Ben Wicks’ study of postwar marital adjustment cited several women who found it hard to settle in a domestic role, when husbands returned ‘as if nothing had changed… Once again, he was the master of the house.… It was a traumatic time… having to ask for any decision, being told what you can and cannot do… they were the worst years of my life.’81 Married women’s
postwar difficulty in adjustment in itself underlined the effect the war had on women’s roles, and was in some cases witnessed by their children. In an oral history-based exploration of post-1945 family life, Barry Turner and Tony Rennell suggest the seeds of feminism’s late- twentieth-century second wave were planted in WW2, when growing girls saw ‘that it was possible to exist without a man about the house… [even] in the most aggravating
circumstances.’ One of their sources stressed that she ‘only had strong women as my role models in my formative years’; another commented that men came back to find ‘strong useful women with harder hearts and harder hands capable of doing jobs that men never dreamed women could do.’82 Summers also emphasizes this image: citing sources who had been
children during the war whose ‘mothers, in becoming fighters and survivors, had become hardened’, and ‘formidable’. One woman commented that the men had spent five years being taken care of by the Army, whereas the women had been running a household and paying bills.83 In turn, ex-servicemen felt resentful and estranged, unable to understand rationing and
shortages of which they, on service rations, had been oblivious.84
Wicks cited a number of archive accounts and correspondents describing women’s
adjustments to postwar life, quoting one woman who (like June K.’s mother) had served in an ambulance station, and greatly missed the independence and workplace camaraderie.
81 A. Freeman, in Ben Wicks, Welcome Home: True Stories of Soldiers Returning from World War II
(London: Bloomsbury, 1991), p. 142.
82 Avril Middleton; Margaret Wadsworth, cited in Turner and Rennell, pp. 137, 162, iv.
83 Julie Summers, Stranger in the House: Women’s Stories of Men Coming Home from the War (London:
Simon & Schuster, 2008; Pocket Books edn, 2009) p. 46.
76 Another woman reflected on the empowering confidence boost, after four years in the ATS on an Anti-Aircraft command post, ‘of being my own person – instead of a housewife pandering to my husband’s every need, which was the norm in those days.’ 85
Writing in WW2’s later stages, Margaret Goldsmith suggested that married women’s war work had shifted ‘the pivot of their working existence’ away from husbands and ‘children even’; young married women had ‘become accustomed to living alone, to making plans and arrangements by themselves without consulting their husbands.’ Acknowledging this might not represent a permanent shift in the domestic ‘balance of power’, she nevertheless suggested younger wives had formed ‘new attitudes’ with many having become accustomed to ‘new economic and mental independence’, and suggested their husbands were becoming ‘accustomed to this independence.’ Goldsmith further argued that although many women had not necessarily relished independence and were homesick for their pre-war lifestyle, this longing was a ‘glowing fantasy’, denying ‘formed habits of independence’ and taking for granted the company and other recompenses of going out to work. She suggested wives ‘may not value their economic independence until they are again forced to ask their husbands for every shilling they wish to spend.’86
In January 1945, Woman’s Own published an article which, while emphasizing the need to reinstate the family home, tentatively acknowledged wives had become ‘more independent’, shouldering more responsibilities in their husbands’ absence, with some having ‘learned to enjoy the independence of salaries of their own. Giving these up may not be too easy.’87 A
1945 WVS newsletter offering advice to staff dealing with demobilized husbands returning
85 Wicks, Welcome, pp. 137, 129-44.
86 Margaret Goldsmith, Women and the Future, p. 15.
87 Norah C. James, ‘Back to Real Life’, Woman’s Own, January 1945, p. 15, cited in Summers, Stranger,
77 home with a pre-war view of women and finding ‘their women terribly independent!’
suggested putting it to them that:
If a woman has had to make decisions as to whether her children shall be evacuated… do all the business over air-raid repairs [one in three houses had been damaged or destroyed] and has perhaps herself kept the (husband’s) farm or shop ticking over, she naturally does not now wait for her husband to decide whether to call in the plumber or not; she knows there isn’t a plumber anyway, and she probably gets on with the job herself!88
This contrasted somewhat with most women’s magazine advice, which echoed Norah James, making it clear which partner would need to adjust.89
Janice Winship underlined the ‘incipient feminism’ of wartime discussions regarding working mothers, citing the National Marriage Guidance Council general secretary regarding the effect of wartime dislocations of family life that characterized the late 1940s. She argued that, given the timid conservativism of Woman magazine when tackling social problems, the ‘radical edge’ it displayed in the immediate postwar era must only have touched the surface of the ‘profound discontents actually felt by women’. Evelyn Home’s advice column tackled the problems of ‘the emotional dislocation of one or both partners returning from the excitement of war’. Some difficulties of the housewife/mother role were demonstrated by what Winship labelled ‘rather fatalistic grumbles’. One correspondent in 1948, a homemaker with a husband and two sons, yearned for her single life ‘when work stayed within the boundaries of 9.30am and 5.30pm, 5 days a week and I was actually paid for it.’90
The falling wartime birth rate had led the government to urge women to have four children, prompting young women to complain to the magazine about not wanting to be slaves to children and the kitchen sink like their mothers. By 1947, with the postwar baby boom allaying birthrate concerns, women were being encouraged back into factories to boost postwar
88 WVS newsletter 1945, cited in Turner and Rennell, p. 125. 89 Summers, Stranger, p. 16.
78 production. Woman tirelessly repeated working wives’ need for help with domestic
responsibilities, exhorting husbands to ‘jettison the idea that one man’s comfort is one woman’s wholetime job,’ given that ‘many married women would be combining marriage and motherhood with paid work.’ 91 By contrasting advice to women in the late 1940s with that in
the 1950s, Winship demonstrated a difference in attitudes towards domestic responsibilities and work in the late 1940s, although there was never any real challenge to the division of labour in the home – it was never suggested that men should take an equal share.