Why History Matters

The Family ‘in Crisis’: A Case Study

Up to this point the application of history to public understanding has been illustrated by means of a rapid succession of briefly analysed issues, in order to demonstrate that historical perspective is an asset across the entire spectrum of public debate. But it is not easy to register all the implications of applied historical thinking from this rapid tour d’horizon. In this chapter the threads of the argument are brought together in relation to a single theme, to demonstrate the different levels at which historical understanding can bear upon a complex issue. The family has been an object of social and moral concern in Britain since the 1970s. During the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, it rose to the top tier of the political agenda, spawning intense public debate. The attention of historians was attracted to this field because official policy rested on assumptions about the history of the family which were manifestly mistaken. But academic scholarship offered more than this. Current research on the history of the family not only served to expose the political appropriation of the past; it also offered historical perspectives which made for a much more accurate reading of the present state of the family – and one which was considerably less negative than the picture presented by the political right.

The politics of family crisis

The 1980s were the last moment in British political history when the government of the day made a confident appropriation of the past to support important areas of policy. During the run-up to the 1983 election, Margaret Thatcher demanded that there should be a return to ‘Victorian values’. At the time it seemed an almost quixotic appeal, given that ‘Victorian’ had so recently been a byword for social neglect and aesthetic ugliness. Thatcher redefined the Victorian era as the period when British business had made the country great, when the state had kept its distance from people’s lives and when the family had been the bedrock of morality. Each of these elements was intended to resonate with popular concerns, but perhaps none more so than the last. During the 1980s, there was extensive press comment about a rising divorce rate, single mothers and disorderly youth. The family, it seemed, was ‘in crisis’. Such a diagnosis was at root historical, as it rested on a pessimistic contrast between ‘then’ and ‘now’. The discourse of ‘Victorian values’ was therefore highly appropriate to this end.

The family in crisis was one of the most distinctive contributions of the Tories to political discourse of the 1980s and early 1990s. It was first adumbrated by Keith Joseph while the party was in opposition during the 1970s. By 1979, the Conservative Party was claiming to be the party of the family, in contrast to the supposed permissiveness and collectivism of Labour. Margaret Thatcher developed this strain with increasing confidence during her premiership. As she remarked in her most famous aphorism: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are only individuals and their families.’1 John Major was, if anything, more emphatic about the need to support family values – it was a prominent plank of his ill-fated ‘Back to Basics’ campaign. The rhetoric of family crisis did not entirely disappear with the departure of the Tories in 1997. In his first speech to the Labour Party Conference as Prime Minister, Tony Blair pledged that every policy and initiative would be tested ‘to see how we can strengthen families’. Compared with the Tories, however, Labour proved much more cautious about exploiting popular anxieties about family life, and much less drawn to historical contrasts. It is not simplifying matters too much to treat ‘the family in crisis’ as a Tory idea and to analyse it with reference to the years from 1979 to 1997.

The crisis was presented in essentially moral terms. Divorce and juvenile delinquency were the telltale evidence of a generation in thrall to short-term gratification. And whereas this hedonistic tendency had in the past been held in check by social discipline, the law now condoned immoral behaviour: Labour had during the sixties enacted ‘permissive’ measures on divorce, abortion and homosexuality – a record which gave a hard political edge to the Tory rhetoric on the family. The state had undermined the family in a further way, by distributing welfare payments which not only assisted genuine casualties but rewarded individuals for irresponsible behaviour. This too could be blamed on the Labour Party. The representative target of these concerns was the lone mother, who stood for the moral irresponsibility of the ‘liberated’ young, the collapse of parental control and the bottomless pit of benefits on demand. The nation would prosper if the family were strengthened; and individuals would flourish and grow if the family was the first charge on their moral and social obligations. Mrs Thatcher claimed that previous governments had neglected these basic truths, and the result was a crisis not only in the family but in the fabric of society: ‘The basic ties of family’, she emphasised, were ‘the very nursery of civic virtue.’2 Her government set out to address the crisis by straight-talking on the virtues of traditional family life and by pruning the welfare system.

A diagnosis which attributed so much to the sixties was bound to make great play with what went before. The traditional family was treated as both a reproach to the present generation and an aspiration. Tory rhetoric depicted it in morally one-dimensional colours. Spouses honoured their vows and stuck together through thick and thin. The home was a bastion of male authority, where due deference was paid by wife and children to the breadwinning paterfamilias. The old were nursed and cherished until their dying day. Most important of all, the family was where the character of the upcoming generation was formed, through a balance of training, discipline and affection. A measure of its success was an absence of hooliganism. And all this in an atmosphere of domestic privacy in which human relations could be cultivated without outside interference.

