doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwl008
DOLLY SMITH WILSON* Texas Tech University
............................................
Postgraduate Essay Prize
Winner for 2005
A New Look at the Affluent
Worker: The Good Working
Mother in Post-War Britain
Abstract
The number of married women working outside their homes after the Second
World War rose rapidly despite widespread criticism of working wives and
mothers. This article discusses three main trends associated with this change. First,
many women reacted to the discourse criticizing working mothers by trying to
change the view of ideal motherhood as exclusively domestically bound. They
defended their actions by arguing that a good mother was not solely one who
stayed at the beck and call of her family, but one who nurtured their self-reliance
and independence by not being constantly available and provided goods and
pleasures otherwise out of reach of the family. Second, the criticism of working
mothers combined with the dual burden that most women faced in choosing
employment to create an unprecedented demand for part-time jobs. The change in
women’s work force participation since World War II is almost entirely attributable
to the rise in part-time workers. Third, because observers and the women
themselves so often described wives’ work as providing extras for the family, the
value of women’s work was debased. This obscured women’s role in creating the
affluent society and allowed the male breadwinner ideal to continue unaffected
despite major social change, as the public still generally viewed men as having
primary responsibility for family support.
[email protected]. The Editors and Editorial Board of Twentieth Century British History
would like to extend their congratulations to Dr Dolly Smith Wilson, winner with this article of the
TCBH Postgraduate Essay prize for 2005.
Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 17, No. 2, 2006, pp. 206–229
! 2006 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [email protected]
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
207
Despite a steady rise in the number of Britain’s married women and
mothers working at jobs outside the home after 1939, the conventional
wisdom that a woman’s true role in life should be domesticity and
motherhood remained widespread. While condemnation of working
mothers lessened somewhat from the 1950s to the 1960s as they became
more common, the domestic ideal hung on tenaciously. Nonetheless,
in 20 years, the typical woman worker shifted from a young, single
girl to a married woman over 30, usually with children. This article
will discuss three related effects of this major demographic and
economic shift.
First, from the early 1950s, many employed mothers began to
challenge, although not overturn, the dominant discourse of the ideal
mother as exclusively bound to the home. The simple fact that so many
women were drawn to work outside the home despite criticism
demonstrates the monetary and psychological importance of employment for women. It was not easy to articulate a vision of working
mothers capable of combating the discourse that mothers who worked
harmed their children or caused juvenile delinquency, but many women
tried to establish a new image of motherhood by citing the benefits
employment provided their families. In this new definition, a good
mother was not solely one who stayed at the beck and call of her
family, but one who nurtured their self-reliance and independence
by not being constantly available, as well as by providing goods and
pleasures otherwise out of reach of the family. This rationalization
in itself shows the continuing strength of domestic ideology, as it was
extremely difficult for a woman to defend work outside the home
without arguing that her paid work benefited her children and home
more than herself.
Second, negative commentary about women in the workforce
obscured the role they played in the economy. Observers generally
considered women neither producers nor an integral part of the
workforce, but rather saw them as consumers. Despite the fact that
women’s earnings increasingly paid for many of the goods and luxuries
considered the essence of the affluent society, from washing machines
to cars, the role women played in creating that society has been
largely unrecognized, both by contemporaries and by later scholars.1
1
For the sake of brevity, affluence is defined here as a rise in living standards and economic
security due to rising wages and the welfare state. F. Zweig, The British Worker (London, 1952);
J.K. Gailbraith, The Affluent Society (London, 1958); F. Zweig, The Worker in the Affluent Society
(London, 1962); J. H. Goldthorpe, D. Blackwood, F. Bechhofer and J. Platt, The Affluent Worker,
3 Vols. (Cambridge, 1968); N. Tiratsoo, Reconstruction, Affluence, and Labour Politics: Coventry,
1945–1960 (London, 1990); L. Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain, 1951–64:
Old Labour, New Britain? (Houndsmill, 2003).
208
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
To be sure, married women who worked were usually not the sole
support of their families, a situation which undermined public
(and sometimes their own) perceptions of the importance of their
work and earnings. But because wives who worked were often seen
as a violation of some natural order, both women and men typically
characterized wives’ earnings as ‘extra’. In consequence, married
women were able to take jobs in record numbers without undermining
the ideology of the male breadwinner because most people viewed men
as having primary responsibility for family support while women’s
principal role was motherhood. Femininity and motherhood were still
inextricably intertwined, just as family support and masculinity were.
A married woman had no ‘right’ to work.
Third, the discourse surrounding working mothers helped create
the demand for part-time work. Rare before the Second World War,
in the 1950s and 1960s the number of part-time workers more than
quadrupled; almost all of them were married women. Rather than
working before marriage, women increasingly worked until the birth of
their first child, took a few years off and returned to work when the
children were older, most commonly when the youngest child entered
school. If possible, most women preferred to return part-time, a choice
which many sociologists and other ‘experts’ hailed as a solution to
fears that working mothers might neglect children, turning them into
delinquents. Government officials, who feared the effects of working
mothers, kept strict controls on the number of childcare places
available, both privately and in public day nurseries, raising the cost of
such care. Most women found part-time childcare cheaper and easier
to arrange, also fuelling the demand for part-time work.
Demographically, as scholars then and now have pointed out, much
of the rise in the number of married women workers was simply
attributable to the overall increase in married women due to a lower
average age at marriage. But it also stemmed from full employment, an
end to marriage bars, and a declining birth rate that reduced the
amount of the time most women spent raising children. Large numbers
of married women workers were also mothers. By the early 1960s in
London, where opportunities were best and costs highest, 42 percent
of women with children under five had an outside job.2 The return of
married women to work was a phenomenon common to all classes,
although it was at first more prevalent among working-class women,
2
OECD, Job and Family: measures to help women fulfil a dual role (Geneva, 1965). London
also had a concentration of immigrant women, who had higher than average rates of paid work.
See A. Phizacklea, Unpacking the Fashion Industry: Gender, Racism and Class in Production
(London, 1990).
209
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
Table 1
Occupational rates of women, 1931–71
Year
Percentage
of all women
occupied
Women as percentage
of total workforce
Ever married women
as percentage of paid
women workers
Percentage
of married
women working
1931
1951
1961
1971
34.2
34.7
37.5
42.6
29.7
30.8
32.4
36.0
22.0
46.4
58.6
71.7
10.0
21.7
45.4
51.3
Sources: Calculated from B.R. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics (New York,
1998), 9–10; A.H. Halsey, British Social Trends since 1900 (London, 1988), 166–173.
who found it easier to overcome their husbands’ objections by seeking
money for a specific financial goal.3
While sociologists have studied the phenomenon of working
mothers, there remains little historical work on the topic. Little of the
type of detailed work that has revealed many subtleties about gender
ideology and employment prior to 1945 has yet appeared for the postwar period.4 While it is often accepted that there was a widespread
discourse on domesticity in the 1950s, responses to that discourse
are understudied, as are the cultural, economic and legal changes that
have most affected women since 1945.5 As we will see, the debate
about working mothers sheds light on issues of affluence, consumerism,
part-time work, politics and post-war gender ideals. Women were not
passive receptacles of gender ideology in the early post-war period,
although it is clear that that gendered discourse did shape their
decisions and their defence of those choices. Women’s actions were
3
Almost all women who worked said they originally remained or returned to work after
motherhood to fund a specific financial goal, such as furniture or a holiday. See note 39.
