Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change

Writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne, 1944-88

David Clark, David Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781134968138
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change brings together leading writers on marriage and the family in a tribute to the life and work of Jacqueline Burgoyne, a major figure in family studies.

Part I
Biography and history

Introduction

In this first part of the book the contributors take as their theme some of the changing aspects of marriage and domestic life in Britain since the end of the Second World War. Their intention, however, is not to produce a detailed family history of the period. The authors have been selective and in so doing have produced an original set of arguments which largely revolve around the predominant characteristics of marriage in the post-war period. At the centre of these chapters are the debates about companionate marriage, notions of marriage as partnership and the extent to which there is any evidence over time of greater equality between men and women in marriage. These are explored on a number of dimensions, ranging from the prescriptions of social policy to the more private territories of sexual and intimate relationships. In all cases, however, the authors place a strong emphasis on understanding both the public and the private dimensions of marriage and domestic life and in particular the interactions between them.

Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield offer a critical exploration of the relationship between ideas about companionate marriage and the processes of post-war social and economic reconstruction, showing how a combination of factors served to place new pressures on women. They describe the interconnections between anxieties about the falling birth rate and the call for mothers to renounce full-time paid employment and remain inside the home as carers of children, making this their unique contribution to the marital ‘team’. At the same time these ‘thoroughly maternal wives’ were also expected to contribute to an enthusiastic and fulfilling sexual life within marriage. Sociologists of the period add some detail to this picture, though studies of marriage in the 1950s generally reveal a rather optimistic and cosy picture of domestic harmony. Nevertheless, there were some counterpoints to this, in public anxieties about rebellious youth and juvenile crime, which were attributed in part to a breakdown in family life. These anxieties were crystallised in a Royal Commission which took the view that couples were taking marriage ‘less seriously’ than before. Only those writers who were able to locate anxieties about marriage in the wider context of historical change were able to provide an analysis which explained some of the external pressures on domestic life and suggested the implications for social policy. Crucial to this debate was an appreciation of the importance of falling family size, the concentration of childbearing within the early years of marriage, increased life expectancy, the rising proportion of married women in the population and the falling average age at marriage. Such trends could combine to foster a set of expectations about marriage, as a fulfilling partnership in which the needs of husbands and wives were given increasing prominence. These were expectations that might easily be disappointed. Finch and Summerfield conclude that post-war ideologies of marriage were often at variance with lived experience, and that the benefits of the companionate model were far more in evidence for men than for women.

Moving on to the 1960s and 1970s, Martin Richards and B. Jane Elliott take as their theme the place of sexuality within marriage. They, too, draw upon debates about companionate marriage and explore some of the assumptions which construct the 1960s as a period of major change in sexual attitudes and behaviour. Richards and Elliott choose an intriguing data set: letters and advice appearing on the problem pages of Woman’s Own magazine. They show how during these years replies to letters shift from an emphasis on didactic advice to the mutual sharing and discussion of problems between husbands and wives. Survey evidence from the 1950s and 1960s points to an increasing emphasis on the quality of sexual relationships within marriage. Problem-page advice reflects this and reveals an increasing openness and frankness about sexual matters, which is linked to the notion that sex within marriage is a crucial form of intimacy and sharing. Sex before marriage also gains growing acceptance during these years and is seen as more and more inevitable, indeed normative. This is not the case with extramarital sex, however. Although some dispensers of popular advice, such as the writers of marriage manuals, do advocate the notion of sexually ‘open’ marriage, survey evidence still suggests that sexual relationships outside of marriage are widely disapproved. Likewise, problem-page advice is unlikely to condone such behaviour, which is generally regarded as a ‘threat’ to marriage. As Richards and Elliott point out though, such attitudes, which if anything are becoming more rather than less strongly held, are widely at variance with behaviour. Although beset with a variety of methodological problems, research evidence suggests that sexual relationships outside marriage are now probably the experience of the majority. Despite this intriguing paradox, these authors point out that recent sociological studies of marriage have almost universally ignored the issue of extramarital sexual relationships.

