Babies Without Husbands: Unmarried Pregnancy in 1960s British Fiction

Abstract

This chapter considers the persistent stigma of unmarried motherhood as an example of the limitations of the so-called permissive society. It examines the depiction of pregnancy out of wedlock in Lynne Reid Banks’s The L-Shaped Room (1960) and Margaret Drabble’s The Millstone (1965), arguing that these novels suggest an uneven pattern of liberalisation rather than a blanket shift to a “permissive society”. In exploring taboo sexual topics, they both participate in a turn to the gritty realism that characterises British fiction of the late 1950s and early to-mid 1960s. While many examples are written by, and feature, male working-class authors from the North of England, Banks’s and Drabble’s novels, with their stories of middle-class women living in London, provide a different regional, classed, and gendered perspective on life in 1960s Britain.