The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
The Death of Christian Britain
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— <strong>The</strong> <strong>Death</strong> <strong>of</strong> <strong>Christian</strong> <strong>Britain</strong> —<br />
in the face <strong>of</strong> her role as mother and wife. 8 <strong>The</strong> return to home and family<br />
was signalled also in women’s magazines. During the war they had been<br />
immensely popular for exploring women’s changed wartime roles (in<br />
employment for instance), social issues <strong>of</strong> expanding welfarism, and the<br />
new female challenges which shortage and war brought to the home with<br />
absent men. But at war’s end, magazines which attempted to retain editorial<br />
on social-conscience issues like equal pay suffered catastrophic impact on<br />
circulation, and a conservatism based on motherhood, cookery and<br />
gardening returned to dominate women’s popular reading. As Evelyn Home<br />
wrote in Woman in 1951, ‘most women, once they have a family, are more<br />
contented and doing better work in the home than they could find outside<br />
it’. 9 Women as consumers became a primary ‘message’ <strong>of</strong> the press in the<br />
1950s, with advertisers funding much <strong>of</strong> the income-growth <strong>of</strong> women’s<br />
magazines, and demanding editorial content to match advertising copy’s<br />
judgement <strong>of</strong> women: ‘Yes . . . but will she roast bread cubes to drop in<br />
your soup?’ 10 By the mid-1950s, most women’s magazines had arrived at<br />
a uniformity <strong>of</strong> concentration on women’s domestic role and the twin goals<br />
<strong>of</strong> finding a husband and raising a family, all done, as Cynthia White noted,<br />
‘to the virtual – not to say virtuous – exclusion <strong>of</strong> all other interests and<br />
activities, including paid work outside the home’. 11 It was the virtue, or<br />
moral judgement, involved in these goals which was a characteristic reassertion<br />
<strong>of</strong> the 1950s. As late as 1961, a columnist in Woman’s Own advised:<br />
You can’t have deep and safe happiness in marriage and the exciting<br />
independence <strong>of</strong> a career as well . . . It isn’t fair on your husband.<br />
I believe [any man] would tell you that he would rather his wife<br />
stayed at home and looked after his children, and was waiting for<br />
him with a decent meal and a sympathetic ear when he got home<br />
from work. 12<br />
<strong>The</strong> ‘hearth and home’ formula was reapplied with a vengeance to girls’<br />
fiction in the post-war decades. New romance comics like Marilyn<br />
(founded 1955), Valentine (1957) and Boyfriend (1959) provided what<br />
Cynthia White has described as ‘a simplified dream world peopled with<br />
heroes and heroines who rushed breathlessly through a series <strong>of</strong> ill-fated<br />
encounters towards the predictably happy ending where “girl-gets-boy”’.<br />
<strong>The</strong>se papers were, she remarks, both naïve and ‘unimpeachably moral by<br />
pre-war standards’. 13<br />
Traditional values <strong>of</strong> family, home and piety were suddenly back on the<br />
agenda between the end <strong>of</strong> war and 1960. <strong>The</strong> churches benefited immediately.<br />
During the late 1940s and first half <strong>of</strong> the 1950s, organised<br />
<strong>Christian</strong>ity experienced the greatest per annum growth in church membership,<br />
Sunday school enrolment, Anglican confirmations and presbyterian<br />
recruitment <strong>of</strong> its baptised constituency since the eighteenth century.<br />
Figures 7.1, 7.5 and 8.1 show the scale <strong>of</strong> this growth, leading to peaks in<br />
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