Introduction
Writing in 1960 Margaret Stacey asserted that, ‘Women, compared with men, tend to show group characteristics regardless of other social factors like class. Their training from childhood sets them apart from boys and together as potential wives and mothers.’Footnote 1 This article will question whether Oxfordshire women did indeed believe there was a commonality in their experiences at this time, irrespective of the locality in which they lived or the class to which they belonged, or whether these differences were more significant than their shared gender.
The role class played in determining the lives of women in post-war Oxfordshire is an important area of study because discourses of class dominated mid-twentieth century Britain. The first objective of this article is therefore to analyse the role class played in determining women's experiences at this time. Class was a focus of concern for sociologists in the post-war period and was a contested issue. The decades after the war were characterised as a time of affluence and the question of embourgoisement, and whether the working class were adopting middle class patterns of life, encouraged considerable debate.Footnote 2 The Oxfordshire women interviewed for this research implied that they felt there had been some levelling of class, if not directly ascribing this to the embourgoisement thesis. For example Tina described how she thought that class distinctions had weakened over time, saying that:
I've heard [my husband] and I've heard [my brother-in-law] say it, ‘We're working class and proud of it’, and I sort of say, ‘I'm not working-class I'm working upwards mate’, and it's sort of more that, and I don't think there is a class distinction as such. They don't say you're rich, you're poor, you're on a different level. It's moulded in a lot more. But there's always going to be obviously where you're born and who you're born to.Footnote 3
As Tina's comments indicate, however, definitions of class are both ambiguous and subject to change, with gender also influencing people's responses. Peter Hiller and H.F. Moorhouse have both found that within the space of one discussion, people may change their definition of ‘class’ a number of times, without being aware of inconsistency.Footnote 4 In their study of working-class attitudes to marriage in 1943, the social psychologists Elizabeth Slater and Mark Woodside proposed that realisation of one's ‘class’ position emerged from routine activities of everyday life: it was the ‘feeling of belonging’ which was ‘felt to be natural and was taken for granted’. They found their respondents were concerned as much with symbolic expressions of power in social relationships as with material realities.Footnote 5 Joanna Bourke suggests that these individual perceptions of class position, ‘provides one way around the thorny problem of gender’.Footnote 6 She stresses that employing categories such as occupation, income, or relationship to the means of production as indicators of ‘class’ is clearly unsatisfactory when focusing on women. Employed women may be categorised in terms of their own occupation, or that of the ‘chief breadwinner’ in the household, and women without paid employment are often allocated to the ‘class’ position of their husband or father.Footnote 7 The advantage of allowing women's self-perceptions to predominate, is that it allows a woman to classify herself in the terms she considers to be appropriate. This article will therefore examine the role class played in both women's experiences of life in post-war Oxfordshire, and how they articulated their subjective understandings of class within their oral history narratives.