Alternatively, the other group with high work rates were professionals who had invested significant
amounts of time into their training, such as doctors.
4
For example, among others, the work of A. Clark, L.L. Downs, M. Glucksmann, S. Pedersen
and S. Rose. The best work on mothers in the post-1945 era remains D. Riley, War in the nursery:
Theories of the child and mother (London, 1983). For newer work, see S. Brooke, ‘Gender and
Working Class Identity in Britain in the 1950s’, Journal of Social History, 34/4 (2001), 773–95;
P. Summerfield, ‘ ‘‘They didn’t want women back in that job!’’: the Second World War and the
construction of gendered work histories’, Labour History Review, 63/1 (Spring 1998), 83–103; and
E. Roberts, Women and families: An oral history 1940–1970 (Oxford, 1995).
5
As noted in P. Thane, ‘What difference did the vote make? Women in public and private life
in Britain since 1918’, Historical Research, 76 (May 2003), 268–85.
210
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
a response not only to criticism of working mothers, but to the material
and emotional attractions associated with affluence. The desire for
the kind of lifestyle later associated with affluence drew many women
into workforce so that they could achieve a higher standard of living
for their family, helping to create the general rise in living standards.
Creating Delinquents—Conventional Wisdom and Working Mothers
The rush of married women into the workforce ran headlong into
the conventional wisdom that women must choose between family
and career. Many observers condemned working mothers as selfish,
unnatural and even dangerous to their children and society.
As sociologist Richard Titmuss commented in 1955, ‘few subjects are
more surrounded with prejudice and moral platitudes than this’.6 Many
formal and informal marriage bars (forcing women to leave work upon
marriage) still existed after the Second World War, although they
declined rapidly due to the post-war labour shortage. Generally, most
of the public condemned not so much the idea of married women’s
work per se as its association with motherhood. In 1965, one public
opinion poll found that while 80 percent of those surveyed thought
women with young (under school-age) children should always stay at
home, less than one percent stated she should do so if there were no
children involved.7
Children made all the difference. Local magistrates, police officers,
social workers, psychiatrists and probation officers were not shy about
claiming that the rise in juvenile delinquency was attributable to
‘the increasing number of mothers going out to work, who ‘‘could not
attend properly to the upbringing of their children as well’’ ’.8 As
psychoanalyst and radio commentator D.W. Winnicott, argued in a 1946
paper entitled ‘Some psychological aspects of juvenile delinquency’—
‘I put it this way. When a child steals sugar he is looking for the good
mother, his own, from whom he has a right to take what sweetness
is there’.9
Probably the best known supporter of deprivation theories, that is,
that separation from the mothers harmed children, was Dr John
Bowlby, whose report for the World Health Organization was excerpted
by Penguin in 1953 as the best-selling Childcare and the Growth of Love.
6
Quoted in D. Riley, ‘The Free Mothers’, History Workshop, 11 (1981), 85–6.
S. Dex, Women’s Attitudes towards Work (New York, 1988), 34.
An unnamed ‘leading probation officer’ at the ‘Women in a Changing World’ conference,
quoted in M. Stott, Organization Woman: The Story of the National Union of Townswomen’s
Guilds (London, 1978), 169–70.
9
Address to magistrates reprinted in D. W. Winnicott, Deprivation and Delinquency (London,
1984), 111–19. Deprivation literature almost never mentioned the role of fathers.
7
8
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
2 11
His research, based on children completely separated from their parents
and housed in institutions during the war, was not appropriate as a
basis for judging the mothering of ordinary women, but this distinction
was quickly lost. In 1958 Bowlby produced a pamphlet with the title
‘Can I Leave my Baby?’ in which he argued that to leave a baby with
anyone but a father or close relatives (even in an emergency) imperilled
the child; a mother gone on a daily basis would cause severe damage.
Delinquency became associated with the mother’s absence for any
length of time, even for a few hours of paid work.10 Few commentators
challenged much of this hyperbole until the 1970s.11
National and local government officials, in particular, rarely
questioned the notion that working mothers resulted in delinquent
children and ignored data from studies actually done on working
mothers that generally showed no such effects.12 For example, in 1954,
the Home Office was quick to link a rise in married women’s
unemployment in Burnley to greatly reduced delinquency rates. But
Ministry of Labour officials found on further investigation that while
the number of women registered as unemployed had increased, the total
number of women employed had risen far more rapidly. If anything,
delinquency had decreased with more women working and seeking
work. They found no link between the rates of married working women
anywhere in Lancashire with either crime rates or delinquency
complaints.13
Civil servants worried both about the effects of the working mother
and possible public hostility if they appeared to be encouraging
mothers to work. In 1958, the Ministry of Labour went so far as to try
to assess what the economic effects would be if all married women
were driven from the labour market, to be replaced either by machines
or younger workers. The resulting prospects were so dire officials
immediately dropped the topic. Without the 3.7 million married women
workers, certain industries and the health care system would simply
collapse.14 Aside from this one rather bizarre study, officials reluctantly
conceded that married women were in the labour force to stay, at least
as long as full employment continued.
10
For extensive discussion of deprivation theories, see Riley, War in the nursery.
Michael Rutter’s Maternal Deprivation Reassessed (Harmondsworth, 1973) sums up
research.
12
For example, T. Ferguson and J. Cunnison, The Young Wage Earner (Oxford, 1951) found
that a mother’s work made fatherless boys strive to succeed.
13
C. P. H. Underhill (Home Office) to G. J. Nash, 27 Jan. 1954, and E. H. McGale to
M. D. Boston, 12 March 1954, LAB 8/2379, The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew
(hereafter simply TNA: PRO).
14
For example, by 1951, married women made up a third of all nursing staff. ‘Note on
the Economic Effects of a Withdrawal of Married Women from the Labour Market’, 23 June 1958,
LAB 8/2380, TNA: PRO.
