Women and Families: an Oral History, 1940-1970. - book reviews

After I recovered from my initial horror at seeing a significant part of my own lifetime discussed as "oral history," I found this book as valuable as the author's earlier project, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940. The oral histories, quoted more generously than in the first book, are fascinating and underused sources for this period, and serve as cautions against the many generalizations offered by generations of scholars: the rise of the symmetrical family, the divorce revolution, the age of "permissiveness," etc. This study adds many distinctive details and variations, a view of the era that preserves the subjectivity of individuals, and, perhaps most valuable, a perspective that examines continuities with the past as well as discontinuities.

As in A Woman's Place, this book focuses on inhabitants of three towns in North Lancashire (ninety-eight women and men interviewed in the late 1980s). Barrow-in-Furness was originally a center of heavy engineering, shipbuilding, and iron and steelmaking; Lancaster, earlier known for its light industries, became, with its hospitals and universities, a service center in the 1950s and 1960s. Preston's cotton industry was in "terminal decline" after a brief postwar revival, and new industries were slowly established in the town.

Women and Families, while acknowledging the impact of the economic dynamism of this period, and the importance of national policies on housing, education, and health care, deals mainly with domestic issues such as courtship, marriage and divorce, parent-child relationships, kinship, and neighborhoods. This book is intended as a sequel to A Woman's Place and some of these respondents are the children of people in the first group. Some changes in Roberts's thinking are apparent, though. In A Woman's Place, Roberts situated herself within family and demographic history; here she engages with a somewhat wider group of scholars, including women's historians. And, whereas in A Woman's Place Roberts maintained that women identified themselves fully with their families, here she, and perhaps the respondents themselves, are more willing to acknowledge conflict within households between children and parents, and between wives and husbands.

The meaning of historical facts is being questioned in some quarters, and theory is encroaching on storytelling in the historical profession. Roberts's response, as an important participant in what might be termed the golden age of British social history, might have been to assert in this book the value and pleasure of reading life histories in all their particularities. Instead, she has, in her programmatic statements defining her project, simply retreated from the controversy. She reduces her claims to truth-telling to unnecessarily diminutive proportions. The project began, she writes, with "no particular theoretical standpoint." (p. 3) Moreover, the book is "not intended to be a comparative one nor does it attempt to synthesize the work of others." (p. 6) She is focusing only on "the local and the personal" and warns that it would be "unwise to draw from it too many conclusions about a wider society." (p. 1)

However, the book does engage with many wider issues that commentators have posed for this period in British history. Roberts literally could not write about these subjects without confronting them in some way, and her book indeed demonstrates many of the major changes of the past half century in family and community life very vividly and persuasively.

This period was, Roberts notes, "a golden age for the family." Two or three children per family rather than six or eight itself meant easier lives for parents and children. And, for just about one generation, couples usually stayed together for life at a point when adult life spans had increased. Divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancies were still pretty rare before 1970.

Roberts's composite picture of workers' domestic lives also suggests that this era, 1940 through 1970, marked the demise of the urban working-class (defined in a sensibly agnostic way) family that had developed in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century, with its fairly strict separation between male and female spheres, its tight control over children, and its recognition of the value of the domestic labors of wives and mothers. Though young people still lived at home in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s until their marriage, parents were losing control over teenagers, both girls and boys. Parents in many cases chose to be more lenient than then own parents had been. Nine- and ten-o'clock curfews were "history" for many teenagers, and young people were less likely to heed their parents' warnings about the choice of friends. Children stayed in school longer than they had in the previous generation, and kept more of their own earnings from full- or part-time jobs. Roberts puts an interesting and useful spin on the question of child discipline by positing it as a society-wide rather than parent-child phenomenon. She describes, for earlier decades, the "interlocking chain of authoritarian figures: neighbours, teachers, clergymen and policemen" all of them "applying the same standards of behaviour and the same punishments" (p. 162) in the decades before 1940 or 1950. As adult control in general over teenagers declined, these parties blamed one another for its deterioration.