It is the growing range of research-based writing on marriage and domestic life which is the main concern of Janet Finch and David Morgan in their chapter on the 1980s. Their theme is realism and the extent to which it may serve as a useful organising principle, particularly in relation to some of the more optimistic accounts of family life which have been produced in earlier decades. In part this is due to the extent to which ‘the family’ came onto the political agenda in the 1980s, but the most important influence on a new and more realistic approach to understanding marriage and domestic life in the 1980s, was the growth of feminist analysis. Finch and Morgan show how a number of studies tend to support the idea that domestic life in the 1980s was characterised as much by continuity as by change, in both aspirations and lived experience; and this work continued to place a strong emphasis on the importance and centrality of marriage within our culture. However, another body of work gets behind some of this in drawing attention to some of the material aspects of marriage, including the economics of the household, not least in a period characterised by high levels of unemployment. Debates on gender came to the fore in these years and research from the period drew attention to continuing inequalities within marriage and family life across a range of dimensions, from employment outside the home, through domestic labour, to the care of children. Despite a good deal of rhetoric in these years, there appeared to be little evidence for any major shifts in male attitudes and behaviour; and as the authors cryptically put it, there were ‘few sightings’ of the ‘new man’. Indeed, male violence within the home became more visible through a number of research studies which argued that domestic violence should be regarded as a normative aspect of patriarchy, rather than a product of individual pathology. In highlighting the darker dimensions of marriage and domestic life, research in the 1980s might be seen to contain a new realism. For Finch and Morgan this underlines the fact that such research cannot stand alone as detached and disinterested scholarly activity and must be seen in the context of wider political and policy debates about the nature of change in domestic life. The evidence they present suggests that sociology and feminism are currently well placed to further these debates.

All three chapters in this part of the book share certain themes in common. In particular, they are concerned with the relationships between biography and history and the ways in which the experiences of intimate life might be shaped by wider social forces. All of the authors raise important questions about research methodology and the problems which face those who seek to carry out research on marriage and domestic life. We are given examples of a number of approaches, from the interpretation of policy documents and a variety of documentary materials, through to evidence produced both in large surveys and small-scale studies using qualitative methods. This enormous spread of approaches has contributed to the range and depth of our understanding over the period 1945–89. Perhaps the most exciting conceptual breakthrough however, with the potential to influence a variety of methods, has been the growth of interest in a life-course analysis, as explained by Finch and Morgan. In recognising the interconnections between personal and social time, between individuals and generations, such an approach sets an exciting framework for further development.

1
Social reconstruction and the emergence of companionate marriage, 1945–59

Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the development of marriage and family life in the period of post-war social reconstruction and up to the end of the 1950s. We have chosen to focus principally on the emerging concept of companionate marriage which, in our view, is the most distinctive feature of domestic life during this period.

Central to the aims of the post-war social reconstruction was the desire to consolidate family life after the disruptive effects of war and to build a future in which marriage and the home would be the foundations of a better life. Partly this required the kind of economic and environmental reconstruction which would provide a physical and material environment conducive to stable family life—most obviously the rebuilding of houses destroyed by war and ‘slum clearance’ programmes which would reshape decaying urban areas. The prominence of this aspect of post-war reconstruction is evidenced by a Gallup Poll produced at the time of the 1945 election, which showed that 40 per cent of voters saw housing as the major issue of the election campaign (Thane 1982:260).

In much of the official and semi-official literature of the period, this physical reconstruction of living conditions was seen as providing the backdrop for the consolidation of stable family life, based upon the type of relationship between marriage partners which itself was suited to the post-war world. Although the phrase ‘companionate marriage’ had been employed as early as the 1920s, it is in the post-war period that it appears more widely, being used to summarise a set of ideas about marriage which ranged from the notion that there should be greater companionship between partners whose roles essentially were different, through the idea of marriage as ‘teamwork’, to the concept of marriages based on ‘sharing’ implying the breakdown of clearly demarcated roles. ‘Partnership’ and ‘equality’ in marriage clearly can mean very different things and both can be traced in the literature of this period. The prominence of these ideas about companionate marriage in the 1950s marks one of the key shifts from the idea of marriage as an institution to marriage as a relationship (discussed by Morgan in Chapter 5).

