Gendered Perspectives on Men's Changing Familial Roles in Postwar England, c .1950–1990
2018; Wiley; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-0424.12333
ISSN1468-0424
Autores Tópico(s)French Historical and Cultural Studies
ResumoThis article examines the ways in which men and women remember men's place in, and experiences of, family life in postwar England during a period when a new ideal of fatherhood arguably emerged. Based on forty-four oral history testimonies with men and women, this article adds a new dimension to existing literature in gender history by closely examining men's and women's perspectives on the same issues. Focusing on decisions around family planning, experiences of pregnancy and birth, and the division of labour in the home, the article analyses how men and women understood their respective roles as parents-to-be and as new parents; how they negotiated the expectations of those around them; and the extent to which the gendering of childcare responsibilities persisted in the decades between 1950 and 1990. Despite the advent of second-wave feminism and multiple challenges to stereotyped roles for men and women within the home over this period, it is clear from this material that parenting often remained a gendered and gendering experience for individuals. While a considerable change in men and women's perceptions of an idealised role for fathers appears to have occurred in the decades after the Second World War, this perception of increased paternal involvement was not always matched by an increase in fathers’ actual involvement. The involvement of the father in parenting continued to vary considerably at the individual level, as had been the case in the first half of the century. Interviewees arguably used and incorporated changing gendered norms, and created gendered and non-gendered identities to manage a workable private life as they became parents. The identity of ‘parent’ could allow for a flexible sharing of duties in childcare, but most interviewees presented themselves as ‘mother’ or ‘father’ within the context of a retrospective interview. The article contributes to growing historiography on the role of fathers within modern British family life.1 Historians such as Joanne Begiato (Bailey), Julie-Marie Strange, Lynn Abrams, Margaret Williamson and Laura King have demonstrated that affectionate fathers can be found in numerous periods and throughout Britain. Irrespective of a family's social and economic circumstances, close bonds could be formed between fathers and children.2 Of course, this was never true of all families, and alongside such affectionate fathers were men who were distant and even abusive.3 Simultaneously, fatherhood fluctuated in its prominence within popular culture, as fathers were demonised and celebrated at different points in time.4 Elizabeth Roberts and, more recently, Laura King locate the beginnings of the modern shift in men's involvement in family life and a new emphasis on shared decision-making between parents in the interwar period. In postwar Britain, there was a more intensified interest in fatherhood, particularly amongst the media, and a ‘family-orientated’ masculinity emerged.5 Fatherhood was a convenient way to help men position themselves and be positioned socially within ‘normal’, peacetime, family life, and away from soldierhood and war – in Britain and beyond. Arguably this increased cultural emphasis on men's family roles and identities echoed an increasing involvement of men in family life, but there remained substantial diversity over the degree to which men played an active role in the home in the 1940s and 1950s.6 Research from the 1960s found that while men were taking on an important share in childcare, this rarely represented an equal division of labour.7 Further, pioneering sociological studies focusing specifically on fatherhood in the 1970s and 1980s presented a mixed picture.8 Outlining the impetus for his study, Brian Jackson noted, ‘Doubtless every generation has to discover fatherhood afresh; but there seemed reasonable grounds for suspecting that some significant shift might just be afoot’.9 In contrast, Charlie Lewis was more sceptical about claims that the 1970s and 1980s had seen a sudden and novel increase in men's involvement in family life, commenting that such claims were ‘as old and perhaps as prominent as the notion of patriarchy’, and that women remained primarily responsible for the home and children.10 This article takes a historical perspective to interrogate gendered perspectives on change and continuity to men's roles from the late 1940s to the 1980s in relation to three main areas: family planning and conception; pregnancy and birth; and infant care. By the end of the twentieth century, the nuclear family itself was destabilised: Jane Lewis, for example, writing in 2003, argued that ‘artificial reproduction and the increasingly messy nature of intimate relationships mean that the family is no longer “natural”; biological and social motherhood and fatherhood can be separated’.11 Lewis noted that most children spent at least some time growing up in a ‘non-traditional’ household.12 However, the reasons why these changes occurred, the point in time in which change began, and the degree of continuity which has remained, are all issues of intense debate.13 In recent years scholars have turned their attention to the postwar period, using gender as a means to analyse developments in sex and marriage, family, and the relationship between men and women at home and in the workplace.14 Despite this interest, there has not been the same attention paid to the relationship between men, work and home that there has been for women. If we are to fully understand these social changes, considering how men's place in the home was conceived is crucial.15 This article therefore extends existing scholarship on postwar British society and the gender relationships which underpinned it by focusing on the role of men within family life. The article interrogates the spaces between ideals and lived experience, evident in the oral history material, and offers a new perspective on debates around continuity and change in men's domestic role. It argues that, while ideals of fatherhood and the role of men in the home dramatically shifted in the postwar period, there were nonetheless important continuities in the gendered division of labour within the home. This period saw a new ideal of highly involved and ‘hands on’ fatherhood in England, and this sense of change was highlighted by interviewees. However, overriding this semblance of change were two factors. Firstly, though ideals and practices of both motherhood and fatherhood were changing, there was little evidence of these roles merging or the gendering of parenthood practices and identities disappearing. Secondly, the division of labour and responsibility for children in practice changed little: women continued to do the majority of childcare in this period. Factors such as class and region influenced expectations, but there was also significant variation between families of the same background, suggesting that interpersonal dynamics and individual behaviour also played a role. This exploration of men's changing familial roles is based on an analysis of two oral history collections, one with men and one with women, which together comprise a total of forty-four testimonies. The two authors conducted these oral history interviews independently, and have subsequently brought them together for further analysis for this co-authored article. Twenty-one of the interviews were with fathers and twenty-three with mothers. The interviews with men were conducted in 2013–2014 specifically by Laura King for a study about men's experiences of their partners’ pregnancies, childbirth and infant care. In three cases, participants’ partners also took part in the interview, and in a further case, one participant's wife was present in the room, and contributed at one point. Male interviewees were found through local community groups, online advertising and advertising in community spaces such as libraries, as well as snowballing. The sample were mostly located in the north of England, but had lived throughout the country and abroad in small numbers too. Many were highly educated and a significant number were or had been engaged with socialist and feminist politics. Most couples in the sample brought their children up together in at least the early years of their lives, though a significant minority subsequently separated. Indeed, given that the subject matter of the original research project focused on men and family life, it can be reasonably assumed that this group of men were especially concerned with their roles as fathers. The interviews with women were carried out between 2002 and 2009 for a project about motherhood in post-1945 England by Angela Davis. The interviews with women were all one-on-one with the exception of Eve whose husband was also present. The female interviewees were found through community and women's groups and snowballing with interviewees putting other women they knew into contact with the interviewer. Interviewees were selected to include a range of locations and educational backgrounds. However, educated middle-class women most often volunteered themselves to contribute to the research and most were living in the south of England at the time of the interview. Snowballing further encouraged the over-representation of the middle class and highly educated, as women tended to recommend women from the same socioeconomic background as themselves. None of the women entered into motherhood as single parents and the majority (although not all) were married to the fathers of their children at the time of their births. A significant number had been single parents at some point due to death or divorce, and some women had later entered into new relationships. The majority of interviewees for both projects were white and most originated from the United Kingdom. These two sets of interviews were subsequently re-used to provide a comparative perspective specifically for this co-authored article.16 Both authors examined all interviews in order to provide a new analysis on this subject matter; adding to the complexity and richness of the research and demonstrating the potential for collaborative work across separate oral history research projects. All interviewees became parents between 1948 and 1990. Most interviewees and their children were born in England.17 They were drawn from various occupational backgrounds, which would largely be classified as middle class, and the sample was, overall, a highly educated one. Middle-class couples are of particular interest here because the narrative of change in gender roles that sociologists believed they were documenting in postwar Britain was presented as being most advanced for these groups.18 In their 1973 book The Symmetrical Family, Michael Young and Peter Willmott suggested that the division of labour between men and women was becoming less marked and that the professional middle class was the vanguard of this change. They argued that men and women were moving towards more or less equal roles, both working in the home and outside it, with the home becoming central to social life and social identities. This trend would, therefore, have been most visible amongst middle-class couples, such as the men and women interviewed here, should it have occurred. In oral history, variables such as social background, geographic location, ethnicity and religion intersect with gender as men and women tell their life stories. Class is identified as an important but ‘fuzzy’ variable, with a large degree of overlap between different groups.19 This was particularly so in the latter half of the twentieth century, as cultural norms relating to parenting held by different class groups were to some extent converging after the Second World War, although differences in practices remained.20 Like class identities, it is clear that local and regional variations remained important, and it is easy to find evidence that individual experiences were shaped by the local context in which they lived. In this article, we take into account such differences, although we predominantly draw on gender as our key question of analysis to focus on the difference in men and women's perspectives. The interviews were conducted in two periods, which, despite being chronologically close, differed markedly in social, economic and political terms. This shaped the interviewees’ reflections. The interviews with women by Angela Davis were undertaken in a generally more optimistic time where new initiatives in childcare and support for working families were encouraging women to enter the workforce and the jobs were available for them to do so. The Labour government of 1997–2010 prioritised support for working parents generally, and working mothers in particular, in the form of childcare and tax credits. In his Comprehensive Spending Review speech on 12 July 2004, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, declared the twenty-first century as the era of universal childcare.21 The women interviewed at this time were therefore living in a period of change which facilitated a new relationship between home and work for many women. The increased support for working mothers that they saw in comparison to when they were raising their own children may have encouraged them to focus on the increased opportunities they perceived as being open to women. As Jane Lewis has argued, the ideal of a male breadwinner, and mother as primary caregiver, dominated attitudes about the family for much of the twentieth century. In both samples, in the 1940s and 1950s, only an exceptional few of the mothers and the wives/partners of the men interviewed worked when their children were below school age. The majority took a period of time out of paid labour before returning, usually part-time, once their children were at school. This reflected national trends and social expectations; formal marriage bars were no longer in place, but social norms encouraged women to leave work upon marriage or, increasingly as the period progressed, upon having children. Sample tables from the 1951 census showed that 4.5 per cent of the women with children under one year of age were in paid work, and less than a quarter of married women in total. As the period progressed more mothers were in paid work. By the end of the 1970s one in six women returned to employment within six months of having their first baby, rising to one in four at twelve months. Between 1988 and 1998, the employment rate for women with children under five rose from 36 per cent to 50 per cent. Thus, the state support for working women in the early 2000s arguably contributed to a sense of optimism about gender equality in the workplace and home. In contrast the men were interviewed by Laura King in the aftermath of the 2007–8 financial crisis, a period when many of the services set up to support working families by the previous administration were at risk under the Conservative-led Coalition. Working mothers were arguably worst affected by the crisis and resulting tax rises, cuts to benefits and public services, and rising unemployment. Indeed female unemployment rose from 678,000 in 2008 to 1.08 million in 2013, a level previously seen in 1988.22 This challenged contemporary assumptions about the inevitability of women's labour market participation. However, this was also a period in which the Coalition government was combining traditional Conservative values promoting the private family unit, and Liberal Democrat initiatives to promote gender equality.23 Fathers’ roles were being renegotiated, not least through the offer of extended parental leave to be shared with their partners. Few men interviewed, however, acknowledged or seemed aware of these policy initiatives. While there are significant differences in the collections, the interviews are in other ways comparable. Both sets of interviews were semi-structured and followed the model described by Penny Summerfield.24 Focusing on the life cycle, the interview format encouraged the respondents to consider their own lives in comparison to their parents and children, and within a wider trajectory of social change. All interviews centred on the interviewee's experience of parenting, placing their subjectivity as mother or father at the forefront, and asked interviewees to place their subjective experiences in relation to their partner. Our analysis acknowledges the individuality of each collection, and each interview, and pays attention to the fact that oral history interviews are co-created between interviewee and interviewer and tell as much about the moment they were undertaken as past events. Nonetheless, we believe oral history is a particularly effective methodology to access subjective attitudes and experiences. The benefits of being able to compare the accounts of men and women outweigh the limitations brought by the fact the interviews were not conducted at the same time or by the same interviewer. Our analysis demonstrates the possibilities of scholarly collaboration to realise the potential of existing data sets as new research questions arise, particularly as there are strong ethical arguments for the reuse of interviews to maximise the opportunity this data presents. Both collections offer rich resources and considered together offer an opportunity to explore men's and women's perspectives of men's changing role in the family alongside one another. Concentrating on three themes – family planning and conception; pregnancy and childbirth; and infant care – this article examines how men's role in the home and family life was understood by each generation, from the perspectives of both men and women. Despite social changes in the decades after the Second World War, from the impact of second-wave feminism to the rise of cohabitation, there was also striking continuity in parenting practices and the different roles performed by men and women into the 1980s. The article suggests this was based on particular beliefs about inherent gendered differences. Yet, despite the discussion of such gender-based differences, both men and women insisted at the time of interview that there had been substantial and significant changes in men's roles over their lifetimes. Indeed, as King has argued, change can occur in ideas and practices of masculinity and femininity without any substantial shift in how the two are positioned in relation to each other.25 In other words, there was change in understandings of motherhood and fatherhood, but the relationship between these roles remained similar. Across the accounts of both men and women, there was an almost Whiggish sense of continual improvement in the behaviour and attitudes of fathers. This article critically examines such notions of change; compares men's and women's articulation of change and continuity; and argues that both the men and women interviewed highlighted differences in their respective roles in family life, even if they also spoke of equality and a substantial shift from previous generations. Men were likely to defer to their wives or partners whom they viewed as ultimately responsible for and more expert in looking after children and home. Women expected their husbands or partners to contribute, but branded this as ‘help’. Thus, although we can find evidence of changing patterns of behaviour, this change was limited by a specifically gendered understanding of an inherent and continuing difference in the way men and women contributed to and were responsible for family life. Decisions to start a family and discussions around what that family will look like are an obvious starting point to understand the ways in which gender roles and expectations influence parenting dynamics. The respective roles of men and women in controlling fertility in the twentieth century have been much debated.26 Kate Fisher has suggested that from the First World War to the 1960s men were often seen as responsible for securing contraception and largely taking care of this aspect of marital relations.27 Furthermore, Fisher suggests that family planning was often tacitly negotiated between wife and husband, rather than being part of an open discussion.28 In a separate study, Fisher and Simon Szreter found there were marked class and regional differences in attitudes towards contraception and the actual methods used.29 Based on their interviews with men and women born between 1901 and 1931, undertaken for their study of sexual behaviour for the period 1918 to 1963, Fisher and Szreter found that, even among this older generation, ‘middle-class women were more prepared to be directly involved in contraception and as a result family limitation was initially approached as a joint problem for couples in discussion with each other’.30 Fisher and Szreter were interviewing an earlier generation than the mainly middle-class couples discussed in this article, who were born between 1924 and 1952. A majority claimed that family size was a shared decision, and many of the men and women interviewed spoke of relatively open discussions about sexuality and family planning with their partner. This arguably reflects the middle-class composition of the interviewees in this study, but potentially indicates significant change in attitudes towards fertility and sexuality in the postwar period. Notably, men and women alike talked at length about wanting a family and what that family might look like; and there was little evidence of men's ambivalence to having children that Marcus Collins found in an earlier period.31 While the testimonies are present selves remembering what they thought and how they acted several decades earlier, and are not a record of their actual feelings or behaviour at this time, these interviewees indicated that they now think, and want to present themselves as having thought then, that family size should be a shared decision. Marjorie, born in 1931, had the first of her four children in Oxford in 1959. Her husband was working at the University where she had also studied. She said the family was planned around her husband's career, but that they were both involved in the decision making: ‘to start with we knew we couldn't possibly cope with having children because my husband was doing … his third year of his doctorate’. When he finished they thought ‘it didn't matter so desperately if a baby came along’. Women who had children later in the period presented a similar picture of shared decision making. Karen, born in 1945, had four children, born in 1967, 1970, 1984 and 1985. When asked whether she and her husband had planned to have two and then two later she said, ‘we had actually talked about it, right at the beginning … It was something that we thought would be nice’. Male interviewees also used this language of shared decision-making regarding family planning. Born in 1942, in a working-class area of Leeds, Mike had worked his way up through the clothing industry. Mike discussed his and his wife's approach to family planning in the early 1970s and placed this in a wider generational narrative of change. He tried continually to involve his wife, who was also present, in the conversation, and said ‘we thought things out very, very carefully, didn't we?’, adding, ‘I don't think my mum and dad did, so much’. Mike and his wife agreed she should give up work when the children were young, demonstrating the persistence of more traditional gender roles within this framework of shared decision making. Edward, born 1940, and his wife Lily, whose only child was born in 1976, also presented their family planning as a joint endeavour when asked whether they had discussed having children, saying ‘we weren't going to have one for six months after we got married’. Problems with fertility meant their son was actually conceived some years later. The fact they were interviewed together likely encouraged this retelling of a shared experience: throughout their account of having a family, they spoke in agreement, filling in the narrative together. However, Edward also suggested that medical staff treated him as uninvolved when they were having fertility problems, indicating continuing norms could be in tension with their relationship. Born in 1950, Alex met his wife in the 1970s and they married in 1975, after she had divorced her first husband. Alex used a shared language of ‘we’ in describing the couple's decisions: ‘We had no desperate desire to have children … but we thought actually if you don't, you've got long, long twilight years to regret it’. He did not differentiate between his and his wife's desires, presenting a united decision-making process throughout the interview. They had four children born between 1979 and 1986. The decision over family size was also presented as one that was reached jointly. Hayley was born in 1926 and brought up in Welwyn Garden City, Hertfordshire. Having worked as a research chemist in Bristol, she left work when the family moved to Essex and had their first child in 1956. Hayley recalled their decision to have three children: ‘I wanted to have four really, coz I was one of four, and he wasn't that keen because he was one of two [laughing] so we compromised with three’. Diana's three children were born in 1958, 1959 and 1964. The first two were born when the couple were living in South Oxfordshire to fit with her husband's career in the RAF. Their last child was born in Yemen where he was then stationed. When asked if they planned their children as they did, Diana answered, ‘yes we did, in fact we decided you know we'd have one, and then we'd have another one and then said yes, we'll have another one [laughing] … we were going to have four. But we ended up with a dog for the youngest one … Coz I think I said no’. For middle-class couples, such as Hayley and Diana, starting their families in the late 1950s, the decision to have children and the number of children they would have was assumed to be something which couples would have control over, and it would be a decision they would reach together. However within this overall picture of joint decision-making, some women, such as Diana in her recollection that she ‘said no’, also hinted that they had ultimate responsibility for family planning. There were also some men who indicated that their wives’ held greater responsibility in decisions about having children. Fred had one daughter in 1961, and although he wanted more, and in particular a boy, his wife wanted to return to her career in nursing. He added, ‘she had given me one child, as it were, and that was my lot! I didn't argue with her’. This trend became more pronounced as the period progressed. For example, when asked whether she and her husband had planned to have their first child in 1960, a year after marrying, Claire replied, ‘Oh yes, we'd planned to have children as soon as we got married’. In total the couple had six children. Discussing whether this was also planned she said, ‘Well we meant to have eight, but then we had six and decided enough was enough’. She added, jokingly, that ‘We were bad at birth control [laughing]. I didn't want to go on the pill because I saw my female friends getting grumpy and putting on weight’. While presenting her choice not to go on the pill in a humorous way, Claire also implied that whilst they envisioned their future family together, the form of contraception was her choice. Pam had two children born in 1977 and 1983. When discussing family size she focused on her own wishes, and did not discuss her husband's views: ‘I definitely didn't want one so I suppose yes I did want two, and I wanted to have them close together because I didn't want a big gap like I had [with my sibling]’. However later in the interview Pam recalled speaking to her doctor and she referred to the decision on starting a family as one that ‘we’ (she and her husband) made, indicating that while contraception may have increasingly been viewed as a woman's responsibility, this was still understood within a context of joint decision-making. She explained: ‘the doctor said to me don't you think you've left it a bit late, because I was thirty [laughs] … I said, “No I don't think so”. We wanted to wait so we had a few years together first and we had a house and we were ready for a baby’. Pam's comments indicate that, while she had her own views on the subject which she expected to realise, she also thought that starting a family was something which couples should decide upon together. Interviewees’ often implicit recognition of their power over such decisions perhaps reflected changing contraceptive technologies, and particularly the invention of the contraceptive pill. This was first available in Britain in 1961, although only for married women, and could enable women to take more control over their own fertilty. By 1964 an estimated 480,000 women were taking the drug.32 While the pill was not the first contraceptive method under a woman's control, and while there is evidence that the educated, middle-class women were already aware of methods of family limitation, Hera Cook believes the introduction of the contraceptive pill was a turning point because of its increased efficacy and the opportunity women had to make autonomous decisions about their own fertility with ease.33 Camilla, who had three children in the early 1960s, discussed the impact of the pill: ‘I mean after the pill came out, it was my saving, things of course changed and I didn't have any more, but I really don't know [laughs] what would have happened otherwise’.34 It is noteworthy that she spoke in the first-person singular here, and described the pill as changing her life, with no mention of her husband. The women's liberation movement also encouraged women to take back control over their bodies in the context of their relationships and encounters with medical practitioners, which may have affected women's actions at the time and the way tho
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