Abstract
Post-war medical debates about the psychiatric consequences of married women’s economic behaviour witnessed far more divergence and collision between perspectives than has often been acknowledged. Practitioners who approached women primarily as facilitators of family health—as wives and mothers—were mistrustful of the competing demands presented by paid employment. They were faced by a growing spectrum of opinion, however, which represented women as atrophying in the confines of domestic life, and which positioned work as a therapeutic act. Advocates of work tapped into anxieties about family instability by emphasizing the dangers posed by frustrated housewives, shifting clinical faith away from full-time motherhood, but nevertheless allowing responsibilities towards husbands and children to continue to frame argument about women’s behaviour. Doctors, researchers and social critics, in this context, became preoccupied with questions of balance, mapping a path which sought to harmonize public and private fulfilment, identity and responsibility. This article traces this discursive shift through a series of conferences held by the Medical Women’s International Association during the early-to-mid 1950s, connecting debates in Britain with systems of broader intellectual exchange. It enriches and complicates historical knowledge of post-war relationships between medicine and feminism, at the same time as offering a conceptual and linguistic context for modern discussion about work-life balance and gender. This article is published as part of a collection entitled “On balance: lifestyle, mental health and wellbeing”.
Highlights
Writing in the New Statesman on 14 February 2016, the feminist author and journalist Laurie Penny set out a persuasive array of reasons for women to think twice about the supposed benefits of heterosexual monogamous relationships
Meeting in Vichy in 1952, Medical Women’s International Association (MWIA) delegates used cyclical connections between physical ailments, psychological disorder, the rhythm and pace of household labour, and subjective feelings of unhappiness and frustration to question whether domesticity under any guise could provide the stimulation and self-fulfilment required by women (American Medical Women’s Association, 1953)
A German sociologist writing for a series entitled “The New Democracy”, Charlotte Luetkens (1946: 125) posed the following question: “ that a woman is faced with an almost unlimited variety of choices, since her relationships, activities, and duties have multiplied, why should we expect a woman’s life to be free of conflicts, tensions, and unsatisfied desires?” these pressures themselves presented serious psychiatric challenges, there was a shared sense among the MWIA that they were surmountable by social and medical measures (Serin, 1956: 34; Ruys, 1956: 39)
Summary
Writing in the New Statesman on 14 February 2016, the feminist author and journalist Laurie Penny set out a persuasive array of reasons for women to think twice about the supposed benefits of heterosexual monogamous relationships. Meeting in Vichy in 1952, MWIA delegates used cyclical connections between physical ailments, psychological disorder, the rhythm and pace of household labour, and subjective feelings of unhappiness and frustration to question whether domesticity under any guise could provide the stimulation and self-fulfilment required by women (American Medical Women’s Association, 1953).
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