The Death of Christian Britain

— The 1960s and Secularisation —
position of women in society’. 3 Though female participation in the labour
market increased, domesticity was revived. In manual occupations, the idea
evolved that women could combine paid and domestic work, while for
middle-class women there was a significant return to the domestic ideal.
For both groups, labour-saving devices could improve domestic efficiency. 4
However, working women became the target of a barrage of official and
popular discourses which returned them to the home and hearth and
imposed on them guilt and anxiety about neglecting their children and
doing them psychological damage. 5 As Liz Heron wrote of the fifties:
It is seen as the time when women, yielding their jobs to the returning
male population as soon as the war was over lost the paid employment
that had given them independence; as the time when the family
was recemented, when women were redomesticated, their role redefined
as that of home-maker; when progress itself had a domestic
incarnation, with the kitchen as the centre of the new developments
in consumer technology. It is seen as the time when all the outward
signs of sexual difference were re-emphasised through style and
fashion, and women’s femininity pronounced in the clothes of the
New Look. 6
Summerfield has recently analysed women’s oral-history narratives on
their wartime lives in terms of two dominant discourses: the modernising
woman and the traditional woman. The first put the accent of the war’s
effects on change and opportunity, a welcome liberalising of women’s roles.
The second pictured the war as something to be endured for a return to
normal or traditional female roles. But Summerfield concludes that despite
‘real’ differences between them, ‘the discourse of modernisation was in fact
riddled with traditionalism’. Few of those who pushed, or identified with,
the discourse of modernisation ‘departed from the dominant, traditional
view that women’s main purpose at the end of the war was to “return
home” and recreate a domestic haven’. ‘The contradiction’, Summerfield
continues, ‘between this representation and the idea that the war had liberated
women was resolved by the suggestion that, later in the post-war years,
women would turn their backs on the domestic “cage” and demand the
freedoms made available by the war.’ 7
The deferment of women’s liberation in the late 1940s and 1950s was
apparent in the fervency with which media circulated the traditional
discourse on domestic ideology. The film Brief Encounter (1945), presciently
symbolising the transition to peacetime moral sensibilities, explored
a woman’s claustrophobic fear of public discovery of her extra-marital love
affair. She worried people ‘could read my secret thoughts’, blushed as
a vicar stared at her on a train, and ‘felt like a criminal’ when found by a
policeman in a public park at dead of night. Her final dissolution of the
affair affirmed – albeit reluctantly – its sordidness and her unbearable guilt
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