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Perspectives on the Working-Class Family in Wartime Britain, 1939–1945

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Geoffrey Field
Geoffrey Field
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Purchase
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Extract

In the late 1940s the British people seemed preoccupied with family and children to an unprecedented degree. A similar revival of family life occurred in other European countries, testimony to the common legacy of the war years, during which private life had been broken apart by death, forced separations, constant anxiety, and unaccustomed privation. But the specific form of postwar familial ideology in Britain reflects the complex circumstances, cultural traditions, and mood of the nation. Everywhere the faces of smiling, responsible parents and healthy, carefree children gazed out from advertising billboards and National Health posters, symbolic of the nation's “social capital” and a better future. Widespread concern about low birthrates helped to strengthen domestic and mothering images of women; magazines and radio espoused the ideas of a growing phalanx of child-care professionals; and government social policy redefined the reciprocal obligations of parents and the state, reflecting a new “social democratic” conception of family as the basic unit of society and the chief incubator of citizenship and community values.

Type
The Working Class in World War II
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 38 , Fall 1990 , pp. 3 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 1990

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References

NOTES

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83. There is very little on the London Women's Parliament and its regional offshoots. It began in 1941, was associated with the campaign for a “People's Convention,” and continued until at least January 1946. NSCN papers contain numerous references. M–OA, Topic Collection 32/F, Diary 5390 details meetings in January 1942. On the character of pro-nursery arguments, see Riley, D., “Some Peculiarities of Social Policy Concerning Women in Wartime and Postwar Britain,” in Higonnet, M. R. and Jenson, J. et al. , eds., Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, 1987).Google Scholar

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88. Report on the Care of Children Committee. Cmd. 6922 (London, 1946).Google Scholar For an administrative perspective on the Act's origins, see Parker, R. A., “The Gestation of Reform: The Children's Act of 1948,” in Bean, P. and MacPherson, S., eds., Approaches to Social Welfare (London, 1983).Google Scholar

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