Love Beyond the Frame: Stories of Maternal Love Outside Marriage in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

These are the words of Margaret Drabble’s heroine in her novel The Millstone (1965), a story about a middle-class academic who becomes an unmarried mother in the 1960s. The Millstone explores anxiety about the alienation of the new ‘career woman’ from loving relationships, including motherhood — the protagonist has a small number of unsuccessful romances and has little contact with her family. When she finds herself pregnant she envisages a termination, telling a friend: ‘The thought of having a baby leaves me absolutely stone cold.’² However, as the words in the extract above reveal, motherhood is a revelation to Drabble’s heroine, drawing her into a loving relationship, the feelings of which are unprecedented. Here, maternal love is expressed through language that mirrors a romantic union, and as the novel develops the maternal relationship continues to outshine the disappointments of romantic, heterosexual love, as the protagonist lives successfully as a single woman with a child. The novel is one of several works of fiction depicting the lives of unmarried mothers in the postwar decades, which are indicative of the changing social behaviour and cultural values surrounding sex, marriage and parenthood after 1945.³ However, unlike Drabble’s character, the women in this chapter are predominantly working-class and their experiences of employment and material circumstance feature strongly in their accounts of love and motherhood.

She put her in my arms and I sat there looking at her, and her great wide blue eyes looked at me with seeming recognition, and what I felt it is pointless to try to describe. Love, I suppose one might call it, and the first of my life.¹

The Millstone, Margaret Drabble