gender post 1939 Flashcards
1
Q
David Clarke; ‘Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change’
A
- Work done by women between school and marriage was considered less important than work done by men – it was a mere ‘stopgap’ for a woman on her way to becoming a mother.
- Much disparity remained in interactions between men and women due to lack of education. Boys were not taught about their future responsibilities as husbands, and education for girls continued to emphasis their future roles as wives and mothers.
- The ideology of marriage did not have ‘equal partnership’ at its core. There was a profound dissonance between the post-war ideology of marriage which benefits were all on the husbands side, and the lived experience in which wives were striving unsuccessfully for a companionate marriage that worked to their advantage.
2
Q
(Own)
A
• Equality can be measured in more than gendered/employment terms – ideology of marriage did have the idea of equal partnership at its core. Continuing differences in the role of men and women were not unequal, but complimentary.
3
Q
Claire Langhamer; ‘The Meanings of Home in Post-War Britain’
A
- Dreams and aspirations formulated in the 1930s were realised in the 1950s wrt the household – desire for home-centred way of life. Longing for home intensified by war. Welfare state centred on family maintenance.
- Trend towards home-based leisure and consumption deepened in post-war years. Rise of TV and decline of cinema. Increase in attention to home aesthetics – growth of women’s magazines and popularity of show rooms (greater care given to this from women).
- Pride in having own front door. Link to Thatcher??
- There was an increased importance ascribed to the household in the post-war period, with particular consideration of the expansion of house-work concerning men. Occasionally men would even ‘share the washing up’.
- Model of masculinity shaped by location – e.g. Ashton community in Yorkshire – man’s activities focused outside the home. ‘family man’ of 1940s and 50s not a universal identity. More rigid gender roles in industrial areas.
- Challenges the assumption that post-war domesticity and ‘traditional’ gender roles were mutually reinforced
- Absence of somestic servants after the war; some women subjected to chores their mothers would have employed other women to perform. Flattening of class difference in lifestyles in middle/working class women.
- Women pressurised by new domestic labours? Perhaps enhanced by consumer durables (e.g. washing machines). Higher standards of home-making??
4
Q
Mark Francis; ‘A flight from commitment?’
A
- We should adopt scepticism towards narratives of male domestication in the twentieth century; men were more often than not unwilling to help out with domestic activities.
- Cites an essay by Lynne Segal, who describes the presence of misogynistic rebellion in a number of mining communities.
- Portrays a sense of post-war male restlessness – ‘yearning for the all-male camaraderie of service life’. However, this manifested itself in purely fictional terms – e.g. ‘Scott of the Antarctic – popular film. Also intertwines issues such as the decline of Empire.
- The reformed conception of married life ‘raised as many questions as it provided solutions’ – ambiguities over the respective responsibilities of husband and wife.
5
Q
Pat Thane; ‘Unequal Britain’
A
- 1950s were the ‘Golden Age’ of the long-lasting marriage
- gender inequalities strong in 1945, and a reinforcement of gender roles throughout the post-war period.
- Overall, little change in the division of Labour within the home.
- Housework and childcare do not necessarily go to whoever has more time – unemployed men often found to have done very little in the home.
- Institutionalisation of gender inequality gained momentum again in the 1990s.
6
Q
Weeks; ‘Making sexual history’
A
- Describes the emergence of common patterns in both homosexual and heterosexual ways of life as a result of ‘long-term shifts in relationship patterns’.
- Interplay of sex, power and politics.
7
Q
Fisher; ‘Birth control, sex and marriage in Britain 1918 – 1960
A
- Focuses on oral histories – good source because you can get information not included in official records.
- Argues that contraceptive choices were generally made by husbands during this period.
- Despite the availability of new contraceptives, traditional methods such as withdrawal and abstinence were still popular amongst those interviewed (193 ppl)
- Female interviewees often did not have the vocabulary to talk about their sexual lives.
