Segmentación fina de los eritrocitos aglomerados

In 1955, three-quarters of those who divorced went on to re-marry, demonstrating how a ‘broken home’ often transitioned back into a married unit.144 _{Amongst our cohort, Rose}

and Beatrice remarried; as lone mothers living with parents, marriage offered a route out of dependence on kin. Barbara’s status as a home- owner with a successful business, gave her an unusual degree of economic independence as a lone mother in the 1950s and 1960s, and an unusual resistance towards re-marriage: “In the Guest House I always used to say: ‘if I talk about getting married, lock me down the cellar until I come to my senses!’”145

IV. Conclusion

The testimonies in this chapter of both unmarried and divorced lone mothers, have demonstrated how individuals and society invested heavily in securing the ‘normality’ of the nuclear family in 1950’s England, so that to enter lone motherhood was to exist on the margins of society. The idea that the decade was an era ‘hallmarked by contradictions for women,’ is borne out by the testimonies of women in this chapter. These women aspired to housewifery and full-time motherhood, secured by a national affluence unbeknown to their parents. However, they discovered the persistence of economic insecurities after 1945 meant their earnings were essential to assuaging family poverty. Although the welfare state improved overall living standards when compared to the inter-war period, the interviewees who married in the 1950s found themselves repeating

142 _{MMB, C900/18557, Barbara Shirley.} 143 _Ibid.

144 _{Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, p. 100.} 145 _{MMB, C900/18557, Barbara Shirley.}

their own mothers work-focused lives, straddling both domestic and employment based spheres of labour and managing the economic safety of the family. Their personal narratives are at odds with cultural assumptions about the value of full-time motherhood and the companionate ideal.

NA was infrequently taken up by lone mothers during this period. It still carried the stigma associated with poor relief and was inadequate in providing an income over a sustained period of time for women with dependents. Social housing was difficult for lone mothers to acquire in the context of a national housing shortage, the ideological preference for nuclear families, and the patriarchal basis of property law and credit acquisition created structural barriers of tenancy and home-ownership. Therefore women’s capacity to wage-earn facilitated their survival as lone mothers during this era, along with the support of the extended family. The re-adoption of divorced mothers into the parental home is a neglected aspect of the historiography of lone mothers during the twentieth-century, which has tended to focus on the housing of unmarried mothers by kin.146 _{Although women and men aspired to form nuclear families and a ‘home of ones}

own’ in the 1950s, the extended family was vital in offering a safety-net when these aspirations failed to ensure a secure base.147 _{As well as providing housing, grandparental}

care of children often facilitated a divorced daughter’s employment. The agency demonstrated by women in this chapter who found a way to mitigate economic hardship in marriage, followed them into lone motherhood, where material strictures and the conflict between wage earning and mothering demanded extreme resourcefulness.

For those interviewees in this chapter whose parents would not allow them to keep an illegitimate child, their stories offer insight into what happened to unmarried mothers when the safety-net of family failed. Recollections of exile to charitable homes and parental insistence on adoption highlight the degree of shame attached to illegitimacy in the 1950s and the lengths some families would go to in order to preserve respectability. Ginger Frost argues that illegitimate children posed a threat well into the twentieth century because their presence broke through the myth of the ideal family: ‘Illegitimacy was one of the most powerful family secrets, well into the twentieth century. Illegitimacy exposed illicit sexuality, and showed that the family involved was unable to

146 _{Frost, ‘“The Black Lamb of the Black Sheep”’; Tebbutt, Women’s Talk.}

147 _{Claire Langhammer has highlighted the extent to which many people were excluded from the} home-centred society, including married couples: ‘Even at the end of the 1950s significant sections of the British population remained excluded from the home-centred society: housing need remained a crucial political issue.’ Langhammer, ‘The Meanings of Home in Postwar Britain,’ p. 343.

fit into the ‘normal’ family pattern.’148 _{Although under the 1945 welfare settlement,}

unmarried mothers could no longer be sent to the workhouse, the Mother and Baby Homes of the 1950s carried with them a stigma associated with the pre-war world of poor relief and incarceration, as well as the continuation of a punitive ethic in relation to women’s illicit sexuality. The 1950s could be seen as a more austere period for unmarried mothers and their children, compared to the war years when the state endorsed their viability, through moderate provision. As Katherine Holden has highlighted during this period it was paradoxically more acceptable for a single woman to adopt a child rather than keep her own.149 _{Perhaps the actual rise in overall living standards during the}

‘golden age,’ as well as the promise of cross-class affluence and the ‘normality’ of the working-class family (hitherto depicted as a problematic group), made illegitimacy for the respectable working-class family even more of social risk than it had been during wartime. Moving into the 1960s, a decade associated with permissiveness, was the risk of lone motherhood to lessen and move the lone mother away from the margins? This is the question to which we now turn.

148 _{Ibid., p. 309.}

149 _{Katherine Holden, In the Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England, 1914–60 (Manchester; New} York, 2007), p. 140.

Chapter 4