The Death of Christian Britain

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