Vernacular Discourses Of Gender Equality In The Post-War British Working Class

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite,Natalie Thomlinson

doi:10.1093/pastj/gtab012

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite, Natalie Thomlinson

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtab012

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Journal: Past & Present	Publication Date: Oct 30, 2021
Citations: 1	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Bristol, University of Reading

Abstract

Abstract Why did women’s roles change so dramatically in the West in the period after 1945? These years saw major changes in those roles, and in dominant understandings of female selfhood, from a model based on self-abnegation to one based on self-fulfilment. The roots of this shift have often been located in the post-1968 feminist movement and in economic change. Examining this question through the lens of Great Britain, this article, however, centres working-class women as drivers of these changes, drawing on oral history interviews with over 100 women from coalfield communities. In the decades after 1950, these women constructed a new vernacular discourse of gender equality which had profound implications for the position of women in society. This vernacular discourse shared some similarities with post-1968 feminism, but rather than focusing on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, it emphasized women’s autonomy, individuality and voice. In constructing it, working-class women drew on pervasive post-war ideas about equality and democracy, discourses of individualism and individual fulfilment, and discourses of ‘companionate’ marriage and ‘child-centred’ parenting in order to make claims for women’s rights. Through doing so, they constructed women not only as wives and mothers, but also as free and equal individuals.

Highlights

Maureen’s testimony offered an intriguing suggestion: she seemed not to have been influenced in any direct way by post1968 feminism, but she did identify as a feminist on her own terms. She outlined what we might call a vernacular ideology of gender equality, focused not on the division of domestic and paid labour, or sexual violence, but on autonomy, individuality and voice. We argue that this vernacular discourse of gender equality, in the construction of which working-class women played a leading role, came to be dominant in the decades after the late 1950s; in this article, we analyse its content and its sources
As we have argued previously, the term ‘feminism’ has been used by some scholars in a sense so all-encompassing that it explains everything and nothing about the changes in women’s lives in Britain after 1945, becoming a category so wide as to become devoid of meaning.[6]
We suggest, allows us to understand the meanings working-class women invested in material, economic and social changes, and the cultural discourses they drew on — including, but not limited to, feminism — to construct a new vernacular ideology of gender equality in Britain from the 1950s on