Nevertheless, things were starting to change, especially in the case of younger couples. ‘Some working-class husbands will share the washing up if their wives go out to work, or will take turns with the baby if their job releases them early and not too tired,’ noted Hoggart. Shaw similarly in her working-class London suburb recorded how a young wife had ‘volunteered the information that she and her husband could talk about everything and anything together, she thought that modern girls were not afraid of their husbands, as the older generation had been, and so they could be companions for each other and do things together’. As for the East End, Young and Willmott were pleasantly surprised by ‘the new sight of young fathers wheeling prams up Bethnal Green Road on a Saturday morning, taking their little daughters for a row on the lake or playing with their sons on the putting green’. Moreover, the drift outwards of many of these younger couples during the 1950s further encouraged a more companionate marriage. John Mogey in Oxford discovered that a strictly demarcated division of labour between husband and wife was over three times less common on the new Barton estate (off the ring road) than it was in the rundown St Ebbe’s district in the city centre. And in Debden, for all its shortcomings in terms of a wider sense of family and kinship, Young and Willmott observed marriages that were much more a ‘partnership’ than those in Bethnal Green, with the husbands often having given up beer or going to football matches and generally being much more focused, like the wives, on their shared home. Indeed, Elizabeth Bott in her 1957 study
Family and Social Network
argued that what decisively pushed couples towards a more companionate approach was the absence of extended family networks, in effect throwing husband and wife on themselves and their own resources.47 Given that the outward migration was set to continue, and similarly the decline of the extended family, the era of the companionate marriage was clearly – if still patchily – under way.
Even if it was a partnership, it was not necessarily a partnership of equals. ‘She was a big heavy woman, on the short side, but broad and very strong, with a strength of mind even greater than the strength of her body,’ was how Adam Faith (born in 1940 as Terry Nelhams), recalling his Acton childhood, described his mother, whereas his coach-driver father, Alf, was ‘the kindest, most passive of men’, in charge of his life only when behind the wheel. Or when Frank Girling, an anthropologist, spent 18 months in the mid-1950s investigating life on a Scottish housing estate largely occupied by unskilled workers, he found that the women had ‘a dominant position in the social life of the area and also in their own homes’, regarding ‘all male activities with tolerant amusement’, and that the men ‘lack the self-confidence and assertiveness of their wives’.
Overall, however, the evidence suggests that more often than not it was the husbands who called the shots, perhaps in part because by this time they tended to be several years older than their wives, which had been much less the case before the war. Mays in inner-city Liverpool, for instance, depicted a world in which girls were anxious to get engaged – and thereby raise their status – as soon as possible after leaving school, followed by marriages in which there was ‘an acceptance of a male-dominated home’, with ‘a great amount of deference paid to the husband as wage-earner and as the traditional head of the family’. Many husbands were tyrants. ‘My father would bellow, “GET YOUR ELBOWS OFF THE TABLE” at everyone, including my mother, whose apron had to be spotless at all times,’ recalls Janet Street-Porter about her father at meal times in working-class Fulham; another compelling memoir,
Silvertown
by Melanie McGrath, describes the unblinking brutality and exploitiveness of her grandfather Len Page, running the Cosy Café in the East End; Billie Whitelaw’s autobiography evokes a loveless marriage to an older actor, Peter Vaughan, increasingly irate as her star rose; and the bullying, hectoring Labour politician George Brown used his long-suffering wife Sophie as little more than a doormat who, in their daughter’s words, ‘just put up with hell, basically’. Sophie might have secretly sympathised with Florence Parsons. ‘I only did it to please him,’ she explained on 1 January 2000 (her 100th birthday, and 21 years after her husband’s death) about her long years of voting Labour. ‘When he’d gone, I changed to Tory.’ Just occasionally, in a world largely run by men for men, the worm could turn. In the spring of 1955, a Derby County club-house went not to Stewart Imlach and his wife, who had been promised it, but instead to a new signing. The manager, Jack Barker, showed the Imlachs an inferior house and tried to sweet-talk Mrs Imlach, whereupon she whacked him with her handbag. ‘I can’t believe I did that,’ she remarked half a century later – and the result, in a display of marital unity, was an immediate transfer request.48