In the first two parts of this chapter we discuss the advent of an ideology of companionate marriage, drawing on bodies of literature concerning the birth rate and motherhood, women’s sexuality and girls’ education and women’s employment, in order to explore the different meanings contained within it and their inconsistencies and limitations. Such ideological constructions influenced perceptions of the lived reality of marriage in this period. Sociologists interested in the question of how marriage was developing were not free from them, and indeed contributed to them. In the third part of the chapter we therefore use contemporary empirical sociological studies not as an ‘uncontaminated’ account of reality, but as a source which gives some sense of the interplay between ideological constructions and lived experience. Further, sociological writing on marriage in the 1950s was very well known, and influenced thinking about British society and social policy well beyond the confines of academic scholarship.

In spite of the optimistic tone in which companionate marriage was discussed in both ‘official’ sources and sociological writing, there were underlying anxieties about whether it would in fact live up to the expectations of the optimists, or whether it might prove to be incompatible with marital stability. Such fears were voiced in particular in discussions of divorce and also of juvenile delinquency. The fourth part of the chapter reviews the warnings sounded in the period about the dangers of the companionate style for the future of marriage.

We finish by listening briefly to some dissenting voices among those thinking and writing about marriage in this period, from a minority which subscribed neither to the optimism of the protagonists of companionate marriage nor the pessimism of those who doubted its viability. This enables us to draw together our discussion by considering the question which no sociologist then posed: was the companionate marriage in a woman’s interests, or did the benefits accrue mainly to the male?

THE BIRTH RATE, MOTHERHOOD AND MODELS OF MARRIAGE

We begin by considering an issue which was of prime importance to public discussions of family life at the end of the Second World War—the birth rate and the overall shape of the British population. Pre-war and wartime anxiety about the falling birth rate of the 1930s which reached a record low in 1940, gave rise to intense discussion about the possibility that the population would fall below replacement level. This preoccupation peaked in the years 1945–47. Public discussion which surrounded it had obvious implications for ideas about motherhood in the immediate post-war period, but also contained a number of implications for models of marriage appropriate to a situation where women were to be encouraged officially to produce children.

The main clearing house for ‘pronatalist’ ideas concerning ways in which the birth rate might be raised was the Royal Commission on Population (RCP), which reported in 1949. Its policy recommendations embraced larger family allowances (introduced in 1945) starting with the first rather than the second child in a family; ‘family services’ for ‘mothers of young children’, including a glittering array of assistance from home helps and ‘sitters in’, to rest homes for mothers, nurseries, nursery schools and children’s playgrounds; and health care based on the new National Health Service to provide the normally healthy married woman, rather than just those medically at risk, with advice on all aspects of reproduction, as well as treatment where necessary. Finally, the housing shortage was felt to be one of ‘the main deterrents of parenthood’ and a programme was urged of building more and larger houses and modernising old ones in the context of a rent- and rate-rebate system linked to family size (Royal Commission on Population [RCP] 1949: paras 658–79). To summarise, post-war British pronatalism was concerned with improving to promote it as a function.

Motherhood, it was assumed, would take place within marriage. ‘Unmarried mothers’ were by the early 1950s depicted in psychosociological literature as ‘pathologically disturbed’ (Riley 1983:196). Yet in spite of the importance of marriage as a site for the developments advocated, it was given relatively scant attention in post-war pronatalism. In so far as marriage was discussed overtly there were contradictory elements in the way in which it was conceptualised. The recommendations of the RCP reflected the view that the cause of raising the birth rate had been impeded by ‘the movement for equality of the sexes’ originating in the nineteenth century, in two ways. First, as more women were drawn into paid work a potential conflict was created with the demands of motherhood. One might expect the Commission to have brought forward proposals to ease this situation but it did not. The second effect of greater equality between the sexes, in the Commission’s view, was to weaken the traditional dominance of the husband and to give more emphasis to ‘the wife’s role as companion to her husband as well as a producer of children’. On one level it was difficult to disapprove of this tendency towards companionate marriage especially in so far as it had raised women’s status. On the other hand, in the process of becoming ‘more considerate’ to their wives, husbands had shown themselves increasingly reluctant to put them through the hardship and danger of ‘unrestricted childbearing’, with the unfortunate effect—from the Commission’s point of view—of contributing to the fall in family size to an average of just over two children (RCP 1949: para. 103). In this sense, companionate marriage itself was potentially a threat to the birth rate, even if in other respects it was to be welcomed. Many of the RCP’s policy recommendations were intended to reconcile what was seen as a ‘modern’ marital style based on a small number of children, with the three- or four-child family regarded by the Commission as essential in the national interest.

Evidence given to the RCP reflects similar contradictions, although some of it welcomes the advent of companionate marriage rather more enthusiastically than the official Report. Particularly groups on the left, such as the Fabian Society, put greater emphasis on the role of the wife as a companion to her husband, and also paid more attention to the issue of working wives. Though their views were not incorporated in the Report, they are indicative of left-wing thinking which influenced the sociological approaches we shall be reviewing later in this chapter. The Fabians saw the ‘new marriage’ of the post-war world as ‘teamwork’ between husband and wife, in contrast to the separatism of marriages a generation earlier which was seen as leading to ‘sex antagonism’. In ‘comradely’ marriages the individual interests of wives were to be subsumed within those of the family group, in an analogous way to that in which ‘citizens’ of either sex were expected to put the interests of the community before their own in the wider society. The Fabian prescription for motherhood endeavoured to reconcile the interests of the family and the community. For the sake of the family, mothers should not combine motherhood with paid work when their children were young, but in the interests of society, wives ‘must realise they should give part-time service to the community when the children are older’. Part-time paid work generally was mentioned, and more specifically ‘teaching and welfare work’ (Fabian Society, quoted by Riley 1983:176).

All this was seen as belonging in the context of marriage as teamwork, but no thought was given in these sources to how the ‘team’ was to be constructed, in the sense of the roles of its members, their degree of equality, and the issue of leadership. In other words, no-one questioned the sexual division of labour: power in the home and shifting its balance were not on the agenda. The implication of this ideology of marriage was that wives were to add to conventional subservience to an admittedly ‘more considerate’ but still bread-winning husband, a responsibility to be his ‘companion’, to produce and rear more children and to engage in paid work in response to social needs if and when they could do so without ill effects on either husband or children.

Only a minority of those involved in pronatalist debates voiced qualms about the possibilities of achieving genuinely companionate marriage in which wives would be persuaded to have more children, without doing something about income sharing between husbands and wives. They included the Labour MP Edith Summerskill, Edward Hulton, the editor of Picture Post, and two wartime feminist organisations—the Six Point Group and the Women’s Publicity Planning Association—formed respectively in 1941 and 1943 to protest against the conscription of women without commitment to equal pay and to support a parliamentary bill removing all sex-based discrepancies from British legislation (Riley 1983:174–5, 179). They advocated legislating to give wives a proportion of their husbands’ incomes. It is in the writings of these groups that one finds some hints that companionate marriage might not be wholly in women’s interests. But while social policy might intrude in all sorts of ways on the mother, intervention into the ‘private’ relations between husbands and wives was not considered appropriate in ‘orthodox’ circles.

Ironically, almost by the time the RCP report was available, fears about the declining birth rate had subsided in the post-war baby boom. At this point the specifically pronatalist political agenda receded, but concern with the conditions of motherhood consolidated in the 1950s around the issue of material deprivation. If anything, these ideas are even more difficult to reconcile with the concept of companionate marriage—or at the very least they im...