The nineteenth-century bourgeois family model has come to occupy a central place in the modern imagination. As Gillis observes, ‘Today our mental maps are filled with homeplaces and our mental clocks set to family times that did not even exist before the nineteenth century.’66 In terms of its structure, its functions and its ways of exhibiting a particular mode of family life, the concept of family that was developed amongst the nineteenth-century European bourgeoisie has come to dominate to such a degree that alternative forms have hitherto received only marginal attention. According to Segalen, in nineteenth-century Europe the bourgeoisie ‘shared an ideology which unified them over and above their material distinctions, by placing at the centre of their values a family model which played a considerable social role. . . both within domestic groups and kinship networks’.67 This new familial idea - and it must be stressed that this was only an idea - encompassed form and function. The single-family model centred upon the conjugal unit came to be seen as the norm, and any alternative forms such as single parenthood or cohabitation were regarded as unacceptable deviations. Moreover, family became analogous to home; the family identified those members of a related kin group who lived under the same roof. It excluded other members of the household such as boarders and servants.
This is not to say that households became any less complex or that the notion of what constituted family became more exclusive. Bourgeois households might typically contain a married couple with their several children plus additional relatives - perhaps an unmarried sister or a widowed parent - and multifarious boarders and domestic servants. So while nuclear family size declined markedly from mid-century onwards, the extended family household was ubiquitous. And kin who lived outwith the conjugal household were still regarded as family, albeit in a wider sense of consanguinity. But, amongst this social class, the meaning of family changed. It was indicative of private space and time, distinct from work in terms of spatial and temporal delineation. Hence the function of the family altered. It was no longer a multitasking unit, which incorporated production, reproduction and consumption. Rather, family became at its core an intimate place, sheltered from the outside world, a sentiment expressed by the English writer John Ruskin in his paean on ‘home’:
It is a place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt and division. . . so far as the anxieties of the outer life penetrate into it. . . and the hostile society of the outer world is allowed either by husband or wife to cross the threshold, it ceases to be a home.68
The family thus imagined was an emotional unit geared to the sustenance of intimate relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children.
At the heart of this domestic familial ideal was the wife and mother. It has become axiomatic to state that family and home became synonymous with woman and femininity in nineteenth-century Europe. In contrast with the eighteenth century, when a household was defined by its patriarchal head, in the nineteenth century a family was not worthy of the name without a woman at its core. Conversely, a woman who lived outwith a family was pitied as lacking the opportunity to fulfil her true womanly role. A woman’s source of personal fulfilment was located within the bosom of her family. The sublimation of a woman’s identity in the mutual roles of wife, mother and domestic manager (and her disassociation from productive work) was an intrinsic part of this new familial ideal.
The family domain is often described as synonymous with the concept of the private sphere, as contrasted with the public sphere of work, commerce and politics. The association of these separate spheres with different gender roles was commonplace in the nineteenth century. It is now widely accepted that religious discourses - evangelical in England, Catholic in France, Lutheran in Scandinavia - effectively shaped notions of the female role as primarily domestic, but the discourse on the ‘angel in the house’ was remarkably pervasive and widespread. The words of one French aristocrat and restorationist - ‘Women belong to the family and not to political society, and nature created them for domestic cares and not for public functions’69 - were a concrete articulation of the ideology of separate spheres that was repeated and reaffirmed across Protestant and Catholic Europe.
In practical terms, what did this mean for women of the bourgeoisie? Did the ideology of domesticity infer women’s containment within the family or did it enhance the value of the roles of domestic manager and mother? Bonnie Smith’s examination of the lives of the wives of industrialists in northern France suggests both are true. On the one hand these women embraced domesticity. They created homes that were an expression of female culture centred upon family and religion. They fashioned a world in which ‘feminine’ values were dominant, entirely separate from the world of business: ‘the bourgeois woman lived in an atmosphere and acted according to precepts entirely at odds with the industrial, market, egalitarian, and democratic world - the world, that is, of her husband’.70 These women’s lives appear to mirror almost perfectly the religious and moral injunctions imparted to them by their mothers, their teachers and the church.
Elsewhere though, women of the middle classes were creating a family life that could not be contained within the concept of the private sphere. Although there appears to be little doubt that married women of this class did withdraw from the formal world of work in line with the identification of them as dependants, they certainly maintained an interest in and influence over the business activity of their husbands and wider kin. English women contributed financial resources to family businesses, they maintained and furthered networks of family and kin as a means of sustaining the family enterprise, and some participated actively in the businesses of their menfolk.71 In France, family businesses often combined the names of both husband and wife - the Mequillet-Noblet cotton company was typical, uniting Parisian bankers with channel-coast cotton merchants - recognising the role of marriage in harnessing the wealth and the vigour of the spouses.72 In Glasgow, married women may have been classified in the census as ‘dependants’ but many played an active role in their husbands’ professions and businesses, especially when they conducted their work from the family home as was often the case with ministers, doctors and lawyers.73 Nevertheless, a married woman was not expected to have an independent economic role; however much she contributed financially or culturally to the family enterprise, she was still primarily defined and judged on her domestic role, and for some women this amounted to an almost intolerable strain. The wives of German civil servants - amongst the lower echelons of the middle classes - in their struggles to conform to the respectable lifestyle of the bourgeoisie resorted to elaborate deceptions (amongst one another) such as hiring a dinner service and extra servants for a dinner party in order to give the impression of the comfortable bourgeois lifestyle.74 This was family on display.
