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THE SELF AND SELF-HELP: WOMEN PURSUING AUTONOMY IN POST-WAR BRITAIN

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2019

Lynn Abrams
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Abstract

In the history of post-war womanhood in Britain, women's self-help organisations are credited with little significance save for ‘helping mothers to do their work more happily’. This paper suggests that the do-it-yourself impetus of the 1960s and 1970s should be regarded as integral to understanding how millions of women negotiated a route towards personal growth and autonomy. Organisations like the National Housewives’ Register, the National Childbirth Trust and the Pre-School Playgroups Association emerged from the grass roots in response to the conundrum faced by women who experienced dissatisfaction and frustration in their domestic role. I argue that these organisations offered thousands of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence and that far from being insufficiently critical of dominant models of care, women's self-help operating at the level of the everyday was to be one of the foundations of what would become, by the 1970s, the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 29 , December 2019 , pp. 201 - 221
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2019 

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References

1 Wellcome Trust Archives: NCT PP/GDR/F/12: Box 64. Minutes of the area organiser/helpers meeting 1 November 1960, London.

2 Wellcome Trust Archives: NCT SA/NCT/A/1/1/2: NCT Official Opening of Headquarters 1 December 1964. Opening address by Viscountess Enfield.

3 Wellcome Trust Archives: NCT SA/NCT/A/1/1/2: Parents’ Group Bulletin Vol. 11 no.3 1956.

4 Wellcome Trust: NCT SA/NCT/A/1/1/2: Handwritten script of a talk or speech (no name or date) to accompany the showing of the film (undated).

5 These organisations do appear in more popular and journalistic treatments of women in post-war Britain, for instance Mary Ingham, Now We Are Thirty: Women of the Breakthrough Generation (1981) and Suzanne Lowry, The Guilt Cage: Housewives and a Decade of Liberation (1980). The NCT and PPA have been discussed by Angela Davis in relation to the modern histories of motherhood and childcare: Davis, Modern Motherhood: Women and the Family in England 1945–2000 (Manchester, 2012) and Pre-School Childcare in England 1939–2010 (Manchester, 2015). The NHR features in Ali Haggett, Desperate Housewives, Neuroses and the Domestic Environment 1945–1970 (2012).

6 Although NCT was launched via the Times newspaper.

7 Women Talking: An Anthology from the Guardian Women's Page 1922–35, 1957–71, ed. Mary Stott (1987), 225. Stott edited the page from 1957 to 1972.

8 Ibid., 225–33.

9 Ingham, Now We Are Thirty.

10 This approach is adopted by Elizabeth Wilson in Only Halfway to Paradise: Women in Postwar Britain: 1945–68 (1980), and Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The Struggle for Women's Liberation (1982).

11 See Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein, Women's Two Roles (1956), and for a recent analysis of the legacy of this interpretive model see McCarthy, Helen, ‘Social Science and Married Women's Employment in Postwar Britain’, Past & Present, 233 (2016), 269–305CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Organised feminism and women's liberation, whilst still awaiting a comprehensive history, functions as a magnetic pole for analyses of women's position in post-war Britain.

12 Examples of the former would include Hannah Gavron, The Captive Wife: Conflicts of Housebound Mothers (Harmondsworth, 1966); Pearl Jephcott with Nancy Seear and John H. Smith, Married Women Working (1962); Viola Klein, Britain's Married Women Workers (1965). See McCarthy, ‘Social Science’; and Lewis, Jane, ‘From Equality to Liberation: Contextualizing the Emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement’, in Cultural Revolution? The Challenge of the Arts in the 1960s, ed. Moore-Gilbert, B. and Seed, John (1992), 96–117Google Scholar.

13 Beaumont, Catriona, Housewives and Citizens. Domesticity and the Women's Movement in England, 1928–64 (Manchester, 2013)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Innes, Sue, ‘Constructing Women's Citizenship in the Inter-war Period: The Edinburgh Women's Citizens’ Association’, Women's History Review, 13 (2004), 621–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 See Stoller, Sarah, ‘Forging a Politics of Care: Theorizing Household Work in the British Women's Liberation Movement’, History Workshop Journal, 85 (2018), 95–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise, 184.

15 Jane Lewis, ‘From Equality to Liberation: Contextualising the Emergence of the Women's Liberation Movement’, in Cultural Revolution?, ed. Moore-Gilbert and Seed, 96–117.

16 See Pascoe, Carla, ‘From the Little Wife to the Supermum? Maternographies of Feminism and Mothering in Australia since 1945’, Feminist Studies, 45 (2019), 100–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marks, Lynne, ‘“A Job that should be Respected”: Contested Visions of Motherhood and English Canada's Second Wave Women's Movements, 1970–1990’, Women's History Review, 25 (2016), 771–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stoller, ‘Forging a Politics of Care’.

