Dan Snow's History Hit - Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen

Episode Date: February 16, 2021

We cover all the big topics on the podcast including weapons of mass destruction, climate change, great power rivalry and the struggle for democracy and many others, but today's podcast is all about the biggest subject of them all. Love.Carol Dyhouse, Professor (Emeritus) of History at the University of Sussex, joins me to talk all about how portrayals of love in popular culture and in particular Disney princesses have influenced how people view love, romance and marriage and how those views have changed since the 1950s.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Stokes History. We like to talk about all the most important things going on in the world on this podcast. We talk about weapons of mass destruction, the climate crisis, great power rivalry,

the struggle for democracy. We do everything here on Dan Snow's History. And today we're talking about the biggest subject of all, and that's love, everyone. Love. Carol Dyehouse is an emeritus professor of history at the University of Sussex. She's written a lot about the social history of women and popular culture. And now she's going on the podcast to talk to me about, big question, Walt Disney, Disney princesses and love. How did Disney princesses change the way women thought about themselves and men and women thought about finding that prince charming, getting married and living happily ever, ever after. And how have those Disney princesses changed? I can say my Mulan and Moana inspired daughters. Well, it's a different scene,

different scene to what it was back in the fifties and sixties. If you like what you get on this podcast, then you've got to go and check out our back catalogue. It's all available without ads, all of it available only on History Hit TV. It's our digital history channel. The good news is go for the podcast, stay for the videos, because there are hundreds, hundreds of history videos on there made by us and licensed by us for the true history fans. There are no aliens on there. There are very few sharks. Well, there's an episode where we talk about USS Indianapolis and the sinking of that ship after delivering the atomic bomb. That involves sharks. But on the whole, there are not many sharks and certainly no aliens. Trying to quickly think about

whether there's aliens. There was an episode on the occult between the wars that may have the odd alien in it. But apart from that, no aliens. If you wish to join that revolution, join the world's fastest growing history channel, please go to historyhit.tv. Or if you like your history in the flesh, don't forget the live tour. It's on this autumn, historyhit.com slash tour. It'd be great to see you all there. But in the meantime, everyone enjoy listening to Carol Dyehouse. Carol, how are you doing? Thanks for coming on the podcast thank you for inviting me delighted that you're interested well how can you not be it's so exciting so we assume that kind of love is unchanging but you're arguing that love and our ambitions for love and our expectations have

changed radically yes i'm not the first person to argue that. My colleague, Claire Langhammer, who wrote a rather wonderful book called The English in Love, argued that love has a history. It's not unchanging. And she suggested that there had been an emotional revolution before what we normally think of as the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s. the 1960s and 70s. So I'm not being original there. But I think what I am trying to do is bring a whole lot of these arguments together to look at how really heterosexual relationships and ideas about love in heterosexual relationships have been completely reshaped since 1950. Let's talk about 1950. What are your sources? How can you research what people thought about love in 1950? I'd love to know. Well, I'm using a lot of other people's research, so I'm not doing it from the ground up, as it were. I use research by Claire Langhammer. I use research by a rather wonderful American scholar of the history of the family, Stephanie Kuntz.

I think my strength is that I bring together a whole lot of stuff from film and popular writing and sort of more empirical stuff from the Mass Observation Archive, which was set up in the 30s, but recreated in the 1980s to collect a whole lot of material about what people really think about, often taken for granted subjects. And they did two surveys later than the 1950s, but in the 1990s, one called Close Relationships and the other called Women and Men, when people talked about the changes that they'd seen during their lifetime and so on. But the book is bookended between two phenomenally popular Disney films, Cinderella in 1950 and Frozen, the first Frozen in 2013. And these have had massive popularity.

However, going back to 1950, which is your starting point and what you were asking me about, I think I've been absolutely fascinated by the way that the Cinderella story infuses the culture in Britain and to some extent the United States in the 1950s. It's not just the Disney film, it's everywhere. You look at women's magazines and the adverts reference Cinderella, even Shell Petroleum advertises itself with a pumpkin and a coach and so on. And I think that sort of relates to people's feelings about the coronation and the royal wedding before that. But I think it just infuses the culture and it shapes the way people think about things, I would argue. I'm so brainwashed by Disney that I just assumed it was kind of just fundamental, universal, that we all one day thought we by Disney that I just assumed it was kind of just fundamental,

universal, that we all one day thought we'd all be at the centre of this kind of gigantic royal pageant featuring ourselves. You know, I'm part of that sort of selfish generation. Are you saying that when my grandma got married in 1939, 1940, did they just not think about it in those terms? What had happened? Was this about democracy? Was it about the birth of consuming? We all suddenly thought, no, we're all Cinderella now. It's not just for toffs. No, I think it's more specific than that. I'm not saying that Cinderella's stories weren't being retold in the interwar period when you say your grandmother got married. But I would say that there'd be many, many more retellings in the first years after the Second World War. And that does

have some sort of historical specificity about it. I mean, each age selects the fairy tales which mean most to it, and then it retells them in its own guise, in a sense. And I would say very strongly that the Cinderella myth had particular purchase in the years after the Second World War. You can relate that, if you like, to consumerism. The fantasy of a wonderful romantic relationship and a home where hard work and austerity and housework weren't too onerous was the dream of a lot of women,

I think, after the war. You think of the Ideal Homes exhibition and so on. But the Cinderella story is retold over and over again in ballet, in cinema, in books. The Lady Bird readers for children have two or three versions of Cinderella in the post-war years. It has particular purchase at a particular historical moment. And I'm fascinated by that, actually. I agree. It's very interesting. But if you got married in 1880, you just simply didn't have the mental space or the ambition or the assumptions, I guess, of a mid-20th century young working couple. The idea of comparing yourself as sort of having a fairy tale wedding was just absurd, was it? Well, it's not just the cultural difference.

There are specific historical differences between getting married in the 1880s. I mean, there have been huge demographic changes. The thing about the post-war years were that people were marrying younger and younger. The end of the 19th century, the middle classes particularly were marrying later and later. If you look at the research that was done by a couple of sociologists, Joe and Olive Banks, on that period, of sociologists, Joe and Olive Banks, on that period. What they argue is that towards the end of the 19th century, the whole business about constructing a bourgeois lifestyle with servants and the right kind of house and all that required quite a big income on the part of the male. Women obviously weren't bringing in income in the Victorian period, so that marriage was getting

delayed. What you have after the Second World War is this fantastic drop in the age of marriage, particularly after the war and into the 1960s, whereby in the early 1960s, something like 40% of brides every year were under 21. And the median age of marriage came right the way down. So I think it hit its lowest in 1966 and was about 21. So what you do have is a whole mass of teenage marriages after the war, which was seen as a huge social problem. But these ideas of finding love, finding your Mr. Right, really, when you were just out of school, were fantastically potent and very, very powerful. So I'm going to park my Marxist right there. So it's not about the kind of economic substructure. It's just about kids. It's about young people getting married and are able to get married.

Because yeah, at 17, 18, I mean, I was all about Cinderella. I mean, I just literally fell in love with Cinderella's every single day, if they happen to be vaguely nice to me in the lunch queue. If they happen to notice this gawky, big, anyway, I'm sorry, I'm revisiting old trauma. So actually, you think it's not just about money, it's just about the fact that they were just young. And these are the stories that just appeal to teenage lovers. They've always been young people, but their social context in which they're growing up is very different. What you have immediately after the war, for instance, is you don't have foolproof contraception until we get to late 60s, 70s. And you also have a proscription against what was called premarital sex.

I mean, it's a category we don't have anymore. Premarital sex was a terrible scandal. So for young people who fell in love, they were likely to marry just in order to have sex, basically in the 50s. love. They were likely to marry just in order to have sex, basically, in the 50s. That changes later on. But at that particular historical moment, it's very important. And the business of young people marrying was so contentious and started to affect policy in a very powerful way because people thought it was never going to change. It did change, of course. It went into reverse. But that wasn't foreseen in the 60s. And the fact that so many young people were often running away from home to get married in the 50s and 60s, running away to Gretna Green and so on, because their parents wouldn't give permission, was seen as a big social

problem and also influenced policy. For instance, it was, I would argue, concerned about very useful marriages was one of the main reasons why the Lacey Committee on the Age of Majority recommended that the age of majority should come down from 21 to 18, which it did in 1969 after that committee. I mean, the idea of running away and marrying was seen as very glamorous. The example that filled the papers in the 50s was James Goldsmith, Jimmy Goldsmith, who ran away with a Bolivian tin magnate's daughter, Isabel, in the mid-50s. They didn't go to Gretna Green. He was 20, she was 18. And the papers were full of this because her father objected. Most kids running away to Gretna Green, the story wasn't as glamorous as that. In fact, it was often quite sordid because in Gretna Green, you could marry in Scotland under 21, but you had a

residence qualification. So the place was packed with people living in cheap B&Bs, in chicken coops and tents and caravans in order to carry out the residence qualification and then get married and just hope their parents didn't catch up with them in the meantime. You listen to Dan Snow's History Hit. More from Carol Dyehouse and Disney princesses after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits.