Domestic family life now demanded as much of women as the complex and busy household had a century earlier. The newly fashioned home of the urban middle classes became a female space; it was women’s responsibility to transform a house into a home and the home into a haven from the busy, ugly world of commerce. The middle-class dwelling place was increasingly located in the new residential areas of cities and in the suburbs such as Glasgow’s West End, Hamburg’s Harvestehude and London’s Clapham Common and was, for the commercial classes, separated from the workplace. This segregation was mirrored in the interior of the home where family and work spaces were clearly separate. Domestic, private family rooms were distanced from the kitchen (site of much labour conducted out of view by female domestic servants) as well as bedrooms and bathrooms. Nevertheless, the home was still a workplace for women. Much labour was required to create the fussy, heavy interiors favoured by nineteenth-century middle-class families. Drawing rooms and parlours were stuffed with furniture, textiles, ornaments and adornments of every kind, antimacassars, embroidered screens and footstools, mats, tray covers, and so on, many of them made by the women of the house. Homemaking and housekeeping merged in these households. The contentment of the family rested upon the skills of the woman of the house in maintaining a tight ship, or an efficient army to paraphrase the language of the doyenne of British housekeeping, Mrs Isabella Beeton. In her Book of Household Management published in 1861, she urged the mistress of the house to compare herself with the ‘commander of an army’ and to lead by example for ‘Her spirit will be seen through the whole establishment; and just in proportion as she performs her duties intelligently and thoroughly, so will her domestics follow in her path’.75 In the larger middle-class houses, the mistress of the house needed to acquire a range of skills more suited to running a small business than a family home. She hired, fired and supervised the servants, planned menus, oversaw the accounts, shopped, ran errands, and prepared country homes for long holiday visits. In smaller households with fewer servants she would take on some of the housework personally, but always keeping in mind that she should endeavour to cultivate the appearance of gentility.
The emphasis on appearance alerts us to the permeable nature of the private domestic sphere in the middle-class milieu. The family and its home were on display - to the servants, to visitors, to business colleagues. Amongst working-class families this permeability is often taken for granted by contemporary observers of social conditions in the urban environment and by historians. Families living in crowded housing and in poverty were, it is assumed, in and out of each other’s dwellings, with women in particular reliant upon reciprocal networks beyond the immediate family. Yet, there was hardly less pressure in these communities to conform to cultural norms and the pressure was, more often than not, exerted by women. The moral compulsion to keep one’s front step whitened, or to maintain a clean communal stair in tenements was little different from middle-class women’s need to entertain using the best china and linen. In the case of working-class women though, external agencies as well as members of their own community passed judgement on their housekeeping skills. And, health visitors, inspectors of the poor, child-savers and a host of philanthropists carried with them middle-class notions of family domesticity. Female philanthropists, bolstered by their own faith in the maternal role in the home, believed they had a duty to the ‘great social household’. In England, the housing reformer Octavia Hill deliberately used female sanitary visitors, exploiting working-class women’s acceptance of discourses on cleanliness and hygiene. Jewish female philanthropists made it their job to ensure new migrants’ homes were reaching acceptable domestic standards in order to avoid criticisms by non-Jews regarding low standards of housewifery and domestic management amongst the immigrant community.
Homemaking was hard work and yet this labour - housework, household management, childcare and the creation of the domestic interior - was defined as unproductive and therefore not valued, at least by others. However, many women did find satisfaction in their family role and sought to receive recognition for it when given the opportunity. In the divorce courts of Germany, women commonly cited their housekeeping and homemaking skills in evidence against their husbands, indicating that not only did women themselves recognise the value of this work in the home, but also that society in general acknowledged a woman’s worth in the domestic domain. In 1871, when accused by her husband of being an extravagant spendthrift, Henriette Dethgens countered that she
Has never shown an addiction to expenditure or a particular addiction to amusements. . . she has lived happily with the plaintiff for many years, has born him many children and has become prematurely old through her fulfilment of her duties as wife, mother and housewife. . . The plaintiff has increasingly rejected her and shows this rejection by treating her unkindly. . .76
The notion of the orderly household still had purchase in the nineteenth century, but now it was the woman of the house who was responsible, judged on her ability to conform to the new standards of domesticity.
The nineteenth-century family was not just woman-centred, it was mother-centred. A family without a mother could hardly be deemed a family at all. Lone fathers who sought to bring up their children following the death of a spouse were pitied. It was assumed that a man would not be able to cope and that children were deemed to require ‘mothering’, a skill men could not acquire. In the words of a female director of a Scottish children’s home, ‘a widower is perfectly helpless with children. He cannot mother the bairns and be the breadwinner too; while he tries to do a father's part, the children miss their mother.’77 Equally, a woman’s identity within her family was strongly determined by her mothering role, as evidenced by this memorial to Sarah Heath from Norfolk who died at the age of thirty-five in 1810:
Thus in the prime of life died much lamented a good Wife and an affectionate Mother whose happiness whilst on earth may truly be said to have chiefly centred in an excessive love for her Children and in the practice of those duties which will cause her loss to be deeply regretted and her Memory long revered.78
The mother-child relationship was at the heart of the new model of familial domesticity. Children came to fulfil an emotional and sentimental role within the family, as opposed to a financial role, and this required intensive parental and especially maternal involvement with children.
