Preliminary Programme

In 1956, the National Council of Women (NCW), an organisation representing over 90 affiliated women’s societies, surveyed its members to ascertain ‘the effects on the family of the employment of married women with children’. The findings revealed that the main motive for married women working was economic, coupled with the desire to be more financially independent. The results of this survey echoed earlier expressions of support by housewives’ associations for the right of wives and mothers to engage in paid work. Giving evidence in 1944 to the Royal Commission on Population the NCW, along with the Mothers’ Union, highlighted ‘a growing reluctance on the part of women to lose the economic independence they enjoyed before marriage’. These views illustrate that women’s organisations were grappling with the question of who ‘keeps the family’ and how to combine paid work with motherhood a decade before the publication of Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein’s ground breaking Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work (1956).
This paper examines how popular women’s organisations, including the NCW and Mothers’ Union, reacted to the increasing numbers of married women engaging in paid work throughout the 1950s and 1960s. An analysis of the NCW survey, along with articles and letters published in the magazines of housewives’ associations, reveals how these groups engaged in debates about married women working and ‘who keeps the family’. Their views and concerns uncover why and how housewives’ associations came to question the male breadwinner model and shifted attention away from husbands to the contribution that wives, and the State, could make to family incomes in postwar Britain. (Show less)

Helen McCarthy has recently observed the post-war model rested on women’s acceptance of a bargain that their work would not disturb wider inequalities in the labour market and home. And that this left: ‘Lone mothers … standing outside, looking in’. One Parent families were 8% of all families in the UK in 1971, rising to 20% of all families in 1992. These numbers, fuelled by increasingly negative media coverage, made issues around state support for single-parenthood some of the most contested, and ones which increasingly challenged the post-war welfare model.
This paper will use the case study of Mothers in Action, a pressure group set up by single mothers in 1969, to argue that the male breadwinner model remained influential on welfare structures in the 1970s and 1980s, to the detriment of single parent households. Using testimony from single mothers it will demonstrate how lived experience can offer a lens through which to reveal the personal and emotional responses to normative welfare practices, and how these responses can catalyse an activism which can challenge ways of how to ‘do’ welfare. In contrast to narratives which position expertise as a central category in the development of welfare practices it will argue that developing new histories of the experiential can offer wider readings of change and continuities in welfare cultures and practices. (Show less)

This paper examines a number of testimonies and opinion polls - including a January 1944 Mass Observation directive - concerning the question of married women’s right to undertake paid work in Britain in and around the Second World War. It explores the ways in which the general public – some of whom were working wives themselves – conceptualised the issue and the ways in which they justified their opinions. Many respondents were conscious of the needs of working-class wives, for example, whilst also categorising the professional woman as set apart from many other potential working wives. Responses were also steeped in expected gender roles and anxieties around the future of these, as well as in projections about the economy and lifestyle. At particular times, respondents identified married women’s right to work as a feminist issue.
This paper is part of a wider cultural history of the marriage bar and married women’s right to work. It is focused on exploring women’s experiences as working wives, on employer regulations, and on wider social attitudes to married women’s paid work. (Show less)