Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (65 page)

Amidst progressive opinion generally, there existed a distinct tendency to esteem hard, sweaty – and almost invariably male – labour above ‘softer’ forms of work, with inevitable implications for pay as well as status. The biography of Jennie Lee, Aneurin Bevan’s equally left-wing wife, records a classic exchange (probably in the early 1950s) between her and another, rather younger, female Labour MP, Barbara Castle. ‘Barbara,’ said Lee, ‘we cannot ask for equal pay when miners’ wages are so low.’ In that case, replied the red-haired one, ‘we will wait for ever’. The weight of opinion – indeed of sentiment – remained with Lee. So, too, in the unprogressive middle-class world at large, where for a long time it remained a distinguishing mark of a man’s assured position in his class if his wife was able to be at home – which obviously could be shown only by actually being at home. On the radio, in films, in women’s magazines, femininity was almost exclusively identified with the home and the nurturing of children. For those women who sought to identify themselves through their careers, there was pity more than admiration. ‘Business Girls’, one of the most haunting poems in John Betjeman’s
A Few Late Chrysanthemums
(1954), is an evocation of ‘poor unbelov’d’ businesswomen living in Camden Town and having a precious if lonely bathroom soak before ‘All too soon the tiny breakfast, / Trolley-bus and windy street!’
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Within the workplace the male attitude to upward female mobility was almost universally discouraging. ‘Such women are the first to agree that they do not represent the general aspirations of their sex’ was how
Midbank Chronicle
, Midland Bank’s staff magazine, put it in 1949. ‘They have not the least desire to impose conditions that would be suitable to themselves upon the great majority for whom the same conditions would be entirely unsuitable.’ Barely half the pay, fewer perks (such as cheap mortgages), inferior pension rights – all were inherent, and duly played out, in the logic of that argument. Unsurprisingly, women working for the big high-street banks were seldom encouraged to take the exams of the Institute of Bankers and thereby achieve promotion. There was no doubt an element of fear involved – that if women advanced in numbers, they might start to threaten men’s automatic position as chief breadwinners – but the male assumption of superiority in the workplace was also a deeply entrenched cultural norm. Listen to the voice of Frank Pound, who in the late 1940s worked in the toolroom at the Mullard Valve Company in south London. He was asked in the 1990s whether there had been women attached to the toolroom, traditionally the preserve of the skilled male elite:

They had a little department, they called it the cow-shed, and the girls was in there doing turning, very simple engineering, which we hardly ever spoke to. You know, we occasionally saw them . . .

And these women would not have had an apprenticeship?

Oh, no, no, no, they were, I believe they called them trainee workers, and they were trained during the war, I take it, to help people get things done in the war, you see.

The implications were clear. Women might have penetrated the toolroom during the exigencies of war, but their presence was no longer acceptable; there was no question of their receiving apprenticeships and thus becoming full toolmakers, and management and the male toolmakers between them would soon ensure that women were wholly excluded from the citadel. In short, it was back to the cow-shed.

Yet the fact is that in her oral history of Mullards, together with similar light-industry firms in south London, Sue Bruley has found ‘no signs that women resisted the pressures to reinforce strict occupational segregation’. Furthermore, ‘the only signs of unrest among the women in these years [1920–60] was over piece rates’, though ‘there is little evidence that dissatisfaction over pay rates spilled over into serious unrest’. Much turned, presumably, on the expectations of working women, as well as the extent to which they looked to their job as the central source of their identity. And certainly the Social Survey’s study
Women and Industry
, based on 1947 fieldwork, made it abundantly clear that in the eyes of most women (working and otherwise) it was wrong to combine work and marriage, with work having to be second best unless that was financially impossible.
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This finding would not have amazed Pearl Jephcott. Through both her sociological fieldwork and her involvement in the girls’ club movement in London, she had a thorough understanding of how young women entering the labour market saw work in the broad scheme of things. In
Rising Twenty
, her 1948 study of just over a hundred girls living in three parts of England (‘a pit village in County Durham; a cluster of decaying and blitzed streets within a mile of Piccadilly Circus; and a northern industrial town [Barrow?] notable for its armaments and shipbuilding’), she set out her stall in a chapter called ‘The Dominant Interest’:

Practically every girl says that she will want to give up her job when she gets married, and expects her career to continue for another five years at most . . . Those who consider that they might stay on at work give as their reason not a belief in the value of their job, nor even personal independence, but ‘only if my husband’s pay weren’t enough’ or ‘if we need to get a good home together’. No one feels her job to be so important either for other people or in her own life that she ought to continue with it.

‘Generations of tradition lie behind this outlook,’ emphasised Jephcott. And she added that ‘for the last 65 years, almost since the weddings of these girls’ great-grandmothers, there has been no appreciable change (apart from the war periods) in the proportion of women of 15 to 45 who do go out to work’.

Jephcott’s findings were particularly relevant given the youthful profile of the female workforce – an age analysis in July 1948 revealed that 57 per cent were 30 or under, compared with 37 per cent of the male workforce. But for a vivid picture of the female workforce as a whole, one turns to the tireless Zweig, whose
Women’s Life and Labour
(1952) was based on well over 400 interviews, mainly in the late 1940s. He visited ‘cotton and silk mills, engineering factories, potteries, woollen mills and finishing-up trades, shops, canteens, hospitals, glove and hat and shoe factories, printing offices and paper-sorting departments in Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, Yorkshire and London’, comprising 46 workplaces in all.

There he found a predominantly unskilled workforce in which ‘a strong preference for a concrete job of a specific nature’ was voiced ‘only infrequently’. A pronouncement like ‘I was always interested in telephones, so I took a job as a telephonist’ was ‘rarely heard’. Instead, the ‘one outstanding preference’ was more often than not expressed in the assertion: ‘This is a clean job.’ And Zweig commented:

The social prestige of jobs is primarily based on the cleanliness and tidiness of the jobs performed, as it has been tacitly assumed that like attracts like, the clean and tidy girls being on clean jobs. The low prestige of mill girls is basically caused by the fluff and dust of the cotton mill . . . The cardroom tenters, who collect the highest share of fluff and dust, enjoy the lowest prestige, the spinners forming the middle and the weavers the upper class.

Many women also preferred what they called ‘a light job’ – interpreted by Zweig to mean light not only physically but also mentally. ‘Maybe they have enough bother and worry of their own,’ a supervisor explained to him about the general disinclination to stick at jobs requiring a significant degree of concentration or thought. ‘When an easy job comes along I have to split it and let it go round.’ There was, argued Zweig, an essentially different mindset involved:

A woman has plenty of subjects which can occupy her mind and her mind is always busy with small bits of everyday life. Not only does she rarely complain of the monotony of her job, but in most cases she loves a repetitive job of such a kind which enables her to indulge in daydreaming or simply reviving pictures of the past. If she was in the pictures last night, she has something to remember the whole day afterwards if the film was interesting. The other advantage of having a light repetitive job is the ability to have a chat: ‘I must keep my eyes on the machines but I can talk’. If the noise is not too deafening the girls can talk freely about their experiences and last night’s outings.

Predictably,
Music While You Work
(on the Home Service at 10.30 each weekday morning) was ‘much more popular with women than with men’.

Were working women broadly content? Zweig had started his inquiry, he admitted, ‘with a preconceived idea about the unhappy woman dragged from her home to work, the little slave doing a monotonous and uncongenial job, the victim of the industrial civilisation’. His eyes were opened:

I can say definitely on the basis of my experience that industry has a great attraction for women workers, apart from a small minority of women whose health and energy are not sufficient to carry on two jobs and who are driven to industry by the whip of want. Women are not interested in industry as such but the industry stands in their mind for many things which they want and opens for them a new world. Here they come into contact with real ‘life’; they feel that they are in a place where there is something worth while going on.

Friends and companionship, chatter and gossip, looking for a mate or just giving one an interest in life – there were many reasons, Zweig explained, why women enjoyed working, in addition to the obvious economic motivation. He went on:

I do not like general theories, and least of all psychological theories, but the one thing which struck me in my inquiry was the sense of inferiority which many, if not most, women have. They accept man’s superiority as a matter of fact and a man’s job is as a rule superior to a woman’s job. You can feel the regret that they were not born men, who have the best of everything and the first choice in practically all things. So they do as much as they can to prove equal to men, to prove that they are not drones or pleasure animals kept by men for their amusement, or sleeping partners to men’s booty. Paid work, especially work in industry, relieves that sense of inferiority.

‘I don’t need to ask my husband for permission to spend a shilling as others do,’ he was told. ‘I spend my own money in my own way.’

This was far from Zweig’s only inquiry in these years, but it seems to have been the one that meant the most to him. He described in his foreword how it had revealed to him ‘a whole world of distinct female values’, exemplified by ‘the amazing endurance and struggle against the adversities of life on the part of many married women with large families’. It was not unusual, he explained, ‘to find a mother of five small children going out to work full-time, getting up at 6 a.m. and going to bed at 12, doing her washing on Sundays, and accepting all this with a smile as a matter of course’. Such women, he asserted, ‘were an inspiration to me – as they can be to anyone who looks deeply into the turbulent waters of life’.

But perhaps the most haunting of the individual case-studies he provided was of a childless married woman, aged 36, working in a factory:

Her steady wage on a machine is £4 plus 15s bonus. She worked for three years during the war and has since been working two years. She likes her job; it’s interesting and of course she likes the money. Her husband is a skilled fitter and turner in the same firm, but she doesn’t know how much he earns. He gives her £4 a week. She saves for a nice house, because for the time being they live with in-laws.

They have no children. Why? ‘It is up to him. I would like to have children and I am not getting any younger.’

Her greatest hope: ‘To get a nice house.’ Her greatest fear: ‘To die.’

The basis of happiness consists of a nice house and a good married life. (‘I can say that because I haven’t got it.’)

She doesn’t go in for pools or other gambling, ‘that I leave to my husband’.

She enjoys life as far as she can. She goes three times a week to the pictures, at the weekends to the pub; she reads Western stories. No churchgoing.

‘Life is what you make it.’

‘She has never heard about the devaluation or cheapening of the pound or the economic crisis,’ Zweig’s pen picture added. ‘What is meant by economic crisis to her is that there are no nylons in the shops.’
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