Happy Families? Varieties of Family Life in Twentieth Century Britain.
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There is a well-known narrative in Britain about the history of the family. That
‘traditionally’ people lived in stable two-parent families, with married parents who stayed
together life-long, boys had fathers at home for role-models, who kept them disciplined ,
and everyone looked after the older generation. Then came the 1960s and permissiveness
and people started divorcing , living together and having babies outside marriage,
unprecedented numbers of complex families of step-relatives formed, and British society
was ‘broken’ as some would put it.
I want to suggest that the real story is a bit more complicated. Of course there
have been major changes since the early 1970s. In particular, divorce, open cohabitation
and childbirth outside marriage became more widespread and socially accepted and the
reasons for this need to be explored. But the longer-term story is more complex and less
well understood.
So far I’ve referred to Britain. In fact there are big differences historically e.g., in
divorce, cohabitation and illegitimacy rates across E&W, Scotland and Ireland due to
differences in family law and cultural diversity. Today I’ll just talk about England and
Wales .
Marriage.
Until WW2, for as far back as we have data, significant numbers of people in E&W
never married . In 1930s still 15% of women and 9% of men never married. This was
partly because women were a majority of the population, not just because of deaths in
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WW1 but because women had longer life expectancy, at all ages, than men. Similar
majority in 19th c. This doesn’t explain why 9% men didn’t marry…. From the end of
World War 2 until the early 1970s, marriage, at least once, became almost universal. This
is a period which, in present day discourse is often presented as an historical norm of
long-lasting, stable marriages. It was actually historically very unusual in the numbers of
long-lasting marriages. Unusual also in that average age at first marriage fell from a
norm over the previous 300 years of around 27 for men and 25 for women, to a mean in
1971 of 22 for women and 24 for men.
Marriages lasted longer than ever before or since because they started at earlier
ages, were less likely to be broken by death in young adulthood or middle age, as life
expectancy grew, and divorce was hard to obtain. Never in English history have so many
marriages lasted so long as between the late 1940s and the early 1970s; whether they
were contented is another question.
The reasons for the earlier marriage ages and higher marriages rates at this time
are uncertain. The sex ratio became more even, and improved living standards may have
enabled more people to marry and at earlier ages. From the early 1970s, the mean age of
marriage rose again, reaching older historical norms in the mid/late twenties by the mid
1980s, and by 2007 the exceptionally high level of 32 years for men and 30 for women.
Marriage rates also fell to historically low levels. This rising marriage age may be easier
to explain. From the 1970s more women were getting a good education and access to
better jobs.More of them delayed motherhood and long-term partnership until they were
established in an occupation.
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Cohabitation
Falling marriage rates from the 1970s did not mean that couples no longer lived,
raised children and formed families together. As marriage rates fell, the numbers of
people openly cohabiting rose, from 3 % of all adult women in 1979 to 13% in 1998.In
2006 in 14% of all families (parents plus at least one child) the parents were unmarried
but were officially registered as parents of their joint children. This is generally seen as
historically new and, in its sheer extent, it probably was, at least in England. There were
similar figures for cohabitation in early 20th c. Scotland where cohabitation was officially
registered as it was not in England and Wales.
The longer history of cohabitation, in England and Wales, like much else about
sexual relationships, is shrouded in secrecy and until the 1970s there are no reliable
statistics. But it was not a late twentieth century innovation. We have surveys and other
sources which suggest quite extensive cohabitation in working class areas on 19th c
London e.g., Charles Booth’s survey of London in 1890s. Throughout the 19th and 20th
centuries there was much less research on the middle classes, whose activities remain
much more secret, though there were certainly respectable middle class couples who
lived together unmarried.
Nineteenth and early twentieth century legislators knew that cohabitation was a
reality, not necessarily welcome or widespread, but common enough for the law to take
notice. The Prevention of Cruelty Act, 1894 provided that rules designed to protect
children from parental abuse should apply also to , as the law put it, ‘ any person
cohabiting with the parent of the child’. The Workman’s Compensation Act, 1906,
recognized unmarried couples and their families as units for the purpose of
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compensation.The distinguished legal historian, Stephen Cretney, has commented: ‘At
the beginning of the twentieth century there were certainly unmarried couples-no doubt a
significant number-who lived together in a factual relationship impossible to distinguish
from matrimony’. But the actual number is impossible to assess.