11
212
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
A sample of the public discourse which the officials feared can be
seen in a 1956 Picture Post story on day nurseries. Reporter Venetia
Murray asked, ‘Is it really necessary in this Welfare State for a woman
to go out to work, or do they do it for the ice cream and the TV?’ The
article featured enormous photos of sad children, taken through the
bars of a crib, so that it resembled a jail cell. The article featured
the wisdom of Dr Ronald MacKeith, described as ‘one of the great
experts on the care of children in the country’, who claimed that
putting a young child in a nursery ‘may cause more lasting and
irreparable damage to the child even than under-feeding it through
poverty’.15 This condemnation is startling considering the then wellknown correlation between poverty, poor housing and delinquency,
yet none of the experts on the topic considered that a mother’s work
could be helpful to the family by alleviating overcrowding and other
problems caused by low income.16
Similarly, Murray dismissed mothers’ reasons for working—better
food, education, clothes and holidays for the children. As she wrote,
‘All the time they explained, their excellent reasons seemed a little like
excellent excuses. It seemed there was just a shade of doubt, or guilt in
their minds’.17 Similarly, a 1958 Times story criticized working mothers
whose earnings went on ‘frivolities’, such as televisions, rather than
necessities such as hot water heaters.18
Women’s magazines also presented an idealized version of
domesticity. A Woman’s Own advice columnist told one woman her
children wanted a mother, not an efficient career woman who ‘can talk
about everything, except pleasant, trivial, day-to-day matters that are
the breath of family life’.19 Another agony aunt in She advised a mother
not to ‘disturb the domestic harmony’ by returning to work against the
wishes of her husband in order to pay school fees. ‘Your husband will
have every right to feel he is being cheated of his wife, and your boys
in the holidays of their mother. Think again!’20
Even as they promoted often unobtainable images of domestic
happiness, women’s magazine editors did sometimes let awareness of
the contradictions in such portrayals slip into print. Woman, cognizant
of the burdens of trying to balance work and home, criticized the
government in 1947 for urging women temporarily back to work to aid
the badly-needed export drive yet doing nothing to make it easier for
15
Venetia Murray, ‘The Children of Women who work’, Picture Post, 7 January 1956.
D. M. Lowson, City Lads in Borstal (Liverpool, 1970), 4; D. J. West, Delinquency
(Cambridge, MA, 1982), 29–30.
17
Picture Post, 7 January 1956.
18
‘Mothers Out at Work’, Times, 2 June 1958.
19
Quoted in E. A. McCarty, ‘Attitudes to Women and Domesticity in England, c. 1939–1955’,
(D.Phil. Thesis, Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, 1994), 168.
20
She, November 1955.
16
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
213
women to do so. In the late 1940s, Woman, Woman’s Own, and Good
Housekeeping urged bored wives without children to beat the ‘brides’
blues’ by going back to work. Yet Woman’s Own also urged women to
stay home if husbands objected, rather than risk the ‘happiness of your
life together’.21
These dilemmas and debates played out not only in agony columns
and letters to the editor but in wider popular culture. Niamh Baker’s
analysis of women’s fiction in the early post-war period found few
books that depicted women at work; when they did the work was
almost exclusively repetitive and dull or labelled feminine: governess,
secretary, teacher, servant. Baker believes that a post-war anti-feminist
backlash made it difficult to use heroines who openly identified with
women’s rights or were professionally successful as many 1930s
characters had been. But women writers often portrayed even menial
work as a source of satisfaction and identity, depicting idleness and
aimlessness as leading to disaster for women and condemning the men
who sought to enforce inactivity upon them. Thus their fiction provided
support for subverting stereotypes, even as characters acted in
stereotypical ways.22 However, the generally middle-brow books
Baker reviewed had their circulation dwarfed by better-selling popular
fiction which reinforced gender stereotypes, such as Mills and Boon
romances (better known in North America as Harlequin) or
Ian Fleming’s James Bond.23 Popular romantic novels and serials,
especially those for girls, depicted women going to great lengths for
love, automatically giving up their careers upon marriage and
motherhood.24
Film also reinforced gender stereotypes. Adaptations from the Angry
Young Men’s misogynistic work were popular, and film scholars have
also pointed to such cinema melodramas as The Man in Grey (1945),
The Red Shoes (1948), and Woman in a Dressing Gown (1957), in which
women are punished for not conforming to conventional roles.25
For example, the 1948 film version of Hans Christian Anderson’s
tale The Red Shoes added a husband and changed the focus from
21
Woman’s Own, 1 September 1955. See also Woman, 29 March, 2, 28 June 1947, quoted in
McCarty, ‘Attitudes to Women and Domesticity in England’, 166–70.
22
N. Baker, Happily Ever After? Women’s Fiction in Postwar Britain, 1945–1960 (New York,
1989), 68–73, 161–4.
23
J. McAleer, Passion’s Fortune: the story of Mills & Boon (Oxford, 1999); T. Bennett and
J. Woollacott, Bond and beyond: the political career of a popular hero (New York, 1987).
24
For the typical giving up of the career, see J. Drummond, ‘Spell of the Islands’, Woman’s
Own, 26 June 1965; J. Gillott, ‘The World of Learning,’ in H. Hunkins-Hallinan (ed.), In Her Own
Right (London, 1968), 23–43; McAleer, Passion’s Fortune, 202–79.
25
M. Landry, ‘Melodrama and Femininity in World War II British Cinema’, in R. Murphy (ed.),
The British Cinema Book (London, 1997), 79–89, 168–9; M. Williams, ‘Women in prison and
women in dressing gowns: rediscovering the 1950s films of J. Lee Thompson’, Journal of Gender
Studies, 11/1 (2002), 5–16; S. Rowbotham, A Century of Women (New York, 1997), 300.
214
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
a punishment for vanity to condemnation of the heroine’s neglect of her
family due to her desire for a career as a ballet dancer. In My Teenage
Daughter (1956), a magistrate scolds the working mother for neglect,
blaming her for her teenager’s smoking, listening to rock music and
taking up with a ‘wastrel’ boyfriend. One of the few positive portrayals
of mothers and work came from 1948’s The Guinea Pig in which the
mother works to raise money to send her son to a public school.
Of course, with the child in boarding school the mother’s daily care had
become superfluous.
The influence of movies and magazines on women is difficult to
quantify, but statistics show that during this period five of every six
women in Britain read at least one woman’s magazine. In 1950, Good
Housekeeping reached one of every two women in the middle-class
while Woman had a weekly circulation of almost 3.5 million in the late
1950s.26 If their domestic agenda had radically disagreed with the
majority of their readers, it is highly unlikely that these magazines
could have sold in such numbers. The editorial staff of Woman claimed
circulation dropped rapidly if they tried to ‘deal with social problems’
rather than print stories on domestic life, knitting or the royal family.27
Similarly, while annual film admissions did plummet from 1.4 billion
in 1950 to 500 million by 1960 (largely the result of competition from
television), many theatre goers still went multiple times weekly and
almost 90 percent of schoolchildren saw at least one movie a month
and usually more.28
In addition, the testimony of working women interviewed during the
1950s and 1960s show that most were aware of ideas on deprivation
and delinquency, even if unable to define the source as Bowlby or
Winnicott. They knew ‘good mothers’ were supposed to be home with
their children or risk negative effects, causing incredible tension
between their feelings of guilt and a desire or need for other outlets.29
Agony columns often featured heart-breaking letters from women
who felt trapped at home, such as a young Hertfordshire mother, 23,
with a 6-month-old baby. ‘I think I do everything for him that
could be expected of a reasonable mother, but Johnny, my husband,
is quite silly about the baby and says that I must never leave him’.