Two especially key areas in the husband/wife balance of power were money and birth control. From a range of evidence, it seems clear enough that most male wage-earners reserved part of their wage for personal spending purposes and then gave the rest to their wives for the housekeeping, often without revealing how much they had held back.49 ‘Unlike many of my friends,’ recalled the Scottish miner Lawrence Daly rather ruefully, ‘I showed my pay slip to my wife and discussed with her what was I thought a fair share for pocket money. My friends thought this proved that I was, as they said, a hen-pecked husband. My wife, on the other hand, saw no virtue in this whatsoever as it was what she had been brought up [in middle-class Worcestershire] to expect.’ What is also clear is that the division of the weekly wage packet was usually inequitable. In 1949 a Mass-Observation survey found that only 14 per cent of husbands spent less than 5s on themselves, compared to 52 per cent of wives; two years later an assessment of why many married women wanted paid work argued that a principal – perhaps
the
principal – reason was in order to avoid having to ask their husbands for the money ‘for a new dress or hat’; Michael Young in 1952 argued that housekeeping allowances had failed since 1939 to keep up with rising earnings; and soon afterwards, Dennis et al in Featherstone discovered that wives there had virtually no personal spending power. ‘They give out the housekeeping money as if it were a gift,’ a 54-year-old middle-class wife from Weston-super-Mare complained to Gorer, and others echoed her bitterness:
Treat their wives as paid housekeepers. Not let his wife know how much money he has. (
Wife, 30, Wigan
)
Meanness or rather hard over money matters. This refers to my husband. (
Working-class wife, 49, Bury St Edmunds
)
Spending too much on cigarettes, betting and the ‘local’ when the wife needs it more for the home and the children. (
Lower-middle-class wife, 29, Bromley
)
They do not understand high cost of living. They do not go shopping with their wives to find out where money goes to. (
Wife, 30, Birmingham
)
Many men deliberately keep wives short of money on pretence of saving for old age, but nothing makes a woman age quicker than having to scrape and do without when children are young. (
Middle-class woman, 56, Birmingham
)
As for birth control, the pioneering work of Kate Fisher has decisively overturned long-standing assumptions that it was women who cared more about this aspect of marriage and who determined the arrangements. Instead, on the basis of extensive oral histories in Blackburn, Hertfordshire, Oxford and south Wales, she has concluded that not only was ‘men’s knowledge of birth control more extensive than women’s’, but that ‘men were frequently given ultimate power to determine whether or not birth control would be used, what method was chosen, and the regularity with which it would be employed’. One of her interviews, with ‘Larry’ (a builder and foreman bricklayer) and his wife ‘Doreen’, has a particular piquancy. They had married in Blackburn in 1946 – he twenty-nine, she twenty-four – and they had had two sons:
LARRY
: We never discussed it.
DOREEN
: What?
LARRY
: This business of, er, family breeding.
DOREEN
: I asked you ‘Please could I have, try for another child?’ You know that. You kept saying ‘No, I don’t want a football team.’
LARRY
: I said I didn’t want a big family.
DOREEN
: Well, I didn’t get one. You said ‘We’re just right, we’ve a two-bedroomed house and we’ve two boys, it means moving, no.’ That’s what you said.
LARRY
: Well, I thought you were in the same mind.
DOREEN
: No, I wanted to try for a girl and you wouldn’t say yes.
LARRY
: Well, I thought it might’ve been a boy.
DOREEN
: Well, if it had’ve been, I’d’ve tried again for a girl.
LARRY
: Well, that’s why I’d’a – stop . . . that’s why I put a stop to it.
DOREEN
: Huh! Yeah, he’s the bo – . . . he was the boss.
LARRY
: Well, I was the boss then.