During World War 1r, official recognition of irregular partnerships continued.
Separation allowances and pensions were paid to all ‘dependents’ of servicemen,
including ‘unmarried wives’, ‘where there was evidence that a real home had been
maintained’, as it was officially put. There is continuing evidence of cohabitation, not just
among working class people, through the 1920s and 30s.
The couples involved were not necessarily opposed to marriage and might
willingly have married had it been legally possible. Often they presented themselves to
the world as married people and were accepted as such, even when friends and
neighbours knew or suspected otherwise. Many people were not censorious if the couple
behaved respectably, did not flaunt their transgression and there was a good reason for it,
such as the difficulty of obtaining a divorce. The most frequent reason seems to have
been the restrictive divorce laws and the costs of obtaining a divorce.
No divorce in
E&W until 1857 except by the expensive process of gaining a private Act of Parliament.
When it was introduced a man could divorce a woman for adultery alone. Women had the
additional task of proving not just adultery but an additional offence such as cruelty,
bestiality… sexual double standard. Scotland had had equal divorce between the sexes
since 1643. There was no divorce in Ireland.
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From at least the late nineteenth century, critics argued that the English divorce
system discriminated against the poor, because proceedings were costly, and against
women. Another disincentive for a woman to end a marriage was that until 1925 custody
of children over age 7 was vested in the father. Even when he died he could will the
guardianship of his children to someone other than the mother. In 1925 , under pressure
from women’s groups, the law was changed to increase the rights of the mother, but these
were not equalized until 1973.
From 1878 women could obtain separation orders from magistrates’ courts, with
maintenance, with a possibility of custody of the children, on grounds of cruelty by their
husbands, and thousands did, but this did not amount to divorce and they could not remarry. Not all who separated then cohabited, but many did. A repeated argument for
reform of the divorce laws was to enable cohabitees to regularize their partnerships, and
to uphold the institution of marriage. This was put repeatedly to the Royal Commission
on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, 1909-12, who accepted it and recommended reform,
but it didn’t come until legislation in 1937 extended the grounds for divorce and
equalized them between the sexes. The new law explicitly aimed at ‘the true support of
marriage, the protection of children, the removal of hardship, the reduction of illicit
unions and unseemly litigation… and the restoration of due respect for the law.’
But divorce continued to be expensive, until legal aid became available in 1949,
and even after that was still stigmatized, especially for women, and the procedures were
often complex. Similar arguments continued until the 1969 Divorce Reform Act which
simplified procedures and led to a great increase in divorces. Right up to 1969, supporters
of reform argued that it would strengthen rather than undermine the stability of marriage,
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by enabling refugees from unhappy marriages to remarry- and many did soon after the
law was passed. But in the longer run, contrary to these hopes, reform was followed by a
mass flight from marriage and increased cohabitation. I will return later to the possible
reasons for this.
There were a lot of reasons why marriages broke up at all times, including
domestic violence- something else the full extent of which we can only hint at until it
was brought into the open by the post 1968 women’s movement. Feminists campaigned
against domestic violence in the late 19th c. They believed it was widespread but there
were no good statistics because it was not a specific offence and the police were reluctant
to intervene in what they defined as domestic matters. This remained so until the 1970s.
This feminist campaign of the 19th c did lead to the introduction of legal separation in
1878 which enabled some women to escape violent marriages. Feminists in the 1920s and
30s campaigned for the appointment of women to police forces so that victims of
domestic abuse, and also victims of child abuse, could look to them for protection. They
believed that both were still prevalent. But the law against domestic violence was not
strengthened until 1976, though of course it has not eliminated the problem.
Child abuse was also exposed in the late 19th c. It was the reason for the founding of the
NSPCC in 1883. They demonstrated that abuse was extensive. This led to legislation
rather more speedily than domestic violence, in 1889. Cruelty to cattle had been outlawed
in 1822.