The woman, who had not been out of the house in 6 months,
26
M. Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 2nd Ed. (London, 2000), 86,
209–10; R. Ballaster, M. Beetham, E. Frazer and S. Hebron, Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity
and the Woman’s Magazine (London, 1991), 111–3.
27
M. Greive, Millions Made My Story (London, 1964).
28
M. Akhtar and S. Humphries, The Fifties and Sixties: a lifestyle revolution (London, 2001).
29
See for example, Letters, She, March 1955; McCarty, Attitudes to Women and Domesticity in
England, 166–70; Roberts, Women and Families, 150–2; and H. Gavron, The Captive Wife: Conflicts
of Housebound Mothers (London, 1966).
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
215
felt imprisoned, despite her husband buying a television and telling her,
‘it ought to be enough’.30 Over 10 years later little had changed
when Hannah Gavron found numerous women confined in their
homes with their children. Many of her subjects did not live near
their families; because many were afraid (or could not afford) to
leave their children with anyone but relatives, they were with their
children all day, every day.31 Another woman told Judith Hubback she
was waiting for the day ‘when the children are bigger, I may be able
to escape’.32
The Birmingham Feminist History Group, which included Catherine
Hall and Angela Coyle, has cautioned that ‘it would be wrong to see
the influence of Bowlbyism either as entirely negative or as foisted
upon unwilling women by the dominant ideologues’. The group argued
that at least the Bowlby school recognized mothers ‘as vital members
of the community’ and home as a place where women had power,
which explains why so many women accepted the implications of
deprivation theories: ‘If you have to be at home, you might as well be
important!’33
Of course, many women were happy at home.34 It is also wrong to
think that paid work was a fix-all for every woman. Not only did
women face extra stress from the dual role, but also, as Sheila
Rowbotham has pointed out, most women’s jobs were not particularly
creative or energizing. Nevertheless, many women dreaded the feeling
of being shut-in and appreciated even jobs not considered ‘careers’.35
Stay-at-home women, however, were often the most vehement critics
of their sisters who worked for pay; possibly they sublimated any
frustration into condemnation of women not content to stay at home.
An at-home mother quoted by Zweig is typical. ‘Working mothers
are often spoiled and selfish; they don’t care twopence about their
homes and children’.36 The same woman went on to say, however,
that working women got more respect and better treatment within their
families.
30
She, March 1955, 76.
Gavron, The Captive Wife.
J. Hubback, Wives Who Went to College (London, 1957), 75.
33
Birmingham Feminist History Group (BFHG), ‘Feminism as Femininity in the 1950s’,
Feminist Review, 3 (1979), 52, 56–58.
34
McCarty, Attitudes to Women and Domesticity, 350; Roberts, Women and Families, 125;
and G. H. Gallup (ed.), The Gallup international public opinion polls, Great Britain, 1937–1975
(New York, 1976), 223.
35
Dex, Women’s Attitudes towards Work, 24–8; S. Rowbotham, A Century of Women
(New York, 1997), 367.
36
F. Zweig, Women’s Life and Labour (London, 1952), 26.
31
32
216
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
Defending Working Mothers
As the Guardian’s Women’s Page editor Mary Stott wrote in the 1970s,
all the ‘disturbing figures by experts’ and heated discussion were
powerless ‘to stop the march of the women out of the four walls of
home, whether for good or ill’.37 The increasing numbers of married
women workers was not only a phenomenon in Britain but rose in
every western country in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970, the majority of
women working in Britain, France, Sweden and the US were married.
These women clearly had either a desire or a need to work strong
enough to balance out the moral condemnation, the cost of childcare,
and the burden of balancing home and work. Since the majority of
women received little domestic help from their husbands, they clearly
had reasons which outweighed what the neighbours (or newspapers)
might have thought. So why did women say they were working?
Most women cited money as the top reason. One factory worker
noted, ‘there was a saying that if you worked in the factory you were
either among the needy or the greedy. Most of us were needy’.38 Even
women who avoided permanent work took casual jobs brewing tea or
cleaning to get money for extras. Said one mother, ‘if it only bought
the material for them to have some pants it was a big help, you know’.
A disabled, poorly paid or absent husband were all reasons to add to
the family coffers, as were high rents caused by the housing shortage.39
Census data and most sociological surveys of married women who
worked found about 15–20 percent of them were the sole or main
support of the family.40 Such women were more likely to invoke
pity than criticism. Almost every source that condemned working
mothers exempted those for whom it was ‘necessary’ to work.41 The
sticking point was that after World War II, the definition of what was
‘necessary’ was in flux.
For many, the spread of affluence changed ideas about
acceptable standards of living, affecting the definition of what it
37
Stott, Organization Woman, 170.
Elizabeth Harrison, ‘Part-time twilight shift worker’, quoted in Rowbotham, A Century of
Women, 290.
39
Quote from Roberts, Women and Families, 124. For details on why women worked, see also
Dex, Women’s Attitudes towards Work; P. Jephcott, Women, Wife and Worker (London, 1960);
P. Jephcott, N. Seear and J. H. Smith, Married Women Working (London, 1962); V. Klein, Britain’s
Married Women Workers (London, 1965); S. Yudkin and A. Holme, Working Mothers and their
Children (London, 1963); and M. Jefferys, ‘Married Women in the Higher Grades of the Civil
Service and Government Sponsored Research Organizations’, British Journal of Sociology, 3/4
(December 1952), 361–4.
40
Jefferys, Married Women, 361–4. Klein and Jephcott found similar rates, although other
surveys found much higher levels of financial necessity, up to 60 percent. Yudkin and Holme,
Working Mothers and their Children, 44–7.
41
For examples, see Dex, Women’s Attitudes towards Work, 34.
38
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
217
meant to ‘need’ to work. While the economic security of affluence was
slow to spread to much of the working class until the later 1950s, the
post-war standard of living of the average Briton did improve. Real
wages rose and goods became ever more tantalizing because average
citizens were now able to afford them, especially as hire-purchase
regulations were relaxed.42 As Elizabeth Roberts has concluded from
her numerous oral interviews, ‘We needed the money’ did not have the
same meaning in 1960 as in 1935.43 Women workers were often not the
poorest women, but rather came from families where the husbands
were skilled manual or lower-white collar workers.
Yet, many more women than one in five who were the main support
of their family said they worked because they ‘needed’ the money.
What did this mean? Many women defined it as specific material
goods—extra lessons, additional clothes, a vacation, furniture, owing a
home, car or even just a television—arguing their work was bringing
a rise in the family’s standard of living. Sociologist Margot Jeffreys
found in a 1951 survey of higher-level civil servants that a desire
for a ‘middle-class way of life’ was a major inducement for women
to continue their careers.44 Women of all classes often mentioned
educational expenses as a top priority—everything from paying for
uniforms and school travel holidays to allowing children (usually boys)
to stay at school longer. Sociologist Pearl Jephcott found that while
most women did not necessarily work for sheer necessities such as
food ‘neither was it for mere pin money if by ‘‘pins’’ are meant pleasant
little frivolities for personal enjoyment. For most women the aim was
a higher standard of living’.45 The enthusiastic response to affluence
reflected not just hunger for material goods, but a desire for a different
family lifestyle.46 After 1945, most working-class women rejected large
families and the burden of the kind of life their mothers had often
lived. Both men and women had material and emotional expectations
for better standards of living and a working wife could add
considerably to achieving those goals.
Women argued they did not work for selfish reasons but rather for
their family’s benefit. Partly, this is because it was not acceptable at the
time for most women to simply want to work or to admit to being less
42
From 1945 to 1975, infant mortality rates were more than halved, real household earnings
increased 35 percent, and commodities such as televisions and vacuum cleaners expanded to reach
over 90 of British homes. Home ownership doubled and foreign holidays and car ownership
quadrupled. Mitchell, British Historical Statistics, 59, 569, 740–3, 848–56.
43
Roberts, Women and Families, 126.
44
Jefferys, ‘Married Women’, 361–4.
45
Jephcott, Women, Wife and Worker, 11.
46
Hoggart also argued attitudes toward affluence (or ‘progress’) were more than mere
materialism. Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Fair Lawn, NJ, 1957), 143.
218
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
than satisfied by a life of homemaking. But of course, denial of
selfishness was also a clear response to criticism of the working mother.
Many women needed to justify their work to society (and often to
themselves) by characterizing it as benefiting, not hurting, their
families. In doing so, these women were challenging the conventional
vision of what constituted a good mother. Turning the deprivation
theories on their head, they argued that selfish, neglectful women were
not those who worked, but those who passed up the chance to raise
the family’s standard of living.47 A good mother increasingly became
one who ‘put herself out for the kids sake’.48 As Carolyn Steedman
wrote about her 1950s upbringing in Landscape for a Good Woman,
‘We’d known all our childhood that she was a good mother: she’d told
us so: we’d never gone hungry; she went out to work for us; we had
warm beds to lie in at night’.49 By the late 1950s, if a local area began to
get a concentration of married women workers, avoidance of paid work
could start to reflect badly on women who stayed home compared
to neighbours balancing the dual role. As Virginia Novarra notes,
‘The woman who did not seek a paid job was culpably passing up an
opportunity to raise her family’s standard of living and was liable to be
a muddler in housekeeping.’50
Women from all income levels defended their work in a variety of
ways. Less affluent women argued they had no choice, while educated
women were more likely to speak in terms of not wasting their talents
and training, although both cited the benefits extra money could bring.
They argued that the advantages outweighed any theoretical risk of
juvenile delinquency. Some, usually middle class, mentioned that
children were likely to be more damaged by a mother forced to stay at
home unwillingly.51 Many women also believed they were creating
stronger, more self-reliant children, ones with a sense of independence
and initiative. It is doubtful that so many women would have worked if
they thought their employment was truly harming their children, but it
was not enough to not harm them, women felt compelled to argue
47
Novarra, Women’s work, men’s work, 68; See also Jephcott, Married Women Working, 23;
Klein, Britain’s Married Women Workers.
48
Jephcott, Married Women Working, 97. It was generally younger working-class women who
used such language as ‘putting herself out’, while professional women tended to stress increased
opportunities for their children rather than a sacrifice on their own part, but the sentiment seems to
have applied to most regions and classes.
49
C. K. Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (New Brunswick, NJ,
1987), 1.
50
Novarra, Women’s work, men’s work, 68.
51
Jefferys, ‘Married Women’, 361–4.
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
219
their work benefited their children. Actress Patricia Roc, mother of a
2-year-old son, justified her work in a 1955 issue of She magazine.
Obviously if any mother works it is not usually for the pleasure of it, but for
economic and social reasons. If I am fortunate enough to be able to provide
my son – through my work – with the extra little touches and the extra
education which will better fit him to face the future on his own, then I am
not only entitled, but duty bound, to continue my career and let a good
nurse or relative care for him when I am not around.52
Similarly, the young Margaret Thatcher urged women in 1952 to ‘wake
up’ to the new Elizabethan age. Home and work could be managed
successfully, she argued; limiting women to domesticity wasted talent.
The idea that the family suffers is, I believe, quite mistaken. To carry on with
a career stimulates the mind, provides a refreshing contact with the world
outside – and so means that a wife can be a much better companion at home.
Moreover, when the children themselves marry, she is not left with a gap in
her life which so often seems impossible to fill.
Then newly married and not yet a mother, Thatcher argued that a
failure to draw competent and able women into public life would be a
betrayal of ‘the tremendous work of those who fought for equal rights
against such misguided opposition’.53 While outsiders were happy to
criticize them, few women who actually worked or their children spoke
of negative effects. The former would not surprise many, the latter
might. A major government social survey done in the mid 1960s asked
respondents whether their own mother had worked, and if so, had they
resented it. Surprisingly few viewed their mother’s working negatively,
although many said they had missed their mother sometimes.54
No discourse is all encompassing, of course, and even at the height
of the scare over juvenile delinquency, there were a few experts willing
to defend working mothers, at least up to a point. Their comments did
not come close to overturning the conventional beliefs about working
mothers, however, and even their positive comments about mothers
reflected the dominant notions about women’s behaviour. Such experts
were generally those with a lot of research time or expertise in the field,
who denied that working caused women to neglect their families.
Rather they found most women’s decisions to return to work were
ultimately shaped by the kind of childcare they could obtain. They
simply did not work if they could not make adequate arrangements.55
52
‘Straight from the Shoulder’, She, June 1955, 72.
‘Wake up, Women’, Sunday Graphic, Feb. 17, 1952. Emphasis in original.
54
A. Hunt, A Survey of Women’s Employment (London, 1968), 89–90, 138–9.
55
For example, Cartwright and Jefferys, ‘Married Women who Work’, 160–1; Jephcott, Married
Woman Workers, 97–8.
53
220
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
Elizabeth Pepperell, Assistant Director of the Industrial Welfare Society,
said that in her career as a personnel officer, she ‘never found a girl
put her job before her children. Professional women sometimes might
but not the manual worker’. She argued the majority of women
working did so out of need. ‘The mother must work . . .. What is the
effect on the children? Admittedly, some children suffer from the
absence of the mother, but in general, children between 9 and 15 are
more resourceful when the mother goes out to work’.56 Pepperell’s
comments reveal both class and moral assumptions. She was reacting
to the discourse that women had no right to work, especially to satisfy
their own needs. Observers associated such employment with
professional women, often stereotyped as selfish, cold and wedded to
their careers. In addition, professionals, largely middle class, did not
have to work. Clearly, ‘having’ to work took away much of the stigma.
