El sentido personal y su carácter regulador

Apart from Marjorie Hamilton, the only middle-class interviewee in this cohort of widows whose mother is not described as engaged in either housework or paid work, the remaining working-class women recall their mothers as powerful, directive figures within the home, who were at the forefront of mitigating the impact of material hardship on family members. The experience of growing-up in a household with fathers, who were

18 _{Janet Finch and Penny Summerfield, ‘Social reconstruction and the emergence of} companionate marriage, 1945-59,’ in David Clark (ed.) Marriage, Domestic Life and Social Change: Writings for Jacqueline Burgoyne (1944-88) (London, 1991).

19 _{Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, England: 1918 – 1951 (Oxford, 1998), p. 303.} 20 _{Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and “Normality” in Post-war British Culture,’ p. 198.}

21 _{Janis Lomas, ‘“So I married again”: Letters from British Widows of the First and Second} World Wars’ History Workshop Journal, 38 (1994), pp. 218-227.

either partially or permanently absent during the inter-war years, is one that touches the early lives of half of these interviewees. Renee Kingston grew-up with an unemployed father who is recalled as a marginal figure in her childhood, when compared to her mother. Renee’s mother is described as both a strong domestic manager and an efficient businesswoman who ran the family’s pawn-broking business, sustaining the family’s capacity to maintain itself, despite persistent poverty:

My mother built-up the business, to such an extent that we all had a good education […] so in spite of the fact that we weren’t, well, we were quite poor really, we lived well because my mother knew how to handle the situation.22

Apart from Marjorie Hamilton, whose middle-class upbringing did not necessitate her finding employment as an adolescent, the contribution of a young woman’s wages to the family economy was a recurrent experience amongst the cohort, made particularly urgent for those women whose families only had one parent. The significance of working-class daughters’ wages to the family economy in the first half of the twentieth century has been recently highlighted, and in those households without a male breadwinner, their economic contribution was particularly important: ‘Daughters’ economic responsibilities were increased by paternal unemployment and death following the First World War, male unemployment in the 1930s, and paternal absence during and after the Second World War.’23 _{Marjorie Swales recalls the impact of the death of her father in the 1920s:}

‘Unfortunately we lost my father, when we were schoolgirls, so mother had to struggle on her own to bring two schoolgirls up.24 _{The family’s loss of its principle breadwinner}

prompted her to find employment instead of completing further education: ‘I went on to an art school, but my course would have been years and I knew when I was fifteen that mother couldn’t manage any longer.’25 _{Betty Spring’s mother died when she was fourteen}

in 1928. She adopts the contemporary language of the ‘broken home’ to describe how the family’s loss of a mother, meant that ‘home’ as she had known it, became lost to her during adolescence, signifying the importance of the maternal role to the functioning of the family unit: ‘Home broke-up, more or less and I had to go into service.26 _{Betty left}

school at fourteen and went straight into employment as a domestic servant in 1928

22 _{MMB, C900/18509, Renee Kingston.}

23 _{Todd, Young Women, Work and Family in England, p. 84.} 24 _{IWM, tape ref. 19997 R01, Marjorie Swales.}

25 _Ibid.

which she describes as ‘slavery,’ working from six in the morning until eleven at night, with one free day a week. Margaret Weston-Burland, Hilda Guy and Marjorie Swales also promptly entered paid work on leaving school. The interviewees were all in employment when they met their future husbands, occupying jobs typical for young women in the 1920s and 1930s such as domestic service, clerical and retail work, whilst living in the parental home. Marjorie Hamilton is the only widow in this cohort who did not enter employment before marriage. Educated by a governess, she hoped to go to Cambridge University (which had been admitting female students since the late-nineteenth century) but her father did not approve of women undergraduates and thus denied her the opportunity of a higher education. Such experience demonstrates how despite advantages of class background, in terms of access to widening educational opportunities, gender distinctions imposed restrictions on young women’s capacity for autonomy.

There is a general silence amongst this cohort of women concerning sexual knowledge and experience prior to marriage. The interviewees do not offer insights into this subject and the interviewers appear to have avoided directly questioning this age group on matters of a sexual nature when compared to younger interviewees from the MMB archive, suggesting an inter-generational perception that participants in their seventies and eighties have a distinct passivity and sensitivity in relation to such matters compared with later cohorts. Elizabeth Roberts, in her study of working-class women’s lives between 1890 and 1940, found there was ‘very considerable reticence on the subject’ amongst the women she interviewed during the 1970s when they were asked to reflect on sexual knowledge and pre-marital sex during their youth.27 _{Existing historiography on the}

subject has revealed how ignorance and shame prevailed in relation to sexual knowledge and experience prior to marriage in the first decades of the twentieth century.28 _Sally

Alexander suggests the burden of multiple pregnancies and births for women during this period informed the innocence of daughters whose mothers’ reticence was borne out of psychological foreboding.29 _{Lucinda McCray Beier’s analysis of working-class oral}

testimony from this period argues parental silence about sexual matters was normative, and fear of sexual knowledge and behaviour was very much related to understandings of

27 _{Roberts, A Woman’s Place, p. 75.}

28 _{McCray Beier, ‘“We were Green as Grass”’; Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution; Steve Humphries,}

A Secret World of Sex: Forbidden Fruit, the British Experience, 1900-1950 (London, 1988); Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution; Margaret Williamson, ‘“Getting off at Lotus”: Sex and the Working-Class Woman, 1920–1960’, Family and Community History 3, No. 1. (2000), pp. 5-18. 29 _{Sally Alexander, ‘The mysteries and secrets of women’s bodies: Sexual knowledge in the first} half of the twentieth century’ in Mica Nava and Alan O’Shea (eds.), Modern Times: Reflections on a Century of English Modernity (London, 1996) p. 164.

social respectability.30 _{This finding is confirmed by the recent research of Kate Fisher and}

Simon Szreter who argue that a general public and ‘intergenerational silence’ existed in the first decades of the twentieth-century in relation to sex.31 _{Seventy-four per cent of the}

interviewees in their sample did not have sex before marriage. Fisher and Szreter’s analysis strengthens the link between sexual ignorance and social respectability by demonstrating how, unlike men, who saw their ignorance as something to overcome, women actively guarded their ignorance in order to maintain an attractive and respectable femininity.32