough reading in any serious sense soon disappears’ (p. 112). No evidence is given in the Report for such a statement.
Report of the Departmental Committee on the Youth Service in England and Wales, Chairman, Lady Albemarle (London: HMSO, 1960). See especially chapter 3.
John Lawson and Harold Silver, A Social History of Education in England (London: Methuen, 1973) p. 436.
Crowther Report, chapters 6 and 9; Jean Floud, ‘Are the Robbins estimates conservative?’ Forum (1946, pp. 79–82); Layard, King and Moser, Impact of Robbins, p. 23. Quoted in Lawson and Silver, A Social History of Education in England, p. 436. ‘A’ Level examinations are generally taken at the age of seventeen or eighteen in the United Kingdom. They follow the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE), which most pupils sit at the end of their schooling, at the age of sixteen. Success with ‘A’ Levels provides access to universities, polytechnics and further education courses.
The 11+ test was not totally objective. Not all children sat the test, and many schools had special classes set aside for children ‘cramming’ for it. Frequently other marks were added to the test marks (e.g. by the Head of the primary school), and as grammar-school places were limited, the number of ‘passes’ had to match the number of places available. In addition the final results were separated into two categories, girls and boys, in order to ‘equalise’ the balance between the sexes. Since girls generally performed better than boys, this could result in girls being excluded even when their marks were higher than those of some boys who had ‘passed’. This is still the practice in some areas where grammar schools remain, and a recent court case (1988) brought by the parents of girls resulted in a ruling that under Equal Opportunities legislation such ‘equalising’ was illegal.
Crowther, 15–18, p. 34.
Ibid, p. 33.
John Newsom, The Education of Girls (London: Faber, 1948).
John Newsom, ‘The Education Women Need’, The Observer, 6 September 1964. Quoted in Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 35.
Judith Bardwick, Psychology of Women (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) p. 178.
Ibid, pp. 180–1.
Susan Brownmiller, Femininity (London: Paladin Books, 1986) p. 29.
Viola Klein, The Feminine Character (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1946) pp. 33–4.
See p. 100 of Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, where she quotes from an article in The Guardian in 1978 which suggests the real reason for the change of policy was because of the influx of West Indian women, many of whom, though living with a man, had not gone through a formal marriage. This was against a background of increasing racial tension and fear of a population explosion among the ethnic minorities.
See below, Note 1, Chapter 4 for divorce figures.
Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, p. 69.
‘The Feminists Mop Up’, leading article in The Economist, 21 April 1956 (vol. 179, no. 5878, pp. 242–3).
Ashley Montagu, The Natural Superiority of Women (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954) pp. 245–6.
Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (London: Frederick Muller, 1955). See chapter 11, ‘Common Women’, pp. 194–317, and his discussion of what he calls the ‘Cinderella myth’ in the chapter ‘A Specimen American Attitude’. The whole book is well worth reading for a good laugh, though that laugh may become a little uneasy on learning of the book’s popularity!
Marjorie Rosen, Popcorn Venus. Women, Movies and the American Dream (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghan, 1973) p. 255.
Quoted in Wini Breines, ‘Domineering Mothers in the 1950s: Image and Reality’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 8, no. 6 (1985) p. 606, footnote 10.
Doris Day was a famous singing-and-dancing star who appeared in many American films of the period. She was the epitome of the ‘girl-next-door’.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own. British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing (London: Virago, 1978).
Elizabeth Goudge, The Joy of the Snow (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1974) p. 147.
Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices (Bath: Cedric Chivers, 1970. First published in 1953).
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© 1989 Niamh Baker
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Baker, N. (1989). Introduction: A myth of happiness. In: Happily Ever After?. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20288-1_1
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