But we need to remember that throughout history, until quite recently, the main
reason why marriages ended in early and middle adulthood was death. Widowhood, most
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often for women, since women have long tended to live longer than men, often leaving
them with young children, through the centuries left many children without fathers and
led to the formation of complex families of step-parents and step-siblings due to remarriage- again, such complex families are less novel in the present and recent past than
is often thought. Widowers were more likely to remarry. Widows, until the 1920s at least,
had an incentive not to, since widows had custody of their children and their property as
married women did not, though they were often left in poverty. They might , like other
single women, move in with their parents or sisters or friends, forming complex
households.
Life expectancy rose in the 20th c, so that by the 1930s only 5% of marriages were
ended by death within 10 years. ‘’Thereafter’ divorce rather than death became the great
disrupter of marriages, producing in the 1980s disruption rates very similar…to those by
death alone in 1820s’. Impoverished single motherhood and boys without male role
models at home, has a long history, though the reasons have changed over time.
Another important change in families from the later 19th c was the fall in the BR
and in family size to an average of around 2 by the 1930s. Increasingly births were
concentrated early in marriage. Sometimes very early. In 1939, for the first time, the
Registrar –General investigated the number of first births conceived before marriage. He
estimated, to widespread surprise, that almost 30 per cent of all first children born in
1938-9 had been conceived out of wedlock. This was based on the number of babies born
within eight-and-a half months of the parents’ marriage, plus the smaller number of
‘illegitimate’ births, as recorded on the birth certificates. Of course some babies will have
been born prematurely, but the Registrar –General estimated that these were balanced by
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the numbers of parents who disguised their date of marriage to hide the premarital
conception.
These relatively high levels of pre-marital conceptions continued through the
1950s and 1960s. The number fell to 10% in 1992, largely because rates of marriage fell
and cohabitation increased. Sex before marriage was not an invention of the 1960s. It has
a long history.
Illegitimacy rates in the early 20th c seem to have been low in E&W compared
with previous periods, except during the two world wars. The increases in both wars
was attributed by moralizers at the time to outrageous behaviour by young people
liberated by wartime conditions. It was more probably largely due to marriages being
prevented or delayed due to the absence or death of men at war and there is clear
evidence of this for WW2 from the Registrar- General’s statistics . These showed that
during the war illegitimacy rose by about the same rate as premarital pregnancy fell. He
concluded that was happening was delayed marriage due to the wartime separation of
couples who would otherwise have married and perhaps so did later.
Illegitimacy remained until the end of the supposedly very respectable 1950s at
levels not seen since the fairly high levels of the 1860s. Then it rose rapidly through the
60s, 70s, and faster of all 1980s. By 1993 more than one-third of all births in E&W
occurred outside marriage. From the 1970s, a growing proportion of births were jointly
registered by unmarried parents, suggesting that they were in a stable relationship and
that the father acknowledged parenthood: 49 % in 1975; 78 % in 1996.
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The main reasons for unmarried motherhood over centuries before the 1960s
were : i) unmarried cohabitation; ii) mistakes, often by young women deceived by
married men; and ii) geographical mobility, when the man had moved on- for reasons of
war or work, before the pregnancy was identified. Some unmarried mothers gave up
their children for adoption. Others lived in a variety of circumstances. Either stably
cohabiting with the father (about one-third according to surveys in 1950s). About another
third lived with their own parents, the child sometimes growing up thinking that
grandparents were his/her parents. Others lived alone in various, sometimes in unhappy
circumstances, but many later married and kept their child.
Parenting
Want to say something now about the history of attitudes to parenting. We’ve seen that
children have always grown up in a variety of family situations. I pointed out in my talk
to the first of these seminars how rare it was before second world war for mothers to give
a lot of time to childcare: the better off delegated it to servants; poorer women to family
members and neighbours because they had to work. After WW 2 to 1960s pressure on
women to care full-time for their children was strong and unprecedented. Concern was
repeatedly expressed that if young children were not cared for primarily, indeed
exclusively, by their mothers, there was a danger that they would grow up ‘delinquent’the contemporary term for youth crime. There was a succession of moral panics about
‘juvenile delinquency’ from 1930s-1960s, though no clear signs that there was more
youth crime than before.
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This emphasis on maternal care began before the war and was strengthened after
the war. It owed much to the growth and the growing influence of psychology and the
growth of social research into social conditions and crime. There was a parallel, new,
concern with the importance of fatherhood for the emotional development of children.
Fathers were not expected to take the same caring role as mothers, but to be sources of
stability and discipline within the home and particularly to provide their sons with good
role models of hard work and good behaviour. Even earlier in the century there had been
concern that ‘delinquency’ among boys was caused because fathers did not provide good
role models, either because they were wholly absent or because they were too busy at
work and not around enough. And often over-crowded homes were no comfortable
environments for family life. The absence of good male role models was held to explain
why boys were more prone to crime than girls. Fathers in the 1950s often said that they
were determined to give their children love support and guidance because they felt that
they had suffered from the lack of it when young from fathers too exhausted by work to
care for them.
What changed by the 1950s was that more families were better off, had better
homes and living conditions and fathers and mothers had time and space to think about
their children and give them more support than their own parents could have done. And
families were smaller and there was optimism about the future- an assumption that
children had better future prospects than their parents in an apparently expanding
economy. Parents were encouraged by an atmosphere, fostered by the media, which saw
the stable 2-parent family as the solution to social problems such as’ juvenile delinquency’
and teenage pregnancy. This was another cause of moral panics at the time though it
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wasn’t rising faster than the number of teenage girls in the population.
Mothers’
responsibility didn’t end when their children went to school. Mothers of school age
children were castigated if they were not at home after school and in the holidays. ‘Latchkey kids’ were another source of the many moral panics of the 1950s – kids who got into
trouble because their mothers weren’t at home for them so they had their own door-keys.
This partly explains the large numbers of women in part-time work at this time.
At this time, and before, it wasn’t specifically lone mothers who got the blame for
social problems, as they have more recently, although there were plenty of them around,
including widows from the war, but two parent families, where the mother did not devote
herself to the care of her children in the early years and fathers did not shoulder their
responsibilities.
From the 1970s, and even more the 80s, there were increasing numbers of lone
mothers, because of increased divorce and separation and increasingly, especially in the
early 90s they and absent fathers became objects of blame for youth crime, poor
educational performance etc. An interesting shift. The social problems identified hadn’t
changed since the late 19th c but the diagnosis of the causes had changed, though they
were still located in the family.
It remains to speculate about what changed and why from the late 1960s. It can
only be speculation because what happened was a major, and international, cultural
change which happened very rapidly and which no-one seems fully able to explain,
though it appears to be a product of societies which were better off, better educated, less
deferential to supposedly traditional values than before, assisted by the emergence of the
birth control pill increasing the opportunities for sex without the danger of pregnancy.
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What followed in terms of families was that the divorce rate grew rapidly after the
change in the law, from an average of 57,089 petitions per year in 1966-70 165,000 in
1993 before declining as fewer people married. Wives were markedly more likely to
petition for divorce than husbands, though women were more likely to suffer financially
from divorce. Divorce like cohabitation largely lost its stigma. Another change was the
end of much of the secrecy and shame that had long surrounded aspects of personal
behaviour in England: the many families where illegitimacy, divorce, rape, violence and
abuse, also death and mental illness were not referred to, as they were not in public
discourse . Since the ‘sixties’ almost everything is public, for good or ill. Whatever the
reasons, it’s a major cultural change.
Critics have seen these changes as destroying the ‘traditional’ stable family. I
have argued that the historical universality of this family form is largely mythological,
though it was closer to reality from the late 1940s to the early 1970s than ever before. Yet
the divorce rates that followed the 1969 reform and the caution about entering long-term
partnerships at early ages among the generation that grew up in post-war families, their
unwillingness to emulate their parents, suggest that this may not altogether have been a
rare period of harmonious family life. Family life in Britain- and no doubt everywherehas always been complex and changing.
A final concluding point. Throughout history people have been aware of social
problems- of crime, violence, abuse. Perhaps what was new in 20th c, beginning in the
19th was the belief that they really could be solved, with the help of emerging expertise in
psychology and the social sciences, apparently increasing understanding of the problems
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and with the growth of government action, reaching into areas previously thought private
and beyond its remit. These hopes may have been over-optimistc.
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