- Note: how do class, religion and region impact on belief? Question is unanswered.
8
Q
Mort; ‘Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society’.
A
• Shows a cartoon published in Private Eye in 1963 – set in Trafalgar square, places people like the Queen, Macmillan (PM), newspaper editors etc. alongside strippers, prostitutes, liberated homosexuals. An ‘elaborate dystopia’.
• Uses West End of London as a prism through which to examine sexual changes.
• Challenges myths of the progressive view of the 1960s as a ‘permissive society’.
• Rejects the idea that the 1960s were a ‘watershed’.
- Many shady goings on in the 1950s, traditionally held as the innocent age.
- One ideal of manhood; fashionable man drawing on aristocratic libertinism.
- Links with a rejection of austerity – extravagant fashions etc., also about rejecting ‘Puritanism’ of the 1950s.
9
Q
Pat Ayers; ‘Work, culture and gender’
A
- In Liverpool, the restructuring of the local labour market had the potential to reshape personal and collective identities. In the post-war period masculinities were played out in new areas; traditional waterfront location was replaced by factories and the household.
- Activities such as DIY and gardening became ‘sewn into the masculinities associated with new industries’.
- Ayers’ description of male identity in Liverpool in the 1960s as being based on the possession of fashionable clothes, records, guitars, and ‘enough pocket money to pay for nights out in city centre clubs’. Linked to changing youth culture.
- Argues that collective identities of manhood in Liverpool not only emphasised working class male identity, but also excluded black men.
- A man’s ability to control the supply of money to his family remained a key aspect of male identity.
- Men continued to derive a clear sense of manliness from rigidly sex-segmented labour markets (own: less important now in an industrial sense, but still poignant in science and engineering which remain male-dominated).
10
Q
Dolly Smith Wilson; ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker’
A
- Increase in the incidence of women’s part time work was almost entirely responsible for the change in women’s participation in the labour market.
- Mothers faced difficulty justifying even part-time employment in the post-war period. Linked with ideas about ‘affluence’.
- There was an idea of working mothers being either ‘needy or greedy’. Women forced to justify their work in terms of their children. Otherwise, working mothers portrayed as selfish, sacrificing the upbringing of their children for a disposable income to be spent on unnecessary consumer durables associated with the period of ‘affluence’ in the 1950s and 1960s. Enhances idea of women’s work as being secondary to men’s.
- Many people believed that the increase in juvenile delinquency in the post-war period was linked to the increasing number of mothers going out to work.
11
Q
Penny Summerfield; ‘Women in Britain since 1945’
A
- Women continued to occupy ‘a secondary sector of the labour market in which - along with black people, the disabled and the elderly – they were treated as more dispensable and less skilled than white men’.
- Unmarried mothers depicted in 1950s literature as being ‘pathologically disturbed’.
12
Q
Sarah Aiston; ‘A Good Job for a Good Girl?’
A
• University careers services were aimed at men – they would go on to have ‘careers’, whereas women would only have ‘jobs’.
13
Q
Carolyn Steedman; ‘Landscape for a Good Woman’
A
- In the 1950s state intervention in childhood was highly visible
- The presence of milk, cod liver oil tablets etc – Steedman had the impression that she had the right to exist.
14
Q
Heron; ‘Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing un in the Fifties’
A
- 50s identified as a time where children and maternal rhetoric were valued by the state
- ‘the war is our shadow, as are the hungry years before it’
- In the time of ‘affluence’ and widely available consumer goods, there is a relationship between material circumstances and subjective identity.
15
Q
Webster; ‘Imagining home: gender, ‘race’ and national identity, 1945-64
A
- Post-war years seen as a time when the British family retreated into the home to heal the scars of the war.
- Describes the difficulty of post-war domesticity (austerity).
- Men were particularly attracted to family life – contrast with the war/barrack life
- Britain reinvented the concept of the home in face of migration from the Empire. E.g. migrants often castigated for the irregularities of their home life.