There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. You're right, of course people have always been young and of course there's always been these stories of love. I mean, Shakespeare obviously is full of passionate love and people marrying for love. I'm wondering, you know, we talk a lot at the moment about why there's a sort of explosion of extremism on social media, given that the messages haven't changed, but we've just found out ways to incredibly effectively place these messages and memes and videos and fake news into people's brains via their phone. Is it just that Disney got so good at blasting out these very compelling, colourful, dynamic

movies in the way they also changed the world of animal rights activism, because everyone started to see these animals given a sort of human characteristics, and it changed the way that a whole generation thought about animals. The effectiveness, the power of this visual medium mean that we started to think about love and romance in a different way. The films were fantastically popular in the interwar period. The cinema had huge influence. It's often said people that look at the history of cinema and film going say that the working class and even ordinary middle class,

well, mainly working class women would go to the cinema two, three times a week. And what they saw massively influenced the way they thought about love. We know it influenced the way they dressed and actually the marketing of cinema in the interwar period, which is before the period I'm looking at here. The marketing of clothes and cinema went together with film magazines like Picture Post and so on. And the links between fashion and cinema were massively exploited and incredibly powerful. Cinema starts to lose a bit of its edge after the Second World War. So I would say it's perhaps more powerful in the interwar period, but still just before television takes over, it's still quite potent. Walt Disney himself believed that cinema and animated cartoons such as Cinderella

both reflected and shaped people's dreams. And I think that's what they did, very definitely. You could say the same with Frozen now. I mean, I don't have small female grandchildren, but I have enough friends who do to know that Frozen completely obsessed a whole generation of small girl children in 2013 and continues to do so. along with films, you know, the production of the Elsa and Anna dolls and the clothes to wear and everything from cosmetics to stationery. And Disney then gets into, towards the end of the period, not just marketing to children, but marketing Disney weddings for adults. You can actually model your wedding in sort of Disney fashion, should you so want to. I mean, I can't imagine anything worse, but people do go for this in a big way. I went to Central Florida years ago now to look at the Kennedy Space Center, one of the world's great museums. And I was forced to take my children to Disneyland for the day. I was very disturbed at the number of grown-ups there,

actual grown-ups without any children. They had no excuse to be there. It was very dark. And you're right. These people in their 20s and 30s were seriously buying into that kind of Disney dream, quote unquote. What's fascinating though, is that at a time when everyone starts getting divorced, the fairy tale ending, not that it's a fairy tale to be forced to stay in an abusive relationship, of course, and we see that in previous generations, but it was certainly the Disney fairy tale ending was just simply not being enacted in up to half of weddings that were breaking up. How did this myth, is it just because young people quite rightly ignore middle-aged people like me and just assume that they'll never turn out like that? How did this myth endure against mounting evidence that the Disney dream was not practical in the flesh?

Well, hang on. I mean, that's to assume that there isn't change. In the period I'm looking at, there's massive change. After the Second World War, there is flurry of divorce because of people's separation experiences during the war, which were often very wounding and made relationships difficult. But then you have something that has been called the golden age of the kind of long, stable marriage. Some historians have disputed that and say, you can see the cracks through the 50s. But the 50s is an era that some people have identified with long and sort of stable marriages. Divorce was quite difficult until 1969 with the Divorce Reform Act. And after the Divorce Reform Act, you get a flurry of divorces. There's now a lot of debate about whether divorce rates are going down. But of course, it's really hard to say because marriage

rates are going down too. A lot of young couples are just cohabiting. So it's quite an interesting controversy as to whether divorce is actually still on the upturn or whether it's actually going down. If it's going down, it's partly because people are not marrying. But some people have also argued that they're marrying later again now. These teenage marriages went, they were a historical blip. The fascinating thing to me is that people thought it was a trend, but it was a historical blip. And we might talk about why it was a historical blip. But the optimistic people who are looking at divorce rates now are suggesting that because young people are coupling up later after getting quite a lot of independence through jobs and living often alone or in flat shares or

something, when they do choose partners and couple up, it's more considered, it's less likely to break up. Because there's quite a lot of evidence to support the fact that these very young teenage marriages were not very stable. The breakup rate was much higher with them than it is now. You can see why. And that's why so many parents were opposed to their young people getting married in their teens, because they knew that the chance of those relationships lasting was not very high. We're living longer as well. So, I mean, it was a fantastically unstable situation. You've got people marrying in their droves at 18 and 20 and living longer than ever before. You've got like