Of course, the financial need of families may not have always been
women’s top priority, but rather simply what they thought seemed
most acceptable or what observers wanted to hear. While over three
quarters of women cited money as the biggest reason for working,
when questioned more closely, most said they would work anyway
(particularly middle-class women who had trained for a professional
career).57 Virtually all surveys or interviews found women motivated
not only by money, but also by a desire to be useful, find
companionship or combat boredom, especially once their children
entered school. Pearl Jephcott thought these women were ‘less in
revolt against pots and pans, than not quite sure how to fill their day’.58
When questioned why they worked, most women gave multiple
reasons. As one said, ‘I was just vegetating at home, and I felt
I needed an interest again, and we needed the money’.59 Sociologist
Ferdynand Zweig argued that women fundamentally regarded work
not just in a material sense but as ‘a change, an escape from the four
walls, the basis of their independence and dignity, a symbol of their
higher status’.60
Indeed, a desire for work was often caused by a resentment of
the power that a single earner held within a marriage. The pages
of women’s publications were filled with letters from housewives
denied money by their husbands, berated for asking for extra
56
Pepperell, October 1958 speech, 5/SPG, Box 533, Six Point Group archive, Women’s Library.
However, professional women usually (consciously or unconsciously) shaped their career to
fit in better with family responsibilities. See S. Aiston, ‘A Good Job for a Girl? The Career Biographies
of Women Graduates of the University of Liverpool Post-1945,’ Twentieth Century British History,
15/4 (2004), 361–87.
58
Jephcott, Married Women Workers, 106.
59
Quoted in Roberts, Women and Families, 127.
60
Zweig, Women’s Life and Labour, 153.
57
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
221
housekeeping money or even pocket change—examples which go a
long way to explaining why so many women were willing to take on
a double burden. Having two incomes altered the balance of power
in many marriages. As one woman said proudly, ‘I don’t need to ask
my husband’s permission to spend a shilling as others do. I spend my
own money in my own way’.61 Telling others that the money was
needed, however, made it easier to justify work, making it more
acceptable even when women worked for other reasons. Said another
woman, ‘I would have felt guilty asking people to look after the
children while I went out. But it seemed acceptable to ask someone to
look after them while I did a job’.62
Thus women workers primarily characterized their work and the
material goods derived from it as being for the family or the children,
even when that may not have been the whole story—a tendency
Carolyn Steedman has also commented on.
Now I enjoy shocking people by telling them how goods were introduced
into households under the guise of gifts for children: the fridge in the house
of the children I played with over the road was given to the youngest as a
birthday present – the last thing an eight-year-old wants . . . . The record
player also came into [our] house in this way, as my eleventh birthday
present. I wasn’t allowed to take it with me when I left, though: it really
wasn’t mine at all.63
This discourse of material things benefiting the children did, of course,
make the parents’ desire for those things far more acceptable. In a
major study done in the early 1960s, Simon Yudkin and Althea Holme
found not a single woman who professed directly to be working for
themselves; rather they spoke of buying a house, holidays, ‘helping
out’, furnishings and clothes or other items for the children—many
of the items so associated with the affluent society—yet only a few
would even acknowledge that extra money ‘provide[ed] jam for the
bread’.64
Evidence related to working-class women’s historic role in the family
also provides another likely explanation for women’s compulsion to
say they were ‘working for the family’. While most saw the post-war
rise in married women working outside the home as an unprecedented
phenomenon, in many respects it was often more of a shift in the
type of work women did than a complete innovation. Since 1939
61
Zweig, Women’s Life and Labour, 18. See also examples in M. Stott (ed.), Women Talking:
An Anthology from the Guardian’s Women’s Page (London, 1987), 30–48. Women at this point
had a legal right only to their own earnings, not any household money they had saved.
62
Roberts, Women and Families, 127.
63
Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 36.
64
Yudkin and Holme, Working Mothers and their Children, 45.
222
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
standardized, paid work for married women outside the home has
increased while married women’s home-based petty capitalism has
declined. Many more married women worked in the first half of the
20th century than the roughly one in ten counted in the census (and
there is evidence that both women and census enumerators
collaborated in this undercounting).65 Close studies of interwar and
Edwardian working-class communities have found as many as 40
percent of women were some sort of petty, or as Carl Chinn puts it,
‘penny’ capitalists. Women earned money through taking in boarders
or washing, child-minding, charring and selling second-hand clothes
or homemade food and drink. They also picked up casual work that
did not reflect as badly on a husband’s abilities as breadwinner.66
Previously, observers rarely acknowledged women’s monetary
contributions to family support because working mothers were part
of the underground economy of sweated labour, casual and home
work unrecorded by the census. This type of ‘women’s work’ became
invisible.
Pearl Jephcott found in the 1950s that many of the working-class
women she interviewed worried that they did not pull the weight
in the family that their mothers had. Even if their mothers had not
worked outside the home, their day-to-day domestic burdens were
generally far heavier.67 (A significant portion of the women who
worked in the early and mid-1950s, when it was still fairly unusual,
however, did have mothers who worked.) It appears that this sense
of having it easier was not only about physical labour but also was
related to the pre-war tradition of women helping to support the family.
This helps explain why many women felt they needed to work and
to explain their work in terms of family support—they were used to
thinking in those terms, even if experts were not.
The Rise of Part-time Work
Since women continued to be drawn to paid work, one could question
whether the public discourse opposing outside jobs had any effect
beyond triggering guilt in working mothers. The answer lies in the
65
For example, C. Black, (ed), Married Women’s Work (1915, reprint, London, 1983).
See for example, L. Davidoff, ‘The Separation of Home and Work: Landladies and Lodgers in
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century England’, in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (New York,
1979); Black, Married Women’s Work; Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love (Oxford, 1986); C. Chinn,
They worked all their lives: Women of the urban poor in England, 1880–1939 (Manchester, 1988),
96–9; E. Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940 (Oxford,
1984).
67
Jephcott, Married Women Working, 106.
66
223
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
Table 2
Full and Part-time Workers, Britain 1951–2001 (in thousands)
Men full-time
Men part-time
Percent part-time
Women full-time
Women part-time
Percent full-time
1951
1961
1971
1981
1991
2001
15,262
47
–
6,041
784
9
15,574
174
1
5,698
1,892
25
14,430
602
4
5,413
3,288
38
13,374
362
3
5,602
3,543
39
13,438
784
6
6,230
5,020
44
13,555
1,396
9
7,054
5,622
43
Source: Hakim, Key Issues in Women’s Work, Table 3.3, Labour Force Survey 2004.
striking demand for part-time work. Between 1951 and 1971, while
almost two million women entered the workforce and the number of
married women working skyrocketed, the number of full-time workers
declined. As seen in Table 2, the overall number of male workers
declined while the number of female workers grew by over 20 percent,
albeit as part-time, not full-time workers. Women working part-time
went from 9 percent of workers to 38 percent and almost all of these
women were married.68 These were the third highest rates of part-time
workforce participation in the western world, and the countries with
higher rates did not have part-time work forces as dominated by
women as Britain.69
Working only part of the day allowed a women outside interests,
money, and as we have seen, a defence from criticism of neglecting her
children. Those who condemned full-time work for women as causing
delinquency were less critical of part-time work, especially for the
mothers of older children. Thus numerous sociologists, economists,
women’s groups, politicians and media commentators advocated parttime work as the way to solve the dilemma of a woman’s ‘dual role’.