The good wife was also required to be the good mother. The good mother was an elaboration on the figure of the ‘natural mother’ popularised by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his 1762 novel Emile. The natural mother was she who trusted her maternal instincts and who bonded with her children physically (through breast-feeding) and emotionally by spending time with them. By the early nineteenth century, pedagogues and feminists had begun to expand the concept of good mothering beyond the natural. Motherhood became a public role, a duty, a responsibility, something to be taught to girls, as Rebecca Rogers demonstrates in Chapter 4. ‘Truly, the saying that “Your child will become whatever you are”’, wrote the German schoolteacher Betty Gleim, ‘is of such immeasurable importance, that, if she really feels it and lives by it, every mother ought to tremble before the responsibility that she takes on as a teacher and educator of the coming generation’.79 Mothers were assuming the roles formerly ascribed to fathers: the moral education of girls and boys and even training in manliness. To what extent did mothers embrace this role? It would be wrong to generalise. Some women immersed themselves in their children’s upbringing, noting all their foibles and personal details and sharing concerns and delights with their husbands. Others took a hands-off approach, spending little time with their children, especially if they employed an army of nursery-maids and nannies. Dominant ideas of motherhood were interpreted and practised in different ways, depending upon material circumstance and personal predilection but none could escape the importance accorded to motherhood in constructions of female identity.
Working-class women perhaps had less room for multiple or alternative interpretations of the maternal role. As Guttormsson has noted, ‘children’s work at an early age and their freedom of movement in the neighbourhood involved a degree of independence which was incompatible with middle-class conceptions of childhood’.80 In addition, the propensity of working-class families to move house frequently, the inadequacy of housing in most urban centres and the need for many women to undertake waged work either outside or within the home militated against the middle-class notion of the family as a constant haven where family members might secure the bonds of affection. In London, frequent demolition of housing and the transitory nature of employment in the city necessitated frequent flits, much to the despair of those concerned with social stability and welfare such as this London doctor who described the poor in 1902 as ‘extremely migratory in their habits. . . Comparatively few of the working classes settle down and let their own affections and those of their children take root.’81 And in all European cities women were obliged to work from home; the identification of women as primarily domestic and only secondary workers pushed the employment of married women in particular into their own homes or small workshops. The textile trade’s predilection for using outworkers or homeworkers on piece rates appeared to permit the coexistence of capitalist production and the new familial ideology, since it was argued that women with children could work when it suited them, fitting wage-earning around childcare and domestic responsibilities. But of course homework competed with familial space and time; homes became workshops, full of manufacturing accoutrements, and children were used as additional labour. Family life, as it was imagined by the middle classes, and home production were incompatible. The ideology of separate spheres, which defined the man of the house as the breadwinner and the woman as homemaker, could not fit the material circumstances of most working-class families. Nevertheless, as a hegemonic discourse it indirectly influenced the ways in which working-class families lived their lives. The churches, the state, employers and philanthropic organisations promoted the middle-class family model as the ideal way of structuring working-class lives. At the level of spatial organisation within the home, the practice amongst the British working classes of maintaining a pristine parlour - a ‘shrine to respectability and domesticity’ - for Sundays and entertaining, appears incomprehensible in the context of overcrowded dwellings and was seen by contemporaries as folly but, as Seccombe points out, the parlour was ‘the inspiration of working-class homemakers, forging an inner sanctum against the din, dust and drudgery of daily life’.82 More generally, employers and many male trade unionists conveniently utilised this ideology to subordinate women’s labour. A French working-man’s newspaper summed up this view: ‘Everyone understands that her place is elsewhere than in the political arena; her place is at the domestic hearth. Public functions belong to the man; private functions belong to the woman.’83 In Britain, the Chartists struggled with the tension between their belief in egalitarianism and in domesticity in regions where women formed a large proportion of the workforce. As Clark concludes, ‘Chartists claimed the privileges of domesticity for their wives and demanded entry into the public sphere for working men.’84 The language of the ‘family wage’ became an aspiration for many in the working classes who struggled to conform to the new familial model and who were judged if they deviated from it. It was not until the end of the century that some working-class families did achieve the model of familial domesticity that bourgeois Europeans had been propagating since the beginning of the century.
In the nineteenth century the new idea of family became powerful. It became associated with the home and with a series of well-defined gender roles - wife and mother, husband and father - which embodied the new model of familial domesticity. Family became a private thing, bounded by relationships between kin and by the material and physical structures of domesticity. One of the consequences of this development was what has been described as ‘self-conscious familialism’: the practice of doing family.85 And because women were at the heart of family life they also became the instigators of the new family rituals which affirmed the value of family life to its members and to onlookers. Family was put on display, most obviously on the ritualised life-cycle occasions such as weddings, baptisms and funerals which, in previous eras, had not been necessarily or exclusively family events. And such occasions were increasingly feminised. Weddings became woman-centred, marking a woman’s most important rite of passage and they became occasions for feminine display and female networking. And while the middle classes felt that a funeral was not an appropriate place for a woman - she was deemed too sensitive and unable to control her emotions in public - women did embody the grief at the loss of a family member by wearing black mourning clothes. Women then, represented their families at such times.