60 years to find everything you want in a partner. Of course, people didn't do it. These very young marriages didn't on the whole last, well, some did, but the trend is not that way. So in fact, what we're trying to do is explain this historical blip of very young, enthusiastic marriers. I'm fascinated by that. I'm also fascinated by the fact that it changed. See, nobody thought it was going to change. When the Lady Committee on the Age of Majority got set up at the end of the 60s, it was chaired by Justice Lady. It had on it Catherine Whitehorn, actually, who's recently died, sadly, but it's a beautifully written report. As a parliamentary paper, it's quite gripping to read, actually, because I think

she drafted it and it's got a sort of insouciance and a sort of wit about it that most parliamentary papers don't have. But it's clear that almost everybody on the committee thought that young marriages, the trend to young marriages was here to stay. And that's why they thought they had to reduce the age of majority from 21 to 18, as I said earlier. And they thought that was not going to change. And then a few years later, of course, it changed radically, which is fascinating. Well, I find it's fascinating. I think the reason it changes, of course, has a lot to do with the contraceptive pill, has a lot to do with the introduction of secondary education, particularly for women, although that took a while to bed in in the 50s, even with the secondary education provided for by the Butler Education Act, the 44 Act, you still get three quarters of women leaving school at 15. But that starts to change. So along with education, along with

better control over fertility, along with access to abortion and so on, you get a push away from these early marriages, but it wasn't foreseen at all. And so coming back to Disney and Hollywood and culture, the list you've just given suggests that actually it's more prosaic. It's about education, it's about money, and it's about contraception and culture and that kind of everyday human existence. What effect do you think Disney, therefore, and this kind of culture imposed on high from these Hollywood studios, what effect do you think is that having then? I think it's absolutely fascinating how much influence Disney has had, because on the whole, scholars haven't really looked at it in any

detail. I mean, some people have. I remember Annette Kuhn looked at the influence of Snow White, which was a terrifying film. I don't know if you ever saw it as a child. It absolutely terrified me as a child. But historians who take seriously young people's changing aspirations and educational qualifications tend to look at schooling and the formal education system. and educational qualifications tend to look at schooling and the formal education system. They don't tend to look at the informal influence of Disney. I think you could definitely make a case that Disney and popular cinema is as potent an educational influence as schooling, but people haven't looked at it that way. So when you said to me a minute ago, you said, so it's really about hard demographic changes

or provision of contraception or something rather than the influence of things like Disney. I don't think it's either or. I think these things are absolutely intertwined and that's one of the things I'm trying to explore in the book. I'm trying to look at the way in which the broader culture

shifts along with these other changes. So the first chapter of the book is called When Men Were Unending because it's about young women thinking that attaching themselves, finding Mr. Right and attaching themselves to a male breadwinner provider was going to like solve their lives for them. You know, that was your main aim in life. Whereas by the end of the period in Frozen, you get a much more complex

pattern where Anna and Elsa are not hot footing it into marriage. And it's not about that. And it's about all sorts of other things, adventure and sisterly loyalty and so on. So it's a sort of reshaping of the myths by which we live. I mean, an optimistic view would be that if in the 1950s, young women saw catching Mr. Right, attaching themselves to a breadwinner as a way of solving their life's problems, by the end of the period, hopefully, they're seeing finding a romantic partner as a kind of beginning rather than an ending. So a heterosexual relationship would not be the end of it, and they all lived happily ever after. It would be the beginning of a journey in which their views and desires and aspirations might well change.

But it's a more complex and, I would argue, realistic story. Has there been any research on what was motivating Disney? There is. And as I say, Walt Disney himself, I mean, I start with a little bit in the book. He was very aware that he wanted his films to both reflect people's hopes and also develop them. That he saw film as hooking into fantasies, but actually creating fantasies as well. The conservative media in the US loved to bash Disney for being progressive. I remember the outcry about Mulan, the animated Mulan, when it showed a woman fighting on the front line. It was said

to be softening the US public up for the introduction of women to frontline posts in the armed forces. Do you think Disney has a gender there or do they respond to fashion? How's that work? Well, one of the fascinating things was when everybody was waiting for Frozen 2, there was a lot of speculation about whether Elsa was going to be allowed to be gay, you know, whether she was actually not going to look for a prince at all, but actually hook up with some other woman. And there was quite a lot of pressure, but I think that would have been going too far. That would have been Disney trying to spearhead social change, which I don't think is ever going to be the case. I think that if you look at the messages given out by Disney, they do almost what

Disney himself said that I just quoted a minute ago. They tap into fantasies and they entrench them and they develop them a little bit. I mean, Disney heroines are much more spunky than they were in the Cold War period. I mean, the 1950s, they're just wet. There they are with their bluebirds doing the washing up and just having no personality at all and falling for Mr. Right just because he has a nice pair of tights and a castle and a kingdom. The princes in the early Disney films, they're ciphers. Whereas if you look at the ones towards the end, there's been a lot more thought going into the kind of

heroes who would be acceptable to more liberated women. And the females in Disney films are much more spunky now than they were. They're not so passive and wet. And they don't moon around with bluebirds, you know. Couldn't agree with you more. I'm very happy to let my kids watch these Disney films. The women are tough. I like them. Well, thank you so much.

What's the name of the book? It is called Love Lives from Cinderella to Frozen. All the best with it. Good luck. Thanks. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense.

But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review. I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams, The Ends of the Earth, explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you