Family Britain, 1951-1957 (90 page)

Illegitimacy rates were low through the 1950s, running most years at or below 5 per cent, or in the mid-1950s around 33,000 illegitimate babies a year. Of those babies, a little under half (about 13,000 a year) were given up for adoption. Why? A report in 1950 about the Church of England’s moral-welfare work in London is suggestive of some of the acute practical difficulties faced by unmarried mothers:

Few people realise how seldom an affiliation order is made against the father of an illegitimate child. Many girls have insufficient evidence on which to apply for a summons. In other instances they have lost touch with the man and are unable to give an address at which he can be found. Workers find a general unwillingness on the part of the mother to take action, especially in cases where the man concerned is married. She, and very often members of her family too, dread the publicity of a Magistrate’s Court. What is due to the child is forgotten or passed over in the confusion caused by other people’s interests and emotions . . .

The Worker’s chief difficulty lies in finding accommodation for the mother who wishes to keep her baby. Often the girl who beforehand has felt adoption to be the only solution to her problem entirely changes her mind when the baby is born. More Hostel accommodation is needed for mothers who can go out to work, and leave the children safely cared for during the day . . . Sometimes the best type of mother, after a great struggle, turns to adoption in the end as a means of gaining security for her child.

Many young, unmarried mothers lacked the skills for adequately paid employment; landlords seldom welcomed such tenants; and it was not until the late 1970s that council waiting lists were opened up to unmarried mothers. Also, there was often pressure from mother-and-baby homes, mainly run by welfare societies of a religious character and from where some 15 per cent of illegitimate births took place. ‘It was presented as in the best interest of the unsupported child to lose the stigma of illegitimacy and to have a stable upbringing with two adopted parents: the homeless child for the childless home,’ notes Gillian Clark in her study of mother-and-baby homes. ‘It was a telling argument for a girl ill-equipped to support them both.’

Above all, there was the stigma itself – a stigma that unmarried mothers felt not only from their immediate families (especially their fathers), but from society at large. A flavour comes through in the response of
Daily Mirror
readers in October 1953 to another reader’s suggestion that it was ‘high time’ that ‘unmarried mothers had some status in this country’:

Why should unmarried mothers be given ‘status’? It is a pity that they do not think of the status they give to their children when they choose to defy the moral conventions, the backbone of family life, and live with other women’s husbands. (
Mother, Stroud
)

My husband knows that, if he left me to set up with some fancy piece, I would do all I could to make her name smell, so that, even if vanity blinded her, her neighbours would see her as a shameless thing. Once she was left unprotected I would swoop down and grab everything I could get, even if it meant that her children were left on the rates. (
Mrs D., Portsmouth
)

Unmarried mothers must always remain without ‘status’ so that they may serve as a good warning to young girls. (
‘Happily Married’, Bolton
)31

Marriage was an integral part – arguably
the
integral part – of the 1950s deal. It was not a deal open to those who, deliberately or otherwise, appeared to be circumventing the terms and conditions.

In 1955 the readers of
Woman’s Own
voted for their favourite radio voice. The winner was a family favourite. ‘For me,’ Nan Wigham from Durham wrote in, ‘Jean Metcalfe’s voice depicts all the qualities I think every woman ought to have. Sincerity, humour, understanding, reliability and tact.’ So much was now being demanded of what Simone de Beauvoir ironically called
The Second Sex
(English edition in 1953). Woman as embodiment of femininity, woman as dutiful, good-companion wife, woman as ingenious, cost-effective, uncomplaining homemaker, woman as strict yet infinitely loving mother – it was a daunting, home-centred, fourfold role.