Any notion of crisis in the family is premised on a sobering contrast between the instability of the family now and the supposed stability of the family at some time in the past. That time is usually unspecified, often expressed as timeless tradition. And so it might have remained if Thatcher had not been drawn to reflect on her Victorian heritage during a TV interview in April 1983. A few weeks later she made explicit the link between Victorian values and family life, describing her own upbringing in these terms:

You were taught to work jolly hard, you were taught to improve yourself, you were taught self-reliance, you were taught to live within your income, you were taught that cleanliness is next to godliness. You were taught self-respect, you were taught always to give a hand to your neighbour, you were taught tremendous pride in your country, you were taught to be a good member of your community. All of these things are Victorian values.3

For Thatcher the Victorian period was exemplary in two respects. On the one hand, rates of economic growth that in the 1980s could only be dreamed of were achieved by untrammelled entre-preneurship, with the added bonus that personal wealth thus accumulated had been invested in the social fabric through large-scale charitable giving. On the other hand, the family had provided the foundation of a stable society, in which parents took responsibility for their own, and self-reliance and self-respect were inculcated in children, along with a sense of duty towards community and country. In subordinating their personal gratification to the good of the household, family members had been trained to be useful members of society. Here Mrs Thatcher was describing her own rec-ollected childhood in the 1930s, but by attributing her upbringing to her grandmother, she was able to lay claim to a Victorian formation. In the same breath she called the principles of her upbringing ‘perennial values’, which implied that authority for good practice could just as well have been drawn from earlier periods. The reason for the Victorian focus was that it enabled Thatcher to make the connection between domestic virtue and economic success. In this she echoed a characteristic strain of Victorian teaching – ‘Happy homes are among the chief causes of a prosperous country,’ wrote one didactic author in 1881.⁴ The rhetoric of Victorian values implied a happy convergence between individual morality and economic rationality.

It is not easy to disentangle the sentimental and the philosophical from the politically down-to-earth in Thatcher’s thinking. At a pragmatic level, talk of family crisis, by shifting attention to the responsibility of the individual, was a useful diversionary tactic from rapidly mounting unemployment (the jobless total was running at 3 million by the election in May 1983). ‘Victorian values’ also provided powerful reinforcement for a key objective of the government – to reduce the charge made by families on the welfare state and thus fund sweeping tax cuts. The Tories characterised the family as an essentially autonomous institution, which had been undermined by a culture of dependency and by the constant med-dling of welfare professionals. For Thatcher this state of affairs con-firmed the validity of a more profound truth: that the family was the strongest bulwark against the extension of state power into the lives of its citizens. She is said to have been much influenced by a book along these lines, called The Subversive Family (1982), by her policy advisor Ferdinand Mount.5

At a rhetorical level, Thatcher wanted to talk up the standing of the Conservatives as the ‘pro-family’ party, identified with those traditional values which older voters yearned to see restored. Thatcher’s language – especially her recollection of discipline and purpose in childhood – was music to the ears of such people, without committing her to anything. Attacks on permissiveness had a comparable generational appeal. In a society which is experiencing many transformations within the span of a single lifetime, most people require an area of life which stands for continuity and security. The family is widely taken to fulfil that function, offering the promise that the most intimate aspects of experience can be kept separate from the maelstrom of change. Yet the family is unavoida-bly implicated in social change. The very forces which drive society towards new forms of economy, technology and culture exact their toll on family relations. The deep levels of anxiety about the family which periodically surface in popular culture arise from the fact that the family appears to be failing in its fundamental functions. As Jane Lewis has remarked, ‘The family is regarded as bedrock and yet it is also feared to be fragile.’⁶ As a result the need to locate the ideal family in the past is hard to resist. The sense of loss is intensified by the feeling that what is vanishing in the present had ‘always’ existed heretofore: its disappearance now, if not final, is a massive reproach to the moral fibre of today’s generation. For the very old, the context may be a rosy-tinted image of early child-hood; for younger people the ideal family is located beyond their direct experience – before the sixties, before the war or ‘in olden times’. But the actual period chosen is immaterial, for the ideal manifestly belongs to traditional time rather than historical time. It expresses an authentically conservative view, not only because it is tailor-made for certain policies of the right, but also because it expresses a heavy pessimism about the condition of mankind.⁷

The Victorian family: Actual and imagined

The past which Margaret Thatcher’s policies were ostensibly committed to recreating was located in the Victorian era, extended to include the ‘Edwardian summer’. Notwithstanding the efforts of historical revisionists, the period before 1914 is still widely regarded as an innocent world of social stability and untroubled patriotism, when the pace of life was on a human scale. The popular image of the Victorian family so familiar from memoirs and photographs is of a piece with this appealing picture. It appears to be the linear ancestor of our own most valued conventions of domesticity: comfort and fireside pursuits; hierarchy and respect; reciprocity between the generations; and a judicious balance between discipline and affection. The cast of characters features a nurturing ‘angel wife’; a man of business, refreshed and restored by the wholesome atmosphere of home; well-behaved but happy children; and cherished grandparents. The bourgeois provenance of this model is unmis-takeable. But it was not so very different from the ‘traditional’ working-class family discovered by sociologists in the 1950s, dating back to the late nineteenth century, with its carefully maintained privacy, independent breadwinner, house-proud wife, and a quiv-erful of children properly educated for the first time in the new board elementary schools. The correspondence is close enough for the working class to share some of the supposed credit of the bourgeoisie as exemplars of ‘family values’.8

The correspondence of this ‘Victorian’ model with social reality was limited. In the 1860s, the bourgeoisie scarcely numbered more than 100,000 households. The lower middle class of clerks and shop-keepers, among whom bourgeois verities were most prized, com-prised approximately one million households. There were a further million working-class families which enjoyed a ‘family wage’, good housing and a reasonable margin above subsistence. In fact, the ‘Victorian’ model applied to 30 per cent of the Victorians at most.⁹ The proportion rose significantly during the late nineteenth century, but half the population was left untouched. The remaining 70 per cent led very different lives. Low wages meant that most if not all family members had to contribute to the income of the household, and even their participation might not be enough to prevent occasional application for relief from the Poor Law authorities. In areas like Lancashire and the Potteries, up to 30 per cent of married women worked outside the home at the beginning of the twentieth century. Over the country as a whole, the proportion of married women at work had by the same period fallen to 10 per cent. But this figure did not include taking in work at home. Much of this outwork fell on children. Child labour in factories was almost a thing of the past by this period, but informal and unregistered child labour was rife. It proved largely impervious to the introduction of compulsory education until the school-leaving age was pushed up to 14 in most parts of the country by 1914. With all family members required to earn some kind of wage, the ‘rough working-class’ domestic economy has been aptly termed as one of ‘forced interdependence’; no more striking contradiction of the supposed complementarity of the Victorian family could be imagined.10

The standards of health and privacy prescribed by sanitary experts were modest enough, but they were confounded on a large scale by overcrowding in multi-occupied dwellings: in 1901, there were over 100,000 such ‘homes’ in London alone.¹¹ We know from the frequency of the registration of births soon after the marriage of the parents that sex before marriage was commonplace; it was a traditional feature of betrothal. When bad faith or adverse circumstances frustrated this expectation, the result was a 4 per cent illegitimacy rate and a rising number of abortions. Ten or even a dozen pregnancies were not uncommon, with perhaps six surviving children in the middle class and somewhat fewer in the working class. Domestic violence existed at all levels of society, but it was particularly prevalent in the homes of the rough working class. Most commonly blamed on drink, wife-beating reflected the insupportable tensions of surviving on the edge of penury, and the humiliation of male unemployment in particular. Children were at risk also. Between 1889 and 1903, the NSPCC intervened on behalf of a total of 754,732 children, for reasons of neglect, violent assault or ‘moral danger’.¹²

Retrospective golden ages are invariably selective: it is asking too much of them to encapsulate an entire cross-section of social experience. But the ‘golden age’ model of the Victorian family is open to the further objection that, even when applied to the top 30 per cent to whom it strictly refers, it seriously distorts historical reality. Integral to the bourgeois family were a number of negative features which few people would wish to revive today. In fact, ever since the post-Victorians made their angry protest after the First World War, there has been a negative counter-image of the Victorian and Edwardian family which emphasises its patriarchal oppression, its dependence on exploited labour, its pathology of sexual denial and its stifling boredom. Most historians stand somewhere between these two extremes – exposing the tensions which arose from the rigorously complementary gender roles within the household, while allowing for some degree of sexual compatibility.¹³

Those carefully posed photographs of prosperous family groups disguise the endemic insecurity of Victorian family life. The insecurity was of two kinds. It was material in that the economic supports were unreliable: unemployment or insolvency were frequent and often came out of the blue, and there was little protection against either. More distressing and just as unpredictable was the threat to life. Twelve per cent of all children born in 1861 died between the ages of 5 and 25.14 Those that survived faced the real possibility of parental death. Twenty-two per cent of children aged 10 in 1861 had lost one parent.¹⁵ The elaborate rituals of Victorian family life held meaning at various levels; but in part they can be seen as an affirmation of endurance over the material and physical perils of life.¹⁶

Women paid a high price for the apparent stability of the classic ‘Victorian’ family. Unless death or sickness intervened, a wife faced an entire lifetime of ministering to the needs of others. Given the size of families, mothering her own children might occupy 20 or 30 years of her life, followed by meeting the needs of her own and her husband’s parents. From this career of care there was little escape. To remain unmarried was regarded as failure; it was also usually a penurious existence, as only very gradually did the list of approved occupations for a respectable spinster extend to work of professional status. Middle-class wives were not supposed to work at all, or at least not for payment: philanthropy was the only completely commendable activity outside the home, partly because it was understood as an extension of the familial ethic of self-effacing service. Working-class women were not subject to the same restraining convention, but they suffered from severely unequal pay. Allowed by law in 1878 to seek separation from an abusive or neglectful husband, many wives were deterred from doing so by the impossibility of supporting themselves and their children. The ‘angel mother’ ideal rested on a structure of coercion and discrimination.

The sexual side of marriage is less open to generalisation, but there is no doubt that the odds were heavily stacked against female enjoyment of the marriage bed. Young women were lucky if they learned even the most basic facts of life from their mothers, and they were unlikely to find other sources of enlightenment. Their spouses, on the other hand, were permitted – even encouraged – to notch up sexual experience before marriage. The scale of prostitution in Victorian England was considered a public scandal, but attempts to control it were directed at the prostitutes rather than their clients. Women who strayed from the road of propriety were harshly judged by the double standard of sexual conduct. Denied sex education and limited in most cases to a single partner for life, the most that can be said of tens of thousands of women is that they had little idea of what they were missing. The only respect in which women were advantaged was in same-sex relationships. Lesbians were frowned upon, but they were not outlawed, whereas male homosexuals ran the risk of the full weight of the criminal law against sodomy and ‘gross indecency’.

Victorian public discourse was discreetly reticent about marital sexuality. What it emphasised instead was a companionate ideal based not on identity of interest, but on a tightly fitting complementarity. The difficulty here was that complementarity was so often experienced as a yawning chasm, and this was particularly evident in the choice of friends and leisure pursuits. Husbands mixed with other men in clubs and taverns or on the football ground. Wives inhabited a women-only milieu of neighbours and mater-nal kin. Husbands and wives shared the common space of home, but in other respects belonged to different spheres. This made the position of the paterfamilias particularly unstable. The relatively recent separation of work from home posed the question of how to make one’s presence felt in a domestic world which was in all essentials the wife’s creation. Hen-pecked passivity would attract social humiliation. Over-assertion, leading to violence against wife and children, was another response which was certainly not confined to the rough working class.17

Even the notion that the Victorian family was the nuclear family par excellence does not hold water. One-parent families were commonplace, though the usual cause was not divorce, but pre-mature death. At the turn of the century, when mortality rates had already been brought down, approximately 25 per cent of all children had the experience of being raised by one parent.¹⁸ Nor was the Victorian family nuclear in the sense of excluding non-family members. A family which echoed the modern convention of two parents and two or more children was, in Victorian terms, a social failure. All middle-class households employed live-in servants, two or three being the standard establishment in comfortably well-off families. The lower middle class, and even some among the more prosperous artisan class, strained every nerve to afford one domestic, often in cramped accommodation. In Victorian culture family was equated with the ‘natural’ ties of blood and matrimony, unsul-lied by mammon, but a market relationship lay at the heart of it.¹⁹

Only in its relations with the outside world did the Victorian family conform to the modern reading of the nuclear family. Nuclear composition does not, of course, necessarily indicate social isolation, but the world of Victorian and Edwardian domesticity was essentially private and secluded. Whether in the suburban villa or the terraced house, respectability was marked by the closed front door and heavy drapes. This was a reflection of Victorian anxieties about social standing in a period of great spatial mobility and ‘new’ money. The Englishman’s house became his castle in a fuller sense than ever before. Traditional forms of surveillance by neighbours could no longer be relied upon. Few working-class people would interfere with wife-beating in a neighbour’s house.

The Victorian family is therefore very inadequately represented by the myth of fireside domesticity. Women were compelled to endure a level of restriction which would be completely unaccept-able to the majority of both sexes today. Free sexual expression was denied to all save heterosexual bachelors. Husbands and fathers were typically ill at ease in the feminine atmosphere of the home, and they were typically detached from its emotional cross-currents. Above all, the conventional picture of the Victorian family runs counter to the experience of the majority of the population; yet that experience was a precondition of the middle-class model, delivering an abundance of exploited domestic labour and supporting a level of social inequality on which bourgeois domestic com-forts depended.

The fallacies of golden age history

Part of the problem with the conservative version of the Victorian past lies in the misreading of evidence. Beliefs about the antiquity of the nuclear family are a case in point. During the 1970s, conservatives derived much comfort from the findings of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, that the two-generation, or ‘stem’, family had been the characteristic English form since the Middle Ages. Yet this was hardly confirmation of the traditional status of the nuclear family as understood in modern times. Peter Laslett and his colleagues discovered that the multi-generational household of Southern Europe was absent from England (and northern Europe in general). They did not maintain that the typical Early Modern household was confined to family members. Indeed, the reverse was the case. It featured servants, lodgers and apprentices, the first two being still very much in evidence in Victorian times. Furthermore, the atmosphere of privacy and seclusion that has come to be integral to the idea of the nuclear family is even more recent: it was the achievement of the Victorians and even then had limited purchase outside the urban middle class.20

But the errors are more systematic than that. The traditionalists’ view of the history of the family is one of unrelieved decline. One of the reasons why academic history made little impression on conservative discourse during the 1980s is that at that stage its most influential practitioners (like Lawrence Stone) were committed to a modernisation model of gradual improvement in the way people behave towards spouses and children since the seventeenth century.²¹ Advocates of the decline thesis, on the other hand, maintain that the evils of family life in our time are new evils. Some are indeed new. The scale of sexual promiscuity among teenagers and young adults is hard to imagine without the transformation in sexual behaviour which followed in the wake of the Pill. But in other cases the assumption of novelty is misplaced. As shown in Chapter 2, the sexual abuse of children which causes such acute anxiety today was one of the concerns – along with neglect and violence – of the NSPCC from its founding in 1883. The Incest Act was passed in 1908 because the offence was believed to be so common. Equally, young people who by their antisocial behaviour seem not to have internalised the discipline of the family have been a recurrent concern since the days of the ‘riotous apprentice’. The class antagonism implicit in much modern discourse on this subject can be traced back to the popularisation of the term ‘hooligan’ at the end of the nineteenth century.22

Perhaps the most blatant misreading of the Victorian past is in the sphere of state welfare. Nowhere has the political need for the ‘right’ past been more pressing. The solution canvassed in some Conservative circles of ‘restoring’ families to the dignity of self-sufficiency by cutting off welfare support has in fact never been attempted, because it would have precipitated widespread starva-tion. The Victorians, so often written off as heartless oppressors of the poor, spent very substantial amounts on the Poor Law and on private charity directed at indigent families; they channelled far more resources into ‘outdoor relief’ (i.e. cash payments to claim-ants) than into the infamous workhouses. The record is particularly striking in the case of old people, a majority of whom received regular payments from the Poor Law authorities for most of the nineteenth century. The idea that families had sole responsibility for looking after ‘their’ old is a fantasy.²³

Golden age rhetoric is also marked by a blithe disregard of historical context. This is one of the dangers in tracing back the history of a very specific area of life with blinkers on. Whatever point in the past is chosen, the family can only be understood as part of an entire social order, embracing economic life, religion and popular culture. When that is done well, not only are apparent resemblances between then and now called into question, but also the very notion of ‘the family’ as a discrete and uniform area of experience. As invoked by the traditionalists, the family is an abstraction, divorced from the historical contexts which gave it meaning.

Just as the ideal family of the past resists the notion of context, so it fails to take account of major changes over time. It relies on a simple juxtaposition of ‘then’ and ‘now’, with no explanation of the contrast – beyond the collapse of moral fibre since the sixties. So the changing structure of the labour market, which cut back on child labour in the late nineteenth century and then radically intensified the demand for female labour during the twentieth century, has no place in the traditionalists’ account. The very factors which might make it possible to understand why the family is a different institution from what it was a hundred years ago are excluded.

The historian’s perspective: Difference and context

Faced with a political interpretation of the Victorian family which is seriously distorted, historians rightly attach much importance to setting the record straight. But the correction of error raises the question of what should be put in its place. The answer is not the replacement of one orthodoxy by another. Unlike the Tory perspective, the findings of historians do not support a single perspective. Here, as in other areas of research, interpretation takes multiple forms, influenced by theoretical orientation. For example, feminist scholarship starts from the premise that the family is a patriarchal institution, deeply oppressive of women; liberal mod-ernisers, on the other hand, take a more benign view of the family as a ‘haven from a heartless world’.24 As a result, alongside some well-substantiated findings – particularly in the areas of demography and family structure – academic enquiry generates grounds for intense debate. Translated into political discourse, this produces a relative openness to different perspectives and different prescrip-tions. At the same time, the diversity of interpretation demands to be judged according to the key criteria of historicity – difference, context and process: the same principles which underpin the work of demolition. These are the procedures which yield the clearest illumination of the present state of the family and the direction it might be taking in the future.

Consider first of all the perspective of historical difference. Traditionalist thinking about the Victorians might be regarded as obsessed with difference – that is, the damning contrast between ‘our’ laxity and ‘their’ moral fibre. But understanding of that difference is inhibited by its subordination to a crude polarity: the Victorian family is perceived as an unqualified moral good, the mirror image of the derelict family of today. Yet freed from that prior judgement, the difference of the past enables us to ask genuinely searching questions about our present state. Victorian families which approximated to the traditionalist ideal – the top 30 per cent – had many children, full-time mothers, and fathers who played little or no part in the running of the household. These features prompt a number of questions which bear on family life today: how has the quality of childcare changed now that parental care is concentrated on one or two offspring? Are spouses whose roles replicate each other’s more likely to live in harmony than those whose roles are clearly demarcated? What does the engaged father bring to his children that his bourgeois Victorian forebear did not? Once an effort is made to explain these differences, historical context becomes crucial. It is by identifying the enabling conditions of the day that we can begin to understand both Victorian family life and our own. In the case of the Victorians, three conditions were central. First, without domestic service the Victorian bourgeois model would have been unattainable. The ideal of the angel mother, attentive to every changing mood of her children, was predicated on her distance from cleaning, fire-tending and cooking. That servants were so readily available was due to the decline of the rural economy after 1850 and the steady influx of young women into the towns. Those conditions had ceased to obtain by the 1920s, though in the longer term their disappearance was partly made good, first by the arrival of electrical household appliances and then by an influx of foreign girls seeking domestic work in childcare. The second condition was the monopolisation of the public sphere by men. This not only entailed the near-total exclusion from paid work of middle-class women. It also gave men maximum prestige within the home as sole earners and sole carriers of public burdens. Today, while that division of labour may prevail in many families, the cultural norm which once sustained it has been undermined, and with it the assumption of masculine superiority. The third condition was the sanction of religion. In respectable Victorian families, the duties owed by husband and wife to each other and by children to their parents were strongly upheld by Christian teaching. Religious belief may have been on the wane from mid-century onwards, but this indicated no retreat from Christian morality: ‘godless Victorians’ were noted for their strict personal code. Today, by contrast, the churches have far less influence, and their pronouncements on family morality sometimes suggest an accommodation with the secular mores. Manuals of marriage and childcare may adopt a prescriptive tone, but they carry no sanctions.

These vanished conditions of the Victorian period may be set alongside the historical conditions which have formed the contemporary family. Here the most critical issue is the demand for married women’s labour. In pre-industrial households of the middling sort, wives took a share of the professional or artisanal activity on which the family income depended. But because production was located within the home, they seldom went out to work. To the Victorians who feature in the golden age model, paid labour for married women could only be understood as a state of poverty in which the wife was compelled to desert her natural duties. Today the prominent role of married women in the workforce is one of the key determinants of family life, in both poor and comfortably well-off households. Without it, the value attached to mother-hood would not have diminished, and children would probably be subject to more supervision at home. Above all, the phenomenon of the working wife has major implications for the relationship between spouses, pushing it towards forms of equality which were utterly foreign to the respectable Victorian.

Two-income families are consistent with another enabling condition of contemporary family life: the ethos of egalitarian individ-ualism. This is generally attributed to the ‘me generation’ of the sixties and the radical demands of ‘second-wave’ feminism in the ensuing decades. As a result, marriage approximates now to what Anthony Giddens calls a ‘democracy of the emotions’. Its rationale is emotional communication; when the channels of communication dry up, there may be little else to sustain the marriage.25 Even more remarkable from the perspective of the traditionalist, children are to a considerable extent included in this democracy. They are more likely to be consulted with regard to family decisions, and more likely to determine how they spend their time. Entirely consistent with this is the presumption that children should not be subject to corporal punishment by their parents.

Finally, the contemporary family is profoundly conditioned by its economic role as consumer. Rising incomes have expanded the scope of consumption, and TV advertising creates the desire for additional needs. But these needs are not confined to the family in a collective sense. Every member is a consumer, and his or her wants – as parent, toddler, teenager and so on – are the subject of specialist production and niche advertising. Critics may deplore the material-ism of contemporary family life, both in itself and because it is a weak foundation for family cohesion, but consumption now provides the principal economic rationale for the family. The perspective that sits best with the findings of historical research regards the Victorian era not as a reproach to us to strive harder for ‘standards’ in family life, but as a benchmark of how our society has been transformed – and with it the actual conditions in which family life is conducted.

The historian’s perspective: Process and innovation

The juxtaposition of ‘then’ and ‘now’ is not, therefore, bound to lead to a nostalgic mindset. Applied in an open-minded way it can bring into focus what is distinctive about our condition and lead to some grasp of what has made that distinctiveness possible. But for the full significance of the difference between ‘then’ and ‘now’ to be understood, the enabling conditions must be seen not just as snapshots in time, but as the outcome of process. One of the reasons why two-income households and the egalitarian ethos of marriage have become such marked features of family life is that they are the outcome of trends that have developed over several generations. They have become integral to our society and culture through an extended process over time.

The wife earning wages on her own account – as distinct from working in partnership with her husband – was an innovation of the Industrial Revolution. Much criticised in its day as a denial of woman’s nature, it was a feature of the Lancashire cotton mills throughout the nineteenth century. But it was less prevalent in other sectors of the economy, and during the latter part of the century the percentage of working wives actually declined. A start–stop pattern also characterised the twentieth century. Substantial expansion of women’s employment during the two world wars was partially reversed when peace returned. But since the 1950s the trend has been continu-ously upward, suggesting that the increasing proportion of married women at work is part of the logic of capitalist development.26 What is at issue is a fundamental structural feature of the family, which will surely continue – and may intensify – in the future.

Nor was the ethos of equality within marriage conjured out of nothing in the late twentieth century. An egalitarian code of personal relations was implicit in the tenets of classical liberalism, as reflected in the writings of John Stuart Mill, for example. In the late nineteenth century, the status of middle-class married women began to be enhanced by legislative changes to their property rights and by the advocacy of feminist campaigners. When Beatrice Webb described her marriage to Sydney Webb as ‘our partnership’, she was tapping into a familiar convention among intellectuals and professional people. In the 1950s, critical discussion by family experts focused on companionate marriage and ‘teamwork’ – a relationship between complementary equals rather than a hierarchical institution. By that time the rising proportion of wives who contributed to the household income gave a material basis to the claim to equality. By contrast, the sixties and seventies marked a genuine new departure with regard to children’s rights. Public campaigns for children in families had focused on dire poverty and extremes of cruelty; they had not championed the rights of the generality of children to be heard as well as seen.²⁷ A comparable perspective can be brought to bear on the iden-tification of the family with consumerism. Although highly characteristic of our age, it is not new, but rather a reflection of the long-standing tendency of British manufacturers to cultivate the home market in preference to overseas markets. That process was already discernible in the late nineteenth century and has been a growing feature of the economy ever since. Mass advertising took off in the same period, and during the inter-war years women’s magazines fulfilled a similar role to television now in fuelling consumer demand. Here, as in regard to working wives, our sense of the possible needs to be informed by a sense of the trajectories in which we find ourselves.

In one field it makes sense to jettison the language of process and to recognise revolutionary change, and that is contraceptive technology. Of course there is an earlier history of contraception, but before the sixties the impact of the condom, the cap and the pessary was held back by a combination of cost, discomfort, unreliability and social stigma. The Pill changed all that, first for wives, then for unmarried women. Small families had mostly been achieved by abstinence; now they were compatible with a sexually fulfilling marriage. As for single people, the fear of pregnancy has historically been the most powerful deterrent to extramarital sexual activity. In the course of about 10 years, this fear effectively disappeared. To urge chastity on young people today is to ask of them self-control unsupported by any other consideration (except the fear of AIDS for a few panic-stricken years in the mid to late eighties). That is a situation without precedent. The indirect impact of the Pill is also significant. Not only can mothers limit their childbearing but can time it to suit the demands of a career, thus further enhancing their job prospects. And because the consequence of effective contraception is usually to reduce the total number of births, married women typically look forward to several active decades after the last child leaves home. This too is a novel development, with important consequences for divorce and for women’s employment. Effective forms of contraception mean that there is no possibility of setting the clock back on these changes.28

Such instances of revolutionary novelty are rare. More typically, historians play the opposite role, disputing the assumed novelty of current practice. This approach is particularly effective when applied to the prevailing political discourse of the family ‘in crisis’. The 1980s were not the first time the alarm has been raised. The Victorians and Edwardians themselves experienced two ‘crises’ marked by anguished diagnoses and draconian solutions. In the 1840s, social observers were appalled by the inversion of gender roles in the households of female factory workers and by the stunted growth of children in the industrial towns, especially where they were employed in those same factories. During the first decade of the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the Boer War, anxieties about national defence and military fitness led to renewed scrutiny of the working-class family, with mothers cast as the villains of the piece. Again, as recently as the years immediately after the Second World War, the family was seen to be threatened by a low birth rate and rampant divorce; poor mothering was singled out, particularly for its contribution to juvenile delinquency. All these episodes of introspection shared a morbid preoccupation with the small percentage of families having acute problems, to the exclusion of the well-functioning majority.29

Yet in each case the severity of the crisis was talked up for reasons which had as much to do with economic or political anxieties as with the state of the family. The nineteenth-century bourgeoisie – the very people who benefited most from the new capitalist order – lived by a family ethic which elevated intimacy, nurturing and leisure in contradiction to the freedom of the market and the atomisation of the individual. Working-class people strove to live by the same ethic, but the main function of their families was to reproduce the labour requirements of capitalism. Tomorrow’s workforce would only materialise if minimal standards of health and child socialisation were practised today. Capitalist expansion encroaches on the family all the time and yet also depends on it for its future prospects. Karl Marx was fully alive to that tension, predicting the demise of the family in industrial society. From the perspective of earlier crises, the recent agonising about the family’s prospects reflects not an unprecedented catastrophe but a recurring symptom of contradiction in the social fabric. To the extent that family life was in crisis in these earlier periods, the dura-bility of the family would seem to be indicated, and with it all the more reason to moderate our fear of change in the present.

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Since the 1980s, anxiety about the state of the British family has been marked by stories of gymslip mums, non-providing fathers and young people beyond parental control. New statistics on the soaring divorce rate and welfare support have stoked the concern. This material may look like an unmediated reaction to today’s news. But behind the headlines lies a historical proposition – that the nuclear family is in the process of collapse. ‘Victorian values’ provided vivid shorthand for this belief and enabled the Conservatives to strike a chord with some sectors of public opinion.

One of the marks of a mature democracy is that such claims are put to the test of critical appraisal. Historians have the appropriate expertise. At one level their role is to refine the definition of the nuclear family in the light of past experience, to enquire how prevalent it was (even in its heyday) and to consider whether it was an unqualified blessing. A further stage is to identify the varied range of factors – demographic, economic and ideological – which transformed family life during the twentieth century. Not all of the traditionalists’ picture falls victim to this appraisal. They are correct, for example, in assuming a greater degree of parental supervision and a lower level of promiscuity among young people during the Victorian era. Where they are wrong is in generalising from these features a golden age of family values which were lived as well as preached. Wrong too is the representation of the massive changes that have occurred in the structure and tone of family life as a fall from grace for which our generation carries the principal responsibility. Recognising as much frees us from the past as moral reproach. Energy can instead be redirected to identifying solutions to new problems – not in a prescriptive way, but in the spirit of opening current debate up to alternative perceptions of the family in the past and the present. As the distinguished historian of family John Gillis has put it: ‘If history has a lesson for us, it is that no one family form has ever been able to satisfy the human needs for love, comfort and security.’30 The history of the family merits study because it uncovers the huge variety of family living in the past, thereby disclosing some of the possibilities which are available in the present. It protects us from the most constraining illusion of all – that there is only one way of managing our social arrangements.