The withdrawal of the family into the private space of the home was accompanied by a self-conscious acting out of family on certain ritualised occasions: Christmas, birthdays, holidays and, increasingly, Sundays became family time in the nineteenth century, replacing the traditional rituals of the agricultural year. But for women, family time necessitated work. The effort involved in decamping a large family to a summer villa drove some middle-class women to distraction and, once ensconced on the coast or in the mountains, they rarely had a chance to rest for it was commonplace to host streams of visitors. The new family ritual of Christmas involved women in a similar frenzy of activity: as Gillis remarks, ‘Christmas was made by rather than for them.’ Not only did they decorate the house, purchase the presents, organise the meal, and so on, but on this day ‘women were supposed to satisfy the imaginings of others, to be more wifely and more motherly on this day than on any other’, in contrast with men whose role was less circumscribed on this day than on any other.86 If Christmas was family ritual par excellence in Protestant and Catholic Europe, Sunday was Christmas in miniature, a weekly ritual which ironically required the labour of wives, mothers and female servants in order to create a family day. Evening church services in England and Wales attracted a higher proportion of women who could not attend in the daytime on account of the demands of preparing Sunday lunch. And in Jewish families, it was women’s work to ensure the family welcomed in the Sabbath on Friday evening. The traditional chicken dinner on Friday night required a lot more than just cooking; ‘creating a religious atmosphere was very hard work.’87 Women cleaned the house thoroughly while their menfolk were at the synagogue, creating a semblance of the good Jewish family home. According to one Glaswegian Jew,
During the week the house might be a chaotic place from which he was happy to retreat, but come the Sabbath and festivals, there was a transformation. Even a man who lived in a hovel - as most Jews once did - would return from the Synagogue to find a palace - the table laden, the rooms gleaming, his wife and daughters in their best clothes.88
Family time for women entailed working for the family in contrast with men for whom family was equated with leisure and repose.
The contraction of the concept and practice of family in the nineteenth century and its association with sentiment, left less space for those individuals - unmarried women and widows - who did not have a formal place within a domestic family unit. The early modern household had been a flexible space, literally and conceptually. The unmarried, the unattached and the widowed could be incorporated into household units as useful additions. Urban industrial Europe was less accommodating to those who existed outside a familial unit. Nineteenth-century European bourgeois society was family-centred in the way it imagined and projected itself and, increasingly, this model came to be practised within urban working-class communities too. Where did single and widowed women fit in a society in which marriage, motherhood and domesticity was held up as the ideal state and in which women were constructed as dependants? In the past, historians assumed that the rise of the private or domestic family of the nineteenth century marginalised these women, at least the poor among them. More recently, the place of the spinster has been rehabilitated by those who urge us to interpret spinsterhood as a choice for some or even an opportunity to reject the chains of domesticity as a form of resistance to the institution of marriage and motherhood. The independent businesswoman, the sprightly feminist spinster and the woman living in a female partnership have rejuvenated the negative image of the spinster and demonstrated that there were positive alternatives to the potential claustrophobia of the familial ideal.89
The idea of family may have changed, but its size and ability to absorb kin did not alter markedly. It is misleading to conflate the domestic familial idea with the reality of middle-class urban households in this period. Certainly the size of the nuclear family was decreasing during the nineteenth century amongst all sections of the middle class. In Glasgow for example, in 1851 the average size of the nuclear family was just 4.2 persons, yet average household size at this time was 8.1 including servants (5.2 excluding servants).90 It seems that these households still contained a variety of co-resident kin and in this sample up to 80 per cent were female with almost one half consisting of sisters and sisters-in-law. Furthermore, not all of these co-resident women were dependent upon male heads of household. Indeed, many were living with siblings. Thus, the unmarried women of middle-class Glasgow were not necessarily existing at the margins of other people’s families. Up to 50 per cent of households in some streets were headed by females, most of them widows. And many of these were independent women, supporting male and female dependants rather than being supported themselves.91
Nevertheless, the family model predicated upon the male breadwinner norm did impact on the choices of unmarried women and, to a lesser extent widows, especially amongst the working classes. In the absence of an inheritance, widows in this category were thrust into a state of dependence. In the northern English industrial town of Preston, 75 per cent of widowed women of all ages lived with their children, for the death of a spouse was a blow sufficient to thrust a woman into destitution. Childless widows were more likely to move in with relatives, not only because of the pressures on space but also on account of the resources she might bring to a household. A widow with no dependants herself would be able to contribute to the household pot.92 A similar situation prevailed in the Caux region of northern France where the decline of cottage spinning and the consequent contraction in work opportunities for women meant that unmarried or widowed females were unable to support themselves. In 1851 27 per cent of widows lived with their children whereas fifty years earlier the figure had been 20 per cent.93
The ultimate threat to the new model family, at least in discursive terms, was the unmarried mother. The ‘fallen woman’ stood in stark opposition to the chaste domestic angel of the ideal family, contained by marriage and economically dependent. However, single parenthood was rarely a lifestyle choice. Most mothers of illegitimate children had aspired to family life. The majority of single mothers were in their early twenties when they became pregnant, similar to the average age of first marriage, suggesting that they believed they were in a serious relationship, one that would lead to marriage. What had changed in the nineteenth-century urban environment was an easing of the moral and social pressures on men to marry their pregnant girlfriends. Moreover, the shift in employment options for young women, with domestic service and factory work incompatible with childcare, and changes in residential patterns owing to labour mobility that often left young women far from home and their kin networks, meant that lone mothers were uniquely vulnerable. And, as Anna Clark shows in Chapter 3, mothers of illegitimate children possessed few rights. One tragic case from late nineteenth-century Edinburgh vividly illustrates the plight of the single mother. In 1887 a young, unmarried domestic servant called Catherine Gunn, who was originally from the far north-east of Scotland, gave birth to twin boys. She immediately hired a woman at 4 shillings a week to take care of the boys ‘for I was in service at the time and could not do so myself’. After eleven months Catherine Gunn was no longer able to keep up these payments and she decided to have the children informally adopted. In response to an advertisement in the newspaper, two women were paid 2 pounds to take each of the boys separately. Shortly afterwards she discovered one of her sons had been murdered by his ‘adoptive mother’.94
Catherine Gunn’s plight was symptomatic of nineteenth-century attitudes towards the family. As a domestic servant she propped up the ideal middle-class domestic family, but as a single mother with two infants she was not able to form her own familial unit. Indeed, had she attempted to obtain poor relief it is likely the twins would have been removed from her and fostered with strangers. The family model engendered by the European middle classes was more self-contained than its predecessor and more rigidly conceptualised as a conjugal unit.
The hybrid family 1900-2000
If the modern family as we imagine it was conceived in the nineteenth century, it achieved maturity in the first half of the twentieth century. In the decades before the Second World War the European family seemed immutable, the conjugal ideal was firmly established and, under fascist and conservative governments alike, it was supported and promoted. After the Second World War, however, the structure of the family changed markedly, so that what individuals recognised as family began to include multiple and various formations of kin and non-kin. The decline of the male breadwinner family since its heyday in the 1950s, and the rise of multiple family forms, including single-parent families, single-person households, cohabiting couples whether they be heterosexual or homosexual, step-families and so on, may be partially explained by changes in women’s opportunities and experiences, notably their increased participation in the labour market and their decreased propensity to marry and have children. However, for most of the century, the state continued to recognise and legitimise family in its nineteenth-century middle-class guise: the nuclear family with the conjugal relationship at its core, albeit through policies which addressed specific issues such as declining birth rates, rising divorce rates and perceived deterioration in standards of mothering. Women have been essential figures in both these conceptions of the family in the twentieth century. In the eyes of European states, women were still identified primarily as wives and mothers to differing degrees, and thus dependants, when in fact this century witnessed a significant growth in women’s wage-earning and a decline in fertility. In material terms then, women in the twentieth century were as much producers as reproducers, but this is not reflected in the construction of the female familial role by the state, particularly in the construction of welfare systems after the Second World War. In the twentieth century official conceptions of the family were increasingly out of step with the complicated realities of family life.
It is generally agreed that the twentieth century saw profound transformations in family life. These changes were demographic, structural and material. To begin with, European co-resident families became smaller over the course of the twentieth century. Between 1901 and 1991 household size declined. From an average of around 4.5 persons at the beginning of the century, European families contained on average between 2 and 3 persons at the end. Behind this change are a number of key demographic shifts: a decline in fertility rates, high age at marriage, rising divorce rates and a relatively high proportion of women remaining single. However, the entire period between the First World War and the 1990s should not be seen as a single entity. Broadly speaking, the period 1900-45 saw a continuation of developments that had started the previous century, that is, a continuing decline in mortality and fertility rates. The period between the end of the Second World War and the 1960s was characterised by a temporary resurgence in the popularity of marriage and a baby boom. From the 1960s onwards Europe experienced a second demographic transition characterised by a shift to continuous low fertility and a move from ‘uniform to pluralistic families and households’.95 In France, for instance, between 1968 and 1989 the proportion of single-person households rose from 20 per cent to almost 27 per cent and the proportion of married couples declined from 68 per cent to 58 per cent.96 These shifts are consequent upon a change in the function of the family whereby it is not the well-being of the family that is important but the well-being and self-fulfilment of individuals.97
Women’s reproductive and productive behaviour is central to this transition. At the start of the twentieth century the mean number of children per woman in western Europe ranged from a high of 5.3 in Greece to a low of 2.5 in France. In the 1990s only Ireland and Sweden exceeded 2.98 The birth rate was already declining amongst the middle classes by the start of the century, but many working-class women were desperate to limit family size on the grounds of their own health as well as economic well-being as the survey by the Women’s Co-operative Guild in England so graphically demonstrated.99 As Diana Gittins argues in respect of England, the decline in the birth rate amongst the working classes was affected by women’s choices and experiences, both before and after marriage. The opening up of new job opportunities for single women in the first decades of the century and the decline of domestic service offered women greater economic and social independence. These women were more knowledgeable about sexuality and birth control and, once married, they embraced the model of the companionate marriage which emphasised complementary roles and a degree of joint decision-making including any regarding family limitation.100
Having embraced the smaller family, women were unwilling to alter their behaviour in response to government inducements to have more children. When the fascist governments of Italy and Germany attempted to promote fertility and maternity by means of rather crude fiscal incentives coupled with honorific awards to mothers, they failed to reverse the fertility decline. In Italy the birth rate continued to fall throughout the Fascist era and the resort to abortion in the absence of other forms of birth control underlined women’s determination to maintain their autonomy in this realm.101 Similarly, in Franco’s Spain, pro-natalist policies failed because ‘motherhood and parenthood were far from being attractive to most families and were seen as an economic liability.’102 Indeed, even in France and Britain after the Second World War where the birth rate did increase, there is little evidence that this was a direct response to state cajolements and bribes. General de Gaulle’s call for French women to have 12 million healthy babies for the regeneration of the French nation, and in Britain William Beveridge’s conviction that ‘in the next 30 years housewives as mothers have vital work to do in ensuring the adequate continuance of the British race and of the British ideal in the world’ accompanied by tax benefits and family allowances were unlikely to have been a major factor in the short-lived post-war baby boom.103 The smaller family was now the norm - large families were disparaged - and few were willing to trade relative economic comfort (achieved on the back of women’s paid work) and the ability to do one’s best for one’s children for a larger family and state recognition.
If women were making positive choices about marriage age and family size, one might assume that family life in the twentieth century was more woman-friendly than it had been in the past in the sense that it was supportive and enabling rather than a constraint on women’s opportunities and well-being. Certainly women’s economic participation rates have risen across Europe since the 1960s as family size has declined, and indeed there is a correlation between the number of children a woman has and her likelihood of working outside the home. In the European Union in 1992, 68 per cent of mothers with one child undertook paid work whereas only 45 per cent of those with three children did so.104 However, throughout the twentieth century woman’s family role remained largely unchanged and this affected women’s labour force participation over the life course. Until the 1980s women’s participation in paid work was determined by her childcare responsibilities. Yet, as Janssens points out, women’s position in society appeared to have changed more dramatically than their position within the family. Higher labour-force participation was counter-balanced by women’s continued responsibility for the organisation of family life, and this in turn influenced women’s choice of work, preferring part-time employment (which is often lower paid) to full-time jobs. Hence, ‘the gender inequalities in family roles are thus interconnected with inequalities in the wider society and the labour market.’105
In material terms, most families since the Second World War had more space, more time and more disposable income with which to conduct family life than in any previous era. The combination of improvements in housing, especially for the working classes, a reduction in working hours facilitating an increase in leisure time, and the increased availability of consumer goods and the income with which to purchase them had a profound impact on the conduct of late twentieth-century family life. Until the First World War only the middle classes had been able to pursue the new domestic family lifestyle centred upon the home. Suburbanisation, whereby residential patterns shifted to the edges of cities, was a middle-class preserve until the inter-war years and the feted garden suburbs with their cottage-style housing were limited to the more affluent, but the design of interior and exterior space in these model towns had more far-reaching influence. The separation of cooking and eating or living areas was a departure from traditional working-class arrangements. But, by the 1920s and 1930s changing patterns of working-class housing facilitated this amongst the more affluent members of the urban working classes. The development of local-authority housing, situated some distance from places of work and planned as lower-density living space with much greater opportunity for family privacy, permitted those who had moved from overcrowded housing to experience something of the family life pioneered by the middle classes, focused upon consumption rather than production. In Germany the new Weimar constitution placed housing at the top of its priorities and entrusted municipal authorities to conduct improvements. The result was garden suburbs modelled after the English experiment, with terraced and semi-detached houses with gardens to promote healthy living.
Housing improvements were not divorced from social and gender relations. The new houses were designed to accommodate a working man, a domestic wife and their children - the conjugal family based on the male breadwinner ideal. The internal spatial organisation was predicated on the assumption that the woman of the house would be homemaker rather than wage earner. Thus, in German modernist-inspired homes the kitchen took pride of place, designed to maximise domestic efficiency and minimise drudgery, ‘intended to elevate woman’s domestic role to that of a competent professional in charge of her specialised workplace’.106 Fears concerning the disruption of gender relations in the post-war economy of western Europe were transmitted onto discourses about the home and family. In Germany, for instance, women were exhorted to find satisfaction in the domestic sphere rather than in the new leisure industries. The churches, conservatives and even some feminists promoted housewifery and maternalism as antidotes to pleasure-seeking. Comments upon the leisure activities of the wife of an unemployed man in 1930 exemplify this new social discourse:
The wife is particular about her appearance, but she is pleasure-seeking and her agreeable conduct is insincere. When her pleasure-seeking does not come into conflict with her duties as a mother she cares for her children in an orderly way. Several times a week she goes to the cinema in the evening or to a dance and during this time she locks the children up.107
Indeed housework and childcare in the bosom of the family was promoted as the ideal form of leisure for married women and newly married women often did not expect to continue participating in leisure pursuits they had formerly enjoyed, such as visiting the cinema. Instead family-based pastimes such as knitting and handicrafts, reading and games with the children were more dominant, activities deemed compatible with work as Tammy M. Proctor explains in Chapter 9.108 But even housework came under scrutiny.109 Efficiency and productivity was the watchword. Housewives were urged to embrace efficiency in the home by avoiding time-wasting and by utilising the new domestic appliances. The kitchen in one of the Frankfurt housing developments was specifically designed to facilitate efficiency with the rational positioning of appliances and work surfaces. Even shopping was scrutinised by some, with women criticised for popping out several times in a day. However, few could aspire to these ideals. In interwar Germany the provision of modern, functional housing was inadequate and only the better-off could afford domestic appliances. Moreover, despite feminist arguments that women’s embrace of efficiency in the home would give them more time for selfdevelopment, in fact it more likely entrenched the sexual division of labour within the home. Images of contented family life with couples and their children spending more leisure time together were only possible if the woman’s burden was lessened.
