Women and Families: An Oral History, 1940-1970.

After I recovered from my initial horror at seeing a significant part of my own lifetime discussed as "oral history," I found this book as valuable as the author's earlier project, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women, 1890-1940. The oral histories, quoted more generously than in the first book, are fascinating and underused sources for this period, and serve as cautions against the many generalizations offered by generations of scholars: the rise of the symmetrical family, the divorce revolution, the age of "permissiveness," etc. This study adds many distinctive details and variations, a view of the era that preserves the subjectivity of individuals, and, perhaps most valuable, a perspective that examines continuities with the past as well as discontinuities.

As in A Woman's Place, this book focuses on inhabitants of three towns in North Lancashire (ninety-eight women and men interviewed in the late 1980s). Barrow-in-Furness was originally a center of heavy engineering, shipbuilding, and iron and steelmaking; Lancaster, earlier known for its light industries, became, with its hospitals and universities, a service center in the 1950s and 1960s. Preston's cotton industry was in "terminal decline" after a brief postwar revival, and new industries were slowly established in the town.

Women and Families, while acknowledging the impact of the economic dynamism of this period, and the importance of national policies on housing, education, and health care, deals mainly with domestic issues such as courtship, marriage and divorce, parent-child relationships, kinship, and neighborhoods. This book is intended as a sequel to A Woman's Place and some of these respondents are the children of people in the first group. Some changes in Roberts's thinking are apparent, though. In A Woman's Place, Roberts situated herself within family and demographic history; here she engages with a somewhat wider group of scholars, including women's historians. And, whereas in A Woman's Place Roberts maintained that women identified themselves fully with their families, here she, and perhaps the respondents themselves, are more willing to acknowledge conflict within households between children and parents, and between wives and husbands.

The meaning of historical facts is being questioned in some quarters, and theory is encroaching on storytelling in the historical profession. Roberts's response, as an important participant in what might be termed the golden age of British social history, might have been to assert in this book the value and pleasure of reading life histories in all their particularities. Instead, she has, in her programmatic statements defining her project, simply retreated from the controversy. She reduces her claims to truth-telling to unnecessarily diminutive proportions. The project began, she writes, with "no particular theoretical standpoint." (p. 3) Moreover, the book is "not intended to be a comparative one nor does it attempt to synthesize the work of others." (p. 6) She is focusing only on "the local and the personal" and warns that it would be "unwise to draw from it too many conclusions about a wider society." (p. 1)

However, the book does engage with many wider issues that commentators have posed for this period in British history. Roberts literally could not write about these subjects without confronting them in some way, and her book indeed demonstrates many of the major changes of the past half century in family and community life very vividly and persuasively.

This period was, Roberts notes, "a golden age for the family." Two or three children per family rather than six or eight itself meant easier lives for parents and children. And, for just about one generation, couples usually stayed together for life at a point when adult life spans had increased. Divorce and out-of-wedlock pregnancies were still pretty rare before 1970.

Roberts's composite picture of workers' domestic lives also suggests that this era, 1940 through 1970, marked the demise of the urban working-class (defined in a sensibly agnostic way) family that had developed in Britain by the mid-nineteenth century, with its fairly strict separation between male and female spheres, its tight control over children, and its recognition of the value of the domestic labors of wives and mothers. Though young people still lived at home in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s until their marriage, parents were losing control over teenagers, both girls and boys. Parents in many cases chose to be more lenient than then own parents had been. Nine- and ten-o'clock curfews were "history" for many teenagers, and young people were less likely to heed their parents' warnings about the choice of friends. Children stayed in school longer than they had in the previous generation, and kept more of their own earnings from full- or part-time jobs. Roberts puts an interesting and useful spin on the question of child discipline by positing it as a society-wide rather than parent-child phenomenon. She describes, for earlier decades, the "interlocking chain of authoritarian figures: neighbours, teachers, clergymen and policemen" all of them "applying the same standards of behaviour and the same punishments" (p. 162) in the decades before 1940 or 1950. As adult control in general over teenagers declined, these parties blamed one another for its deterioration.

Roberts also documents another striking change in working-class family life probably dating to this era: the older assumptions about reciprocity between mothers and children - mothers "working for" their children, children repaying them with household chores and, later, with income - were breaking down. Mothers themselves, as well as the media around them, stressed having fun and school achievement as children's responsibilities rather than "helping mother." The significance of a mother's domestic work and the duty to help her were both losing their grip on people's thinking. And more and more mothers were taking on full responsibility for their children's psychological and intellectual development. Chapter Eight, "Changing Attitudes To Childcare," catches a number of conversations, sometimes between generations, about the "rights" of mothers and of children as women attempted to read the new map of motherhood.

Women and Families reports the undermining of other elements of working-class culture as well. Health professionals rather than neighborhood networks were the authorities to which mothers resorted when children were sick; the old female layer-out of the dead was replaced by professional undertakers. Television (by 1975, 60 percent of United Kingdom households had one) moved neighborhood life from street corners and doorsills to domestic interiors, as viewing rather than talking became a central leisure activity.

As with its predecessor, this book's unique contribution is the group of beautifully done oral histories on which it is based. Roberts and her assistant, Lucinda Beier, were obviously extremely skilled at enabling their interviewees both to remember their pasts in detail and to talk about issues that are rarely discussed in most oral history projects: sex, pregnancy, anger, conflict. There are funny stories, like Mr. Milholland's tale of bringing a girlfriend home unannounced to a house full of laundry with "the male underwear ... on the fender being aired." His mother's attempt to surreptitiously remove the offending garments did no good, for when the couple settled on the couch, they found the underwear under their cushions. (p. 64) Some stories illustrate much wider issues. A woman revealed the fear of sexual danger attached to more freedom for teenagers when she described a skirt she had favored because it functioned like armor protecting her from male attackers. The skirt was so tight, "I couldn't get it up to go to the toilet. But I thought that was great because if you got a lad and he was a bit randy he had no chance of getting up, you know. I could hardly walk in it, it was that tight.... I felt quite safe in it." (p. 65) Mr. Lodge, from Preston, gives a very concrete picture of older maternal prerogatives in his description of his mother's insistence on being his chaperon at young people's dances:

I didn't used to care very much for her coming because I would be speaking to a girl and I'd come off the dance floor and then she'd tell me what I'd said. Because she was a weaver and she could lip read every word I said to anybody in the hall. (p. 46)

Much as I learned from this study, I certainly had some problems with it, beginning with the author's squeamishness about making general claims for the validity of her research. While Roberts certainly sheds light on many significant issues, she often does so through a back door: in occasional and scattered statements, sometimes contradicted at other points. Also, though the anonymous respondents are carefully identified in many respects, and the method of recruiting them is discussed, very little is said about the act of interviewing itself. After more than a decade of soul-searching especially by anthropologists about the meaning and context of such interviews, the interviews themselves could become part of the story: how memory functioned for those interviewed, where and how they talked, how the historian-interviewers positioned themselves, and whether memories and personal stories have a special status as sources - a position she probably could defend. Another of the book's problems, as Roberts acknowledges, is that World War II is nearly invisible in this format. Few of the informants were young adults between 1939 and 1945, though some had been evacuated as children, a major experience for them, and two of the men who served benefited from army training in their post-war jobs.

Ellen Ross Ramapo College of New Jersey