Unsurprisingly, Larry had also not permitted Doreen to work: ‘I felt as though I could keep her.’50
Sex itself was the subject of only one systematic survey during the 1950s – Eustace Chesser’s
The Sexual, Marital and Family Relationships of the English Woman
(1956), based on questionnaires completed in 1954 by more than 6,000 female informants, located via GPs and with a middle-class bias. The married women were asked about their degree of ‘sexual satisfaction in sexual intercourse’, to which 43 per cent replied they had ‘a lot’, 36 per cent ‘a fair amount’, 16 per cent ‘a little’ and 5 per cent ‘none’. Three other suggestive findings emerged: the higher up the occupational ladder the husband was, the more sexual satisfaction his wife was likely to get (or at least claim to get); among wives not fully enjoying intercourse, the four most common reasons given were ‘husband ejaculates too quickly’, ‘husband does not pet enough before intercourse’, ‘too frequent intercourse’ and ‘husband expresses too little tenderness’; and overwhelmingly it was felt by wives that men wanted sex more frequently than women did. Over the years the methodology behind Chesser’s survey would be much criticised – Chesser himself, a doctor, wrote prodigiously on sexual matters – but it remains a key source.
Do his findings suggest a broadly satisfied or dissatisfied female population? Much turns on that ambiguous phrase ‘a fair amount’, but overall it is hard to be sanguine, given other contemporary evidence and subsequent oral testimony. ‘Fifty out of every hundred wives still go through their years of married life without discovering that physical satisfaction can, and should, be as real and vivid for them as it is for their husbands,’ claimed Dr Helena Wright, on the basis of ‘hundreds of talks’ with her patients and much correspondence, in her
More About the Sex Factor in Marriage
, a 1947 follow-up book that was in wide circulation all through the 1950s. Or take a matter-of-fact sentence in Shaw’s account of family life in a working-class London suburb: ‘The impression gained from the remarks volunteered by many of the women in all age groups was that they did not enjoy intercourse, but rather regarded it as a necessary part of married life.’ It was probably even worse in Featherstone, where according to Dennis et al ‘very few women stated real satisfaction with their sex lives’, with the authors noting that for the men there, sex was essentially ‘a matter of conquest and achievement’. Nor did the fundamental misalignment necessarily ease with age. The Bethnal Green sociologists did not greatly concern themselves with sex, but Peter Townsend in his study of old people there did record his impression that ‘some women had rarely experienced sexual satisfaction and found it difficult to give a husband “his rights” when they became infirm’. The most vivid evidence – perhaps not altogether representative, but surely far from wholly atypical – comes from the recollections of Renee Lester, a Scunthorpe mother of six:
I wasn’t one of the lucky ones. Every night I’d maybe read for a bit and keep my eye ready on the clock for when he came home from the pub. He’d be home around ten to eleven. When I heard footsteps I’d blow the lamp out and pretend to be asleep. He would come home full of beer and start mauling me. I just wanted to sleep and it used to cause no end of trouble if I refused him. You’d get a swipe if you didn’t. And sometimes they’d say, ‘Oh bugger you if that’s the way you feel.’ I didn’t care if he said that, but mostly they demanded their rights. There was no affection with it, no love, they just wanted sex. It was a duty, a horrible duty to me, I didn’t like it. A woman didn’t get satisfaction from sex then, she was just disgusted with it, if she was owt like me. And you’d lie there and you’d be looking at the cracks in the ceiling thinking, ‘Oh that crack could do with filling in, that could do with a bit of whitewashing.’
‘It was no fun,’ she concluded bleakly, ‘it was just nasty, dirty and degrading.’51
How much did unsatisfactory sex lives matter to those involved? Probably quite a lot, in that among Natalie Higgins’s 1950s cohort (much likelier to complain about the subject than the 1930s cohort had been) ‘some women expressed disappointment that sex only lasted “two minutes,” that their husbands did not act tenderly toward them during sex, or said that they would have liked “a bit more foreplay” ’, while ‘some men wished that their wives had instigated sex sometimes, or were simply more active during intercourse’. Particularly for women, notwithstanding their underlying pragmatism about marriage, the ubiquitous messages of the era must have made a significant difference, heightening expectations and, all too often, increasing subsequent disappointment. Those messages, of course, were less to do with sex itself than romance and the ideal of the happy, mutually contented, indissoluble union, but it did not take a huge leap of the imagination to picture that ideal as finding its most perfect expression in the bedroom. The cruel gap between aspiration and reality – arguably the master-theme of the 1950s – comes out in the bitter tone of some of the complaints made to Gorer: