Dan Snow's History Hit - Working Motherhood

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

Dr Helen McCarthy, lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge, joins Dan to discuss the complicated past of working motherhood. They consider how women have been excluded from the world of work as well as attempts to break into it, and how these developments have informed our views on gender, work and equality in Britain today.For ad free versions of our entire podcast archive and hundreds of hours of history documentaries, interviews and films, including our new in depth documentary about some of the greatest speeches ever made in the House of Commons, please signup to www.HistoryHit.TV Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/$1.

Hello and welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm very lucky to have Dr Helen McCarthy on the podcast. We're talking about women and we're talking about the world of work and the exclusion of women from that world and then attempts to break into it and exactly where we are at the moment. She is a historian, she's a lecturer in modern British history at the University of Cambridge. She's an absolute legend. She's written extensively on modern British history, particularly the role of women. One of her books called Women of the World and her current one is Double Lives about working motherhood in modern Britain. I think lots of us men and women like are thinking of working parenting at the moment, given that we're doing a lot of it. Kids locked at home, us trying to keep

careers on the go. It is quite challenging, particularly when your daughter stabs your son with a big wooden sword that you got on your last trip to a castle. That is the reality of my morning. If you want to listen to all the back episodes of this podcast, if you want to go to watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries, please go to History Hit TV. It's the digital history channel we channel we got the world's best digital history channel in fact um and you can go over there and you can use the code pod1 pod1 and that will get you a month for free and then the next month just one pound euro dollar so we're talking we're talking getting you through basically may and most of may and june for just one pound euro dollars that's not bad it's not a bad service that so go and check it out while that offer lasts. In the meantime, please enjoy this conversation with Dr. Helen McCarthy.

Helen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Hello, it's lovely, lovely to be here. We're recording this in the spring of 2020. Coronavirus is about to hit Britain in earnest. First few people have been suffering from it. And one of the things that strikes me is that your work is about the history of mothers who fought for and then worked for pay equal to that of men. As we're now looking at potentially schools breaking up for weeks and weeks and weeks, months and months. This is an interesting time to be publishing this book, isn't it? It's a very interesting time to be publishing this book. I mean, what we're facing is a massive withdrawal of state support for the care of school-aged children and obviously lots of nurseries, nursery schools

are going to be closing as well and I suspect lots of child minders also may no longer be able to look after children so we're going to be facing this massive care gap and it will be you know fascinating as well as you know daunting to think about how working parents are going to fill that gap whether they're going to you know try to activate informal care networks involving family, friends. I mean, there is a big question about the role of grandparents, because one of the rationales for not shutting schools that the government has been making is that, of course, grandparents do a huge amount of informal care, but they are also amongst the more vulnerable groups when it comes to having more complications from the

coronavirus. So it may be that grandparents won't be available. And you're going to have some pretty frantic, stressed out parents, you know, trying to work from home whilst also looking after their kids. Is this something from your research that you're very familiar with? I mean, what have been some of the impediments to women achieving quality in the workplace? I mean, well, there are a lot of them. So let's start with caregiving and children. Has that traditionally in a pre-industrial industrial economy in Britain, that's been overwhelmingly the job of women, has it? Well, I guess the standard story of the Industrial Revolution and its aftermath is that Britain sort of moved from a society based around household production and the family economy, where economic activities

and family caregiving were in a sense all taking place in the same space and at the same time, although women were generally more responsible for the care of children than men. And then the Industrial Revolution came along, separated the home from the workplace, and this led to sort of married women being banished to the home and becoming full-time homemakers. Now, of course, it was always a bit more complicated than that, but it is certainly true to say that the absence of care provision and the sort of historic underinvestment in nurseries and nursery schools in this country has made a huge difference to not just whether mothers could go out to work but the kind of work that they could do. So you know if one looks at the history of working motherhood in Britain we see that part-time work, casual work, seasonal work, home-based work played a very big role in terms of women's wage earning after marriage and motherhood.

Whereas full-time continuous work over the life cycle and in workplaces away from the home was much less, was much, much harder for women to do. As ever, when there was an industrial economic mode of working, did the culture come to reflect that? Did the culture start to insist that that was a woman's natural place? What one sees in the 19th century is the rise of what's been called the male breadwinner family. So this is the sort of ideal that you ought to have an economy which can deliver permanent, secure, well-paid work for men, jobs which are well paid enough for a father to be able to keep his family, all his dependents on a single wage. And that was very much the demand and aspiration of the trade union movement right through the 19th century and well into the 20th. But it was never the reality. So it

was something which many men aspire to, but often were not able to deliver. And this is why many wives and mothers continue to earn wages in order to supplement the male wage. But it was very much the dominant ideology, and it was very much what justified unequal pay. It justified men's higher wages. It justified the demarcation of skilled work so that it was the preserve of men, and unskilled work as something that women would do. And yes, it very much dictated our contemporary understanding, actually, of standard employment, you know, standard employment as full-time work pursued continuously over the life course. But this is very much a male model of work which originates in the 19th century.

Has anyone tried to trace the kind of idea of equality within relationships as the industrial system subjugated women to these men, or in many cases? Was there an impact within the family space? The distribution of power and resources within the family has been a concern of feminist historians for quite a long time, particularly in the context of industrialisation and in the context of the rise of the male breadwinner family. So, you know, the question is, because men are the ones earning the wages and the primary earner for their households, does this then give them particular privileges in the household? And there's very strong evidence that it did, that male breadwinners felt that they were entitled to

leisure, they were entitled to go to the pub, they were entitled to go to their club, they were entitled to hang on to a pretty significant portion of their wages, which they could spend on beer or tobacco, and that they were exempt from most domestic tasks. So there was a sort of a strong kind of demarcation in terms of gender roles within the home. Now there are cases where we can see a rather more egalitarian spirit at work. So if we take, for example, the textiles industries of Lancashire in the late 19th and early 20th century, where there was a strong tradition of married women's work in the cotton mills. So it was quite an unusual industry in that women did continue

to work beyond marriage and often beyond pregnancy or between pregnancies as skilled power loom weavers. And studies, oral histories that have tried to explore the household dynamics in these families of weavers, of these dual earner households have found that domestic labour was much more likely to be shared between husbands and wives, because there was a recognition that both were going out and both were earning, and both were contributing to household finances. And so, you know, men had to do a bit of the washing up, they had to bathe children, they had to be a bit more cooperative when it came to, you know, to picking up children from baby minders, and so on. So what's changed? Obviously, we still have a long way to go, and there's still income inequality.

And as you say, our perception of lifelong career is still very much skewed by that Victorian industrial paradigm. But there have also been extraordinary changes. Are those rooted in politics and in ideas and in culture? Or are they rooted in the nature of work? What I argue in my book is that there's one big transformation that we can trace over the course of the 20th century, and that is a transformation in the meanings of working motherhood. So working motherhood changes from something which is considered to be a social problem to something which is recognised widely to be a social norm. So what I mean by that is that late Victorians and Edwardians tended

to look on the wage-earning mother as a symbol of moral and economic disorder. She seemed to undermine the sanctity of the family, the sacred duties of motherhood, and she was also a sign that something was wrong in the economy. That is to say, you know, capitalism was not providing enough jobs to allow men to keep their families on a single wage. So she's a real figure of anxiety. By the later 20th century, I would argue that the working mother has become pretty ordinary. That is to say, she's accepted as a pretty everyday, ordinary, unremarkable feature of the economic and social landscape. Which is not to say that working mothers become equal and they absolutely do not but rather the idea that a mother might

want or need to return to some form of wage earning after the birth of her children this becomes seen as a fairly legitimate and ordinary kind of aspiration and in terms of what drives that well there are lots of things driving it. But in the book, I really privilege women's own expectations and their aspirations for the kinds of lives that they might want to lead. And I see that the real kind of crux, the real kind of hinge decade is the 1950s and 1960s when married women are more likely to be going back to work after they've completed their families and their children are at school. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

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That's really interesting you privilege that, because that implies it's not just because jobs change and women found they could out-compete men in jobs that didn't involve lugging massive great loads of steel all over the place. So what was it that made women aspire to escape from the drudgery of subservient married life? I think there are sort of long-term structural shifts and then there are much sort of shorter-term triggers. So we can see over the course of the first half of the 20th century, families are getting smaller. And we know that the middle classes start limiting the size of their families

from the 1880s and 1890s. And we know that working-class couples start doing it in the 1920s and 1930s. And they're not doing it because women are desperate to pursue careers or to get back to work. They're doing it because they know that they can give their children a better standard of living if they have a smaller family. They can have better housing, their children can stay in school longer. And then what this means by the 1940s and 50s is that women are sort of getting to their mid-30s, late 30s, early 40s, and realising that their children are at school, they themselves are in pretty good health, and the foundation of the National Health Service

makes a big difference here to working-class women's health. And unlike the interwar period, where there was mass male unemployment and global depression, the economy is booming. And there are lots of employers out there who can't find enough male labour or full-time younger unmarried women to recruit. And therefore, they're turning to the older married woman. So it's this sort of combination of factors that all kind of come together in the 1950s to make it possible for many working class housewives and some middle class women as well who are going back to jobs like teaching or nursing or social work to have another shot in the workplace, to go back to the workplace rather than marriage and motherhood signalling the permanent withdrawal of women from work.

We haven't mentioned the war in traditional, perhaps a little bit too facile narratives. We're told that women proved themselves in the First and Second World War, and therefore won respect in a patriarchal society. I mean, where's the historiography on that now? Yes, you're right. The way that historians have debated the impact of the two world wars on women's lives has often been quite polarised. It either changed everything and was this sort of revolutionary shift or it changed nothing and things very much carried on as normal. I mean, the picture, as always, is much more complex than that.

I mean, in terms of working mothers, I think both the First and Second World Wars have mixed effects. So the First World War is important because it focuses minds on the issue of maternal health. And so there's a great deal of anxiety in 1914 to 18 about the impact of industrial war work on women's bodies and on their reproductive systems in particular. So as men are perishing in battle, there's a heightened concern about the health and well-being of the generation yet to be born. And this means that the state is then willing to open nurseries,

to fund factory canteens, to provide medical services in order to ensure that women's health improves. But it also means that at the end of the war, there's this very strong conviction that women must be restored to their primary role as homemakers and nurturers of the next generation. I think in the Second World War, it's a bit different because there's less of a focus on the maternal body, but there's more interest in how the workplace can be organised to accommodate the large numbers of wives and mothers whose labour is very much needed, but without imperiling the stability of the family and ensuring that when

men come back from the war, you know, they will still have wives and homes to go to. But one innovation that we do find, which is very significant from the Second World War, is the introduction of part-time work. So although women had often earned casually, intermittently, throughout the 19th century, doing homework and taking in neighbours' laundry and so on, after the Second World War, regular part-time work in industry and also in shops and to a much less extent in offices becomes available on a much larger scale. And this is something that was first introduced during the Second World War in order to try and mobilise more married women for the war effort. And it sticks. And so this is a very important wartime innovation that has long-term significance for working mothers. very important wartime innovation that has long-term significance for working mothers.

Does political representation, is it a necessary precursor to this story? Is it a necessary condition for allowing women into the workplace in this culture change? Or does the politics follow the economics and what is actually happening? It's a really interesting question. And I would say that before the 1950s, I would argue that most female politicians are very much speaking up for women's interests, but they don't necessarily see advocacy of working motherhood as something that they want to prioritise. So if you think about the Labour Party, for example, there are lots of passionate politicians who are trying to improve women's health. They're trying to get women active in local government. They're trying to open nursery schools.

They're trying to sort of tackle maternal mortality. But they don't see fighting for the rights of the working mother in terms of, you know, getting her, fighting for her right to go back to work as something that is a high priority. So there's a strong assumption that's widely held, including by many feminists in the first half of the 20th century, that what is most in women's interests is to be supported in their role as homemaker and as mother. So someone like Eleanor Rathbone, for example, who's one of the leading feminist politicians of the first half of the 20th century, her big cause is family allowances. So these are taxpayer-funded cash benefits that will be paid to mothers

to recognise the value of the work that they're doing bringing up their children. And she sees that as far more important than fighting for the right of mothers to return to work. This changes in the second half of the 20th century and certainly by the 1970s the women's liberation movement and those advocating for the Sex Discrimination Act and for the Equal Pay Act and for maternity rights, they are very much arguing for the rights of the working mother in the workplace. So there's a real shift, I'd say, in the politics over the second half of the 20th century. Well, I just want to finish up. Do you think your successors will be looking on the next few months with this giant experiment in burden sharing, homeschooling, childcare, because of

course, the men can't escape. Technically, the men should be locked in with the rest of the family. So I wonder what will happen culturally. I really, really hope that there are academics, there are sociologists across the world collecting data on this, because it really is this sort of huge social experiment that's being carried out by governments of very different kinds across the country, across the world, different social models, different political systems, different childcare traditions, different family structures. And it will be absolutely fascinating to see how that pans out. I mean, what I very much hope will not happen is that where, you know, a couple might feel that only one of them can continue working from home

or where an employer is encouraging you to take unpaid leave, it'll be women who'll inevitably be the ones to step back from work and to lean in to caring for their children. I very much hope that this doesn't reinforce the traditional sexual division of domestic labour in the home. I very much hope that what we will see coming out of this extraordinary experiment is the normalisation of home working and the normalisation of more flexible ways of working and of sharing of care between parents. I hope you're right. I've been wrong about nearly every technological and societal development in the last 20 years,

but let's hope we're right about this one. Well, as historians, we're very good at looking back and explaining what happened rather than predicting the future. Yes, yeah, that's right. Sadly, sadly. Helen, that was a real tour de force. Thank you so much. What is the book called? The book is called Double Lives, A History of Working Motherhood, and it's out on the 16th of April. Go and get it everybody thank you very much for coming on the podcast

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