Woman’s place in the family remained in the kitchen. This was her workplace. The disappearance of servants from middle-class homes necessitated that the woman of the house take over all household-management tasks, but still this work had to be separated from other parts of the house as it had been in the Victorian residences inhabited by the servant-employing classes in the nineteenth century. In the 1940s the British Medical Association condemned working families from eating their meals in the kitchen, remarking: ‘The kitchen is the housewife’s workplace and preparation room.’110 Cooking and eating in the same space encouraged family disintegration, muddling family time with the work of producing and clearing up after a meal. And even as late as the 1960s, in spite of employment changes that saw more women than ever before working outside the home, a British woman’s magazine proclaimed to its readers:
The kitchen has become the most important room in the house. This is the room which, more than any other, you like to keep shining and bright. A woman’s place? Yes. For it is the heart and the meaning of home. The place where, day after day, you make with your hands precious gifts of love.111
No one had any doubts about the material improvements brought about by the move to the suburbs, but many have argued that women suffered psychologically as a result of their physical isolation and their entrapment within the hegemonic familial ideal. The notion of female ‘suburban neurosis’ was popularised in the USA by feminist writer Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique (1963), but similarly in western Europe the image of the isolated, vacuous and often depressed housewife is ubiquitous in media representations of family life. The French film-maker Jacques Tati’s film Mon oncle (1954) was a satirical comment on post-war suburban life, in which the housewife was portrayed endlessly attempting to create the perfect home not least for the benefit of her neighbours; a modern version of the nineteenth-century wives of German civil servants whose dinner parties were the ultimate artifice. Celia Johnson’s portrayal of the frustrated middle-class suburban wife and mother on the verge of a love affair in the British film Brief Encounter (1945) was a trenchant comment on the emptiness of the post-war familial ideal and on the desire of some women to escape its constraints through exploring their sexuality.
Those working-class families that were fortunate to move into the new inter-war housing began to create a lifestyle that mirrored the domestic model pioneered by the nineteenth-century middle classes. Family and home in this context converged. Some have argued the change was most visible for men who began to invest more time and effort in their family life at home. The distance of these estates from places of work and men’s physical separation from work-based leisure spaces such as the pub encouraged them to engage more in family and home-based activities such as gardening and home improvement.112 However, there were limits in the extent to which men associated themselves with family life. There were still strict divisions between male and female housework and men often drew the line at undertaking visible or public activities they perceived would undermine their masculine identity; pushing the baby’s pram is the task most often mentioned in this regard. The family was still - male housework notwithstanding - a female domain.
The greatest changes in the material conditions in family life happened after the Second World War. The large-scale destruction of housing in wartime necessitated massive rebuilding programmes and a chance to further fashion family life. In Britain the construction of council housing estates in the 1950s, and then in the 1960s the encouragement of privately financed housing and similar initiatives in social housing elsewhere, resulted in the movement of people from inner-city residential areas to new suburbs, dormitory towns and, eventually, New Towns. Many of the new dwellings were medium - and high-rise apartment buildings encapsulated in the French architect Le Corbusier’s massive Marseilles housing complex. But far from safeguarding family privacy and promoting a sense of community, these housing solutions had just the opposite effect. Studies of British housing estates showed that initial responses from residents were positive, largely because of the vastly improved housing conditions and facilities. But in the longer term high-density housing proved detrimental to the kind of family life the residents aspired to, particularly in respect of the needs of children. The child-centred twentieth-century family was poorly accommodated here. The single-family home with a garden was still the most desirable model for all social classes.
The conjugal family model consisting of a married couple and their children continued to inform social policy - including housing policy - well into the 1960s. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the family continued to be represented by an ideal type consisting of husband, wife and children exhibiting a degree of togetherness through privatised leisure activities based on the home. While improvements in domestic facilities were slow to reach the working classes - outside toilets and the absence of water-heating technology were still ubiquitous in many working-class communities - the appearance of home entertainment in the form of radios and televisions is said to have engendered family solidarity and communication. In Britain the television broadcast of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1952 is widely recalled as one of the first family-viewing events, humorously portrayed in Kate Atkinson’s novel of British family life Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Here, Ruby Lennox describes the family gathered in her parent’s living room, above the shop in York:
Our own Coronation guest list is not so long as the Queen’s. For a start we have no Commonwealth friends to invite, although Auntie Eliza is reputed to be friendly with a couple from Jamaica - one of the many taboo subjects drawn up on a separate list by George (Auntie Eliza is George’s sister-in-law, married to his brother Bill). We are also, amongst other things, forbidden to talk about Auntie Mabel’s operation, Uncle Tom’s hand and Adrian’s weediness. Uncle Tom isn’t our uncle, he’s Bunty’s and Auntie Bab’s uncle, and has been invited here today because he has nowhere else to go - Auntie Mabel is in hospital having her unmentionable operation. (Uncle Tom’s hand is a wooden replica of the one that was blown off long ago). Adrian is our cousin - Uncle Clifford and Auntie Gladys’ only son. . . Lucy-Vida is our cousin, Auntie Eliza and Uncle Bill’s daughter (Bunty would much rather she didn’t have to invite this side of the family). Auntie Babs has also brought her husband, Uncle Sidney, with her, a mild cheerful man who we hardly ever see.
