Happy families? History and family policy
brings together
evidence on the history of families and how they have
changed over the last few hundred years, examining the
claims that abound about “broken” families. It finds that
high rates of non-marriage among men and women bringing
up children existed during much of the past two centuries,
making the period 1945-70 unusual, rather than the norm.
Marriage break-up, marital unhappiness and violence towards
women and children were also common in the past, partly
because divorce was financially and legally difficult. The
report also tackles claims about the lack of male “role-
models” noting that before the 1950s there were always large
numbers of impoverished families headed by lone mothers.
The prevalence of premarital sex in contemporary society
is also discussed, and identified as a normal part of the
courtship process for large sections of the population over the
last 250 years. The report concludes that the poorest families
have always found it hardest to achieve stability and harmony,
suggesting that socio-economic inequality may be a more
important challenge than features of the family itself.
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Happy families?
HISTORY AND FAMILY POLICY
Happy families? History and family policy
by Pat Thane
Pat Thane
The British Academy, established by Royal Charter in 1902, champions and
supports the humanities and social sciences. It aims to inspire, recognise and
support excellence and high achievement in these elds across the UK and
internationally. The British Academy is a Fellowship of over 900 UK scholars
and social scientists elected for their distinction in research. The Academy’s
work on policy is supported by its Policy Centre, which draws on funding
from ESRC and AHRC.The Policy Centre oversees a programme of activity
engaging the expertise within the humanities and social science to shed
light on policy issues. All outputs from the British Academy Policy Centre
go through a rigorous peer review process to ensure that they are of the
highest quality. Views expressed in reports are not necessarily shared by each
individual Fellow.
1
HAPPY FAMILIES?
HISTORY AND FAMILY
POLICY
A REPORT PREPARED FOR
THE BRITISH ACADEMY
by Professor Pat Thane FBA
THE BRITISH ACADEMY
10-11 Carlton House Terrace
London SW1Y 5AH
Web site: www.britac.ac.uk
Registered Charity: Number 233176
©The British Academy 2010
Published October 2010
Revised September 2011
ISBN 978-0-85672-590-6
Typeset by Soapbox
www.soapbox.co.uk
Printed by Repropoint
CONTENTS
Preface 5
Key messages 7
Executive summary 9
1. Introduction 17
Why history? 17
Time and place 17
2. Facets of family life 23
Marriage 23
Cohabitation and divorce 25
Marriage break-up: domestic violence 38
Widowhood 45
Births 48
i) Birth rate 48
ii) Family size 51
Illegitimacy 54
Household and family structures 57
Relationships between generations 60
Moral panics about the family 62
3. Conclusion 67
Endnotes 71
About the author 79
British Academy policy publications 80
CONTENTS
4
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
4
5
PREFACE
Those who make public policy must decide in the present
and anticipate the consequences of their decisions. However,
they will gain perspective if they also understand the historical
context and the long-term trends that have shaped the issues
with which they deal.
In this research overview report, Professor Pat Thane
provides an historical perspective on patterns of family
formation and dissolution as well as insight into the policy
debates that surrounded those trends; as policymakers and
opinion formers of earlier generations thought about problems
that are still with us today, especially family stability, the welfare
of children, domestic violence and poverty. In writing that is
as lucid as it is informed, she details the extent to which the
period of the 1950s and the 1960s – the experience of which
still shapes opinion today – was unusual historically in terms of
rates of marriage, age of marriage and longevity of marriage.
Earlier periods show greater similarity in terms of cohabitation
and illegitimacy with recent decades. What does appear to have
altered is the stigma that once surrounded cohabitation.
This is the rst report from the British Academy that brings
to bear the skills of the humanities on questions of public policy.
We are grateful to Pat Thane for showing just how valuable
an historical perspective can be. Dr Johnson once said of a
second marriage that it was a triumph of hope over experience.
Pat Thane has shown that policies made in hope that neglect
experience will not be a triumph at all.
Professor Albert Weale FBA, Vice-President
(Public Policy), British Academy
prEFaCE
5
7
KEY MESSAgES
• Higher rates of non-married men and women brought
up children together in past centuries than is always
recognised; the period 1945-70 is unusual in this respect,
not “the norm”.
• Similarly, there were higher rates of marriage break-
up, marital unhappiness and violence towards women
and children than is realised, partly because divorce was
nancially and legally inaccessible to all but middle and
upper class men.
• Not until 1978 were men legally fully restrained from
beating their wives.
• Due to lower life expectancy and war casualties, before
the 1950s there were always large numbers of impoverished
families headed by lone mothers and boys lacking male
“role-models”.
• Premarital sex appears to have been a normal part of the
courtship process for many people throughout the past 250
years. There is clear ocial evidence of this from the late
1930s. It was not an innovation of the 1960s.
• The poorest families have always found it hardest to achieve
stability and harmony, suggesting that socio-economic
inequality may be a more important challenge than features
of the family itself.
KEy mESSaGES
8
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
8
9
ExECuTIvE SuMMARY
There are many contemporary claims about the changing
nature of “the family”. These changes are sometimes said to
be symptoms and sometimes causes of problems in the wider
society. History can be an aid to understanding current social
issues: what is new and distinctive about them, and how they
have come about.
This report focuses mainly upon the period since
industrialisation in Britain in the early nineteenth century, when
reliable national statistics became available. It examines the
history of the family in England and Wales (signicant legislative
and cultural dierences exist within the UK) and outlines
important changes and continuities.
Marriage: Prior to World War Two, a signicant number of
people in England and Wales never married, partly because
women were a majority of the population. From the end of
World War Two until the early 1970s, people married earlier,
marriage rates increased and marriage became almost universal.
The exact reasons for this are uncertain, but are likely to include
the increasing evenness of the sex ratio and improved living
standards, which enabled more people to marry and at earlier
ages. From the early 1970s, the mean age of marriage rose and
marriage rates have now fallen to historically low levels.
Cohabitation and divorce: A major reason for unmarried
cohabitation in the twentieth century and before was the
problematic state of the divorce law. Grounds for divorce were
biased against women. It was not until 1937 that legislation
equalised the grounds for divorce between the sexes. Partly as a
result, unmarried cohabitation was more common than is often
claimed. Furthermore, provided that they did not aunt their
deviance, this was widely accepted, including by law and clergy.
EXECUTiVE SUmmary
9
10
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
However, concern about the presumed extent of what were
called “stable illicit unions” fuelled demands for change. In the
1960s, the Law Commission expressed the hope that a reformed
divorce law would “buttress rather than undermine the stability
of marriage”. The 1969 Divorce Reform Act established
irretrievable breakdown as the sole ground for divorce. It was
part of a cluster of legal changes at this time, including the
reform of laws relating to abortion and homosexuality acts.
Despite the Law Commission’s hopes, from the early 1970s
cohabitation increased and was openly acknowledged as never
before, including in ocial statistics. The history of cohabitation
in England and Wales, like much else about sexual relationships,
is shrouded in secrecy and until the 1970s there are no reliable
statistics. But cohabitation was not a late twentieth century
innovation and the meaning of the increase remains uncertain.
In the nineteenth century and before, an important barrier
to a wife leaving her abusive husband was that she had no right
to custody of her children when they were over the age of seven
years. In 1925, legally-married women were enabled to apply
for custody over their children of all ages. From 1926, married
and single women could hold and dispose of their property on
the same terms as men. These changes removed some of the
obstacles to women leaving unhappy marriages.
Domestic violence: A persistent cause of marriage
break-up was domestic violence. The rst known sustained
campaign against this in Britain started in the 1850s,
when John Stuart Mill and others spoke out against it, but
it was not until the post-1968 women’s movement that
domestic and sexual violence against women were brought
prominently into the public arena. In 1976 the Domestic
Violence and Matrimonial Proceedings Act empowered
county courts to grant orders forbidding molestation of a
spouse or child. The Act was extended in 1978. Women had
11
greater redress against domestic violence than ever before,
but, like child abuse, it continues.
Widowhood: Almost certainly, throughout history, more
marriages were broken by death than by marital conict. At
least until the early twentieth century, due to the early deaths of
parents as well as other causes of family break-up, many children
grew up in struggling families; these were often female-headed
(as widowers were less likely to bring up children alone), with
many boys lacking “male role models”. There were also many
complex households.
For single parents without sucient means, if no family
support was available, the only resort before 1925 was the Poor
Law. This might provide sucient cash “relief ” to enable the
family just to survive, or insist that they all enter the workhouse,
or take just the children into the workhouse.
Birth rate and family size: Between the 1770s and the
mid-nineteenth century the average number of children born
per woman was around six. From the 1870s the number fell
gradually to an average of two by the 1930s. Over the twentieth
century, people in England and Wales also became more likely
to be parents of at least one child who survived to their old age
than at any other time.
Birth rates were low by European standards in eighteenth
century England. They rose between the 1750s and 1820s before
stabilising. From the 1870s there was steady decline reaching
a low point in 1933. This decline was common to much
of western Europe, causing widespread concern. The panic
subsided in the 1950s when it became evident that the birth rate
was rising again, only for concerns to recur from the 1980s.
From 1968 onwards the decline was probably due to the
availability of the pill, combined with real improvements in
women’s educational and employment opportunities which led
EXECUTiVE SUmmary
12
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
many women, especially in the middle class, to delay childbirth.
However, the rapid decline in the mid 1970s through to the
1980s may also have been driven by unemployment and the
growing cost-of-living, especially with regards to housing.
Births outside of marriage: In the early nineteenth century an
estimated 20 percent of rst births were “illegitimate” and over half
of all rst births were probably conceived outside marriage. This
suggests that premarital sex was a normal part of the courtship
process, from at least the mid-eighteenth century. Illegitimacy rose
during World War Two, leading to a moral panic. From the early
1960s the number of illegitimate births rose rapidly, becoming
steeper still in the 1980s. By 1993 more than one-third of all births
in England and Wales occurred outside marriage.
Household and family structures: Mean household
size remained more or less constant at around 4.75 from the
sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century,
and households generally consisted of just two generations.
Evidence also suggests that in many European countries, from
the medieval period onwards, older people preferred to maintain
their own household for as long as they were able.
In some regions of England and Wales, by the mid-
nineteenth century, households consisting of adults of two
generations became rather more common. This was partly
due to increasing longevity and partly to economic change,
as grandmothers joined their migrant children in cotton
manufacturing districts to care for children.
Families and households have become more complex over
the past century, as more people survived to later ages. By the
later twentieth century three-generation families were normal
and four-generation ones increasingly common, but since the
1950s, there has been an even stronger trend towards smaller
households and generations living apart.
13
Relationships between generations: Nonetheless,
relationships between close relatives have never ceased when
they no longer shared a household. The demands of younger
upon older generations are likely to increase given high
housing prices, the risks of partnership breakdown, the costs
of higher education, and later entrance to the workforce.
Childcare is often provided by grandparents. Evidence suggests
that the long continuity of reciprocal support among close
relatives who do not co-reside has been supplemented with,
rather than replaced by, public welfare. Technology also keeps
even distant relatives in close touch and brings them together
when needed.
Moral panics: The belief that the family is disintegrating has
a long history. Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1845: “There are
great bodies of the working classes of this country nearer the
condition of brutes than they have been at any time since the
Conquest”, whilst the Assistant Bishop to the Archbishop of
Canterbury published a pamphlet, The Breakdown of the Family,
in 1949.
In 1962 the sociologist Ronald Fletcher presented evidence
that the family had never been stronger. Fletcher made a
powerful case that the family has not declined and that where
families had diculties, they were due above all to socio-
economic disadvantage. He acknowledged, convincingly, that
families had problems but fewer, not more, than in the past.
Historical examples of moral panic might suggest scepticism
when they recur.
Conclusions: Families have always been diverse; there has
never been such a thing as the ideal British family unit. Poor
families have had greater diculty sustaining stability and
harmony, which may suggest that socio-economic inequality is a
more important challenge than change in the family itself.
EXECUTiVE SUmmary
14
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
There is also no systematic historical evidence of a
relationship between family patterns and practices, and wider
social problems. Those who call on a nostalgic vision of a family
and blame today’s “new” diversity for societal problems may
have to look elsewhere for their explanations.
16
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
16
17
INTRODuCTION
• History is often invoked in contemporary discussion of the
“break-up” of the British family.
• History can aid understanding of change in the family and other
issues, but only if it is accurate.
• We will survey the history of the family mainly since
industrialisation.
• We will look specically at England and Wales, due to important
legal and cultural variations in Scotland and Ireland.
WHY HISTORY?
What can history contribute to contemporary debate about
family policies? Interpretations of history are regularly invoked
in discussion of families today
1
and, as we will see, long have
been. Changes in the family are said to be sometimes symptoms,
sometimes causes, of problems in the wider society. History can
be an aid to understanding current social issues, how they have
come about and what is new and distinctive about them - but
only if that history is as accurate as possible in the current state
of knowledge. Since history is so often invoked in this context,
what do we know about key features of the history of the
British family and about the association between change in the
family and wider social change?
TIME AND PLACE
This survey will focus mainly upon the period since
industrialisation became established in Britain, the early
nineteenth century, because only from that time do we
2
17
iNTrOdUCTiON
1
17
18
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
have reliable national statistics of essential features of family
history. Registration of births, marriages and deaths became
compulsory in England and Wales in 1837 (and in 1855 in
Scotland and 1864 in Ireland, which was wholly part of the
United Kingdom until 1922) and the rst reliable national
census was in 1841. But there have been excellent longer-
run studies, notably by the Cambridge Group for the History
of Population and Social Structure, using parish registers
and other sources to reconstruct the population of England
from 1541.
2
There are no comparable long-run studies of
Wales, Scotland or Ireland. This longer time period will
be considered where appropriate. The survey will examine
the history of the family in England and Wales, not in the
whole of the UK, because of signicant legislative and
cultural dierences between England and Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland - making historical generalizations across
the nations problematic. For example, as the distinguished
legal historian, Stephen Cretney, points out, “throughout the
twentieth century the United Kingdom continued to enjoy
the luxury [or, he added in a footnote, “the absurdity”] of
three distinctive marriage codes”,
3
and, he might have added,
had done so for much longer. Among other dierences,
“informal marriage”, contracted by the mutual consent
of the parties without intervention by Church or State,
became illegal in England in 1753, while the Scots retained
it until 1940.
4
The English law of 1753 also laid down that minors under
the age of 21 could marry only with the consent of their
parents, which the Scots also resisted.
5
Hence, for a long time,
Gretna Green, the rst village in Scotland on the coaching route
from London to Edinburgh, was a popular marriage venue for
runaway lovers from England and Wales. In his introduction to
the report on the census of 1851, the rst Registrar-General,
William Farr, complained that:
19
Seduction and polygamy are greatly facilitated – concubinage
is concealed by the appearance of marriage - under the law
of Scotland; and in the North of England the bargain to live
together, and to marry conditionally is very much encouraged
by the facility of going into Scotland and being married.
The degree in which that takes place in the border counties
is incredible. English minors are legally married, without the
consent of their guardians, in Scotland; and at Gretna Green,
one important object of the English Marriage Act of 1753 is
defeated. English parents of property are still afraid …to send
their eldest sons to the University of Edinburgh, from the
justiable apprehension that they might succumb before the
facilities of the law and the charms of the women of Scotland.
6
Irish Marriage Law was dierent again and continued in
Northern Ireland after 1922.
The UK still has three dierent divorce laws. From 1643,
Scottish law allowed both women and men to obtain divorces on
exactly the same grounds, and divorce was allowed for adultery or
desertion. In England and Wales divorce was almost unobtainable,
except by the expensive procedure of a private Act of Parliament,
until, after long wrangling, a legal process was introduced in
1857. Thereafter, in English law, a man could divorce his wife for
adultery alone; a woman had to prove the additional aggravation
of desertion, cruelty, incest, rape, sodomy or bestiality. Neither
could gain a divorce simply for desertion.
7
Gender equality in
divorce came about in England in 1923, as we will see. Scots
and English law came more closely into line in 1940, though
dierences remain. It is still the case, for example, that in England,
Wales and Northern Ireland a couple must have lived apart for
at least two years and both must consent before a divorce can
proceed, whereas in Scotland one year of separation suces.
No divorce was allowed in Northern Ireland before 1939,
as in the Republic of Ireland, other than by a private Act of
iNTrOdUCTiON
20
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
Parliament. A modied form of the English 1937 Act was
introduced in 1939. The English law of 1969, allowing divorce
on grounds of irretrievable breakdown, was introduced in
Northern Ireland in 1978, with amendments which made it
more costly and time-consuming.
8
There have long been fewer
divorces in Northern Ireland compared with mainland Britain.
In 1981, after the law in Northern Ireland had been somewhat
relaxed, the crude divorce rate was 1.2 per 1000 married people
compared with 12 in England and Wales. The rate rose to 2 in
Northern Ireland and 14 in England and Wales in 1991, and was
2.1 (an all-time high) and 11 respectively in 2007.
9
Abortion
remains illegal in Northern Ireland, having been legalised in
England, Wales and Scotland in 1967.
Another dierence was that civil marriage did not exist
in Scotland until 1939, having been introduced in England
and Wales in 1836. Many Scottish churches would not marry
divorced people. Hence, though divorce was easier to obtain at
an earlier date in Scotland, before 1939 remarriage was often
impossible until the previous partner died. Consequently, a
major reason for cohabitation in Scotland at this time was the
diculty of divorced people remarrying, while in England and
Wales a major reason was the diculty of obtaining a divorce
(see below). In Scotland,
10
irregular marriage could be ocially
registered and ocial statistics exist, though not all such
relationships appear to have been registered. Between 1855 and
1939, irregular marriages notied to the Registrar accounted for
12 percent of all Scottish marriages.
11
In England and Wales, the
equivalent relationship, cohabitation, was not ocially registered
and historians have to rely on estimates and inference until the
1970s.
12
Censuses, of course, exist, but people living in irregular
circumstances did not necessarily tell the truth to census-takers.
Such legal dierences owe much to cultural dierences across
the four nations, including the inuence of religious institutions.
There have long been other dierences, for example in the
21
incidence of unmarried motherhood. This was particularly high
in north east and south west Scotland, at least from the mid-
nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries.
13
The introduction of
compulsory civil registration showed that in 1859-60, births out of
wedlock were 9.1 percent of all births in Scotland compared with
about 6.5 percent in England and Wales.
14
The levels in Scotland
remained high for the remainder of the century, then fell to under
7 percent in 1900-1950, while those in England and Wales fell to
4 percent in the same period.
15
Unmarried motherhood seems to
have been tolerated more readily in parts of Scotland than in most
of England or Northern Ireland, where levels were lower still but
have risen considerably since the 1970s.
16
These very brief indications of cultural and legal dierences
within the UK suggest the diculties of generalising about
‘the family’ across the UK. They also suggest the potential for
comparative studies exploring whether, for example, stricter
marriage and divorce laws have created a less “broken” society in
Northern Ireland in the past 40 years compared with Scotland
and England and Wales and, if so, by what measures.
iNTrOdUCTiON
22
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
22
23
FACETS OF FAMILY LIFE
MARRIAGE
• High rates of non-marriage among men and women existed
until World War Two.
• From the end of the War to the early 1970s, there were higher
marriage rates and lower marriage ages.
• Long-lasting marriages started earlier, people lived longer and
there were few divorces.
• From the 1970s, England and Wales saw a rising age of marriage,
more cohabitation and births outside marriage.
Figure 1. Source: ONS, Social Trends 40, p. 2 0.
Before World War Two a signicant number of people in
England and Wales never married. The proportion of never-
married women uctuated between 9 and 12 percent in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, reached over 10
percent in the mid-nineteenth century and more than 14
FaCETS OF Family liFE
500
Number of marriages (thousands)
450
400
350
300
250
200
150
50
0
1845
1851
1857
1863
1869
1875
1881
1887
1893
1899
1905
1911
1917
1923
1929
1935
1941
1947
1953
1959
1965
1971
1977
1983
1989
1995
2001
2007
100
2
23
Marriages in England and Wales, 1845-2007
24
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
percent in the rst third of the twentieth century. This was
partly because women were a majority of the population
over many centuries, due to lower male life expectancy and,
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, higher male
emigration rates.
17
That cannot be the whole explanation
however, because at all times signicant numbers of men never
married: 9 percent in the 1931 census, compared with 15
percent of women.
From the end of World War Two until the early 1970s
marriage rates increased and marriage became almost universal.
This period was also historically unusual in that the average age
at rst marriage fell from a norm over the previous 300 years
of around 27 for men and 25 for women, to a mean in 1971 of
22.6 for women and 24.6 for men, and most marriages lasted
longer than ever before or since. They started at earlier ages,
were less likely to be broken by death in young adulthood or
middle age as life expectancy grew, and divorce was still hard
to obtain. Never in history have so many marriages been so
lengthy as between the late 1940s and the early 1970s. Whether
they were contented is another issue.
The reasons for the earlier marriage ages and higher
marriage rates at this time are uncertain. The sex ratio became
more even, and improved living standards may have enabled
more people to marry and at earlier ages. From the early 1970s,
the mean age of marriage rose again, reaching older historical
norms in the mid/late twenties again by the mid 1980s and,
by 2007, the exceptionally high level of 31.9 years for men
and 29.8 for women. Marriage rates also fell to historically low
levels.
18
These trends were closely associated with the parallel
trends towards more extensive and open cohabitation, lower
birth rates, more openly acknowledged births outside marriage,
a higher average age of mothers at rst birth, and improved
educational and employment opportunities for women. All of
these changes are discussed below.
25
COHABITATION AND DIVORCE
• Increase in open cohabitation from 1970s.
• Cohabitation not new in England and Wales: long previous
history, acknowledged, if not necessarily approved of, by clergy
and the law, but no statistics before 1970s.
• Main reason: the diculty and costs of divorce. Ending “illicit
unions” was the reason for demanding divorce reform from late
nineteenth century.
• Gradual reform 1937- 1969.
• From 1969 increased divorce and cohabitation.
Figure 2. Source: ONS, Social Trends 40, p. 2 2.
Falling marriage rates from the 1970s did not mean that couples
no longer lived, raised children and formed families together. As
marriage rates fell from the early 1970s, cohabitation increased
from 3 percent of all adult women in 1979 to 13 percent in
1998, and became open whereas previously it had generally
been secret.
19
In 2006, in 14 percent of all families (parents plus
180
Number of divorces (thousands)
160
140
120
100
80
60
40
0
1920
1923
1926
1929
1932
1935
1938
1941
1944
1947
1950
1953
1956
1959
1962
1965
1968
1971
1974
1977
1980
1983
1986
1989
1992
1995
1998
2001
2004
2007
20
FaCETS OF Family liFE
Divorces in England and Wales, 1920-2007
26
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
at least one child) the parents were unmarried. This is generally
seen as historically new and, in its sheer extent, it probably was.
The history of cohabitation in England and Wales, like much
else about sexual relationships, is shrouded in secrecy and until
the 1970s there are no reliable statistics. But cohabitation was
not a late twentieth century innovation and the meaning of the
increase remains uncertain.
The National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her
Child (later One Parent Families, and now called Gingerbread),
the foremost voluntary agency in this eld from its foundation in
1918, found that most births out of wedlock between the wars
(around 4 percent of all births, an historically low level as we see
below) were to unmarried mothers living in a stable relationship
with the father.
20
A major reason for unmarried cohabitation in
the twentieth century and before was the problematic state of the
divorce law. In the 1950s, perhaps one-third of illegitimate births
were to women who were divorced or living apart from their
husbands, unable to obtain a divorce after a failed marriage or
anxious to avoid the public stigma of divorce.
21
None of this was new between the wars. Charles Booth
commented in his survey of the London poor in the 1890s:
Legal marriage is the general rule, even among the roughest
class, at any rate at the outset of life; but later, among those who
come together in maturer years, non legalised cohabitation [is] far
from uncommon, and this irregular relationship is commented
upon not always to its disadvantage. …The diculty (said one
of the clergy) “is that these people manage to live together fairly
peaceably as long as they are not married, but if they marry
it always seems to lead to blows and rows”.… A missionary
mentioned the case of an old couple who had lived together
unmarried for forty years, whose real relationship transpired
when the man was ill. “He would have married me again and
again” (said the woman) “but I never could see the good of it.”
22
27
…It is noted by the clergy who marry them, how often
both the addresses given are from the same house…. More
licence is granted by public opinion to the evasion of the
bonds of marriage by those who have found it a failure, than
is allowed to those whose relations to each other have not yet
assumed a permanent form. This peculiar code of morality
is independent of recognised law, and an embarrassment to
religion, but… those teachers of religion who come in closest
contact with the people are the most forward in recognising
that the word “vice” is inapplicable to the irregular relations
that result, whether it be before or after the legal marriage;
though they would probably cling (in religious desperation) to
the appellation of “sin”.
23
The striking thing about this observation is not only that
unmarried people lived together, but that those who might
have been expected to be their sternest critics - the clergy -
could accept such relationships. There are also suggestions by
contemporary commentators that, especially in the cities, for
much of the nineteenth century, unknown numbers of younger
people lived together before marriage.
24
Ross concludes that in
poor districts of East London between 1870 and 1918, “a great
many marrying couples were actually cohabiting when they set
out for the church.”
25
Nineteenth and early twentieth century legislators knew
that cohabitation was a reality, not necessarily welcome
or widespread, but common enough for the law to take
notice. The Prevention of Cruelty (Amendment) Act, 1894,
provided that rules designed to protect children from parental
abuse should apply also to step-parents and “to any person
cohabiting with the parent of the child.”
26
The Workman’s
Compensation Act, 1906, recognised unmarried couples
and their families as units for the purpose of compensation:
an illegitimate child and the parent of an illegitimate child
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who was dependent on his or her earnings could receive
compensation (e.g., in a case of death in an industrial accident)
although an unmarried partner could not.
27
In early twentieth century law courts, varying attitudes were
expressed towards cohabitation, but the rights of cohabitees
in wills, trusts and contracts could be upheld if this was
judged to be the intention of the person responsible for the
will, deed or contract.
28
Frost’s comment on legal attitudes to
nineteenth century cohabitation, that “The Victorian courts’
reaction to these relationships combined ocial disapproval
with pragmatic acceptance”, also seems applicable for much of
the twentieth century.
29
Both civil and criminal courts dealt
with such relationships, without formally recognising them.
There was no legal penalty for cohabitation as, in the past, there
had been in the Church courts.
30
Throughout the nineteenth
century, the courts upheld contracts between cohabiting
couples - for example, where the man agreed to support the
woman nancially - provided that the contract could not be
interpreted as a deliberate inducement to immorality.
31
Cretney
has commented that, “At the beginning of the twentieth century
there were certainly unmarried couples - no doubt a signicant
number - who lived together in a factual relationship impossible
to distinguish from matrimony.”
32
The actual number in England
and Wales is impossible to assess.
33
The couples involved were not necessarily opposed to
marriage and might willingly have married, had it been legally
possible. Often they presented themselves to the world as
married people.
34
A minority of intellectuals opposed formal
marriage in principle, arguing that real mutual commitment
did not require the sanction of church or state,
35
but a more
frequent reason seems to have been the restrictive divorce
laws and the costs of obtaining a divorce. From at least the
late nineteenth century, critics argued that the divorce system
discriminated against the poor, because proceedings were costly,
29
and against women for whom it was harder than for a man to
obtain a divorce (see above). Lawyers were expensive and, until
1920, divorces in England and Wales could only be heard by the
High Court in London, a further cause of expense for non-
Londoners. After 1920 “poor persons” and undefended petitions
could be heard at local assizes, and this was extended to all cases
in 1943. Lawyers’ costs remained a problem. Only from 1950
was Legal Aid available for divorce cases.
36
Divorce quickly
came to make the largest demands on the Legal Aid fund.
37
But
the legal procedures continued to be “daunting” especially in
contested cases.
38
The Matrimonial Causes Act, 1878, enabled women
to obtain separation orders from magistrates’ courts, with
maintenance, on grounds of cruelty by their husbands, but this
did not amount to divorce. Between 1897 and 1906, 87,000
separation and maintenance orders were issued, mainly to
poorer people. During the rst decade of the twentieth century,
an annual average of 7,500 petitioners obtained separation
orders; only 800 gained divorces.
39
Not all who separated then
cohabited, but a repeated argument for reform of the divorce
laws was to enable cohabitees to regularise their partnerships,
and hence to uphold the institution of marriage.
40
The Divorce
Law Reform Union (DLRU), founded in 1906, described the
situation of all too many people as:
A Nation’s Tragedy. Separated, but bound irretrievably by
a lengthened chain; unable to full their rightful functions
in the interests of national happiness and prosperity. Forced,
many of them, into illicit and irregular unions, and, as a result,
bringing into the world children who are branded almost as
Cain was branded.
41
Criticism of this kind led to the appointment of the Royal
Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in 1909,
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chaired by Lord Gorell, former president of the Divorce
Court. This experience convinced him that the law needed
radical change, in particular because it discriminated against
poorer people.
42
The majority report of the Commission,
published in 1912, based on extensive evidence, concluded
that “beyond all doubt” divorce was “beyond the reach of
the poor”. It referred to the extent of cohabitation, de facto
marriages and “irregular and illicit unions” that resulted. The
Royal Commission recommended equality of the sexes in the
divorce law and extending the grounds for divorce to include
desertion, cruelty, incurable insanity, habitual drunkenness and
penal servitude for life.
The 1912 report met much hostility and led to no
signicant change in the divorce law also due partly to the onset
of World War One.
43
After the war, following pressure from the
DLRU and women’s organisations, the Matrimonial Causes Act
1923 at last enabled women to divorce men for adultery alone.
Between 1901 and 1915 there were 2654 petitions, an average
of 51 percent per year brought by women; in 1926-35, there
were 8856, on average 57 percent brought by women. Further
legislation in 1937 allowed divorce after three years’ desertion.
Husband or wife could then obtain a divorce on grounds of
adultery, desertion for at least three years, cruelty, or being of
“unsound mind and continuously under care and treatment” for
at least ve years; a wife could, additionally, divorce a husband
guilty of rape, sodomy or bestiality. Separation by mutual
consent could not yet be dened as “desertion”. The 1937 Act
explicitly aimed to amend the law “for the true support of
marriage, the protection of children, the removal of hardship, the
reduction of illicit unions and unseemly litigation, the relief of
conscience among the clergy, and the restoration of due respect
for the law.” A P Herbert, who led the campaign for the 1937
Act insisted that the previous law was a “denite incitement to
immorality.”
44
31
Such comments again suggest the high number of
“irregular” partnerships in early twentieth century England,
some of which produced children, and that they were
not universally disapproved of because the reasons were
understood. Early in World War One, the government agreed
that tax-funded allowances should, for the rst time, be paid
to all “dependents” of servicemen, including “unmarried
wives”, “where there was evidence that a real home had been
maintained”.
45
These had to satisfy more stringent standards
than other family members, such as parents, who had only
to prove that the serviceman had “helped to keep them”. An
unmarried partner had to prove that the serviceman was her
sole support and that she “would otherwise be destitute” and
the relationship had to have preceded the man’s enlistment
by at least six months.
46
The allowance would be paid even if
the soldier had a legal wife, if the conditions were satised.
47
Unfortunately, it appears impossible to establish how many
such allowances were paid because the ocial statistics do
not distinguish unmarried partners from “widows and other
dependents”, other than wives and children. From 1916,
“unmarried wives” were also permitted to receive pensions if
their partner died or was injured. Their pensions were lower
than those paid to other women and, again, the conditions
were more stringent.
48
Ocial recognition of cohabitation continued in post-
war unemployment relief legislation, which was intended
to support servicemen and their families in their transition
to peacetime unemployment. The Unemployed Workers’
Dependants’ (Temporary Provision) Act in 1921, allowed
ve shillings per week for a wife, or “where a female
person is residing with an unemployed worker who is a
widower or unmarried, for the purpose of having care of his
dependent children and is being maintained by him, or has
been and is living as his wife.”
49
Thereafter, unemployment
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insurance continued to provide, as it had not previously, for
the dependents of insured workers. The Unemployment
Insurance Act of 1927, in response to scandalised comments
by backbench MPs, removed the reference to any woman
who “has been or is living as his wife”. In practice it allowed
payments to cohabitants with men living apart from their
wives, provided that they had children, but removed allowances
from cohabitants without children.
50
Labour MP John
Wheatley commented that, “Now we are out of the War
days we are back again into the state of hypocrisy in which
we usually live except in periods of national necessity.”
51
Allowances for the “unmarried wives” of servicemen were
reintroduced in World War Two.
Joanne Klein’s study of “irregular marriages” among that most
respectable section of the working class, policemen, in three major
British cities between 1900 and 1939, concludes that “exible
notions of marriage persisted within the working class…into the
interwar era…while only a small minority of policemen lived in
unusual situations, their more conventional colleagues had few
problems with their choices. Senior ocers showed remarkable
tolerance for domestic irregularities” and “their choices did
not necessarily meet with disapproval from their respectable
neighbours.”
52
Klein comments that by no means all irregular
partnerships involving policemen came to ocial notice.
A study by Manchester Health Department in 1938 of all
traceable illegitimate children born in the city in 1933 (427)
found that 35 percent of the parents were cohabiting stably at
the time of the birth. In his annual report for 1938, the Medical
Ocer of Health wrote:
This largest group were born into households in which there
was an irregular union, and therefore a fairly permanent home
in which the children had two parents. In some cases the
illegitimacy was not known outside the home. A number of
33
parents had postponed their marriage, others were indierent
to the marriage ceremony, but the largest number were living
together in an irregular union because one partner had a
husband or wife, and was living apart.
By 1938 some of the parents could not be traced, but 32
percent were still cohabiting and lived with their children in an
apparently stable family relationship. A very few had married
each other.
53
We have no idea how many such partnerships existed,
but reports of their existence before World War Two are too
many and too diverse to ignore. It seems to have been widely
realised that the divorce laws led many decent people into
cohabitation and, provided that they behaved respectably and
did not aunt their deviance, this was accepted. The number of
divorces rose during and after World War Two, but complaints
about the divorce law continued. In 1945, AP Herbert, still an
MP, received “innumerable sad letters from citizens separated
but still unable to divorce” as did other MPs, including from
old age pensioners wishing no longer to “live in sin” but to be
able to be “respectably married”.
54
A major problem was that
a divorce petition could be brought only by the “innocent”
party. “Innocent” partners might refuse to petition, on grounds
of religious conviction, or vindictiveness, thus preventing
their partner from remarrying, while still enforcing alimony
payments through the process of judicial separation. Another
problem was the need to provide rm evidence of fault
beyond probability in contested cases. This led, notoriously, to
the construction of bogus “evidence”, such as staged adulterous
liaisons in seaside hotels.
The debate about divorce law reform resumed after World
War Two, polarised as ever. Again, concern about the presumed
extent of what were now called “stable illicit unions” fuelled
demands for change. This led to the establishment in 1956
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of another Royal Commission, chaired by a Lord of Appeal,
Fergus Morton. This divided those who supported divorce
only for a proven matrimonial oence and those willing to
permit it after long separation. The Commission rejected
divorce simply on grounds of breakdown of the relationship,
for which the House of Commons had voted by a large
majority in 1951. In response, the Conservative government
changed details of the administration of the law but initiated
no fundamental change. Pressure for reform continued,
including by the still active DLRU and the more recently
formed Marriage Law Reform Society, and from people
directly aected by the divorce law, especially those who
could not remarry. In 1962 the Labour MP and solicitor Leo
Abse introduced a Private Members’ Bill adding seven years
separation as grounds for divorce. He focussed his argument
on the hardship caused to children born illegitimately because
their parents could not marry, claiming that the bill was not
“about divorce but about the family”, particularly about family
stability. There was still strong opposition to the principle and
much modied legislation emerged in the Matrimonial Causes
Act 1963. Its unsatisfactory character reinforced pressure for
further change. “It became increasingly accepted that no public
interest was served by keeping legally in existence a marriage
which had in fact broken down.”
55
Surprisingly powerful support for change came from a
report in 1966, Putting Asunder, by a committee established by
the Archbishop of Canterbury, when the Church of England
had previously opposed reform. It accepted breakdown of
the relationship as the main reason for divorce, incorporating
adultery and other causes of breakdown, provided that
proof of breakdown was rigorously established. The Labour
government was committed to law reform, especially of
family law and established the Law Commission for that
purpose. It pointed out shortly after its establishment that,
35
due to the unsatisfactory nature of the divorce law, there were
a “large number of illicit unions that cannot be regularised
and a still larger number of bastard children who cannot
be legitimised.”
56
It worked closely with the Archbishop’s
group and recommended a less complex and, it believed,
more feasible, procedure: a period of separation of at least six
months as evidence of breakdown in addition to the existing
grounds for divorce. Consensus rapidly emerged around a
compromise: “irretrievable breakdown” would replace the list
of matrimonial oences, demonstrated by the parties living
apart for two years, if both consented to divorce, ve years if
one did not.