‘How to Dress to Please Men’ was the expressive title of a series in
Everywoman
in the early 1950s, with a special emphasis on personal grooming (‘He likes you to be soft and silky’). Other women’s magazines relentlessly pushed the ideal – indeed the indispensability – of feminine physical attractiveness. ‘She won’t get far without polishing up her good points and disguising her bad ones so that he’s completely befogged by glamour!’ advised
Woman’s Own
in 1951. ‘It’s at this stage that the romantic compliments are paid and the diamond engagement rings get shopped for!’ Operating at an elite level above the mass-circulation magazines, there were two particular cynosures of beauty and elegance. Barbara Goalen,
the
British mannequin of the era until her retirement in 1954, was recalled for how ‘her haughty demeanour, delicate bone-structure and wasp waist came to represent the height of glamour’, while for older women the great exemplar was Margot Smyly, who in the pages of
Vogue
assumed the persona of ‘Mrs Exeter’, remembered as a ‘chic matron’ and ‘a very feminine social being in her luncheon suits, cocktail dresses and well-wielded fur stole’. One shrewd observer, who had long ago reconciled herself to the cultivation of non-physical charms, found the whole phenomenon altogether too much. ‘On T.V.,’ reflected Barbara Pym in 1955, ‘I thought that women have never been more terrifying than they are now – the curled head (“Italian style”), the paint and jewellery, the exposed bosom – no wonder men turn to other men sometimes.’32

For wives, there were competing messages. Officially this was the dawning age of the companionate, shared-interests, no-separate-spheres marriage – as ordained in 1949 by the Royal Commission on Population, with its manifest approval for the by now increased emphasis on ‘the wife’s role as companion to her husband as well as a producer of children’, as given cinematic wifely flesh by the stylish, witty Kay Kendall in three mid-1950s comedies,
Genevieve, The Constant Husband
and
Simon and Laura
. Yet equally powerful, arguably more powerful, was the discourse stressing that good companions did not mean equal companions. ‘Don’t try to be the boss,’ warned Monica Dickens in her
Woman’s Own
column in 1955 as she attacked ‘the slightly abnormal woman who wants to have her cake and eat it’. In other words: ‘She wants a man to give her love, companionship, a home, children, and the wherewithal to support life comfortably; but she cannot bring herself to let her man be the head of the household.’ It was the same in the marriage bed, at least as laid down by Dr Mary Macaulay’s
The Art of Marriage
, first published in 1952 and subsequently as a Penguin. Not only was ‘the success of the erotic side of the marriage chiefly the husband’s responsibility’, but it was ‘a shocking thing’ to hear of a wife refusing her husband’s sexual advances, in that ‘such an attitude would be impossible in any woman to whom loving and giving were synonymous’.

Sex was conspicuously – if predictably – off the agenda when
Woman’s Own
in 1955 asked ‘Are You a Perfect Partner?’ and put some leading questions:

Some weeks after you suggest an idea,
he
offers it afresh as his own . . . Would you (a) Let it go and say nothing? (b) Remind him that it was your idea originally? (c) Accuse him of having a terrible memory?

He loves animals and wants to get a dog, you are not so keen . . . Would you (a) Give in because it’s what he wants? (b) Argue against it? (c) Forbid it?

He’s buying you presents that he can’t afford . . . Would you (a) Accept his presents and say nothing? (b) Tell him you love him just as much without his presents? (c) Show anger at his wasteful extravagance?

You earn more money than he does . . . Would you (a) Offer to pay for both of you? (b) Go ‘dutch’? (c) Suggest some entertainment you know he’ll be able to afford?

He keeps comparing you unfavourably with other girls . . . Would you (a) Fume inwardly and say nothing? (b) Tell him sweetly to take out the girl he obviously prefers? (c) Make uncomplimentary remarks about him?

The correct answers were a, a, b, c and b. Full marks, and ‘you will be the perfect wife and deserve a perfect husband’; high marks, and ‘you will make some man very happy’; but a low score, and ‘you need more tolerance and a greater understanding of the man you love’.

