Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Administration in a Changing Society
- 2 The Social Division of Welfare
- 3 Pension Systems and Population Change
- 4 War and Social Policy
- 5 The Position of Women
- 6 Industrialization and the Family
- 7 The Hospital and its Patients
- 8 The National Health Service in England: Some Aspects of Structure
- 9 The National Health Service in England: Some Facts about General Practice
- 10 The National Health Service in England: Science and the Sociology of Medical Care
- Appendix to Lectures on the National Health Service in England: Summary of Evidence and Sources of Reference on the Quantity and Quality of the General Practitioner’s Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
5 - The Position of Women
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2022
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- Preface to the Original Edition
- 1 Social Administration in a Changing Society
- 2 The Social Division of Welfare
- 3 Pension Systems and Population Change
- 4 War and Social Policy
- 5 The Position of Women
- 6 Industrialization and the Family
- 7 The Hospital and its Patients
- 8 The National Health Service in England: Some Aspects of Structure
- 9 The National Health Service in England: Some Facts about General Practice
- 10 The National Health Service in England: Science and the Sociology of Medical Care
- Appendix to Lectures on the National Health Service in England: Summary of Evidence and Sources of Reference on the Quantity and Quality of the General Practitioner’s Work
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
In a period when the possibilities of social progress and the practicability of applied social science are being questioned it is a source of satisfaction to recall some of the achievements of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain. The development of the personal, legal and political liberties of half the population of the country within the span of less than eighty years stands as one of the supreme examples of consciously directed social change.
There have been numerous historical and biographical studies of this Movement and of Millicent Fawcett and its other leaders. Many of these studies have analysed the political, legal and vocational consequences, though largely within a middle-class ethos. Few have been concerned with the working-class woman, and particularly with the conditions of life of the working-class mother. Yet, during the present century, far-reaching changes, social, economic and technological, have affected her status and role as a wife and mother, as a home-maker, as a contributor to the economy of the family, and in a variety of situations in the cycle of married life. Social historians and sociologists have been curiously neglectful of such studies and have allowed the subject of the position of women in modern society to be dominated by the psychologist, the psychiatrist and the sexologist.
The purpose of this essay is twofold. First, to draw together some of the vital statistics of birth, marriage and death for the light they shed on the changes that have taken place since the beginning of the century in the social position of women. Secondly, to suggest that the accumulated effect of these changes now presents the makers of social policy with some new and fundamental problems.
The fall in the birth rate in Western societies is one of the dominating biological facts of the twentieth century. Commenting on the British statistics, the 1949 Report of the Royal Commission on Population noted the rapidity of the decline in family size after 1900. Viewed within the context of the long period of industrial change since the seventeenth century, it is the rapidity of this fall which is as remarkable as the extent of the fall over the past fifty years.
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- Essays on the Welfare State (Reissue) , pp. 54 - 64Publisher: Bristol University PressPrint publication year: 2018