17 See, for example, Beaumont, Housewives and Citizens; Beaumont, ‘Housewives, Workers and Citizens: Voluntary Women's Organisations and the Campaign for Women's Rights in England and Wales during the Postwar Period’, in NGOs in Contemporary Britain: Non State Actors in Society and Politics since 1945, ed. N. Crowson et al. (Basingstoke, 2009), 59–76; Innes, ‘Constructing Women's Citizenship’.

18 Examples here include Liddington, Jill, The Road to Greenham Common: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Macrae, Eilidh, Exercise in the Female Life-Cycle in Britain, 1930–1970 (Basingstoke, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19 Callum G. Brown, Religion and the Demographic Revolution: Women and Secularisation in Canada, Ireland, UK and USA since the 1960s (2012); Szreter, Simon and Fisher, Kate, Sex before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We await a serious study of the ‘expressive revolution’ as it was experienced by women via therapeutic practice but see Haggett, Desperate Housewives, for a discussion of female ‘neurosis’.

20 See Freedman, M., ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships: Rethinking the Feminist Critique’, in Feminists Rethink the Self, ed. Meyers, D. Teitjens (Boulder, 1997), 40–61Google Scholar, and Mackenzie, C. and Stoljar, N. (eds.), Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

21 B. Martin, A Sociology of Contemporary Cultural Change (Oxford, 1981). For a discussion of how this impacted on women's narratives of the period see Lynn Abrams, ‘Heroes of Their Own Life Stories: Narrating the Female Self in the Feminist Age’, Cultural and Social History (2019), advance online publication. For an exception to the tendency to see women's autonomy and self-expression as mutually dependent see Wilson, Dolly Smith, ‘A New Look at the Affluent Worker: The Good Working Mother in Post-War Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 17 (2006), 206–29CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which argues that working women responded to the denigration of working mothers by demanding part-time work and demonstrating that a woman who worked benefited her family.

22 Betty Jerman, ‘Squeezed in like sardines in suburbia’, The Guardian, 19 February 1960.

23 Maureen Nicol cited in Betty Jerman, The Lively-Minded Women. The First Twenty Years of the National Housewives Register (1981), 29.

24 The Guardian, August 1961.

25 Jerman, Lively-Minded Women, 10.

26 Women's Library: NHR Spring Newsletter 1966. (Consulted at the former premises of the Women's Library, London Metropolitan University, where NHR newsletters were available on open shelves.)

27 Cited in Jerman, Lively-Minded Women, 22–3.

28 The term ‘cake-icers’ was used by NHR national organiser Lesley Moreland to describe those women who were domestically inclined. Cited in ibid., 35.

29 Ibid., 67; LSE, Women's Library: NHR Spring Newsletter 1966; Autumn Newsletter 1966.

30 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/1/16: Survey reports 1966–. Survey published 1967, conducted by University of Manchester Extramural Department.

31 LSE, Women's Library, NHR Newsletters, Autumn 1966.

32 LSE, Women's Library, 5/NWR/1/15 Correspondence 1969–1972: Sheila Partington to Lesley Taylor, 1965.

33 Jerman, Lively-Minded Women, 48.

34 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/5/3: Maureen Nicol. Letter from Chris White, 17 February 1994.

35 LSE, Women's Library: NHR Spring Newsletter 1966 (Cardiff).

36 See Lowry, The Guilt Cage, 86.

37 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/1/16 Survey reports 1966–.

38 LSE, Women's Library: NHR Newsletter, October 1965.

39 LSE, Women's Library: Spring Newsletter 1966.

40 LSE, Women's Library: NHR 5/NWR/1: unidentified press cutting (Yorkshire newspaper), undated, c. 1970.

41 Sunday Times, 1967. Jerman discusses the article and NHR's response in Lively-Minded Women, 62.

42 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/1/15 Correspondence 1969–1972.

43 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/4/1 (box 14): Sheerness Times Guardian, 28 August 1981.

44 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/4/1/28 Kent 1970–1992, Kent and Sussex Courier, Tunbridge Wells 6 March 1992; 5/NWR/4/1/35 Norfolk 1971–1995, Norwich Mercury and Advertiser 7 October 1988.

45 Interview with Kathleen (pseudonym), conducted by Lynn Abrams, 2011.

46 For examples of this trajectory see Abrams, Lynn, ‘Liberating the Female Self: Epiphanies, Conflict and Coherence in the Life Stories of Post-War British Women’, Social History, 39 (2014), 14–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47 PPA's founder Belle Tutaev had helped the NHR Harrow group set up a crèche and helped to edit New Forum, produced by NHR members. See Jerman, Lively-Minded Women, 151–2.

48 See Lewis, Jane, ‘The Failure to Expand Childcare Provision and to Develop a Comprehensive Childcare Policy in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s’, Twentieth Century British History, 24 (2013), 249–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Randall, Vicky, The Politics of Child Daycare in Britain (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

49 UCL, Institute of Education Archive, Pre-School Playgroup Association Collection (hereafter PLA) PPA 16/1–3: Playgroup News, issue 1, 1969.

50 PLA/PPA 1/1: Comparison Report, 1967–9, p. 1

51 PLA/PPA 6/1 (3): Memories of Playgroups: Cynthia Robinson.

52 Ibid.

53 PLA/PPA 6/1: Memories (Anon Essex).

54 Gray, M. and McMahon, L., Families in Playgroups. A Study of the Effect of Playgroup Experience on Families (Reading, 1982)Google Scholar cited in McMahon, L., ‘The Significance of Play for Children and Adults’, in Insights from the Playgroup Movement: Equality and Autonomy in a Voluntary Organisation, ed. Henderson, A. (Stoke-on-Trent, 2011), 30Google Scholar.

55 PLA/PPA/4/6: Brenda Crowe, ‘Parent Involvement’, in Parents in Playgroups (c.1971).

56 McMahon, ‘The Significance of Play’, 32–3.

57 LSE, Women's Library: 5/NWR/4/21/33 Merseyside 1968–1990: The Reporter, 19 April 1985 St Helens.

58 PLA/PPA 5/4: Contact magazine 1964.

59 PLA PPA 1–4: Crowe area report, Birmingham February 1968.

60 Wright, V., Abrams, A. Kearns, L. and Hazley, B., ‘Planning for Play: Seventy Years of Ineffective Public Policy? The Example of Glasgow, Scotland’, Planning Perspectives, 34 (2019), 243–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

61 PLA/PPA 2/9: Scottish PPA to Scottish Education Department, 1965.

62 Hazley, B., Abrams, V. Wright, L. and Kearns, A., ‘“People and their homes rather than housing in the usual sense”? Locating the Tenant's Voice in Homes in High Flats’, Women's History Review, 29 (2019), 728–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

63 PLA/PPA 2/28: Scottish Pre-School Playgroups Association, Playgroups in Areas of Need (1977), 13.

64 Ibid.

65 See Abrams, L., Wright, L. Fleming, B. Hazley, V. and Kearns, A., ‘Isolated and Dependent: Women and Children in High-Rise Social Housing in Post-War Glasgow’, Women's History Review, 29 (2019), 794–813CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 PLA/PPA FAW: ‘Playgroups for Non-Working Mothers’, Times Educational Supplement (1971).

67 See Playgroups in Areas of Need and Finch, Janet, ‘The Deceit of Self Help: Preschool Playgroups and Working-Class Mothers’, Journal of Social Policy, 13 (1984), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The PPA was not blind to the problem. On a visit to Birmingham in 1968 Brenda Crowe was confronted with the realities of a ‘deprived’ area where mothers required nurseries and nursery schools with trained staff rather than playgroups. PLA/PPA 1–4, Area Report, Birmingham February 1968.

68 PLA/PPA FAW: ‘Social Gap and Playschools’, The Guardian 1971.

69 PLA/PPA 4/46: Barbara Keeley, ‘The Effect of Pre-School Provision on the Mothers of Young Children’ (M.Sc. thesis, Cranfield Institute of Technology, 1980), 70.

70 Ibid., 76.

71 Ibid., 72–3.

72 Finch, ‘The Deceit of Self Help’; Finch, Janet, ‘A First-Class Environment? Working-Class Playgroups as Pre-School Experience’, British Educational Research Journal, 10 (1984), 3–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 Davis, Modern Motherhood, 38–9.

74 PLA/PPA/2/28: Playgroups in Areas of Need, 7.

75 Ibid., 15.

76 See Davis, Modern Motherhood, 36–7.

77 The PPA at national level regarded itself as a network rather than a hierarchy, ‘mutually supportive and independent’. Insights, ed. Henderson, xvii.

78 PLA/PPA 16/1: Memories (Anonymous Dunstable).

79 The Guardian, 16 February 1966.

80 Insights, ed. Henderson, xv.

81 PLA/PPA 1/3: Text of speeches given at PPA conference, June 1972. Max Paterson ‘Parents Matter Most’, 21.

82 Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise; Lowry, The Guilt Cage, 82.

83 Chodorow cited in Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships’, 43.