The perfect partner was also the perfect homemaker, not least in the context of the enhanced prestige of the housewife in the eyes of the newly servantless middle class. It was a role played out above all in the kitchen. ‘A woman’s place?’ almost needlessly asked
Woman’s Own
. ‘Yes, it is! For it is the heart and centre of the meaning of home. The place where, day after day, you make with your hands the gifts of love.’ More generally, the vogue for domesticity was nurtured and spread across the land’s villages and small towns by Women’s Institutes – at the peak of their popularity, flower-arranging a particular speciality – while the strongly perceived need to pass on housewifery skills across the generations was summed up by a Bolton councillor, Mrs Heywood, pronouncing in 1953 on the importance of washday: ‘If the laundry goes out of the home, a child will have no training in house management.’33

An undeniable judgementalism was involved, typified by television ads for washing powder and the like unashamedly equating the moral worth of the wife with the whiteness of her husband’s shirts. Happily, for those afraid of falling short, help was at hand, especially as the range of consumer products rapidly expanded from the mid-1950s. The Good Housekeeping Institute was assiduous in its advice, with its compendious guide to
The Happy Home
(1955) including detailed chapters on ‘The Good Steward’, ‘Easier Housework’, ‘Home Laundrywork’, ‘Cooking Craft’ and ‘The Perfect Hostess’, and of course women’s magazines were suffused with practical tips and information. Here, the special emphasis was on making good the shopping and culinary skills that had been lost during the long years of austerity and shortages, a tutorial service exemplified by the ‘Wooden Spoon Club’ in
Woman
and ‘Cecile’s Cookery Class’ in
Woman’s Weekly
. ‘A very great part of a woman’s life is spent choosing, buying and preparing goods for her own and her family’s consumption,’ reflected Mary Grieve, editor of
Woman
all through the 1950s. ‘Success is as cheering and vitalising to her as it is to a man in his chosen career, failure as humiliating.’

A couple of gender stereotypes seem to have remained near-sacrosanct. One was male assumptions about – whatever her apparent intentions – female extravagance. ‘Do you like it, dear?’ the strip-cartoon character Gaye Gambol asked her husband, George, in the
Sunday Express
in January 1955 as she showed him her new dress. ‘Er . . . yes . . . but,’ replied George, before she blithely went on, against the background of a black cloud gathering over George’s long-suffering head: ‘I got it in the sales – it was reduced from £5 to £4 – I saved a pound. And I saved ten shillings on these shoes and nearly two pounds on all this dress material. You’re always saying that we must economise so I’m going shopping again tomorrow to save some more money.’ Arguably the matching female assumption was how the housewife’s control of the day-to-day domestic domain ultimately if covertly gave her the whip hand. ‘The woman of the house is the most important person in it,’ was how
Woman’s Own
put it in 1957. ‘Her husband may be stronger and cleverer than she is. He may be a business tycoon, or a genius or a famous personality. His wife may seem inferior to him in the more obvious ways – but there is one subtle way she can outdo him every time, and that is in her influence in the home . . .’34

Yet however exalted, a housewife did not exist on the same plane as a mother. Early in 1954, Oliver Willmott’s wife explained in his Parish Notes that whereas the members of their WI had ‘learnt to do many practical things’ and ‘seen demonstrations’ that had ‘helped us to improve our cooking, sewing, handicrafts, and the interior decorations of our houses’, the purpose of the Mothers’ Union was altogether more spiritual, being ‘a society of Christian women pledged to help one another in performing faithfully the duties they owe to their husbands, their children and their God’. She added that ‘we come to the monthly meeting of the M.U. to refresh our ideals, and to reaffirm the mother’s motto, which is “I serve” ’. The key cinematic text was
Mandy
– a 1952 Ealing drama (and Jane Asher’s screen debut) in which Phyllis Calvert played the endlessly devoted, endlessly warm mother of a deaf-mute daughter – but one figure above all was identified with the coming centre-stage of the idealised mother, a phenomenon no doubt in large part the inevitable legacy of the involuntary paternal disappearing act during much of the 1940s. This was the psychoanalyst John Bowlby, who in the early 1950s relentlessly and brilliantly propagated his research findings about the crucial influence of mother-love on the formation of a child’s character and personality. Typical was his conclusion to a
News Chronicle
article (bluntly headed ‘The Mother Who Stays at Home Gives Her Children a Better Chance’) in 1952: