Abstract
This book provides a historical description of public concern with unmarried motherhood in Britain through the lens of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and Her Child (referred to in the book, and here, as ‘NC’). Content from the NC’s archives, including its annual reports, research commissioned by the organisation, and most affectingly, letters written by women requesting the Council’s advice and financial assistance, are woven through each chapter to illustrate changing attitudes and circumstances. However, the book does not restrict itself to the NC archives, but draws in material from parliamentary debates, demographic statistics, government reports, private correspondence and interviews, newspapers and the biographies of well-known individuals with experience of illegitimacy as diverse as the authors Rebecca West and Ian McEwan, the musicians Eric Clapton and John Lennon, and political figures Sylvia Pankhurst, Virginia Bottomley and Clare Short.
Chapter 1, ‘Secrets and Lies’, describes the origins of the NC in the years immediately following the First World War and sets the scene for the public and private dimensions of unmarried motherhood as a social issue. Chapter 2, ‘Between the Wars’, details the kind of financial assistance available to unmarried mothers during the 1930s and documents the increasing public and political prominence given to the cause through the work of the NC and its supporters in Parliament. Chapter 3 describes the response to rising illegitimacy rates during the Second World War (fuelled in part by the physical separation of couples both married and unmarried), which included concerns about young women’s increased freedom and autonomy. However, the book reports that the Registrar General had already highlighted a rise in conceptions out of wedlock (up to 30% of first children) in 1939, suggesting that the war was not wholly to blame for rising illegitimacy rates. The influence of John Bowlby’s attachment theory in the 1950s and 1960s is discussed in Chapter 4, ‘Unmarried Motherhood in “Family Britain”’, along with the impact, both positive and negative, of welfare provision and the increasing formalisation of adoption. The following chapter takes a more detailed look at the post-war welfare state.
Assessing the significance of the 1960s is an important theme throughout the book, but in particular in Chapter 6, ‘The Permissive Society?’, the authors seek to account for what they see as a long process of liberalising social attitudes which predates the mid-twentieth century. The complexity of the relationship between liberalisation and continued moral anxiety is indicated when the authors report that in this period, the NC was itself concerned about young people’s sexual behaviour and was critical of what it saw as the dysfunctional behaviour of some unmarried mothers. But it was also concerned to avoid explicit stigmatisation: in 1973 the organisation change its name to the National Council for One Parent Families and in 1974 it stopped using the word ‘illegitimate’ to describe babies born to unmarried parents.
The government-appointed Finer Committee and its report into One-Parent Families is assessed in Chapter 7, while Chapter 8, ‘The Struggle Continues: 1980s–90s’, turns its attention to the attempt to politicise ‘family breakdown’ by the Thatcher and Major governments, in the context of a large increase in births outside marriage and apparent popular acceptance of pre- and extra-marital sex.
The final chapter, ‘Into the Twenty-First Century: Progress?’, assesses the move away from moralising about marital status by the 1997 New Labour government and the proclaimed ‘compassionate conservatism’ of the 2010 Coalition, with an evaluation given of the impact of welfare reform on the fortunes of single mothers.
Overall, the book provides a fascinating and very readable exploration of the interrelationship between private realities and public attitudes. The multiple dimensions of public and private morality are illustrated with satisfying complexity. It will be of interest to scholars as a historical study of the construction of a particular social group as a problem, as a case study of the life of a philanthropic organisation over time, and as a contribution to the understanding of the deep meanings attached to family.
Two questions unanswered by the book: Were there tensions within the NC as it changed over time? What significance should we give to the rise from 4% of births occurring out of wedlock in 1902 to almost a quarter of households with dependent children being lone parent families today?