Women’s groups from across the political spectrum encouraged parttime work to prevent a waste of talent, while others thought it would
lead more women to full-time work. Middle-class feminist groups
68
C. Hakim, Key Issues in Women’s Work, 64–6. Hakim argues that part-time workers are
almost always ‘secondary’ earners who matter less in the workplace than full-time workers and that
women’s pay still lags behind men because women choose to have a different relationship with the
labour market than men do. However, she fails to account for how the cost and difficulty of
obtaining childcare might leave women with less than a free choice. She also equates part-time work
with inefficiency and lack of attachment to the work force.
69
H. Pott-Buter, Facts and Fairy Tales About Female Labor, Family, and Fertility (Amsterdam,
1993).
224
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
particularly attempted to create part-time job opportunities beyond
clerical, manual or distributive work.70
Experts believed that with part-time work a woman could work with
less stress on herself and her family and avoid turning her neglected
children into teenage delinquents. Many women agreed; part-time work
was in much higher demand at local employment offices than full-time
work; typically 60–85 percent of applicants wanted part-time work.71
This was not only due to the discourse regarding negative effects of
working mothers, but a practical reality for many women. Working
wives generally continued to have the bulk of housekeeping duties.
While many men did take on new roles, such as watching the children
at night while their wives worked twilight shifts, studies showed
that even by the mid-1970s, men typically did only 10–25 percent
of domestic work. Even if both partners worked an equal amount
of time outside the home, women spent twice the time on household
chores. Men’s work in the home was ‘helping’ women, who had
primary responsibility for the household whether or not they had
paid work.72
Working part-time eased the stress of balancing work and home,
but it also allowed employers and the government to avoid addressing
many of the costliest needs of employed mothers, such as childcare.
As noted earlier, women’s decisions to return to work were shaped
by the availability of childcare and it was easier to get part-time care.
It was just this sort of problem that created some critics of part-time
work. They feared it would hurt women’s long-term job prospects,
creating a class of second-tier workers and preventing public and
employer’s policies from altering to reflect the changing social and
economic reality.73
For the same reasons that women desired part-time work, they also
often resisted employers’ demands for increasing amounts of overtime
in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes putting them at odds with male
70
Political and Economic Planning, Employment of Women (London, 1946); E. M. Harris,
Married Women in Industry (London, 1954); A. Myrdal and V. Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home
and Work (London, 1956), xi, 18–25, 30–9; Pearson, Mothers at Work, 10–28; Yudkin and Home,
Working Mothers and their Children, 24–6; OECD, Job and Family, 2–6; The Future Employment of
Women (1965), CCO 170/5/51, Conservative Party Archives, Modern Papers, Bodleian Library,
Oxford University; Women’s Information and Study Centre, Comeback: a guide for the educated
women returning to work (London, 1964), 3–7.
71
Employment exchange figures in LAB 8/3415 and LAB 8/3255, TNA:PRO.
72
A. Oakley, ‘What is a Housewife?’, in Terry Lovell (ed.), British Feminist Thought: A Reader
(Oxford, 1990), 77–83; Roberts, Women and Families, 35–40; Dex, Women’s Attitudes towards
Work, 30–42; M. Young and P. Willmott, The Symmetrical Family (London, 1973), 95–122; and
A. J. McIvor, A History of Work in Britain, 1880–1950 (London, 2001), 182–4.
73
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, Press Release F/32, 28 October 1965,
‘Part-time work for women – the ‘Pros’ and ‘Cons’ in MSS.200/C/3/EMP/21/3, Confederation of
British Industry Archives, Modern Records Centre; OECD, Job and Family.
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
225
co-workers who typically wanted overtime work. While some unions
supported women workers and the measures that could help them
work more easily, such as increased nursery care, others opposed
nursery expansion and supported marriage bars or other measures to
limit women’s competition, provoking many women’s conviction that
unions favoured men’s interests over women’s.74 The TUC and most
unions did not give much more than lip service to ‘women’s’ issues
such as nurseries until the advent of women’s liberation in the early
1970s. As one man argued regarding proposals for nurseries at the 1966
Civil Service Clerical Workers Association annual meeting, ‘What is
needed was better pay so that we could keep our wives at home where
they belonged. What we want is to give breadwinners throughout the
country enough pay to keep their wives at home.’75
Women, Affluence and Consumerism
Thus far, we have seen that many women defended themselves against
criticism of their decision to work by taking on part-time work and
insisting they were addressing their families’ needs, not their own. This
discourse has also affected views of the post-war affluent society.
Women have been noticeably absent in the literature about affluence
and the affluent worker, playing a role neither as political beings nor
as producers/workers. There are several reasons for this. The male
breadwinner was still the norm in the early post-war period—until the
early 1970s the majority of married women did not work outside the
home. But more importantly, men and women existed in two separate
labour markets, one for men, considered the real workers, the other for
women, considered low-paid auxiliaries working on the side, unrelated
to their real role as wives and mothers.
It is not surprising that women were not considered affluent
workers, since throughout the 1950s and 1960s, employers generally
saw women as a sort of abnormal male worker—what Ferdynand
Zweig termed ‘a type of their own’. Women workers were not
resources, but problems, and businesses made concessions to women
workers only when they were forced to. Denied opportunities for
74
On nurseries and unions’ support of working mothers, see S. Lewenhak, Women and Trade
Unions (London, 1977), 255–9; S. Boston, Women Workers and Trade Unions, 2e (London, 1987),
252–62; TUC archives, MSS.292/119/2, Modern Records Centre and D. S. Wilson, ‘ ‘‘The True
Sphere of Woman’’?: Gender, work and equal pay in Britain, 1945–1975’ (D.Phil. Thesis, Boston
College, 2005), 252–73. For more on the culture of overtime, which was also vital to creating the
affluent society, see J. Rule, ‘Time, affluence and private leisure: the British working class in the 1950s
and 1960s,’ Labour History Review, 66/2 (Summer 2001), 223–42.
75
Quoted in Boston, Women Workers, 275.
226
D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
advancement or training, women remained in a second-tier
workforce—segregated into low-status, low-paid ‘women’s work’.
Despite the increase in married women workers, most employers
continued to calculate wages as though all women workers were single;
they argued that because women did not support families they
deserved lower wages than men.76 This same idea of dependence was
reflected in welfare policy, which reduced married women’s benefits on
similar grounds.77
Women’s absence from the literature on affluence is also related to
the discourse about wives, workers and proper mothering. Continually
depicting women’s income as ‘extras’ downplayed their earnings.
Before the Equal Pay Act 1970 took effect men’s average wages were
twice as high as women’s, leading to the depiction of women’s earnings
as secondary, even if women’s contributions to a combined household
income were significant. Elizabeth Roberts’ oral history investigation
of Lancashire families found two common assumptions among men
with working wives: that their wages would be higher than their wives
and that men’s wages alone should be enough to support a family.78
If the husband made more than the wife, he remained the family’s
supporter—an essential piece of masculine identity. But this view
inevitably downgraded the importance of his wife’s wages, and
contributed to the public picture of women working merely for pin
money, no matter their real contributions to family income.
Instead, commentators mentioned women far more often in their
roles as housewives—purchasers and consumers extraordinaire. This
vision of women as spenders, not earners, was a major factor in
underestimating women’s contributions to the economy and helps
explain their absence from the body of work on affluent workers.
The association of women and consumption is not new, of course,
and since the 19th century, one of the central portrayals of women has
been as consumers.79 The increasing number of women working made
little dent in this view as both business and political parties continued
to identify women with this role. In fact, affluence may have only
strengthened this view. Many women unwittingly reinforced an
association of women, domesticity and consumption through their
claims that they worked to provide their family with material comforts
they would otherwise lack.
76
See for example, Unsigned, ‘Equal Pay Problem: Should This Become a General Rule?’
Chamber of Commerce Journal, August 1956, 8.
77
E. Wilson, Women in the Welfare State (London, 1977).
78
Roberts, Women and Families, 129–31.
79
See E. Rappaport, Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of the west end (Princeton,
2000); M. Andrews and M. M. Talbot (eds), All the world and her husband (New York, 2000).
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
227
Men also became the target of the expanded marketing tactics in
the 1950s, but women in many ways remained the quintessential
consumer.80 A sample of this vision of woman as consumer not
producer can be seen in the 1957 Festival of Women, renamed from its
original title of the Festival of Women at Work and turned into a tribute
to women as consumers. Sir Graham Hayman, president of the
Federation of British Industry, claimed the festival was important not so
much for noting the contributions of women to the workforce, but in
their role as ‘chief consumers of industry’s end products’. Business
leaders cared more that women made 85 percent of all purchases than
that they made up a third of workers. Even Trades Union Congress
General Secretary Vincent Tewson called the festival ‘a recognition of
what Britain owes to women not only as workers but as housewives
and mothers’. Along those lines, the festival featured pavilions on
fashion, 20th century homemaking, cookery, kitchen appliances and
beauty and leisure products—all aimed at women as consumers and
housewives, not workers.81
This gendered vision also had political effects. Both Labour and the
Conservatives tended to see women more as consumers than workers,
although the political parties sent very different messages on what
affluence and the economic changes of the 1950s meant. While
John Goldthorpe and others showed that workers did not necessarily
shift political loyalties from Labour as their wages rose and affluence
expanded, they studied only men, not women.82 In reality, the bulk of
existing evidence demonstrates that women voters in the 1950s found
the Conservative message more appealing and credible than Labour’s.83
Carolyn Steedman attributed her working-class mother’s affinity for
the Conservatives to the Tory message that wanting the products of
80
Matthew Hilton has argued that affluence began to change the stereotypical vision of the
consumer from female to male, at least for consumer organizations. M. Hilton, ‘The Female
Consumer and the Politics of Consumption in Twentieth-Century Britain,’ The Historical Journal
45/1 (2002), 103–28; and Consumerism in Twentieth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2003). Also,
L. Whitworth, ‘Anticipating Affluence,’ in L. Black and H. Pemberton (eds), An affluent society?
Britain’s post-war ‘Golden Age’ revisited (Aldershot, 2004), 167–84. However, a vision of the
affluent male consumer did not necessarily trickle down to individual producers, advertisers or
shop owners.
81
Festival of Women flyer and planning memos, CCO 3/5/27, Conservative Party Archives.
Similarly, the 1947 government campaign to draw women back into textile work also appealed to
women’s consumer desires. See S. Curruthers, ‘ ‘‘Manning the Factories’’: Propaganda and Policy on
the Employment of Women, 1939–1947,’ History 7/2 (June 1990), 232–56.
82
Goldthorpe et al., The Affluent Worker.
83
Black, The Political Culture of the Left in Affluent Britain; A. Black and S. Brooke, ‘The
Labour Party, Women and the Problem of Gender, 1951–66’, Journal of British Studies, 36/4 (1997),
419–52; I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska, ‘Explaining the Gender Gap: The Conservative Party and the
Women’s Vote, 1945–1964’, in M. Francis and I. Zweiniger-Bargielowska (eds), The Conservatives
and British Society, 1880–1990 (Cardiff, 1996), 194–223.
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D O L LY S M I T H W I L S O N
affluence was reasonable and moral behaviour.84 During this time,
many in the Labour Party and the left, fearful of moral decay associated
with affluence, seemed to imply that it was somehow betraying the
revolution to want a washing machine.85 As Stephen Brooke has
argued, an additional unwritten subtext to the affluent worker debates
was that social changes of the 1950s aroused a nostalgic myth about the
working-class Mum unsullied by modern work, affluence and desire.86
In reality, however, women increasingly reacted to the yearnings
aroused by affluence by working, although they placed their work
within a discourse of family need and female consumption.
Conclusion
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many women reacted to the persistent
negative discourse about working mothers in two key ways. Their
demand for part-time work solved the dilemma of the need for
women’s labour both in paid work and at home while defusing fears
about delinquency. But working women also attempted to change the
image of the good mother from one who stayed home to one who took
on extra work for the benefit of her family, indicating that the important
monetary and emotional satisfaction of work could overwhelm public
discourse against it.
A more consumer-oriented society drew women into the work force,
even as affluence changed the way women defended a desire to work.
Women started to enter the workforce in large numbers before affluence
was particularly widespread, and many women stated that they
worked to help their families acquire the accoutrements of affluence—
although any status as affluent workers has been denied them. Further
research on this topic can aid our understanding of post-war affluence,
consumerism and the politics surrounding them.
Women were clearly responding to the condemnation of working
mothers, however, by taking such care to refer to work almost
exclusively in terms of its benefits to their families. Thus when they
spoke their work they tended to downplay its value to themselves or
to the general economy. Business saw women workers as problems,
84
Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman, 120–21.
L. Black, ‘The Impression of Affluence,’ in An affluent society?, 85–106; S. Fielding, ‘Activists
against ‘‘Affluence’’: Labour Party Culture during the ‘‘Golden Age’’ ’, Journal of British Studies, 40
(April 2001), 241–67.
86
Brooke, ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain in the 1950s’, 773–95. This type of
nostalgia is best seen in texts such as The Uses of Literacy, although while Hoggart’s ‘Landscape with
Figures’ concentrates on the idealized homebound ‘mam’, there are places where the new reality of
working mothers slips into his descriptions, 48–51, 81–2.
85
THE GOOD WORKING MOTHER
229
not resources or even true workers. The discourse of working mothers,
families and extras created a vicious circle. The tendency to characterize
women’s work as being for pin money ironically strengthened the
male breadwinner ideal in the face of the major social shift regarding
married women’s work. It also upheld the notion of women’s position
as second-tier workers outside the real workforce, depriving them of
any possible status as affluent workers in their own right.