The Archbishop continued to have reservations and there
was opposition from women’s organisations to what Baroness
Summerskill called a “Casanova’s Charter” because, among
other things, it did not include adequate nancial safeguards
for “innocent” wives. But opinion polls suggested general
support for change. The Divorce Reform Act 1969 followed,
originating in another Private Member’s Bill, after skilful
lobbying by Abse and others, with government support. The
new law established irretrievable breakdown as the sole grounds
for divorce. This could be proven by the petitioner satisfying the
court that the respondent had committed adultery, or was guilty
of “unreasonable behaviour”, and that the petitioner found it
intolerable to live with him/her as a result; or by separation for
at least two years if both parties consented; for ve years if one
partner did not.
The Law Commission had expressed the hope that a
reformed divorce law would “buttress rather than undermine
the stability of marriage”. This had been an argument for reform
for almost 100 years, as had the belief that easier divorce would
render cohabitation unnecessary. The change in the law certainly
enabled long-time cohabitees to marry. Cretney witnessed in the
Divorce Court in 1972:
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A succession of elderly persons of eminently respectable
appearance….give the oral testimony then required in support
of divorce petitions. All had lived apart from their lawful
spouse for more, usually much more, than the stipulated ve
years. In almost every case the story was essentially the same:
the youthful wartime marriage, the long separation in service
of “King and Country”, the drift apart, the formation of a
new relationship, the birth of children, the woman taking the
man’s name, the passionate desire to legitimise those children
and so on. In each case the decree was granted: in each
case the elderly couple’s faces reected happiness and quiet
domestic content.
57
But rather than disappearing, from the early 1970s
cohabitation increased, as we have seen. Equally strikingly,
it was now openly acknowledged as never before, including
in ocial statistics. The characteristics of cohabiting couples
probably changed (although we cannot be sure because we
have systematic data from the 1970s but not before), becoming
more diverse.
58
Cohabitation was more likely to be a matter
of choice rather than enforced by restrictive divorce laws, to
be a conscious “trial marriage” and to include more younger
people, indeed “Generally cohabiting couple families are much
younger than married couple families”;
59
and cohabitees still
tend to be poorer and less educated than married couples. For
all of these reasons cohabiting couples may be more likely
to break up than married couples, though many are highly
committed to the relationship. The divorce rate also grew
rapidly after the change in the law, from an average of 57,089
petitions per year in 1966-70 to 121,772 in 1971-5, then rose
to a peak of 165,000 in 1993 before declining, unevenly, to
128,500 in 2007 (11.0 divorcing people per 1000 married
population).
60
Even more than before, wives were more likely
to petition for divorce than husbands, though women were
37
more likely to suer nancially due to divorce. Divorce, like
cohabitation, largely lost its stigma.
Divorce Law reform in 1969 was just one of an unusual
cluster of legal changes at this time, including, in 1967 the
legalisation of abortion and of homosexual acts in private
between consenting adults over the age of 21; in the same year
local authorities were empowered to provide family planning
advice and contraceptives free of charge; in 1968 the Race
Relations Act advanced attempts to diminish racial intolerance,
and ocial censorship of the theatre was abolished; in 1970
came the Equal Pay Act.
Divorce reform should not be interpreted in isolation from
these other changes. They were both symptoms and promoters
of major international, cultural changes whose origins and
eects are hard to interpret. They may be seen as ushering in a
more “permissive” society of selsh, uncommitted individualists,
or as promoting a culture of greater tolerance and respect,
rejecting discrimination on grounds of race, gender or sexual
preference, opposed to blackmailing and driving homosexuals
underground and preventing women dying from backstreet
abortions. As we have seen, illegitimacy, cohabitation, pre-marital
pregnancy and marriage break-up had long histories in England
and Wales. Their existence was acknowledged and accepted,
to varying degrees, by many people and even by the law, but
strongly opposed by others, as they still are. There was a taboo
against open disclosure of such personal circumstances which
were often closely guarded family secrets. Such secrecy was not
conned to sexual matters but to other highly personal aspects
of life. The death, even of close relatives, was regularly hidden
from children, though it was, normally, hardly shameful. Mental
illness was widely treated as a secret family shame, not publicly
revealed. For whatever reason, what occurred from the 1960s
was the disappearance of much of the secrecy and shame that
had for so long surrounded many aspects of personal behaviour.
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MARRIAGE BREAK-UP: DOMESTIC
VIOLENCE
• Domestic violence was a frequent reason for marriage break-up.
• Long history but rst sustained campaigns against it 1850s and
60s, led by John Stuart Mill, then Frances Power Cobbe.
• Followed campaigns against cruelty to animals. Paralleled
campaigns against cruelty to children. Both controlled by law in
nineteenth century, long before domestic violence.
• Women, in all classes, were trapped in violent marriages because
divorce was dicult; they were often nancially dependent and
lost custody of children if they left marriage.
• 1839 upper class abused wife, Caroline Norton, gained change
in law, allowing mothers custody of children, but only up to
age seven.
• Feminist campaigns in 1920s. In 1924 women gained equal
guardianship rights.
• Feminist campaigns in 1960s and 1970s led to rst law against
domestic violence, in 1974.
• But, like child abuse, it continues.
One such area shrouded in silence was domestic violence. The
reasons for marriage break-up before and after 1969 were, of
course, many. A persistent cause was domestic violence. The rst
known sustained campaign against this in Britain started in the
1850s, when John Stuart Mill, among others, spoke out against
it, though it was known to have a much longer history.
61
At the
time there were many press reports of brutality to wives.
62
In
the 1860s, the feminist Frances Power Cobbe, took up the issue
she called “wife-torture.”
63
As she acknowledged, it was unlikely
to be new. It was perhaps more visible as society became more
urbanised, and more women campaigned for equal rights and
the protection of women. At the same time, there was increased
39
public awareness of violence within the family, including against
children, despite considerable resistance to “intrusion” by the
state into the historic rights of husbands and fathers over their
wives and children, including the right to beat them. Family
violence was not necessarily increasing. It may even have come
into focus because other forms of violence were declining or
because society was becoming less tolerant of violence of all
kinds.
64
“Cruel and improper treatment of cattle” was outlawed
in 1822, and extended to other animals in 1835.
Cases of child abuse, at least as terrible as any in the early
twenty-rst century, reported in the 1850s and 60s led to
campaigns for legal action and, in 1883, to the foundation of the
Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Children (later the National
Society, NSPCC), consciously modelled on the RSPCA, founded
in 1824. SPCC investigated cases of cruelty and sought to protect
children, emphasising how much abuse went on within the family
but that it was an issue not only in working class families. Their
campaigning contributed to the introduction of the Prevention
of Cruelty and Protection of Children Act, 1889, which made
proven cruelty to children illegal for the rst time and allowed
children to be removed from their families to a place of safety,
usually a charitable institution such as Barnardo’s. They might also
be legally adopted by Poor Law guardians. The Act was tightened
in 1894 and again in the Children Act 1908. This for the rst time
imposed penalties for neglect as well as wilful cruelty.
65
There was
growing evidence of the extent of poor parenting.
The law was slower to respond to evidence of violence
against women. In 1868 Cobbe, as a lead writer for a London-
based newspaper, the Echo, noticed a number of legal cases,
including the indictment of Susanna Palmer, in 1869, for
wounding her husband. Palmer had been married to James
Palmer for twelve years, during which time she had supported
them and their four children. James had contributed just ve
shillings over the twelve years. He had been in prison a number
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Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
of times for acting violently towards his wife and children, but
his prison experiences made him more aggressive. Susanna
applied to the magistrates for a Protection Order. She was
refused because her husband had not deserted her. During yet
another dispute, Susanna picked up a knife to defend herself;
she injured James and he brought charges against her. She was
sentenced to prison, where Cobbe visited her. Cobbe discovered
that an assault by a husband against a wife was considered by the
courts to be an inferior oence to a wife assaulting a husband.
Acts “which would amount as assault if committed against a
stranger, may be legally innocent when committed by a husband
against a wife” as a nineteenth century legal text put it.
66
It might be asked why Palmer put up with this treatment for so
long when she was capable of supporting the family. Many women
were trapped in unhappy marriages because they could not get
a divorce or, at this time, even a legal separation. But another
important barrier to a wife leaving her abusive husband - apart
from fear of his revenge – was that she had no right to custody of
her children when they were over the age of seven, and Palmer
could hardly leave her children with a father who did not work
and had already abused them. Hers was not an isolated case. In
London in the 1850s and 1860s, in any neighbourhood of two
to four hundred houses, an estimated ten to twenty men were
convicted of common assaults upon women in any one year.
67
And
a London social worker estimated in the 1910s that 99 percent of
“wife-beating” incidents were never reported to the police.
68
Serious domestic violence was almost certainly most
prevalent in poorer urban districts where lives were most
desperate, though Cobbe believed that this was not because
middle and upper class husbands were necessarily less violent:
Wife-beating exists in the upper and middle classes rather
more, I fear, than is generally recognised; but it rarely extends to
anything beyond an occasional blow or two of a not dangerous
41
kind. In his apparently most ungovernable rage, the gentleman
or tradesman somehow manages to bear in mind the disgrace
he will incur if his outbreak is betrayed by his wife’s black eye
or broken arm, and he regulates his cus or kicks accordingly.
69
She believed they were culpable also because:
the same generous-hearted gentleman, who would themselves
y to render succour to a lady in distress, yet read of the beatings,
burnings, kickings and “cloggings” of poor women well-nigh every
morning in their newspapers without once setting their teeth and
saying, “This must be stopped! We can stand it no longer.”
70
Rather, Cobbe believed, they treated wife-beating with a
“half-jocular sympathy.”
71
One upper class victim was Caroline
Norton, born 1808, an English society beauty who at age 19
married the aristocratic George Norton. As she later described:
We had been married about two months, when, one
evening…we were discussing some opinion Mr Norton had
expressed: I said (very uncivilly) that “I thought I had never
heard so silly or ridiculous a conclusion.” This remark was
punished by a sudden and violent kick…it caused great pain
for many days, and being afraid to remain with him, I sat up
the whole night in another apartment.
72
Caroline continued to endure this treatment for nine years,
while she supported the family by her writing and her husband
squandered his and her income. She left him several times but
always returned because she could not legally gain custody of
their three sons. When she left again after a quarrel in 1835, he
sent the children away and refused to allow Caroline access, as was
his legal right. They separated and a court order allowed her access
to the children, though not custody, but he took them to Scotland
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where the law diered and the order had no force. She used her
social connections and skills as a writer to campaign for the right
of mothers to custody of their children. With support from male
politicians, she persuaded Parliament in 1839 to grant a mother
access to and custody of her children aged under seven, provided
that she had not committed adultery, the furthest Parliament
would go in encroaching upon the rights of the father. Mothers
still could not gain custody of older children: the father was
legally the sole parent. This remained so until the 1920s.
Caroline’s problems were not over. Her husband reluctantly
granted access to her sons, but failed to tell her when one had
a fatal accident, to her great grief. Also, under then current
property law, he could claim a legacy left to her by her father
and successfully demand that her publishers pay him her
earnings. In 1855 she gained revenge in one of the few ways
open to a married woman at this time: she ran up large debts for
which her husband was legally liable, turning against him her
legal subordination as a wife.
73
The obstacles to most women leaving their husbands in the
nineteenth century and before suggest that marriages which did
not break-up were not necessarily stable and contented. Cruelty
of wives towards husbands, in all classes, was less common but
not unknown.
74
Cobbe wrote eloquently about male violence
in newspapers and journals and drew together such statistics as
she could nd. Since assaults by husbands upon wives were not
specic oences, the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales listed
together “aggravated assaults on women and children” – 2737
in 1876, 3106 in 1875, 2841 in 1874, four-fths of which she
estimated as being assaults by husbands upon wives.
75
These
were the reported cases. Many were not reported.
At the same time Cobbe helped draw up a Bill to protect
abused wives. This was incorporated in an amendment to the
Matrimonial Causes Act, 1878, which enabled wives whose
husbands were convicted of assaulting them to gain a separation
43
order, maintenance payments and custody of children under the
age of ten, though not if the wife was found guilty of adultery.
The law was somewhat tightened up by the end of the century
and it was widely used (see above).
The Royal Commission on Divorce, 1910-12, heard much
evidence of domestic violence and of dissatisfaction with the
law relating to it, though some witnesses cited the fact that
abused wives stayed with their husbands as evidence that marital
devotion outweighed the experience of violence and argued
against easier divorce, though others recognised that women’s
nancial dependence, concern for their children and fear of
retribution was often the explanation.
76
The Commission also
heard how hard it was for women to support themselves and
their children and the inadequacy of the maintenance, for which
the maximum allowed under a separation order was two pounds
per week, which husbands often evaded paying.
Concern about the physical and sexual abuse of women and
children continued through the inter-war years, though, like
most sexual matters at this time, it was rarely publicly discussed
except in coded language. The issues were taken up by newly
enfranchised women. Feminists and suragists, such as Cobbe, had
campaigned against abuse and the sexual double standard, and for
equal divorce rights, before women of age 30 and above gained
the vote in 1918. Righting these among many other gender
inequalities was seen by many of them as a reason why women
needed the vote, though they were not always prominent in
surage campaigns among the many other inequalities (including
poor maternity care and unequal access to employment, pay and
education) which aected the mass of women.
77
All these issues were taken up by women’s organisations
after 1918. The demand that women be appointed as magistrates
and to juries was partly designed to ensure that women
involved in marital or family cases no longer sat alone in courts
otherwise wholly populated by men. The Sex Disqualication
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Removal Act, 1919 allowed women to become lawyers, and to
be appointed as magistrates and to juries.
78
The campaign to
appoint policewomen was similarly intended both to extend
women’s employment opportunities and to ensure that women
could report cases of assault to women, and that there were
more police ocers responsible for, and willing to detect and
prevent, abuse of women and children. Women were slowly
appointed to local forces from 1920.
79
Women’s organisations helped to bring about important
changes in the law. In 1922 the level of maintenance allowable
under a separation order was increased and in 1925 the grounds
on which a separation order could be obtained was extended to
include cruelty and habitual drunkenness and women no longer
had to leave the marital home in order to obtain an order. In
1925 women were enabled to apply for a court order giving them
custody over their children of all ages, provided that they were
legally married. This right was extended to parents of illegitimate
children in 1959. Mothers acquired equal guardianship rights
without the need to apply to a court only in 1973.
Cruelty to children continued to be a public, though under-
recognised, issue through the later twentieth century. Domestic
violence was even less acknowledged for a long time. In the
1950s and 60s police were told “not to meddle; it was a family
aair and we weren’t allowed to meddle in it.”
80
Reports of
wife-beating were not recorded as assaults and the Criminal
Investigation Department (CID) often refused to be involved in
reported cases. Police who wanted to assist could not prosecute;
women complainants had to pursue their own action.
81
The post 1968 women’s movement brought domestic
violence and sexual violence against women into public
prominence as never before. They provided refuges to support
women eeing abusive partners, and publications such as Erin
Pizzey’s Scream Quietly or the Neighbours will Hear (1974) made
a lasting impact. The House of Commons investigated the issue
45
in 1974-5. In 1976 the Domestic Violence and Matrimonial
Proceedings Act empowered county courts to grant orders
forbidding molestation of a spouse or child and excluding a
spouse from the family home or part of it; powers extended to
couples who were not married but had been living together on
a stable basis. 170 years after men were prevented from beating
their cattle they were restrained from beating their wives.
Women had greater redress against domestic violence than ever
before, but, like child abuse, it continues.
82
WIDOWHOOD
• Throughout history until twentieth century, the major reason for
marriages ending in early adulthood or middle age was death.
• Men had lower life expectancy, leaving large numbers of
impoverished families headed by lone mothers and boys lacking
male “role-models”.
• Remarriage, more frequent for men, created complex step-families.
• Poor lone mothers and children also shared complex
households with grandparents and other relatives, or with other
widowed families.
Almost certainly, throughout history, more marriages were
broken by death than by marital conict. Certainly this is easier
to quantify. Females have long tended to outlive males and, until
the mid-twentieth century, both were more likely to die in
early adulthood or middle age than in the more recent past. An
estimated 24 percent of marriages contracted in the later 1730s
were terminated by the death of one of the partners within
10 years, around 56 percent within 25 years. Of the cohort
marrying in the 1780s, about 19 percent were ended by death
within 10 years, about 47 percent within 25 years. For marriages
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in the 1880s the percentages were 13 and 37 respectively. Many
marriages contracted in the early years of the twentieth century
were destroyed by the First World War. For the more fortunate,
life expectancy gradually extended: 91 percent of marriages
lasted at least 10 years and 74 percent for at least 25 years; 44
percent lasted 40 years or more. Apart from the smaller losses
of the Second World War, just 5 percent of marriages of the
later 1930s were ended by death within 10 years; 85 percent
of couples who had not divorced (79 percent of all couples)
reached 25 years. “Thereafter”, comments Michael Anderson,
“divorce rather than death became the great disrupter of
marriages, producing in the 1980s total disruption rates very
similar… to those by death alone for the 1820s.”
83
There are no good statistics of the numbers of living
widowed persons before the mid-nineteenth century. In the
second half of the century, at any one time, about 2 percent of
men and 3 percent of women aged 25-34 were widowed, about
4 percent of men and 8 percent of women aged 35-44,
7 percent of men and 16 percent of women aged 45-54, and
14 percent of men and 30 percent of women aged 55-64. These
gures fell slowly through the nineteenth century, then faster
in the twentieth, though still in 1951 7 percent of men and
22 percent of women aged 55-64 were widowed. Given that,
into the early twentieth century, most married women bore
children throughout their fertile years, one outcome throughout
history was a signicant number of children living in single
parent, especially in female-headed, households. For 19 English
communities at various dates, 1599-1811, Laslett showed that,
on average, about 16 percent of children were living with
a widowed parent who had not remarried, two-thirds with
mothers, one third with fathers; 5 percent were living with a
remarried parent and step-parent.
84
Widowers were more likely to re-marry than widows. In the
sixteenth century an estimated 30 percent of all those marrying
47
were widows or widowers.
85
By the mid-nineteenth century
about 15 percent of men and 9 percent of women marrying
were widowed; 8.9 percent and 6.6 percent respectively in the
early 1900s. One outcome was numerous complex families
including stepchildren and step-siblings.
At all times, including the twentieth century, it seems
to have been less common for widowers than for widows
to bring up their children alone. It was dicult to combine
childrearing with the long hours of work needed for working
class people to support a family. Better-o widowers could
employ servants to care for their children, although it was
probably more common for an unmarried female relative to
join the household. This might occur also in the households
of working class widowers; or the children might move into
the homes of grandparents or other relatives, as was not
uncommon in poor families, even when both parents survived
but were too poor to cope. Better-o widows might be well-
provided for and able to employ servants. Most women would
struggle to earn enough to support their children, even if they
had childcare, most probably from relatives. Widows might
share a home with their mothers, often widowed themselves,
who cared for the children while she worked. If no family
support was available, the only resort before 1925 was the
Poor Law, which might provide sucient cash “relief ” to
enable the family just to survive, or insist that they all enter
the workhouse, or take just the children into the workhouse,
enabling the widow to work sometimes, leaving her with one
child to support, lest she forget her maternal obligations.
86
The precise numbers are hard to reconstruct, but it is clear
that at least until the early twentieth century, due to the early
deaths of parents as well as other causes of family break-up, very
many children grew up in struggling families, often female-
headed, with many boys lacking “male role models”, and that
there were many complex households.
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BIRTHS
• Birth rates low in early eighteenth century and before.
• Rose 1750s-1820s. Average births per family: six.
• Decline 1870s-1930s, in birth rate and family size, international
in higher-income countries, probably due to economic and
cultural change. Fall in infant mortality.
• 1930s-1950s, panic about low birth rate and ageing population.
Average family size: two to 1960s.
• Birth rate rose again World War Two - late 1960s: higher
marriage rate, higher living standards.
• Premarital sex probably normal from at least the mid-eighteenth
century. From 1939 ocial statistics of premarital pregnancy exist
for the rst time: almost 22.5% brides were pregnant at marriage.
• Declining birth rate, 1968 to lowest ever level in 2001.
• Then rise to near- replacement rate, sustained to present.
• Early twentieth century more people in old age had a surviving
child than at any time in history.
i) Birth rate
Birth rates were low, by European standards, in eighteenth
century England and before, rising from 1750s, peaking in
the 1810s and then stabilising at moderately high levels until
the 1870s, when there was a gradual decline to an historically
exceptionally low point in the 1930s. This decline was
common to much of western Europe causing widespread
concern.
87
There was anxious talk by prominent gures - such
as William Beveridge – of a “twilight of parenthood” and
the looming costs to a shrinking younger generation of the
“menace” of ageing populations, since life expectancy was
rising simultaneously. The panic subsided in the 1950s when
it became evident that the birth rate was rising again, only to
recur from the 1980s.
88
49
The reasons for the decline from the 1870s are unclear
and there were signicant regional divergences which aected
dierent social groups more or less simultaneously.
89
Birth rates
tend to fall as women become more educated and independent,
as was the case in England and Wales, gradually, from the later
nineteenth century. At the same time infant and child mortality
rates underwent a historically unprecedented decline. For the rst
time in history, parents could begin to assume that any child might
survive from birth to adulthood. Both middle and working class
families recognised that with fewer children they could achieve
higher living standards. By the inter-war years, working class
families could, for the rst time, hope that their children could
realistically aspire to upward mobility through improved education
and occupational opportunities, and that with fewer children
they could give them better opportunities.
90
New methods
of contraception (caps, more comfortable condoms) became
available from the later nineteenth century, but the most popular
methods of birth control through to the 1950s, especially for
working people, continued to be the age-old coitus interruptus and
abstinence, suggesting that birth rate decline was driven by social,
cultural and economic rather than technological inuences.
91
During World War Two the birth rate began to rise again,
which, to the surprise of demographers, was sustained throughout
the 1950s and 60s, although there was no return to nineteenth
century levels, or even to those of the rst quarter of the twentieth
century, and no “baby-boom” to match that in the US. Immediately
after the war when the increase was greatest, the most likely reasons
for the rise were delays in marriage and starting families due to the
absence of men at war; thereafter, continued higher marriage rates,
full employment and growing prosperity.
The rise in births was common to most higher income
countries at this time, though the most evident “boom” in
births was in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, all of
which experienced increased immigration, mainly from Europe,
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after the war, which had damaged them less than many other
countries. Births per 1000 population in the US fell from 30 in
1909 to 18.5 in 1934, rising to 26.5 in 1949.
Figure 3. Sources: B. R. Mitchell and P. Deane, Abstract of British Historical
Statistics (CUP 1962) pp. 29-30; A. H. Halsey and J. Webb, Twentieth Century
British Social Trends (Macmillan, 2000) p. 34.
Figure 4. Source: ONS, Social Trends 40, p. 7.
0
1838-1842
1873-1877
1883-1887
1901-1905
1921-1925
1931-1935
1936-1940
1946-1950
1951-1955
1956-1960
1961-1965
1971-1975
1981-1985
1991-1995
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
0.00
England Wales Scotland Northern Ireland
1971
1973
1975
1977
1979
1983
1985
1987
1989
1981
1993
1995
1997
1999
2001
2003
2005
2007
1991
0.50
1.00
1.50
2.00
2.50
3.50
TFR
3.00
Birth rates per 1000, England and Wales
Total Fertility Rate (TFR) in the UK
51
From around 1968 began what, again, seemed like an
inexorable decline in birth rates. Again, this was international
in higher income countries. The reasons probably include the
availability of the pill, widely believed to be a safe and eective
method of contraception, combined with real improvements in
women’s educational and employment opportunities which led
many, especially middle class, women to delay childbirth until they
had completed their education and were established in occupations.
However, the most rapid decline came in England and Wales from
the mid 1970s through the 1980s when it may also have been
driven by unemployment and the growing cost-of-living, especially
of housing.
92
The birth rate decline led, as it had in the 1920s and
1930s to international panic about the looming “burden” of older
generations on a shrinking younger generation.
93
Taking a dierent measure of changing fertility, the Total
Fertility Rate (TFR), which calculates average family size in
relation to the rate of childbearing among women, reached its
lowest level in England and Wales of 1.63 children per woman
in 2001 (in 1931-5, the lowest point previously recorded, it
was 1.80). Then, again to general surprise, came a sustained
turnaround. In 2008 the TFR in England and Wales was
1.96 (2.11 in N. Ireland).
94
This was driven by higher fertility
among women in their thirties and forties and the increasing
proportion of non-UK-born women of childbearing age. It
occurred without any apparent change in the marriage and
cohabitation practices of the UK-born population. Non-UK-
born mothers were more likely to be married.
95
ii) Family size
Family size also changed over time. Between the 1770s and
the mid-nineteenth century, the average number of children
born per woman was around six. From the 1870s the number
fell gradually to an average of two by the 1930s. However, the
number of children in each family surviving to age 25 averaged
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only between three and four in the mid-nineteenth century and
the infant mortality rate more than halved in the rst 40 years of
the twentieth century. While women born after World War One
averaged about one third of the number of children of women
born in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the
number of children surviving to adulthood fell by only about 40
percent.
96
Family size became increasingly concentrated in smaller
numbers. In the 1870s, and probably at most previous times, it
was widely dispersed: no one size category contained more than
10 percent of families; more than 5 percent fell in all categories
from 0 to 10.
97
In more than one in ten families, eleven children
or more were born: more than a quarter of all births. By the
1930s, continuing to the 1960s and beyond, there was a more
uniform norm of two children per family.
Increasingly births were concentrated early in marriage –
sometimes very early. In 1939, for the rst time, the Registrar
General investigated the number of rst births conceived before
marriage. His Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Years
1938 and 1939, estimated, to widespread surprise, that almost 30
percent of all rst children born in 1938-9 had been conceived
out of wedlock. This was based on the number of babies born
within eight-and-a half months of the parents’ marriage, plus
the smaller number of “illegitimate” births (see below), as
recorded on the birth certicates. Some babies might have been
premature, and the certicates did not always record the date of
marriage, often intentionally to hide a premarital conception.
98
It was compulsory to do so in Scotland, but not in England and
Wales. The Registrar General believed that these omissions were
statistically counterbalanced by omissions of children born in the
last two weeks of the normal term of pregnancy, i.e. between eight-
and-a–half and nine months. He calculated that 22.5 percent of
brides were pregnant before marriage. Among mothers under 20,
at least 42 percent of rst births had been premaritally conceived;
53
31 percent among those aged 21, 22 percent at 22, 10 percent at
25-9, and 8 percent at 30-4. Later Statistical Reviews showed that the
percentage of all babies conceived out of wedlock fell from 14.6
percent of births in 1938, to 11.8 percent in 1943, before rising
again to 14.9 in 1945.
99
The proportion of “illegitimate” births rose,
especially in the last year of war, but not substantially (see below).
The relatively high levels of premarital conception continued
through the 1950s and 1960s. In 1957 20.4 percent of all brides
aged under 45 were pregnant,
100
returning to the 1938 level of
22 percent in 1965.
101
The number fell to 10 percent in 1992,
largely because rates of marriage fell and cohabitation increased.
Premarital conceptions among women under 20 were 47.9
percent in 1945, 56.4 percent in 1955, 57.1 percent in 1965 and
33.2 percent in 1996.
102
The premarital conception rates of the 1930s-60s appear to
have been historically rather low. In the early nineteenth century,
in the decade of peak fertility, an estimated 20 percent of rst
births were illegitimate and over half of all rst births were
probably conceived outside marriage;
103
indeed it is likely that
“premarital sex was a normal (though perhaps more or less normal
at dierent points in time) part of the courtship process for very
large sections of the population”, from at least the mid-eighteenth
century.
104
The historical evidence suggests that we should
treat with caution such comments as: “for at least 750 years [in
England]...if a man gets a woman pregnant before [marriage] he
may well have to marry her but they tend to avoid full sex settling
instead for elaborate forms of heavy petting”, “for much of our
history and for most people full sexual activity was delayed” until
“by the 1960s we were having more sex and earlier.”
105
Over the twentieth century, people in England and Wales,
whether married or not, whether their children were conceived
within marriage or not, became more likely to be the parent of
at least one child who survived to their old age than at any time
in history.
106
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ILLEGITIMACY
• Rising levels of “illegitimacy” c1750-late nineteenth century.
• Then fell, except during First and Second World Wars. Wartime
rises mainly due to separation of couples who would otherwise
have married.
• Post Second World War decline, but only to mid-nineteenth
century level.
• Rise from 1960s, at its steepest in 1980s. 1996: one third of all
births “illegitimate”, mainly due to unmarried cohabitation; also,
78 percent of illegitimate births jointly registered by unmarried
parents.
• 1987 the term “illegitimate” removed by law from ocial
discourse.
Figure 5. Source: ONS, Social Trends 40, p. 2 4.
Until the 1970s, illegitimate and legitimate birth rates followed
similar trajectories: they rose and fell together, both rising
between c.1750 and 1850 and falling from the later nineteenth
1845
1851
1857
1863
1869
1875
1881
1887
1893
1899
1905
1911
1917
1923
1929
1935
1941
1947
1953
1959
1965
1971
1977
1983
1989
1995
2001
2007
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
50
45
Percentage of births outside marriage in
England and Wales, 1845-2007
55
century to the 1930s, suggesting that they were inuenced
by similar factors. In 1846-50, 67 in every 1000 live births
were illegitimate. The gure fell steadily to 40 in 1906-10.
During World War One it rose to 53.9 in 1916-20.
107
This
was probably due to marriages being prevented or delayed
due to the absence or death of men at war rather than, as was
assumed at the time, to licentious behaviour by young people
liberated by wartime conditions. Until the 1930s, there were
more illegitimate births in some rural than in urban areas: in
1900 6 percent of all births in North Wales, Norfolk, Hereford
and Shropshire, compared with c 3.6 percent in London,
Lancashire, Staord.
108
Illegitimacy rose again in World War Two. This time the
Registrar General had statistics to hand to try (unsuccessfully)
to calm moral panic. He calculated that the number of babies
conceived out of wedlock (both illegitimate and legitimate)
fell from 14.6 percent of all births in 1938 to 11.8 percent in
1943, before rising to 14.9 in 1945.
109
Premarital pregnancies
fell, between 1939 and 1945, from 60,346 to 38,176, while the
number of illegitimate births rose, 26,569 to 64,743. There is no
means of knowing how many of these were legitimated when
their parents were reunited after the war and able to marry.
110
The Registrar General concluded that the explanation for the
rise in illegitimate births:
is almost unquestionably to be found in the enforced degree
of physical separation of the sexes imposed by the progressive
recruitment of young males into the Armed Forces and
their transfers to war stations at home and abroad, rendering
immediate marriage with their home brides increasingly
dicult- and, in the case of many- quite impossible …
…To the extent to which this is the explanation, the lapse
will often have been of a temporary character only, since it is
to be presumed that in many, probably a large proportion, of
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the cases where the parents were reunited after the war they
will have married and thereby legitimated many of the children
registered as illegitimate and secured to them the normality of
home life and upbringing of which they might otherwise have
been deprived...
…Taking the six war years as a whole the average increase
of 6 percent in the total number of irregularly conceived births
will hardly be regarded as inordinate, having regard to the
wholesale disturbance to customary habits and living conditions
in conjunction with the temporary accession to the population
of large numbers of young and virile men in the Armed Forces
of our Dominions and Allies.
111
The number of live births registered as illegitimate remained
until the end of the 1950s at very low levels not seen since
the 1860s: 54.9 per 1000 live births in 1946-50, and 50.1 in
1956-60. Thereafter they rose rapidly: 69 in 1961-5, 86.8 in
1971-5, and 104.6 in 1976-80.
112
The rise was steeper still in
the 1980s. By 1993 more than one third of all births in England
and Wales occurred outside marriage.
113
The term “illegitimate”
was removed from ocial discourse, including that of ocial
statistics, by the Family Law Reform Act 1987.
The main reasons for “illegitimacy” over centuries
before the 1960s were unmarried cohabitation (see above),
mistakes, often by young women deceived by married men,
and geographical mobility, when the man had moved on
before the pregnancy was identied, often leaving the mother
unable to prove paternity or get support from the father.
These continued, but, from the 1970s, a growing proportion
of “illegitimate” births were jointly registered by unmarried
parents, suggesting that they were in a stable relationship and
that the father acknowledged parenthood: 49 percent in 1975,
61.3 percent in 1983, 71.2 percent in 1989, and 78.1 percent
in 1996.
114
57
HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY STRUCTURES
• Average household size small in pre-industrial England and
elsewhere in northern Europe, consisting of two generations,
due to high death rates and high rates of geographical
mobility.
• Older people’s preference for independent living until too frail to
cope alone.
• High proportion of older people without children surviving or
living within reach.
• More complex, three generation households in nineteenth
century industrial centres.
• Twentieth century trend to generations living apart, but changes
over the family life-course. More complex, three and four
generation, families.
Figure 6. Source: ONS, Social Trends 40, p. 1 4.
1961
3.1
2.9
2.7
2.5
2.4 2.4
1971
Number of people
1981 1991 2001 2009
FaCETS OF Family liFE
Average household size in Great Britain
58
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
Contrary to a one-time sociological orthodoxy that in “pre-
industrial” societies most people lived in large, complex family
groups, Laslett established in the mid 1960s that in England
such households had never been common. He concluded from
the rather sparse available data from household listings of 100
English communities, 1574-1821, that mean household size
had remained more or less constant at around 4.75 from the
sixteenth century until the end of the nineteenth century;
though he pointed out that a majority of the population lived
in households of six or more, often including servants, who
might also be relatives. Households generally consisted of just
two generations, parents and children.
115
Subsequent research
has found this pattern not to be peculiar to England, but quite
common historically in northern Europe and, current research
shows, in parts of eastern Europe also.
116
This should not be too surprising given, in particular, high
death rates before the twentieth century, which meant that it
was unlikely that three generations of a family would be alive
together for more than, at most, very few years. High rates of
geographical mobility in England over the same long time
period reduced the likelihood of co-residence among vertical
and lateral kin. Also, there is strong evidence that in many
countries, even in medieval Europe, and for long after, older
people preferred to maintain their own household for as long
as they were able even if they had adult children willing to give
them a home, due often to a preference for independence or
sometimes to concern about loss of power and control if they
gave up their own homes. King Lear is a re-working of popular
folk tales warning of the danger to older people of giving
themselves and their property into the care of their children,
and also, in the person of Cordelia, a reminder that not all
children were treacherous.
117
It was also rational for people to
plan for the strong possibility that when they reached old age
their children might have migrated far away in search of work
59
or that they would have no surviving children. The latter was
true of an estimated one-third of women reaching age 65 in the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, falling to below 20 percent
by the late eighteenth century.
118
Contrary to widespread belief,
it was not unusual to live to old age in “the past”. In the late
sixteenth century about 7 percent of the English population was
aged 60 or above, about 9 percent a century later, 10 percent
in the early eighteenth century.
119
Older people with surviving
children might move to live with them if they became unable to
care for themselves, often for a short time before death, if there
was space in often over-crowded homes. Similarly a widowed,
deserted or impoverished woman might move to share a parent’s
or relative’s home, as might orphaned grandchildren or children
whose parents could not aord to support them.
Households consisting of adults of two generations became
rather more common, at least in some regions of England and
Wales, by the mid-nineteenth century, partly due to increasing
longevity, partly to economic change, when grandmothers
joined their migrant children in cotton manufacturing districts
to care for children while mothers as well as fathers worked in
the mill.
120
In the twentieth century, especially from the 1950s,
there was an even stronger trend to smaller households and the
generations living apart; more people could aord independent
space. But complex shifts continued over the life-course, as
they always had, including older people joining the households
of younger relatives late in life and younger ones returning to
their parents’ households following crises such as divorce.
121
Families and households have become more complex over the
past century, as more people survived to later ages. By the later
twentieth century three-generation families were normal – not
generally living in the same household – and four-generation
ones increasingly common.
122
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RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN
GENERATIONS
• Family relationships remain close even when relatives do not
share a household.
• Long tradition of relatives living nearby and exchanging regular
support.
• Mutual support between generations: older often give more to
younger generations, possibly an increasing trend.
• Modern technology enables exchange between distant relatives.
• Public welfare supplements, rather than substitutes, for family
support.
At all times we should be wary of making interpretations
about family relationships from household arrangements.
Relationships between close relatives have never ceased, or
necessarily weakened, when they no longer shared a household:
“kinship does not stop at the front door” as Anderson put it.
123
Relationships may indeed be warmer when relatives do not share
space, given the tensions that can arise from constant contact.
There is abundant evidence through centuries of relatives living
not together but within reach and in regular contact, of separately
residing children helping elderly parents with household tasks and
health care or nancially, grandparents looking after grandchildren
and/or supporting them and adult children nancially and in
kind. Care and support has always occurred downwards as well as
upwards though the generations.
124
Studies of a sample of British
people aged 55-75, mainly not living with younger relatives, in
the late twentieth century showed that:
Between two-thirds and three-quarters of parents ...were
involved in some sort of exchange relationship with at least
one of their children. Generally more Third Age parents
61
were providers than recipients of help, but there was a strong
reciprocal element to intergenerational exchange… Parental
characteristics associated with higher probability of providing
help included higher income, home ownership and being
married or widowed rather than divorced. Higher income
and home ownership were, however, negatively associated
with odds of receiving help from a child… suggesting socio-
economic dierences in the balance of support exchanges…
help from a child was positively associated with older parental
age... in Britain, as in the USA, the balance of intergenerational
exchanges involving Third Age adults is downward rather
than upward, in contravention of depictions of older adults as
‘burdens’ on younger generations.
125
A similar pattern can be found in England throughout recorded
history.
The demands of younger upon older generations are likely
to increase in future given high housing prices, the risks of
partnership breakdown and the costs of higher education, now
that more young people attend university than ever before
(over 40 percent aged 18-21 compared with about 4 percent
in the early 1960s, 7 percent in the early 1970s) and enter the
workforce at later ages than ever before. Among less prosperous
older parents it has recently been shown how much childcare is
provided by grandparents, especially in lower income families,
often at real costs to themselves, including giving up their
own jobs to support their working children by caring for their
children.
126
Contact and exchange between the generations
remains close in very many families, despite persistent assertions
to the contrary and despite geographical distance. Modern
technology – telephones, and increasingly the internet – can
and do keep even distant relatives in close touch, while motor
and air transport can and do bring them together when needed.
Modern evidence suggests that the long continuity of reciprocal
FaCETS OF Family liFE
62
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
support among close relatives who do not co-reside has long
been supplemented rather than replaced by public welfare, from
the Old Poor Law to the Modern Welfare State, which has
always been targeted mainly on the poorest families.
127
MORAL PANICS ABOUT THE FAMILY
• There is a long history of moral panics about the disintegration
of the family and its association with disintegration of society.
• There are examples from nineteenth century and from post-
Second World War England, despite historically low rates of
marriage break-up.
• The persistence of such panics could suggest scepticism when
they recur.
The belief that the family is disintegrating as never before,
deteriorating from some romanticised past, and society with it,
has a long history. As industrialisation and urbanisation grew in
the early nineteenth century, a Manchester doctor claimed:
The chastity of marriage is but little known or exercised;
husband and wife sin equally, and an habitual indierence to
sexual rights is generated, which adds one other item to assist in
the destruction of domestic habits.
128
Benjamin Disraeli wrote in 1845:
There are great bodies of the working classes of this country
nearer the condition of brutes than they have been at any time
since the Conquest…Incest and infanticide are as common
among them as among the lower animals. The domestic
principle wanes weaker and weaker every year in England.
129
63
Friedrich Engels may not have agreed with Disraeli
on everything, but he expressed similar views: “next to
intemperance in the enjoyment of intoxicating liquors, one of
the principal faults of English working men is sexual license.”
130
Engels attributed these real problems to poverty and extreme
social inequality, above all, as did the less politically radical
pioneering Medical Ocer to the City of London in the 1870s,
Sir John Simon, among others.
131
After World War Two, the extreme poverty of the nineteenth
century had been eradicated and, as we have seen, the number
of long-lasting marriages in England and Wales was never higher,
before or after. Yet, the Assistant Bishop to the Archbishop
of Canterbury published a pamphlet, The Breakdown of the
Family (1949), claiming that “the life of the family is seriously
threatened” because “people make greater demands on one
another in married life”; “easy divorce has changed the attitude
of people to marriage” and “the conditions of modern industrial
life threaten the family.” The High Master of St Paul’s School
wrote in the Sunday Times in 1956 that:
When the late Archbishop of York declared that the home is
the greatest casualty of our time, this warning was endorsed
by the experience of priests and probation ocers, of teachers
and magistrates, and even of those politicians whose economic
policies have stimulated this gradual dissolution of home life.
132
An inuential social policy textbook at the time claimed that
“the most urgent problems which confront sociologists, social
administrators and workers today are such symptoms of a sick
society as the increasing number of marriage breakdowns.”
133
Another academic lamented:
widespread moral collapse and domestic disintegration… the
fundamental nature and purpose of marriage has been lost in
FaCETS OF Family liFE
64
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
a struggle for equality and social justice in isolation from the
biological and domestic context in which, in its natural setting,
the institution of marriage occurs.
The bureaucratic Welfare State is too large and too
impersonal to inculcate that instinctive loyalty which binds
together members of the family or group in a sense of common
duty to each other and to society of which they are an integral
part…this crucial ethical factor is largely inoperative in modern
society.
134
A grammar school headmaster claimed in 1961, “It seems to
me that the father gure has lost much of his awe and all of his
majesty.”
135
Some blamed the “emancipation” of women.
136
In 1962 the sociologist Ronald Fletcher was moved to
gather evidence that the family had never been stronger
in reaction to what he regarded as such “high-handed and
pompous condemnations.”
137
Fletcher made a powerful case that
“The family has not declined. The family is not less stable than
hitherto. The standards of parenthood have not deteriorated”,
and that where families had diculties they were due above
all to socio-economic disadvantage.
138
He acknowledged,
convincingly, that many families had problems but fewer, not
more, than in the past.
Historical examples of moral panic about the family can be
multiplied. They might suggest scepticism whenever they recur.
66
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
66
67
CONCLuSION
• Families have always been diverse and changing, and change
continues.
• No golden age of universal stable families.
• Poorest families have always found it hardest to achieve stability
and harmony, suggesting that socio-economic inequality may be
a more important challenge than features of the family itself.
• No evidence of a relationship between family patterns and
practices and wider social problems.
Families are changing. They always have, collectively and over
the life course of each family. Families have always been diverse,
and society in England and Wales has become increasingly
culturally diverse in recent decades, with increased immigration
of people from cultures with dierent family traditions. There
was no golden age, when the mass of the population lived
contentedly in long-lasting, stable, two-parent nuclear families,
extra-marital sex and family violence were almost unheard of
and most older people were nurtured by adult children more
prosperous than they. The golden age came closest in the 1950s
and early 1960s, at least in terms of long-lasting marriages. What
went on within those marriages, or in marriages at any time,
is less certain. The divorce rates that followed the liberalisation
of the divorce law in 1969, and the rush to abandon marriage
for cohabitation by the children of these post-war marriages,
suggests that it may not altogether have been a rare period of
more or less universal, harmonious family life.
Throughout this survey it has appeared that poor families
have greater diculty sustaining stability and harmony,
which may suggest that socio-economic inequality is a more
important challenge than change in the family itself.
139
It has
3
CONClUSiON
67
68
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
also emerged that there is no systematic historical evidence
of a relationship between family patterns and practices and
wider social problems- such as violence and poor educational
performance- except possibly that, in recent decades, increased
cohabitation, divorce and unmarried parenthood have occurred
in parallel with stable or falling levels of crime and greatly
improved educational performance overall, especially among
girls (although least among the poorest boys and girls). But, of
course, correlation is not the same as cause.
70
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
70
71
ENDNOTES
1 E.g. D. Willetts, The Pinch (London, Atlantic, 2010) Ch.1.
2 E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schoeld, The Population History of England,
1541-1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1989).
3 S. Cretney, Family Law in the Twentieth Century. A History (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 19.
4 Ibid. p. 4-5.
5 Ibid. pp. 4-19.
6 Report on 1851 Census. Vol. 1. p. 1.
7 O. R. McGregor, Divorce in England (London, Heinemann, 1957),
pp.1-22.
8 C. Archbold, ‘General Principles and Recent Developments
in Northern Ireland Family Law’ in A. Bainham (ed.), The
International Survey of Family Law, 1996 (The Hague, The
International Society of Family Law, 1998), p. 300-1.
9 sdhttp://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=170, www.nisra.
gov.uk/demography/default.asp2.htm Accessed 5 April 2010.
10 On Scotland on I am grateful to Professor Eleanor Gordon and
Dr Anne-Marie Hughes, University of Glasgow, for sharing their
current work with me.
11 I owe this information also to Gordon and Hughes.
12 D. Coleman, ‘Population and Family’ in A. H. Halsey and J. Webb
(eds.), Twentieth Century British Social Trends (London, Macmillan,
2000), p. 59.
13 L. Leneman and R. Mitchison, ‘Scottish Illegitimacy Ratios in
the Early Modern Period’ in Economic History Review, 2
nd
series,
40 (1987), pp. 41-63; A. Blaikie, E. Garrett, R. Davies, ‘Migration,
Living Strategies and Illegitimate Childbearing: A Comparison
of Two Scottish Settings, 1871-1881’ in A. Levene, T. Nutt, S.
Williams, Illegitimacy in Britain, 1700-1920 (London, Palgrave,
2005).
ENdNOTES
71
72
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
14 M. Anderson, ‘The social implications of demographic change’ in
F. M. L. Thompson (ed.) The Cambridge Social History of Britain
1750-1950, Vol. 2. (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991),
p. 35.
15 Ibid. p. 41.
16 Ibid. p. 37; Coleman, ‘Population’ p. 55.
17 R.S. Schoeld, ‘English Marriage Patterns Revisited’, Journal of
Family History 10 (1985).
18 J. Lewis, The End of Marriage? (Cheltenham, Edward Elgar, 2001) p.
30; ONS, Social Trends, 40 , p. 1 2.
19 Lewis, The End?, p. 34.
20 P. Thane and T. Evans, Sinner? Scrounger? Saint? Unmarried
Motherhood in Twentieth Century England (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, forthcoming, 2012), Ch. 1.
21 V. Wimperis, The Unmarried Mother and Her Child (London, George
Allen and Unwin, 1960), p. 29.
22 C. Booth, Life and Labour of the People in London. Final Volume. Notes
on Social Inuences. (London, Macmillan, 1903) pp. 41-2.
23 Ibid. Volume 1. Religious inuences. pp. 55-6.
24 S. Parker, Informal Marriage, Cohabitation and the Law, 1750-1989
(London, Macmillan, 1990), p. 75.
25 E. Ross, Love and Toil. Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918
(Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 64.
26 R. Probert, ‘Cohabitation in Twentieth Century England and
Wales: Law and Policy’ Law and Policy, Vol. 26, No. 1 Jan 2004, p.14.
27 Ibid. p. 15.
28 Ibid. p.16.
29 G. S. Frost, Living in Sin. Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in Nineteenth
Century England (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2008), p. 1.
30 Ibid. p. 11.
31 Ibid. pp. 18-23. Cretney, Family Law, pp. 516-7.
32 Cretney, Family Law, p. 516.
33 For discussion of cohabitation in the twentieth century see Tanya
Evans ‘The other woman and her child. Extra-marital aairs and
73
illegitimacy in twentieth century Britain’ Women’s History Review
Vol. 20, No. 1 Feb 2011, pp. 47-66.
34 Frost, Living in Sin, Sic passim.
35 Ibid. pp. 169-224.
36 R. I. Morgan, ‘The Introduction of Civil Legal Aid in England and
Wales’ Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 5, 1994, 38-76; Cretney,
Family Law, pp. 312- 318.
37 Cretney, Family Law, p. 287.
38 Ibid. p. 252.
39 R. Phillips, Putting Asunder; A History of Divorce In Western Society
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1988).
40 Royal Commission on Divorce and Matrimonial Causes. Report. CD.
6478 (London, HMSO 1912), para. 234.
41 Pamphlet, The Divorce Law Reform Union’s Objects and Aims, Papers
of Helena Normanton, The Womens Library/7HLN/B/01.
42 De Montmorency, JEG rev. H. Mooney, ‘Barnes, John Gorell,
rst Baron Gorell (1848-1913) Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004); Cretney, Family
Law, p. 275.
43 McGregor, Divorce, pp. 28-9.
44 Ibid. p. 29; J. Lewis ‘Marriage’ in I. Zweinger-Bargielowska (ed.),
Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Pearson Education
Ltd, 2001), p. 72.
45 Report on the Administration of the National Relief Fund up to 31
st
March 1915 . Cd 7756 Parliamentary Papers, 1914-16, p. 5.
46 Departments of State and Ocial Bodies Separation Allowances for
Dependants of Unmarried Soldiers (or Widowers) during the War. Nov
seventeenth, 1914. quoted Probert ‘Cohabitation’ n. 8 p. 29.
47 National Relief Fund p. 14.
48 Ibid. p. 54, 67-8.
49 Parker, Informal Marriage, p. 89-90.
50 Ibid; Cretney, Family Law, p. 520
51 Hansard, House of Commons, Vol. 210 col. 1970.
52 J. Klein, ‘Irregular marriages: unorthodox working class domestic
ENdNOTES
74
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
life in Liverpool, Birmingham and Manchester, 1900-1939’.Journal
of Family History (No. 2, 2005) pp. 210-229.
53 Wimperis, Unmarried Mother, p. 68-9.
54 The discussion of divorce law reform which follows draws mainly
upon Cretney, Family Law, pp. 319 -91. Cretney, Family Law, p. 323
n. 24.
55 Ibid. p. 352.
56 Ibid. p. 320.
57 Ibid. 379 n.392.
58 Social Science and Family Policies. Report of a British Academy
Working Group, Chair Sir Michael Rutter (2010) p. 46.
59 ONS ‘Overview of Families’ 4 October 2007: www.statistics.gov.
uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=1865 Accessed 10 April 2010.
60 Social Trends 40 p. 12.
61 As discussed in E. P. Thompson, ‘Rough Music: Le Charivari
Anglais’, Annales, 1972, vol. 27, pp. 285-312.
62 A. J. Hammerton, Cruelty and Companionship. Conict in Nineteenth
–Century Family Life (London, Routledge, 1992), pp. 27-29.
63 F. P. Cobbe, ‘Wife-Torture in England’, The Contemporary Review ,
Vol. XXXII, April-July 1878, pp. 55-87.
64 Hammerton, Cruelty, pp. 15-16; V. A. C. Gatrell and T. B. Hadden,
‘Criminal Statistics and their interpretation’ in E. A. Wrigley (ed.),
Nineteenth Century Society, (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, 1982), pp. 336-96.
65 G. Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870-1908
(Stanford University Press, 1982); L. Jackson, Child Sexual Abuse in
Victorian England (London, Routledge, 2000).
66 Quoted in L. Williamson, Power and Protest. Frances Power Cobbe and
Victorian Society (London, Rivers Oram, 2005), p. 81.
67 N. Tomes, “Torrents of Abuse’: Crimes of Violence Between
Working Class Men and Women in London’ Journal of Social
History, 1978, Vol. 11, No. 3, p. 330; V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘The decline of
theft and violence in Victorian and Edwardian England’ in V. A. C.
Gatrell, B. Lenman, G. Parker (eds.), Crime and the Law: The Social
75
History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500 (London: Europa,
1980), pp. 284-301.
68 A. Martin, ‘The Mother and Social Reform’ The Nineteenth Century
and After, 73 (May 1913), pp. 1071-72.
69 Cobbe, ‘Wife Torture’, p. 58.
70 Ibid. p. 56.
71 Ibid. p. 57. Also, see cases described by Hammerton, Cruelty, pp.
107- 118.
72 J. Perkin, Victorian Women (London, John Murray, 1991), pp. 114-5.
73 M. Finn, The Character of Credit. Personal Debt in English Culture,
1740-1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2003).
74 Hammerton, Cruelty, pp. 5, 46-7, 87-8, 111-2.
75 Cobbe, ‘Wife-Torture’ pp. 70-1.
76 Hammerton, Cruelty p. 43.
77 A. Logan, Feminism and Criminal Justice. A Historical Perspective
(London, Palgrave, 2008), pp.30,143-4.
78 Ibid.
79 Louise Jackson, Women Police. Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in
the Twentieth Century (Manchester, Manchester University Press,
2006).
80 Ibid. p. 184,
81 Ibid.
82 Cretney, Family Law, pp. 752-6.
83 Anderson, ‘Social implications’, p. 29- 32.
84 Ibid. p. 50.
85 Wrigley and Schoeld, Population History, p. 258.
86 P. Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain’ History Workshop Journal, No. 6 1978, pp. 29-51.
87 M.-S. Quine, Population Politics in Twentieth Century Europe,
(London, Routledge, 1996).
88 P. M. Thane, ‘The debate on the declining birth-rate in Britain:
the ‘menace’ of an ageing population, 1920s-1950s’ Continuity and
Change 5 (2), 1990, pp. 283-305.
89 E. Garrett, A. Reid, K. Schurer, S. Szreter, Changing Family Size in
ENdNOTES
76
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
England and Wales. Place, Class, Demography, 1891-1911 (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2001).
90 Mass Observation, Britain and Her Birth-Rate (London: John
Murray, 1945), pp. 21-5.
91 S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate
Life in England, 1918-1963 (Cambridge, Cambridge University
Press, forthcoming 2010).
92 Coleman, ‘Population’, p. 34.
93 World Bank, Averting the Old Age Crisis. Policies to Protect the Old and
Promote Growth (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1994); Thane, ‘The
‘menace’.
94 www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=369. Accessed April 7
2010. A TFR of 2.1 is required to replace two parents, with a small
allowance for mortality.
95 Social Trends 40, p. 12.
96 Anderson, ‘Social implications’, p. 39; Coleman, ‘Population’, p 97.
97 Anderson, p. 41
98 Papers of the Royal Commission on Population, Vol. 11, Reports and Selected
Papers of the Statistics Committee (London, HMSO, 1950), p. 136.
99 S.M. Ferguson and H. Fitzgerald, History of the Second World War.
Studies in the Social Services (London, HMSO and Longam’s Green,
1954), p. 91-2.
100 Wimperis, Unmarried Mother, Table 11 (no page number in text).
101 K. Kiernan, H. Land, J. Lewis, Lone Motherhood in Twentieth Century
Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 35. Described
by D. Willetts, in Pinch, p.40, as an ‘historic peak’, when ‘Britons’
were ‘having more sex’ than before.
102 Coleman, ‘Population’, p. 53.
103 Anderson, ‘Social Implications’, p. 36; T. P. R. Laslett et.al. (eds.),
Bastardy and its Comparative History (1980), pp. 54-5.
104 Anderson, ‘Social Implications’, p. 36; Laslett et al., Bastardy; Levine
et al., Family Formation, Ch 9.
105 Willetts, Pinch, pp. 1-2, 38-41.
106 I. M. Timaeus, ‘Family and households of the elderly population:
77
prospects for those approaching old age’ Ageing and Society, 6, 1986,
pp. 271-93.
107 H. Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution. English Women, Sex and
Contraception, 1800-1975 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004),
p. 103.
108 Wimperis, Unmarried Mother, p. 25.
109 Ferguson and Fitzgerald, Studies, p. 91-2.
110 Ibid. p. 92.
111 Registrar General’s Statistical Review of England and Wales for the Six
Years 1940-1945, Text, Vol 11, Civil, p. 144.
112 Cook, Sexual Revolution, p. 103.
113 Coleman, ‘Population’, p. 51.
114 Ibid. p. 54.
115 P. Laslett and R. Wall (eds.), Household and Family in Past Time
(Cambridge University Press, 1972).
116 S. Sovic, ‘European Family History. Moving Beyond Stereotypes
of ‘East’ and ‘West’’ Cultural and Social History, 5, 2 (July 2008), pp.
1411-1434.
117 Pat Thane, Old Age in English History, pp. 73-88; S. Shahar, Growing
Old in the Middle Ages (London, Routledge, 1997), p. 94.
118 Thane, Old Age, p. 136, n.57.
119 Ibid. p. 20.
120 M. Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth Century Lancashire
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 56-7.
121 See essays in S. McCrae (ed.), Changing Britain. Families and
Households in the 1990s (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999).
122 J. Brannen, ‘Cultures of intergenerational transmission in four
generation families’ Sociological Review, 54, 1, pp. 133-155.
123 Anderson, Family Structure.
124 P. Thane, Old Age, pp. 119-146, 287-307,407-435.
125 E. Grundy, ‘Reciprocity in relationships: socio-economic and
health inuences on intergenerational exchanges between Third
Age parents and their adult children in Great Britain’ British Journal
of Sociology, 2005, Vol. 56, Issue 2, p. 233.
ENdNOTES
78
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
126 Julia Griggs, Protect, Support, Provide. Examining the role of
grandparents in families at risk of poverty. Report for Grandparents
Plus and the Equality and Human Rights Commission,
March 2010.
127 Thane, Old Age, p. 103-146.
128 Quoted in McGregor, Divorce, p. 75.
129 B.Disraeli, Sybil (1845. 1904 edition) p. 228.
130 Ibid. p. 76.
131 Ibid. pp. 78-9.
132 Sunday Times, 21
st
October 1956, quoted in McGregor, p. 58.
133 M. P. Hall, The Social Services of Modern England (London,
Routledge, 1952).
134 E.O.James Marriage and Society ( 1952) pp. 187-8.
135 R. Fletcher, Britain in the Sixties. The Family and Marriage
(Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962), p. 14.
136 Ibid.
137 Ibid. p. 12.
138 Ibid. p. 16.
139 See also E. Ferri and K. Smith, ‘Partnerships and Parenthood’ in E.
Ferri, J. Bynner, M. Wadsworth, Changing Britain, Changing Lives.
Three Generations at the Turn of the Century (London, University of
London Institute of Education, 2003), pp. 105-132.
79
AbOuT THE AuTHOR
Pat Thane
Pat Thane is Research Professorin Contemporary History
at King’s College, London. Sheco-manages the History and
Policy project (www.historyandpolicy.org).She was Vice
President of the Royal Historical Society,2005-8; Chair of
the Social History Society, 2002-08;a member of the Peer
Review Colleges of the Arts and Humanities Research Council
(continuing) and the Economic and Social Research Council in
2002-08.
Pat’s most recent publications are: Unequal Britain. Equalities
in Britain since 1945 (ed. 2010); Women and Citizenship in Great
Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century (2010) co-edited with
Esther Breitenbach;The Long History of Old Age (ed. 2005);
and Britain’s Pensions Crisis: History and Policy (2006),co-edited
with History and Policy contributors Hugh Pemberton and
Noel Whiteside. Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners? Scroungers?
Saints? Unmarried Mothers in Twentieth Century England will be
published by Oxford University Press in 2012.
aBOUT THE aUTHOr
80
Happy FamiliES? HiSTOry aNd Family pOliCy
bRITISH ACADEMY
POLICY PubLICATIONS
Drawing Electoral Boundaries, a British Academy Report,
September 2010
Choosing an Electoral System, a British Academy Report,
March 2010
Social Science and Family Policies, a British Academy Report,
February 2010
Language Matters, a Position Paper by the British Academy,
June 2009
Punching Our Weight: the humanities and social sciences in public
policy making, a British Academy Report, September 2008
Joint Guidelines on Copyright and Academic Research- Guidelines
for researchers and publishers in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
published jointly by the British Academy and Publishers
Association, April 2008
Peer Review: the challenges for the humanities and social sciences,
a British Academy Report, September 2007
Copyright and Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences,
a British Academy Report, September 2006
The British Academy, established by Royal Charter in 1902, champions and
supports the humanities and social sciences. It aims to inspire, recognise and
support excellence and high achievement in these elds across the UK and
internationally. The British Academy is a Fellowship of over 900 UK scholars
and social scientists elected for their distinction in research. The Academy’s
work on policy is supported by its Policy Centre, which draws on funding
from ESRC and AHRC.The Policy Centre oversees a programme of activity
engaging the expertise within the humanities and social science to shed
light on policy issues. All outputs from the British Academy Policy Centre
go through a rigorous peer review process to ensure that they are of the
highest quality. Views expressed in reports are not necessarily shared by each
individual Fellow.
Happy families? History and family policy
brings together
evidence on the history of families and how they have
changed over the last few hundred years, examining the
claims that abound about “broken” families. It finds that
high rates of non-marriage among men and women bringing
up children existed during much of the past two centuries,
making the period 1945-70 unusual, rather than the norm.
Marriage break-up, marital unhappiness and violence towards
women and children were also common in the past, partly
because divorce was financially and legally difficult. The
report also tackles claims about the lack of male “role-
models” noting that before the 1950s there were always large
numbers of impoverished families headed by lone mothers.
The prevalence of premarital sex in contemporary society
is also discussed, and identified as a normal part of the
courtship process for large sections of the population over the
last 250 years. The report concludes that the poorest families
have always found it hardest to achieve stability and harmony,
suggesting that socio-economic inequality may be a more
important challenge than features of the family itself.
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Happy families?
HISTORY AND FAMILY POLICY
Happy families? History and family policy
by Pat Thane
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