Helen McCarthy, Double Lives: A History of Working Motherhood in Modern Britain, Bloomsbury, 2020; £27 hbk, £9.89 pbk.
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RATING: 90
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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It is my impression that people who locate themselves within the field of political economy, even if they come at it from a critical perspective, do not read enough history. Especially, perhaps, social history. If that is your case, you could not do better than start with this fascinating study, which is by a country mile the WWR Book of the Year (for which, by the way, only books published this year are eligible). Uncritical practitioners of 'international political economy' certainly don't read social history - how otherwise to understand their fixation on states and markets, and their tendency to take the Atlantic world in the 1960s as a moment of 'normality' against which everything else is measured? Not that IPE is the only culprit. I recently put a book aside after reading only three paragraphs (and one of them a single sentence, at that). They read as follows:
'There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society, and politics remain the same.
Then there are those short years in which everything changes all at once. Political newcomers storm the stage. Voters clamor for policies that were unthinkable until yesterday. Social tensions that had long simmered below the surface erupt into terrifying explosions. A system of government that had seemed immutable looks as though it might come apart.
This is the kind of moment in which we now find ourselves.'
It gets worse. Transcribing these words, I see that the next sentence is 'Until recently, liberal democracy reigned triumphant'. Does the writer (whose book I shall review here at some point, but not until I can face it again) know nothing? Were they sentient in 2001-10 (everyone will be able to remember one or two lodestar-shifting events in that decade, in the United States alone)? Then 1991-2000 (say, developments in China, and Central and Eastern Europe); 1981-1990 (for variety, Latin America); 1971-80 (oh, I don't know, Vietnam, OPEC, inflation, the rise of neoliberalism); 1961-70 (decolonisation); 1951-60 (the transformative rise of social democracy in Western Europe); 1941-50 - search me, but there must have been something ... and so on.
Well, that may be an extreme example, and, to be fair, mindlessly written purely for effect by a shallow ideologue. But history has its merits. My memory goes back to the 1950s - as a National Health Service baby, a twin in fact, moving into a new council house (public housing) when I was five. My father worked on the buses, and my mother did a number of part-time jobs, in a school canteen, as an auxiliary in the local 'cottage hospital', assembling boxes at home for the local soap company, and so on. They were both born just after the First World War, and served in the Second. My father died, young, in 1970. My mother lived on, in modest comfort, and is living in care today. Go back another 70 years, and you come across the contrasting case of Isabella Killick, 'tailoress in Mile End', the first working mother profiled by Helen McCarthy in this truly excellent book: a mother of three, and the main breadwinner after her husband's health broke down in 1885, 'finishing' trousers as a home worker between six in the morning and eight at night, and eating meat 'once in six months' (1). A decade later, they were both in the workhouse. Isabella lived long enough to qualify for a pension and move out again, dying in 1920, the year in which my father was born.
Such circumstances can still be found today, around the world and not least near enough to where I was born and where I now live, and McCarthy describes the resurgence of home-working from the 1970s as her account draws to a close (349, 373-6). In between, she addresses the lives of working mothers, from a huge range of sources, profiling extensively the varied writings and observations of feminists, socialists and 'free thinkers' on related topics over the years: among them, in the early chapters, Mabel Atkinson (Fabian socialist and educator); Barbara Bodichon, author of Women and Work (1857) and co-founder in 1858 of the English Woman's Journal; Eleanor Rathbone (elected Member of Parliament for Combined English Universities in 1929, and memorialized by the building named for her at the University of Liverpool, where she taught); Olive Schreiner (author of Women and Labour, 1911 and much more besides); and Gertrude Tuckwell, trade unionist, author of The State and its Children, 1894, president of the National Federation of Women Workers and the Women's Trade Union League, and the first woman magistrate in London.
The book is organised in four chronological parts: Disinheritance, 1840-1914; Citizens, 1914-1951; The Best of Both Worlds, 1951-1970, and Doing the Impossible, 1971 to the Present. Its 'first and major claim' is this: 'The meaning of working motherhood has changed dramatically over the past century and a half. What was understood to be a social problem arising from economic pressure on families has become a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers. This amounts to a profound transformation in the lives of British women and this book aims to describe and account for it' (5). McCarthy sets out accordingly to 'tease out the interplay between structural forces, cultural attitudes and lived experience', taking women's feelings and desires as its central theme, 'not because these alone prompted growing numbers of mothers to enter the workforce from the middle of the twentieth century, but because they became central to the reimagining of working motherhood as a social norm' (8).
For the earlier period, McCarthy draws primarily on the accounts of the various mostly middle-class 'investigators of women's work' or 'educated ladies of independent means' who filed official reports or otherwise left written records: Adelaide Anderson, Principal Lady Inspector of Factories; Clementina Black, trade unionist and suffragist; Clara Collet, secretary to Charles Booth, and social investigator; Ada Nield Chew, working-class suffragist; Millicent Garrett Fawcett, suffragist leader and author of Political Economy for Beginners (Macmillan, 1870), written for use in schools, from which you learn that the capitalist is a benefactor, as 'any circumstances which tend to increase capital, act powerfully in ameliorating the condition of the poor' (p. 33);* Lettice Fisher, founder of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (1918), and author of another educational text, Getting and Spending: an Introduction to Economics (Collins, 1922); Mary Macarthur, founder of the newspaper The Woman Worker; Margaret MacDonald, 'co-founder of the Women's Labour League and a loyal defender of the working class' (28); Hilda Martindale, factory inspector in Hanley and Longton, in the Staffordshire Potteries; and many more. Further evidence comes from census materials, diaries, a mass of secondary sources, and, increasingly over time, personal testimony. A rich array of voluntary and official institutions provide more, and capture the intensity of state surveillance, 'do-gooding', and gender- and class-based contestation: the Fabian Women's Group, the National Federation of Women Workers, the National Home Workers' League, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, the Women's Cooperative Guild, the Women's Industrial Council, the Women's Industrial Defence Committee, the Women's Labour League, and, again, many more.
I can only illustrate briefly the richness of the material, and the glimpses it provides of the 'everyday lives' of working mothers. I do so principally with a focus on the period to 1951. First, here is Hilda Martindale, writing about the Pottery towns in 1904, and explaining why young working class women wished to continue working after marriage, and became 'depressed and out of health' if obliged to remain at home:
'At thirteen years of age the majority of these women would have begun to work in the factory, to handle their own earnings, to mix with a large number of people with all the excitement and gossip of factory life. They would thus in most cases grow up entirely ignorant of everything pertaining to domesticity. After marriage, therefore, it is hardly probable that they would willingly relinquish this life to undertake work of which they are in so large measure ignorant, and which is robbed of all that is to them pleasant and exciting' (33).
Clara Collet commented similarly, of young women in Birmingham: 'After marriage they miss not only the cheerful society (for it is cheerful) of the factory, but also the steady work to which they have become accustomed, and for both reasons many of them persist in going to the factory' (34). It was not easy, though, to combine motherhood with full-time employment. Especially in the nineteenth century, in the virtually complete absence of infant and nursery care, young working mothers had to cope as best they could, and exhaustion and child mortality were shockingly common. Some readers will be familiar with the common nineteenth-century practice on the part of women 'minding' infants while their mothers worked, of doping them with opiates, recorded by Engels among others. Just as graphic in its way is the report by a voluntary worker in Rochdale in 1914 of 'cases where babies under six months had been given raw tripe, fish and chips, pickled herrings and tinned salmon' (36). The main killer, of course, was contaminated milk. In the early years of the twentieth century (1910-11), in the absence of maternity benefits of any kind, two thirds of new mothers in Preston were back at their looms within three months, and only a tiny proportion were away from longer than six, while amongst eighty-two women in the Dundee Jute industry, 'some forty-six worked to within a month of confinement, twenty-seven to within a week, and seven to within a few hours' (19). Nor was marriage, even to a steady 'bread-winner', a protection against working-age poverty: 'In 1901, just under a quarter of all married women aged between forty-five and sixty-five were widowed, a reflection of men's poorer life expectancy resulting from their greater susceptibility to acute illnesses and workplace accidents' (20).
For many women, paid work meant 'home-work', and then as now 'home-work was not a relic of the pre-industrial past but evolved hand in hand with the modern factory system. Employers could drive up productivity by investing in machinery and disciplining their operatives on the shop floor, but using home-workers was an effective strategy in sectors vulnerable to fluctuating demand, volatile consumer tastes and fierce competition ... far from occupying a peripheral space outside the "real" economy, home-work was integral to the organisation of production within Britain's expanding consumer industries' (46). It ranged from finishing clothing to making nails and chains, and it was often more a 'family' than an individual enterprise. The sight of children 'lugging large parcels of carefully wrapped boxes or bundles of freshly lined trousers through the streets' (47) was common, while in hook-and-eye carding, 'first of all the row of hooks is sewn on, and then the mother will pass that over to the tiny little child, and she hooks the eyes to it, and then the mother has to go over that card again and sew on those eyes' (52-3, from evidence to the Select Committee on Homework, 1907). These were the 'sweated industries', on display at the Sweated Industries Exhibition offered as entertainment, with live exhibits (entry, one shilling) at Langham Place in 1906. Thanks to the digital archive of the University of Warwick, you can inspect the exhibition catalogue yourself (Mudie-Smith, 1906). All in all, the picture given here substantially qualifies the rough notion of the 'male breadwinner', as far as the poor were concerned:
'In its 1897 survey, the Women's Industrial Council noted the case of an artificial flower-maker in Clerkenwell, who took in only small quantities of work because piece rates in the trade had fallen and her eyes were bad. She and her unemployed husband survived primarily on six shillings a week earned by a fourteen-year-old son and another six from a nineteen-year-old daughter, who was also able to bring home spare scraps of food from her job as a cook. As well as making a few flowers, the woman added a shilling or so to the purse by cleaning the ground floor of the building in which the family rented their rooms. A cardboard-box-maker visited by the same investigator received thirteen shillings from her husband's dock work plus a few shillings from an adult son, but there were three children still at school and the family were in real difficulties when her own work was slack, as it happened to be at the time of the survey' (55).
It was cases such as this, prominent in the evidence gathered a decade later by the Select Committee, that led to the 1909 Trade Boards Act, which regulated tailoring and box-, lace- and chain-making. In the process, the evidence of contrasting cases where women home workers developed high levels of skill over long careers of full time work, to the extent in some cases of building businesses and employing apprentices, was dismissed. As McCarthy comments:
'the agitation over sweating established a cultural script in which women's inability to behave like full-time, skilled workers - to behave more like men, in fact - provided the starting point for all conversations about why home-work existed, why it was so poorly paid, and why it was a problem for a 'modern' industrial nation like Britain. As we shall see, this script could be pressed into service to devalue married women's work later in the century, including home-work, which declined after 1909 but never disappeared' (65).
Prominent among the opponents of home work were the leading Fabian socialists, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice declared the sweated home worker 'an enemy to her sex' (56); Sidney denounced home-working as the 'essential element of evil' in the sweating system. Calling together in Industrial Democracy (1897) for a national minimum wage, they argued that 'it would "set free for domestic duties, an ever increasing proportion of the women having young children to attend to"'. For the Webbs, a modern industrial order was one in which able-bodied men and unmarried women worked in factories, whilst wives and mothers care for their families and homes; as Sidney had testified to a Royal Commission on Labour in 1892, 'I would much prefer to bring about such a condition in society in which the mother of a family did not work for her living at all' (57). Beatrice is profiled at the beginning of Chapter 3, 'Serving Two Masters', which addresses the tension (strictly an either/or choice, it seemed to her) between motherhood and a career. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, sister to Millicent Fawcett and the first British-qualified woman to appear on the General Medical Council's Register, is presented as a counter-example, with her reliance on servants duly noted (69-73). This leads into discussion of the various social, legal and cultural aspects of the 'ideal' of submissive domesticity among the middle classes; the limited choices facing the 'redundant' women who 'did not, or could not, marry' (74, about one in ten of the relevant population); and the widespread practice (not least among public service employers) of barring married women, or terminating the employment of women who married: no married woman was appointed to a permanent salaried post in government between 1873 and the Second World War (83). Women could and did enter primary and secondary teaching in growing numbers: among them, prior to the war, was Ellen Wilkinson, who taught at Oswald Road Elementary School (where she was reprimanded for refusing to make her students sit silently with their arms folded) before graduating from the University of Manchester. Local Education Authorities generally put regulations in place to limit or prohibit the employment of married women, especially after the First World War (86).
Part One concludes with an ominous reference to the tendency to 'reframe motherhood as a social function necessary for the perpetuation of the "race"': 'By 1914, observers of all ideological persuasions viewed the problems and possibilities of working motherhood through this lens of citizenship, nationhood and population. It was a vision that was about to be dramatically sharpened by the political convulsions, social upheavals and economic shocks which swept Europe as the continent plunged into its first total war' (96). In what follows, the shattering impact of the war (on glass walls and ceilings, as well as on people's lives) is deftly conveyed, as is the impact of the signal from the British Treasury in March 1915 to male-dominated trade unions that the use of female labour in heavy industry was strictly temporary (102). Overall, wage differentials improved from 50 per cent to around a third; but the newly employed women workers were aware that when hostilities were over they would lose their positions. It is not surprising that some feminist activists therefore supported calls, as the war came to an end, for new measures 'to support mothers in their full-time occupation as homemakers to the nation' (103). In the meantime, the diet of working-class women improved during the war, as wages rose and works canteens proliferated, especially in the huge munitions industry (though the improvement, note, was often from a diet of 'bread and butter and tea', 111). At the same time, soldiers' uniforms were being finished by home workers in the East End, prompting Sylvia Pankhurst to stage another sweated industries exhibition in May 1915 (118).
Concerns over continuing infant mortality, combined with a revival of pro-natalism, were reflected positively in 'National Baby Week' in 1917 and in the 1918 Maternal and Infants Welfare Act, limited as its provisions were, but negatively as counterparts to the pressure to give jobs to returning soldiers (reinforced by the 1920 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act), and redirect married women to their role as 'home-makers for the nation'. War-time crèches were closed, for fear that they would tempt mothers to continue to work (124-5). This at a time when 8.4 million women finally won the right to vote, and in which Eleanor Rathbone, advocating a 'new feminism', began her campaign for a family allowance, paid directly to the mother in accordance with the number of her children, modelled on the 'separation allowance' that had been paid during the war (Beveridge, who supported it at the time, would introduce it only in 1946).
In short, the promotion of the notion of the male breadwinner by the state gained significant momentum in the particular circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the First World War (129-32). It would be further intensified from the early 1930s in the context of mass unemployment, and reflected in discriminatory measures that removed many married women from access to unemployment benefits. The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act appeared to open new opportunities, and new factories in light industries related to consumption did bring new opportunities for women workers on assembly lines (137-9); however, marriage bars continued in other areas of work, the Act notwithstanding - in teaching in particular, and in the Civil Service and the BBC. It was by no means predominantly a 'private industry' practice. In short, paid work became the norm for single women ('only 12 per cent of unmarried eighteen- to-twenty-four-year-olds were not in regular employment by 1931', 139), while the figures for married women were almost exactly the reverse. The practice of employing young women in the period up to marriage, then dispensing with their services, familiar in multinationals across the developing world, seems to have been just as common in Britain between the wars. Manchester City Council, I'm pleased to note, 'dropped its marriage regulation in 1928 following feminist pressure' (152). Domesticity was supported, sometimes in unexpected ways: 'The Electrical Association for Women was founded in 1924 to promote investment in infrastructure and raise awareness of [the] new technology in the home. Its president, Caroline Haslett, called for 'scientific management' principles to be introduced to the humble kitchen, arguing that housewives would benefit from rational layouts, easy-to-clean floors and work surfaces, and from modern appliances such as gas cookers, refrigerators and electric kettles and irons' (158). At the same time, shrinking family size as birth control gradually became more accepted and practiced meant that the two-child ideal was 'well established by the end of the 1930s' (164), and the stage was set for a shift in the 1950s, as opportunities for spending increased (cars, foreign holidays, and the like), and the attraction of a two-earner model grew. All in all, the 1930s may have seen the rise and fall of the male breadwinner-female housewife-2.4 child 'nuclear' family as a social reality, rather than an influential norm.
In turn, the evolution of employment practices during the Second World War would give rise to enduring trends. Crucial here were the conscription of single women aged 20 to 30 into the armed services, civil defence and war industries, fully phased in by March 1941, and its extension to forty- and then fifty-year old women in 1942 and 1943 respectively. Correspondingly, a secret memo to the Cabinet from Prime Minister Churchill in November 1941 urged maximum efforts to encourage married women to volunteer for employment, 'to release mobile women for essential industry', and proposed to support this with expanded nursery places, and extended use of part-time shifts (175). In a marked turnaround from previously very poor provision, 72,000 full-time and 138,000 part-time places in nurseries and nursery classes in elementary schools were created by 1944, though local authorities dragged their heels. School dinners followed, to avoid the problem of children moving from nursery to school having to return home for lunch, and were made mandatory in the 1944 Education Act, but after-school care was not addressed. This was the period in which part-time work was widely introduced, leading Anne Scott-James, the woman's editor of the Picture Post, to enthuse that 'this type of half-time job gives a housewife a feeling of security. She hasn't got to rush herself to death, or neglect the family. She still has half the day to shop, cook, clean the house and look after the children' (183); home-working or 'out-working' was also promoted by Ministry of Production, and similarly increased. The supporting evidence is rich, in particular from the archives of the Mass Observation social research organisation inaugurated in 1937 - too rich to summarise effectively here, but well summarised by Mrs X of Willesden, a mother of two in March 1944: 'It's all work, that's all there is' (186). Single women who 'fell pregnant' had a tough time, and the provision made strikes a grimly comic note: for fear of drawing public attention to the phenomenon, a generous scheme giving six month's support introduced by the Ministry of Health for factory workers in 1941 'was cloaked in the strictest secrecy, so much so that many of the social workers and welfare officers who might have made referrals did not know of its existence'. In total, 36 women benefited (188).
The 'new model of working motherhood' (200) that came into being between 1944 and 1951 was one that followed the path of least resistance. The great majority of single women were in paid work; steady economic growth allowed part-time jobs in particular for married women to proliferate while men enjoyed 'full employment'; new opportunities for consumer spending reconciled previously reluctant husbands to two-income households; and with fewer children, women could devote more years to work. Governments changed regulations (such as the marriage bar) to suit labour market needs, rather than to respond to a reformist or feminist agenda. 'According to one 1951 estimate, there were publicly funded nursery places for just 1 per cent of Britain's under-fives, with priority given to "social cases", typically the children of unmarried mothers, unsupported widows and deserted wives or children from "broken" homes' (208); and with investment in Britain's new defence programme creating further demand for women's labour in industry in the same year, one official [R.L. Bicknell, to be precise, ft. 42, p. 440] offered the opinion that 'working mothers whose children go to school will generally prefer to solve their problems with the help of friendly neighbours, perhaps at some trifling cost, and will commonly be able to do so, at any rate as far as term-times are concerned' (209). This may sound harsh, but is benevolent in comparison with an un-named municipal officer in Guildford, who took the view that 'the woman who wanted to supplement her income to buy a new hat ... was not a deserving person to claim a place in a nursery for her child' (218). McCarthy's conclusion, that: 'The incentives of spending and getting would be fully felt in the later 1950s, when disposable incomes could be converted into washing machines, fridges, new clothes and better quality cuts of meat' (211), describes exactly the case of Waynflete Avenue, Brackley, at exactly that time.
McCarthy's judgement here is impeccable, and I quote at length:
'Yet if a new moral economy of working motherhood took shape in the post-war decades, some women still found themselves positioned outside it. The dual role privileged a pattern of work predicated on a mother’s return to the labour force when her children were judged old enough to be ‘safely’ left. This was neatly in line with the advice of psychoanalysts like John Bowlby, whose theory of maternal deprivation gained further purchase in the 1950s, even if it was never universally accepted. The dual role also let fathers and policymakers off the hook; if women re-entered the workplace only when their children were at school, and often did so on a part-time basis, then no change was needed either in men’s primary identity as breadwinners or to the existing regime of minimal public investment in day-care. The minority of women who did earn continuously whilst their children were young were out of step with this emerging norm. Widowed, separated, divorced and unmarried mothers typically fell into this category, as did professional ‘career women’ and many migrant mothers born outside Britain. In summary, working motherhood became increasingly ‘ordinary’ in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was a narrowly conformist kind of ordinariness, like the narrowly conformist times which produced it' (231).
Bowlby, by the way, was an important figure, and it is essential to have a sense of his biography (wikipedia version, I confess): he was apparently brought up by a nursemaid, Minnie, who left the family when he was nearly four, then passed over to a much colder and more distant nanny, seeing his mother only for an hour after teatime, until he was sent to boarding school. His theory of maternal deprivation, no doubt deeply felt, failed to discriminate between this woeful circumstance and the working-class pattern of leaving a child, during the day, with a loved and loving family member (cf. p. 252). Senior government policy-makers, more familiar with the Bowlby pattern, were apparently persuaded that the two circumstances were much the same.
McCarthy goes to make a series of key points. First: 'This new era for working mothers opened at a moment when most families in Britain were experiencing significant material improvements in their daily lives. A comprehensive welfare state, universal secondary education, low unemployment and rising wages offered security and opportunity on an unprecedented scale' (ibid). Second: 'Employment rates amongst married women rose steadily through the 1950s, reaching 35 per cent in 1961 and 49 per cent a decade later, according to census data' (233). Third: 'It might seem paradoxical that at the very moment that the housewife was culturally enthroned in her ideal home by magazines and advertisers, millions of married women were looking for jobs outside it. Yet, in truth, these phenomena were intimately interlinked. The working mother was also the home-centred mother in the sense that her earnings were frequently what enabled families to enjoy a higher level of domestic comfort' (234).