The Coronation audience are constantly dividing and re-dividing into different parties and factions the most common of which is that age-old favourite - men and women. Everyone is related in some way (unfortunately) to each other except for Dandy the Dog and Mrs Havis, Nell’s next-door neighbour who has no family (imagine!) of her own.113
By the late 1960s there was one television set for every five people in western Europe, 47 million sets in total.114 And, in Britain at least, the image of the family watching the television was reflected back in the representation of family on the television in all kinds of programmes from sitcoms to quizzes, so that ‘marriage and the nuclear family emerge perhaps battered but fundamentally unchallenged.’115
Yet, since the Second World War the western European family has been getting smaller on average and more simple. The most important trends contributing to this were the rise in the divorce rate, especially since the 1960s, the decline of marriage and the popularity of cohabitation, the rise in the number of one-parent families and the increase in single-person households. In France, for instance, these accounted for 27 per cent of all households in 1989; in Sweden 33 per cent of households contained only one person in 1980.116 Many of these single-person households consist of the elderly, but younger unmarried and divorced men and women have contributed to this trend. The implications for women of this reshaping of the family are not clear-cut.
Since the 1960s, changes in the structure and size of the family have reflected women’s positive choices about their lives. The decline in marriage and fertility rates, the rise in the number of women remaining childless and the increase in lone-female households suggests that women - at least those amongst the more affluent and educated classes - took advantage of improvements in education and employment prospects to gain more autonomy for themselves outwith the family. The proportion of women working outside the home rose from 49 per cent in France in 1968 to 60 per cent in 1994. In Sweden the rates are even higher at 58 per cent in the 1960s to 76 per cent in the 1990s.117 However, it was only in the past three decades of the twentieth century that unmarried women were able to cast off the sole identification with family that had cast such a shadow over their predecessors. Until then, as Katherine Holden has argued, ‘the powerful links between marriage and biological motherhood, which left the nuclear family as the sole legitimate forum for intimacy, made it harder for women publicly to acknowledge relationships which lay outside’, it might be added with either women or men.118
On the other hand, some of the structural changes in the family have not necessarily been to women’s advantage. The decline of the male-breadwinner family since the 1950s has not resulted in the rise of the so-called symmetrical family: that in which roles and responsibilities were equally shared by both sexes. Women’s greater participation in paid work has not been accompanied by any significant reduction in her familial responsibilities. Indeed, even in the former East Germany, where there was massive female labour-force participation - 91 per cent in 1989 - there was no concomitant shift in the gendered division of labour within the family.119 Feminist sociologists have long drawn attention to how women are unable to trade their educational and professional qualifications for equal advantage in the labour market because ‘conjugal and family life hamper women’s professional interests. . . the sex-determined difference in the management of professional careers is a corollary of the persistence of the sex-determined division of domestic and child-rearing tasks’.120 At the end of the twentieth century women still undertook the bulk of domestic household tasks. In Norway, for instance, women spent an average of thirty hours per week on household tasks compared with men’s eighteen. And as European populations become increasingly elderly it is women who take most responsibility for caring for the elderly and infirm. If they do not carry out these tasks themselves, they employ other women to do it for them. The only way many professional women manage to reconcile work and family life is by paying another woman to undertake household tasks, an ironic reversion to the nineteenth-century bourgeois family model. Men, it has been argued, ‘refuse to play the egalitarian game’, in part because they still identified themselves as income-earners or producers whereas women have always assumed multiple roles within the family.
Since the 1960s western European countries have witnessed the increasing separation of marriage or cohabititation and parenthood. By the 1990s in Britain 17.5 per cent of all households with dependant children were classified as lone mothers.121 The majority of these women had not, at least initially, made a positive choice of single parenthood: two-thirds were divorced, separated or widowed. Yet in Britain there has been a reluctance by the state to acknowledge these women and their children as self-contained family units, evidenced by attempts to force absent fathers to support their children financially. And lone mothers have seen their role continually debated in terms of whether they should be working outside the home or staying at home to care for the children, in the context of a discourse on the family that implicitly regarded the two-parent conjugal family with the male breadwinner at its core as the ideal. The overwhelming evidence, of course, is that this model increasingly had little purchase at the end of the twentieth century.
The twentieth-century family was a hybrid - caught between the conservative impulses of the first half of the century and the adaptations and alternative family forms of the post-Second World War era. It would be too simple to map women’s experiences onto these two phases, regarding the first as a period of constraint for women as their identification with the family and the familiar roles of housewife and mother were heightened and the second as a time of liberation as women increasingly broke free of the family as the prime locus of identification in their lives. The reduction in fertility rates has been accompanied by an intensified focus on parenting and the child-centred family at the same time as women’s participation in the labour market has risen. Yet family work continues to occupy more space and time in women’s lives than it does in men’s and, as Gillis astutely remarks, she remains ‘the symbolic centre of the frantic household’.122
World History
