Women, Marriage and Paid Work in Post-war Britain

This article explores the effects of the growth in married women's employment upon the dynamics of British marriages in the post-war period. Drawing on popular sociology, newspapers and women's magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, it shows how shifting patterns of women's labour, linked to longer term demographic and socio-economic trends, prompted considerable debate about the stability and future of marriage. Whilst some argued optimistically that the employment of wives strengthened marriage through the material security guaranteed by a second wage and by building greater commonality of interests between spouses, other sources point to a more complex picture. Working wives were seen to imperil marital harmony because of the challenge they posed to men's traditional' identity as providers and to the legitimacy and modernity of the full-time housewife-worker in the home. The article concludes that paid work made a significance difference to marital power relations in this period; women's wages did not free them wholly from economic dependency, but they nonetheless offered a small slice of financial autonomy and elevated wives' status within the marriage relationship. Paid work thus offers historians an analytical thread of continuity linking the 1950s to later decades of change in women's lives.