The broader point, of relevance to critical IPE and 'everyday politics', is that this was a highly specific conjuncture, sharply distinct from the recent past, and highly unstable, as some perceptive observers were aware. At the same time, it emerged against the backdrop of steady change in the relevant parameters of age of marriage, age at birth of first child, family size, level of education, duration of marriage (on the one hand, both partners generally lived longer; on the other, separation and divorce became more common), caring responsibilities, home ownership, prospects for children's futures, and security in old age. It was by no means a golden age: 'Women returning to manual work after an extended break typically took jobs that were less skilled and lower paid than the ones they had held before marriage or childbirth, and the position of part-timers was especially precarious. These workers usually had poor job security and inferior promotion prospects, fewer holiday or sick pay entitlements, and were excluded from occupational pension schemes' (243). And according to one estimate, there were 175,000 widows bringing up a total of around 260,000 children in the mid-1960s, along with a quarter of a million separated wives and 55,000 divorced women heading households, and 'often living in highly precarious circumstances' (254). All in all, 'the post-war model of working motherhood rested on women's acceptance of a bargain which opened up new employment opportunities without disturbing wider inequalities in the labour market and at home. Women settled for jobs which were less skilled and lower paid than the ones they had done before becoming mothers, and they continued to accept primary responsibility for childcare and housework' (258-9). The implications of the argument are clear. Governments, employers and male partners looked to their own interests first, with little concern for the consequences for working mothers. Governments made minimal provision in support services; employers offered the terms and conditions they could get away with; and male partners for the most part welcomed the additional income but declined to take on an equal share of domestic labour. Mothers who chose to work had to bear practically all the burden of adjustment themselves.
The section on the period to 1970 is completed in two contrasting chapters, the first on the experience of graduate working mothers, the second on immigrant mothers. The first is anchored by Judith Hubback's Wives Who Went to College (1957), which addressed 'the many difficulties faced by married women in the professional workplace', and urged governments and employers to make adjustments that would facilitate the better use of this 'highly skilled womanpower' (262). The areas of work that opened up centred on 'the massive demand for teachers, doctors, nurses and social workers created by the expansion of the welfare state', professions 'closely identified with the "caring" qualities which women were widely believed to possess'. 'By contrast, other expanding areas of professional employment, including the Civil Service, law, academia and higher levels of industry, were as unfriendly to women as they have ever been' (264). According to the Robbins Report of 1963, '45 per cent of women with science degrees went into the classroom, whilst among those studying arts and humanities subjects, the proportion was closer to 60 per cent' (268). As regards the women who were part of the wave of immigration from Ireland and Empire or Commonwealth countries from the 1950s, the 'liberal, open-door policy' of the 1948 British Nationality Act 'was driven by economic and political self-interest, adopted at a time of desperate labour shortages', and intended to 'allow for a modest flow of temporary migrants to help revive Britain's flagging economy and under-staffed welfare state'. It underestimated the number of Commonwealth citizens 'who would assert their rights by seeking new lives for themselves and their families in Britain' (294), so successive governments set out to roll back its provisions, piece by piece, while new communities across the country were left to fend for themselves, in poorly paid or precarious work, often in a context of casual or overtly hostile racism.
When the focus moves to the period from 1970 to the present, we are on the familiar ground of 'neoliberalism' and welfare cut-backs, and in a social and political environment dominated by efforts to bring more mothers into the labour force by deliberately reducing levels of support outside the labour market. McCarthy's two chapters, 'Superwomen' and 'Doing It All', are richly sourced, and excellent, from the perspective of critical political economy, in the way in which they relate contemporary issues to the historical trajectory previously outlined. The central irony, of course, is that women born after the Second World War who had 'reached adulthood and were beneficiaries of the NHS, the 1944 Education Act and, for a growing minority, the expansion of higher education' (324) were confounded in their aspirations by the counter-revolution that developed pace from the mid-1970s. If the consequences of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) were disappointing, it was not only because of their limitations, but also because of the steady erosion of standard employment contracts and stable labour market opportunities over subsequent decades; and equally, as McCarthy points out, because as noted above, the pre-Thatcher baseline in terms of provision was so minimal. As late as 1978, a Central Policy Staff Review on services for working mothers acknowledged that hitherto 'the (convenient) assumption has been that the parents, and in particular the mother, can normally cope unaided with a child's first five years of life with a certain amount of fairly elementary help on health and development, together with some part-time nursery education for children over three', and recommended ambitious reforms. The response of Home Secretary Merlin Rees was lukewarm: he felt that a major switch of resources would raise 'important questions of principle about the extent to which the Government ought to finance programmes designed to make it easier for women to go out to work' (338). If 'the mismatch between women's ever-growing desire for independence and fulfilment on the one hand, and labour market restructuring and the rolling back of the State on the other, created an especially toxic mix from the 1980s' (358), it was all the more so the case because baseline provision was so poor, reflecting the limitations of previous reform:
'In 1979, just 10 per cent of working mothers received more than the statutory minimum maternity pay, and by 1990 this had inched up to 14 per cent, in most cases offered by public sector employers under pressure from their unionised workforce. Less than 4 per cent of mothers reported any assistance from employers with childcare costs or provision of workplace nurseries. ... in practice, most employer-sponsored schemes threw the initiative on to women themselves. It was the ambitious career woman’s own responsibility to build networks, seek out mentors and make a success of the flexible working arrangements now so generously on offer. And it was her job to organise childcare, which for the highest-flying professional mothers meant, as in earlier times, a succession of nannies, mothers’ helps and resident au pairs. The market for this kind of waged domestic labour surged in the late twentieth century to meet expanding demand from dual-career households' (361-2).
Familiar ground, then. There is a wealth of detail in these chapters - not least, the account of a renewed wave of home-working mentioned above. Even the response of New Labour after 1997, which represented a kind of 'high point' reflected in the 'Women's Unit' and a raft of policy initiatives undoubtedly driven by politicians, such as Diane Abbot, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell and Claire Short, whose agendas can be described as feminist to some if differing degrees, appears in retrospect to have been focused more on expanding the flexible workforce and achieving a 'sure start' for future workers than primarily addressed to the needs of working women per se (377-382). If sisters, as Annie Lennox put it in 1985, were doing it for themselves, it was pretty much because they had to. Taking the burden of adjustment on themselves, as always, they more and more postponed motherhood, or renounced it altogether, in a trend that has continued. In the meantime, successive governments, egged on by the European Commission and sundry other international bodies, devoted themselves to fine-tuning 'welfare' systems aimed to make mothers more available, on the most flexible of terms, for paid work, and the number of women in full-time work climbed steadily. McCarthy does not take the story beyond New Labour, but her sober conclusion rings entirely true today.
In short, this is a great book, enormously valuable in particular for anyone interested in the political economy of social reproduction. The footnotes are as rich as the text, and direct the reader to a wealth of further material: nos. 5, 10, 15, and 20 attached to the introduction, for example (391-4), will provide instructive reading throughout the winter months. Just one or two more recent sources of value, among many, are listed below. All in all, McCarthy barely puts a foot wrong, though I think she greatly underestimates 'the thrill of selling plastic containers to one's friends' (239).
* 'Prove from the propositions enunciated in this chapter,' reads the last of a set of questions intended to improve the understanding of its young students reads, 'that the capitalist is the real benefactor to the wage-receiving classes, not the spendthrift or the almsgiver'. An interesting discussion of communism follows.
References and further reading
Beechey, Veronica, and Tessa Perkins. 1987. A Matter of Hours: Women, Part-Time Work and the Labour Market, Cambridge.
Huws, Ursula. 1984. The New Homeworkers: New technology and the changing location of white-collar work, London.
Mudie-Smith, Richard. 1906. Sweated industries : being a handbook of the "Daily News" exhibition. Warwick Digital Collections, University of Warwick: https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p21047coll2/id/329/rec/3.
Pederson, Susan. 1993. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945. Cambridge.
Toynbee, Polly. 2003. Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain. London.
'There are long decades in which history seems to slow to a crawl. Elections are won and lost, laws adopted and repealed, new stars born and legends carried to their graves. But for all the ordinary business of time passing, the lodestars of culture, society, and politics remain the same.
Then there are those short years in which everything changes all at once. Political newcomers storm the stage. Voters clamor for policies that were unthinkable until yesterday. Social tensions that had long simmered below the surface erupt into terrifying explosions. A system of government that had seemed immutable looks as though it might come apart.
This is the kind of moment in which we now find ourselves.'
It gets worse. Transcribing these words, I see that the next sentence is 'Until recently, liberal democracy reigned triumphant'. Does the writer (whose book I shall review here at some point, but not until I can face it again) know nothing? Were they sentient in 2001-10 (everyone will be able to remember one or two lodestar-shifting events in that decade, in the United States alone)? Then 1991-2000 (say, developments in China, and Central and Eastern Europe); 1981-1990 (for variety, Latin America); 1971-80 (oh, I don't know, Vietnam, OPEC, inflation, the rise of neoliberalism); 1961-70 (decolonisation); 1951-60 (the transformative rise of social democracy in Western Europe); 1941-50 - search me, but there must have been something ... and so on.
Well, that may be an extreme example, and, to be fair, mindlessly written purely for effect by a shallow ideologue. But history has its merits. My memory goes back to the 1950s - as a National Health Service baby, a twin in fact, moving into a new council house (public housing) when I was five. My father worked on the buses, and my mother did a number of part-time jobs, in a school canteen, as an auxiliary in the local 'cottage hospital', assembling boxes at home for the local soap company, and so on. They were both born just after the First World War, and served in the Second. My father died, young, in 1970. My mother lived on, in modest comfort, and is living in care today. Go back another 70 years, and you come across the contrasting case of Isabella Killick, 'tailoress in Mile End', the first working mother profiled by Helen McCarthy in this truly excellent book: a mother of three, and the main breadwinner after her husband's health broke down in 1885, 'finishing' trousers as a home worker between six in the morning and eight at night, and eating meat 'once in six months' (1). A decade later, they were both in the workhouse. Isabella lived long enough to qualify for a pension and move out again, dying in 1920, the year in which my father was born.
Such circumstances can still be found today, around the world and not least near enough to where I was born and where I now live, and McCarthy describes the resurgence of home-working from the 1970s as her account draws to a close (349, 373-6). In between, she addresses the lives of working mothers, from a huge range of sources, profiling extensively the varied writings and observations of feminists, socialists and 'free thinkers' on related topics over the years: among them, in the early chapters, Mabel Atkinson (Fabian socialist and educator); Barbara Bodichon, author of Women and Work (1857) and co-founder in 1858 of the English Woman's Journal; Eleanor Rathbone (elected Member of Parliament for Combined English Universities in 1929, and memorialized by the building named for her at the University of Liverpool, where she taught); Olive Schreiner (author of Women and Labour, 1911 and much more besides); and Gertrude Tuckwell, trade unionist, author of The State and its Children, 1894, president of the National Federation of Women Workers and the Women's Trade Union League, and the first woman magistrate in London.
The book is organised in four chronological parts: Disinheritance, 1840-1914; Citizens, 1914-1951; The Best of Both Worlds, 1951-1970, and Doing the Impossible, 1971 to the Present. Its 'first and major claim' is this: 'The meaning of working motherhood has changed dramatically over the past century and a half. What was understood to be a social problem arising from economic pressure on families has become a social norm rooted in a more expansive set of needs, rights and preferences felt and asserted by mothers. This amounts to a profound transformation in the lives of British women and this book aims to describe and account for it' (5). McCarthy sets out accordingly to 'tease out the interplay between structural forces, cultural attitudes and lived experience', taking women's feelings and desires as its central theme, 'not because these alone prompted growing numbers of mothers to enter the workforce from the middle of the twentieth century, but because they became central to the reimagining of working motherhood as a social norm' (8).
For the earlier period, McCarthy draws primarily on the accounts of the various mostly middle-class 'investigators of women's work' or 'educated ladies of independent means' who filed official reports or otherwise left written records: Adelaide Anderson, Principal Lady Inspector of Factories; Clementina Black, trade unionist and suffragist; Clara Collet, secretary to Charles Booth, and social investigator; Ada Nield Chew, working-class suffragist; Millicent Garrett Fawcett, suffragist leader and author of Political Economy for Beginners (Macmillan, 1870), written for use in schools, from which you learn that the capitalist is a benefactor, as 'any circumstances which tend to increase capital, act powerfully in ameliorating the condition of the poor' (p. 33);* Lettice Fisher, founder of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child (1918), and author of another educational text, Getting and Spending: an Introduction to Economics (Collins, 1922); Mary Macarthur, founder of the newspaper The Woman Worker; Margaret MacDonald, 'co-founder of the Women's Labour League and a loyal defender of the working class' (28); Hilda Martindale, factory inspector in Hanley and Longton, in the Staffordshire Potteries; and many more. Further evidence comes from census materials, diaries, a mass of secondary sources, and, increasingly over time, personal testimony. A rich array of voluntary and official institutions provide more, and capture the intensity of state surveillance, 'do-gooding', and gender- and class-based contestation: the Fabian Women's Group, the National Federation of Women Workers, the National Home Workers' League, the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, the Women's Cooperative Guild, the Women's Industrial Council, the Women's Industrial Defence Committee, the Women's Labour League, and, again, many more.
I can only illustrate briefly the richness of the material, and the glimpses it provides of the 'everyday lives' of working mothers. I do so principally with a focus on the period to 1951. First, here is Hilda Martindale, writing about the Pottery towns in 1904, and explaining why young working class women wished to continue working after marriage, and became 'depressed and out of health' if obliged to remain at home:
'At thirteen years of age the majority of these women would have begun to work in the factory, to handle their own earnings, to mix with a large number of people with all the excitement and gossip of factory life. They would thus in most cases grow up entirely ignorant of everything pertaining to domesticity. After marriage, therefore, it is hardly probable that they would willingly relinquish this life to undertake work of which they are in so large measure ignorant, and which is robbed of all that is to them pleasant and exciting' (33).
Clara Collet commented similarly, of young women in Birmingham: 'After marriage they miss not only the cheerful society (for it is cheerful) of the factory, but also the steady work to which they have become accustomed, and for both reasons many of them persist in going to the factory' (34). It was not easy, though, to combine motherhood with full-time employment. Especially in the nineteenth century, in the virtually complete absence of infant and nursery care, young working mothers had to cope as best they could, and exhaustion and child mortality were shockingly common. Some readers will be familiar with the common nineteenth-century practice on the part of women 'minding' infants while their mothers worked, of doping them with opiates, recorded by Engels among others. Just as graphic in its way is the report by a voluntary worker in Rochdale in 1914 of 'cases where babies under six months had been given raw tripe, fish and chips, pickled herrings and tinned salmon' (36). The main killer, of course, was contaminated milk. In the early years of the twentieth century (1910-11), in the absence of maternity benefits of any kind, two thirds of new mothers in Preston were back at their looms within three months, and only a tiny proportion were away from longer than six, while amongst eighty-two women in the Dundee Jute industry, 'some forty-six worked to within a month of confinement, twenty-seven to within a week, and seven to within a few hours' (19). Nor was marriage, even to a steady 'bread-winner', a protection against working-age poverty: 'In 1901, just under a quarter of all married women aged between forty-five and sixty-five were widowed, a reflection of men's poorer life expectancy resulting from their greater susceptibility to acute illnesses and workplace accidents' (20).
For many women, paid work meant 'home-work', and then as now 'home-work was not a relic of the pre-industrial past but evolved hand in hand with the modern factory system. Employers could drive up productivity by investing in machinery and disciplining their operatives on the shop floor, but using home-workers was an effective strategy in sectors vulnerable to fluctuating demand, volatile consumer tastes and fierce competition ... far from occupying a peripheral space outside the "real" economy, home-work was integral to the organisation of production within Britain's expanding consumer industries' (46). It ranged from finishing clothing to making nails and chains, and it was often more a 'family' than an individual enterprise. The sight of children 'lugging large parcels of carefully wrapped boxes or bundles of freshly lined trousers through the streets' (47) was common, while in hook-and-eye carding, 'first of all the row of hooks is sewn on, and then the mother will pass that over to the tiny little child, and she hooks the eyes to it, and then the mother has to go over that card again and sew on those eyes' (52-3, from evidence to the Select Committee on Homework, 1907). These were the 'sweated industries', on display at the Sweated Industries Exhibition offered as entertainment, with live exhibits (entry, one shilling) at Langham Place in 1906. Thanks to the digital archive of the University of Warwick, you can inspect the exhibition catalogue yourself (Mudie-Smith, 1906). All in all, the picture given here substantially qualifies the rough notion of the 'male breadwinner', as far as the poor were concerned:
'In its 1897 survey, the Women's Industrial Council noted the case of an artificial flower-maker in Clerkenwell, who took in only small quantities of work because piece rates in the trade had fallen and her eyes were bad. She and her unemployed husband survived primarily on six shillings a week earned by a fourteen-year-old son and another six from a nineteen-year-old daughter, who was also able to bring home spare scraps of food from her job as a cook. As well as making a few flowers, the woman added a shilling or so to the purse by cleaning the ground floor of the building in which the family rented their rooms. A cardboard-box-maker visited by the same investigator received thirteen shillings from her husband's dock work plus a few shillings from an adult son, but there were three children still at school and the family were in real difficulties when her own work was slack, as it happened to be at the time of the survey' (55).
It was cases such as this, prominent in the evidence gathered a decade later by the Select Committee, that led to the 1909 Trade Boards Act, which regulated tailoring and box-, lace- and chain-making. In the process, the evidence of contrasting cases where women home workers developed high levels of skill over long careers of full time work, to the extent in some cases of building businesses and employing apprentices, was dismissed. As McCarthy comments:
'the agitation over sweating established a cultural script in which women's inability to behave like full-time, skilled workers - to behave more like men, in fact - provided the starting point for all conversations about why home-work existed, why it was so poorly paid, and why it was a problem for a 'modern' industrial nation like Britain. As we shall see, this script could be pressed into service to devalue married women's work later in the century, including home-work, which declined after 1909 but never disappeared' (65).
Prominent among the opponents of home work were the leading Fabian socialists, Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Beatrice declared the sweated home worker 'an enemy to her sex' (56); Sidney denounced home-working as the 'essential element of evil' in the sweating system. Calling together in Industrial Democracy (1897) for a national minimum wage, they argued that 'it would "set free for domestic duties, an ever increasing proportion of the women having young children to attend to"'. For the Webbs, a modern industrial order was one in which able-bodied men and unmarried women worked in factories, whilst wives and mothers care for their families and homes; as Sidney had testified to a Royal Commission on Labour in 1892, 'I would much prefer to bring about such a condition in society in which the mother of a family did not work for her living at all' (57). Beatrice is profiled at the beginning of Chapter 3, 'Serving Two Masters', which addresses the tension (strictly an either/or choice, it seemed to her) between motherhood and a career. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, sister to Millicent Fawcett and the first British-qualified woman to appear on the General Medical Council's Register, is presented as a counter-example, with her reliance on servants duly noted (69-73). This leads into discussion of the various social, legal and cultural aspects of the 'ideal' of submissive domesticity among the middle classes; the limited choices facing the 'redundant' women who 'did not, or could not, marry' (74, about one in ten of the relevant population); and the widespread practice (not least among public service employers) of barring married women, or terminating the employment of women who married: no married woman was appointed to a permanent salaried post in government between 1873 and the Second World War (83). Women could and did enter primary and secondary teaching in growing numbers: among them, prior to the war, was Ellen Wilkinson, who taught at Oswald Road Elementary School (where she was reprimanded for refusing to make her students sit silently with their arms folded) before graduating from the University of Manchester. Local Education Authorities generally put regulations in place to limit or prohibit the employment of married women, especially after the First World War (86).
Part One concludes with an ominous reference to the tendency to 'reframe motherhood as a social function necessary for the perpetuation of the "race"': 'By 1914, observers of all ideological persuasions viewed the problems and possibilities of working motherhood through this lens of citizenship, nationhood and population. It was a vision that was about to be dramatically sharpened by the political convulsions, social upheavals and economic shocks which swept Europe as the continent plunged into its first total war' (96). In what follows, the shattering impact of the war (on glass walls and ceilings, as well as on people's lives) is deftly conveyed, as is the impact of the signal from the British Treasury in March 1915 to male-dominated trade unions that the use of female labour in heavy industry was strictly temporary (102). Overall, wage differentials improved from 50 per cent to around a third; but the newly employed women workers were aware that when hostilities were over they would lose their positions. It is not surprising that some feminist activists therefore supported calls, as the war came to an end, for new measures 'to support mothers in their full-time occupation as homemakers to the nation' (103). In the meantime, the diet of working-class women improved during the war, as wages rose and works canteens proliferated, especially in the huge munitions industry (though the improvement, note, was often from a diet of 'bread and butter and tea', 111). At the same time, soldiers' uniforms were being finished by home workers in the East End, prompting Sylvia Pankhurst to stage another sweated industries exhibition in May 1915 (118).
Concerns over continuing infant mortality, combined with a revival of pro-natalism, were reflected positively in 'National Baby Week' in 1917 and in the 1918 Maternal and Infants Welfare Act, limited as its provisions were, but negatively as counterparts to the pressure to give jobs to returning soldiers (reinforced by the 1920 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act), and redirect married women to their role as 'home-makers for the nation'. War-time crèches were closed, for fear that they would tempt mothers to continue to work (124-5). This at a time when 8.4 million women finally won the right to vote, and in which Eleanor Rathbone, advocating a 'new feminism', began her campaign for a family allowance, paid directly to the mother in accordance with the number of her children, modelled on the 'separation allowance' that had been paid during the war (Beveridge, who supported it at the time, would introduce it only in 1946).
In short, the promotion of the notion of the male breadwinner by the state gained significant momentum in the particular circumstances of the immediate aftermath of the First World War (129-32). It would be further intensified from the early 1930s in the context of mass unemployment, and reflected in discriminatory measures that removed many married women from access to unemployment benefits. The 1919 Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act appeared to open new opportunities, and new factories in light industries related to consumption did bring new opportunities for women workers on assembly lines (137-9); however, marriage bars continued in other areas of work, the Act notwithstanding - in teaching in particular, and in the Civil Service and the BBC. It was by no means predominantly a 'private industry' practice. In short, paid work became the norm for single women ('only 12 per cent of unmarried eighteen- to-twenty-four-year-olds were not in regular employment by 1931', 139), while the figures for married women were almost exactly the reverse. The practice of employing young women in the period up to marriage, then dispensing with their services, familiar in multinationals across the developing world, seems to have been just as common in Britain between the wars. Manchester City Council, I'm pleased to note, 'dropped its marriage regulation in 1928 following feminist pressure' (152). Domesticity was supported, sometimes in unexpected ways: 'The Electrical Association for Women was founded in 1924 to promote investment in infrastructure and raise awareness of [the] new technology in the home. Its president, Caroline Haslett, called for 'scientific management' principles to be introduced to the humble kitchen, arguing that housewives would benefit from rational layouts, easy-to-clean floors and work surfaces, and from modern appliances such as gas cookers, refrigerators and electric kettles and irons' (158). At the same time, shrinking family size as birth control gradually became more accepted and practiced meant that the two-child ideal was 'well established by the end of the 1930s' (164), and the stage was set for a shift in the 1950s, as opportunities for spending increased (cars, foreign holidays, and the like), and the attraction of a two-earner model grew. All in all, the 1930s may have seen the rise and fall of the male breadwinner-female housewife-2.4 child 'nuclear' family as a social reality, rather than an influential norm.
In turn, the evolution of employment practices during the Second World War would give rise to enduring trends. Crucial here were the conscription of single women aged 20 to 30 into the armed services, civil defence and war industries, fully phased in by March 1941, and its extension to forty- and then fifty-year old women in 1942 and 1943 respectively. Correspondingly, a secret memo to the Cabinet from Prime Minister Churchill in November 1941 urged maximum efforts to encourage married women to volunteer for employment, 'to release mobile women for essential industry', and proposed to support this with expanded nursery places, and extended use of part-time shifts (175). In a marked turnaround from previously very poor provision, 72,000 full-time and 138,000 part-time places in nurseries and nursery classes in elementary schools were created by 1944, though local authorities dragged their heels. School dinners followed, to avoid the problem of children moving from nursery to school having to return home for lunch, and were made mandatory in the 1944 Education Act, but after-school care was not addressed. This was the period in which part-time work was widely introduced, leading Anne Scott-James, the woman's editor of the Picture Post, to enthuse that 'this type of half-time job gives a housewife a feeling of security. She hasn't got to rush herself to death, or neglect the family. She still has half the day to shop, cook, clean the house and look after the children' (183); home-working or 'out-working' was also promoted by Ministry of Production, and similarly increased. The supporting evidence is rich, in particular from the archives of the Mass Observation social research organisation inaugurated in 1937 - too rich to summarise effectively here, but well summarised by Mrs X of Willesden, a mother of two in March 1944: 'It's all work, that's all there is' (186). Single women who 'fell pregnant' had a tough time, and the provision made strikes a grimly comic note: for fear of drawing public attention to the phenomenon, a generous scheme giving six month's support introduced by the Ministry of Health for factory workers in 1941 'was cloaked in the strictest secrecy, so much so that many of the social workers and welfare officers who might have made referrals did not know of its existence'. In total, 36 women benefited (188).
The 'new model of working motherhood' (200) that came into being between 1944 and 1951 was one that followed the path of least resistance. The great majority of single women were in paid work; steady economic growth allowed part-time jobs in particular for married women to proliferate while men enjoyed 'full employment'; new opportunities for consumer spending reconciled previously reluctant husbands to two-income households; and with fewer children, women could devote more years to work. Governments changed regulations (such as the marriage bar) to suit labour market needs, rather than to respond to a reformist or feminist agenda. 'According to one 1951 estimate, there were publicly funded nursery places for just 1 per cent of Britain's under-fives, with priority given to "social cases", typically the children of unmarried mothers, unsupported widows and deserted wives or children from "broken" homes' (208); and with investment in Britain's new defence programme creating further demand for women's labour in industry in the same year, one official [R.L. Bicknell, to be precise, ft. 42, p. 440] offered the opinion that 'working mothers whose children go to school will generally prefer to solve their problems with the help of friendly neighbours, perhaps at some trifling cost, and will commonly be able to do so, at any rate as far as term-times are concerned' (209). This may sound harsh, but is benevolent in comparison with an un-named municipal officer in Guildford, who took the view that 'the woman who wanted to supplement her income to buy a new hat ... was not a deserving person to claim a place in a nursery for her child' (218). McCarthy's conclusion, that: 'The incentives of spending and getting would be fully felt in the later 1950s, when disposable incomes could be converted into washing machines, fridges, new clothes and better quality cuts of meat' (211), describes exactly the case of Waynflete Avenue, Brackley, at exactly that time.
McCarthy's judgement here is impeccable, and I quote at length:
'Yet if a new moral economy of working motherhood took shape in the post-war decades, some women still found themselves positioned outside it. The dual role privileged a pattern of work predicated on a mother’s return to the labour force when her children were judged old enough to be ‘safely’ left. This was neatly in line with the advice of psychoanalysts like John Bowlby, whose theory of maternal deprivation gained further purchase in the 1950s, even if it was never universally accepted. The dual role also let fathers and policymakers off the hook; if women re-entered the workplace only when their children were at school, and often did so on a part-time basis, then no change was needed either in men’s primary identity as breadwinners or to the existing regime of minimal public investment in day-care. The minority of women who did earn continuously whilst their children were young were out of step with this emerging norm. Widowed, separated, divorced and unmarried mothers typically fell into this category, as did professional ‘career women’ and many migrant mothers born outside Britain. In summary, working motherhood became increasingly ‘ordinary’ in the 1950s and 1960s, but it was a narrowly conformist kind of ordinariness, like the narrowly conformist times which produced it' (231).
Bowlby, by the way, was an important figure, and it is essential to have a sense of his biography (wikipedia version, I confess): he was apparently brought up by a nursemaid, Minnie, who left the family when he was nearly four, then passed over to a much colder and more distant nanny, seeing his mother only for an hour after teatime, until he was sent to boarding school. His theory of maternal deprivation, no doubt deeply felt, failed to discriminate between this woeful circumstance and the working-class pattern of leaving a child, during the day, with a loved and loving family member (cf. p. 252). Senior government policy-makers, more familiar with the Bowlby pattern, were apparently persuaded that the two circumstances were much the same.
McCarthy goes to make a series of key points. First: 'This new era for working mothers opened at a moment when most families in Britain were experiencing significant material improvements in their daily lives. A comprehensive welfare state, universal secondary education, low unemployment and rising wages offered security and opportunity on an unprecedented scale' (ibid). Second: 'Employment rates amongst married women rose steadily through the 1950s, reaching 35 per cent in 1961 and 49 per cent a decade later, according to census data' (233). Third: 'It might seem paradoxical that at the very moment that the housewife was culturally enthroned in her ideal home by magazines and advertisers, millions of married women were looking for jobs outside it. Yet, in truth, these phenomena were intimately interlinked. The working mother was also the home-centred mother in the sense that her earnings were frequently what enabled families to enjoy a higher level of domestic comfort' (234).
The broader point, of relevance to critical IPE and 'everyday politics', is that this was a highly specific conjuncture, sharply distinct from the recent past, and highly unstable, as some perceptive observers were aware. At the same time, it emerged against the backdrop of steady change in the relevant parameters of age of marriage, age at birth of first child, family size, level of education, duration of marriage (on the one hand, both partners generally lived longer; on the other, separation and divorce became more common), caring responsibilities, home ownership, prospects for children's futures, and security in old age. It was by no means a golden age: 'Women returning to manual work after an extended break typically took jobs that were less skilled and lower paid than the ones they had held before marriage or childbirth, and the position of part-timers was especially precarious. These workers usually had poor job security and inferior promotion prospects, fewer holiday or sick pay entitlements, and were excluded from occupational pension schemes' (243). And according to one estimate, there were 175,000 widows bringing up a total of around 260,000 children in the mid-1960s, along with a quarter of a million separated wives and 55,000 divorced women heading households, and 'often living in highly precarious circumstances' (254). All in all, 'the post-war model of working motherhood rested on women's acceptance of a bargain which opened up new employment opportunities without disturbing wider inequalities in the labour market and at home. Women settled for jobs which were less skilled and lower paid than the ones they had done before becoming mothers, and they continued to accept primary responsibility for childcare and housework' (258-9). The implications of the argument are clear. Governments, employers and male partners looked to their own interests first, with little concern for the consequences for working mothers. Governments made minimal provision in support services; employers offered the terms and conditions they could get away with; and male partners for the most part welcomed the additional income but declined to take on an equal share of domestic labour. Mothers who chose to work had to bear practically all the burden of adjustment themselves.
The section on the period to 1970 is completed in two contrasting chapters, the first on the experience of graduate working mothers, the second on immigrant mothers. The first is anchored by Judith Hubback's Wives Who Went to College (1957), which addressed 'the many difficulties faced by married women in the professional workplace', and urged governments and employers to make adjustments that would facilitate the better use of this 'highly skilled womanpower' (262). The areas of work that opened up centred on 'the massive demand for teachers, doctors, nurses and social workers created by the expansion of the welfare state', professions 'closely identified with the "caring" qualities which women were widely believed to possess'. 'By contrast, other expanding areas of professional employment, including the Civil Service, law, academia and higher levels of industry, were as unfriendly to women as they have ever been' (264). According to the Robbins Report of 1963, '45 per cent of women with science degrees went into the classroom, whilst among those studying arts and humanities subjects, the proportion was closer to 60 per cent' (268). As regards the women who were part of the wave of immigration from Ireland and Empire or Commonwealth countries from the 1950s, the 'liberal, open-door policy' of the 1948 British Nationality Act 'was driven by economic and political self-interest, adopted at a time of desperate labour shortages', and intended to 'allow for a modest flow of temporary migrants to help revive Britain's flagging economy and under-staffed welfare state'. It underestimated the number of Commonwealth citizens 'who would assert their rights by seeking new lives for themselves and their families in Britain' (294), so successive governments set out to roll back its provisions, piece by piece, while new communities across the country were left to fend for themselves, in poorly paid or precarious work, often in a context of casual or overtly hostile racism.
When the focus moves to the period from 1970 to the present, we are on the familiar ground of 'neoliberalism' and welfare cut-backs, and in a social and political environment dominated by efforts to bring more mothers into the labour force by deliberately reducing levels of support outside the labour market. McCarthy's two chapters, 'Superwomen' and 'Doing It All', are richly sourced, and excellent, from the perspective of critical political economy, in the way in which they relate contemporary issues to the historical trajectory previously outlined. The central irony, of course, is that women born after the Second World War who had 'reached adulthood and were beneficiaries of the NHS, the 1944 Education Act and, for a growing minority, the expansion of higher education' (324) were confounded in their aspirations by the counter-revolution that developed pace from the mid-1970s. If the consequences of the Equal Pay Act (1970) and the Sex Discrimination Act (1975) were disappointing, it was not only because of their limitations, but also because of the steady erosion of standard employment contracts and stable labour market opportunities over subsequent decades; and equally, as McCarthy points out, because as noted above, the pre-Thatcher baseline in terms of provision was so minimal. As late as 1978, a Central Policy Staff Review on services for working mothers acknowledged that hitherto 'the (convenient) assumption has been that the parents, and in particular the mother, can normally cope unaided with a child's first five years of life with a certain amount of fairly elementary help on health and development, together with some part-time nursery education for children over three', and recommended ambitious reforms. The response of Home Secretary Merlin Rees was lukewarm: he felt that a major switch of resources would raise 'important questions of principle about the extent to which the Government ought to finance programmes designed to make it easier for women to go out to work' (338). If 'the mismatch between women's ever-growing desire for independence and fulfilment on the one hand, and labour market restructuring and the rolling back of the State on the other, created an especially toxic mix from the 1980s' (358), it was all the more so the case because baseline provision was so poor, reflecting the limitations of previous reform:
'In 1979, just 10 per cent of working mothers received more than the statutory minimum maternity pay, and by 1990 this had inched up to 14 per cent, in most cases offered by public sector employers under pressure from their unionised workforce. Less than 4 per cent of mothers reported any assistance from employers with childcare costs or provision of workplace nurseries. ... in practice, most employer-sponsored schemes threw the initiative on to women themselves. It was the ambitious career woman’s own responsibility to build networks, seek out mentors and make a success of the flexible working arrangements now so generously on offer. And it was her job to organise childcare, which for the highest-flying professional mothers meant, as in earlier times, a succession of nannies, mothers’ helps and resident au pairs. The market for this kind of waged domestic labour surged in the late twentieth century to meet expanding demand from dual-career households' (361-2).
Familiar ground, then. There is a wealth of detail in these chapters - not least, the account of a renewed wave of home-working mentioned above. Even the response of New Labour after 1997, which represented a kind of 'high point' reflected in the 'Women's Unit' and a raft of policy initiatives undoubtedly driven by politicians, such as Diane Abbot, Harriet Harman, Tessa Jowell and Claire Short, whose agendas can be described as feminist to some if differing degrees, appears in retrospect to have been focused more on expanding the flexible workforce and achieving a 'sure start' for future workers than primarily addressed to the needs of working women per se (377-382). If sisters, as Annie Lennox put it in 1985, were doing it for themselves, it was pretty much because they had to. Taking the burden of adjustment on themselves, as always, they more and more postponed motherhood, or renounced it altogether, in a trend that has continued. In the meantime, successive governments, egged on by the European Commission and sundry other international bodies, devoted themselves to fine-tuning 'welfare' systems aimed to make mothers more available, on the most flexible of terms, for paid work, and the number of women in full-time work climbed steadily. McCarthy does not take the story beyond New Labour, but her sober conclusion rings entirely true today.
In short, this is a great book, enormously valuable in particular for anyone interested in the political economy of social reproduction. The footnotes are as rich as the text, and direct the reader to a wealth of further material: nos. 5, 10, 15, and 20 attached to the introduction, for example (391-4), will provide instructive reading throughout the winter months. Just one or two more recent sources of value, among many, are listed below. All in all, McCarthy barely puts a foot wrong, though I think she greatly underestimates 'the thrill of selling plastic containers to one's friends' (239).
* 'Prove from the propositions enunciated in this chapter,' reads the last of a set of questions intended to improve the understanding of its young students reads, 'that the capitalist is the real benefactor to the wage-receiving classes, not the spendthrift or the almsgiver'. An interesting discussion of communism follows.
References and further reading
Beechey, Veronica, and Tessa Perkins. 1987. A Matter of Hours: Women, Part-Time Work and the Labour Market, Cambridge.
Huws, Ursula. 1984. The New Homeworkers: New technology and the changing location of white-collar work, London.
Mudie-Smith, Richard. 1906. Sweated industries : being a handbook of the "Daily News" exhibition. Warwick Digital Collections, University of Warwick: https://wdc.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p21047coll2/id/329/rec/3.
Pederson, Susan. 1993. Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State: Britain and France, 1914-1945. Cambridge.
Toynbee, Polly. 2003. Hard Work: Life in Low-Pay Britain. London.