Pat Thane and Tanya Evans: Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England

Abstract

This book offers a rich and comprehensive historical analysis of how policies, public debate, voluntary action and social context shaped the lives of unmarried mothers and attitudes towards them in twentieth-century England. The study combines the history of a particular group, in this case unmarried lone parents, with the history of the National Council of the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (NC), a voluntary organization established in 1918. It draws mainly on the NC’s archives: annual reports, research commissioned by the organization and examples of the often dramatic cases of mothers requesting advice and help; but it also relies on demographic statistics, developments in family policy, parliamentary debates, social research on lone parents, debates in the media, biographies and interviews. More than just an account of unmarried motherhood, the research shows how changes in law, gender relations, welfare provision, political and popular discourses, war and peace, are the bed-rock of the social construction and meanings of parenthood over time. Spanning analysis across a whole century is a major challenge. In doing so, the book reveals the breath-taking complexity of understanding change and continuity in society’s treatment of family living arrangements and diverse forms of motherhood and fatherhood. The book adopts a chronological approach, beginning in early 20th England and moving, chapter by chapter, over the course of the twentieth century and up to first decade of the twenty first century. The core analytical structure of each chapter is the same: the changing numbers of single mothers and other demographic data (e.g., infant mortality rates, marriage and cohabitation), unmarried motherhood and sexuality as public issues, the work of the NC and other political or social actors, the