The second aim of this article is to investigate the importance of locality upon lived experience, and to engage, in Charles Phythian-Adams’ words, in the process of ‘unravelling localized identities.’Footnote 8 Using Oxfordshire as a case study it is possible to examine a range of communities: rural, urban and suburban. While ethnicity and religion are also important variables in determining people's experiences of community, they were not remembered as particularly significant for the Oxfordshire interviewees. Female immigrants from Commonwealth countries were not common in Oxfordshire before the 1970s and none were interviewed for this study. Although religion was recalled as being important in their community by some of the women, and many had attended church as children, they did not present it as a significant factor in determining their experiences of rural life.Footnote 9 Sociologists and social anthropologists writing during the 1950s and 1960s attributed the different social characteristics they found in communities to the particular nature of the areas they studied. For example, in rural communities the extended family was considered to be particularly strong because there was little mobility and much intermarriage.Footnote 10 It was also believed that the father-son tie was stronger in rural areas; men shared the same occupation, and farms were passed down the male line.Footnote 11 Middle-class communities were held to be less kin oriented than working-class communities, social mobility meant that families lived further away from one another, with friends playing a more important role. These friends tended to come from further away, were often found through education and employment rather than being found amongst neighbours, and were more often found through the husband rather than the wife.Footnote 12 Families in the suburban estates of both the inter-war and post-war years were thought to be more privatised, because there was no sense of neighbourhood, which in turn left women lonelier and more isolated than they were in traditional urban communities.Footnote 13
This article will analyse how the nature of these different areas affected women's experiences. It will confirm some of the findings of the contemporary surveys, namely that class differentials could be significant, with the more geographically mobile middle classes less likely to receive support from family. In addition there was an intimacy and pattern of neighbourliness in traditional rural working-class communities, which was not seen on the new estates. However the picture of estates derived from this study, for both middle-class and working-class women, was not the bleak picture common in contemporary discourse. This finding may indicate that post-war investigators were overly pessimistic about the new estates, tending to romanticise the old neighbourhoods. They did not take into account that while different to those seen in the old areas, new community structures could build up in the estates. Of particular importance, post-war commentators did not recognise the agency of women, especially mothers of young children, in striving to form bonds of friendship, and often assumed that women were passive victims of their environment rather than active participants within it.
The years between 1945 and 1970 were marked by significant social changes, which were particularly visible in the context of the lives of women. Married women were increasingly likely to participate in the workforce; early marriage, smaller families and longer life expectancy meant that childbearing no longer filled a woman's whole life; contraception enabled women to plan their families and have control over their own bodies. However, as Selina Todd has noted, it is an era that remains greatly neglected by historians.Footnote 14 The post-war period has also been subject to historical generalisations. For example the 1950s are seen as a golden age of prosperity and consensus before the upheavals of the 1960s, with low illegitimacy and divorce rates and high marriage rates.Footnote 15 The ideal of companionate marriage, which stressed the centrality of the relationship between husband and wife in the family, and that men and women had equal status, but different roles, was strong. Social surveys and community studies conducted during these years were imbued with a spirit of optimism. The Birmingham Feminist History Group conclude that this assurance reflected a wider confidence, as, ‘Ideologies in the fifties stressed agreement, the promise of the future, and economic expansionism; the continued existence of class divisions, poverty and inequality were forgotten.’Footnote 16
Stephanie Spencer notes that, in historical analysis of the 1950s, the period has been seen as an age of consensus during which a conservative government was able to re-establish Britain's prosperity and build on welfare state legislation. In reality, as has been increasingly demonstrated over the past two decades, the picture is more nuanced. Many of the social changes believed to have occurred after the war had already commenced beforehand; and there was a great deal of continuity as well as change. Furthermore, in recent years historians have also shown how the effects of both these changes and continuities were mediated by factors such as class and ethnicity. However as Spencer argues, while this notion of consensus has been challenged as more records have become available and the complexity and compromise of post-war policies have become apparent, the comparative lack of interest that has been shown by women's or gender historians until recently, means that the mainstream historical understanding of this remains relatively untouched by the introduction of a gendered perspective.Footnote 17 The final objective of this article is therefore to discuss the ways in which the women I interviewed expressed their experiences of rural living, to analyse the subjectivity of their narratives, and to examine how their accounts relate to contemporary debates and existing historical interpretations to add to understanding of women's lives at this time.
Methodology
In order to examine women's aspirations, attitudes and experiences of rural living, this article will be based on oral history interviews with ninety-two women who were living in different locations in Oxfordshire, rural, urban and suburban. These are the villages of Benson and Ewelme in south Oxfordshire, the Wychwood villages in west Oxfordshire, the twenty-four square miles of north Oxfordshire covered by the Country Planning survey, the city centre areas of Oxford, the contrasting suburbs of Cowley and north Oxford, and a group of Somerville graduates. The women all lived in Oxfordshire when their children were growing up, but the range of communities they lived in was specifically chosen to enable a comparison of local experiences. As many women as logistically possible were interviewed. While the numbers are significantly lower than for social survey and sampling methods, as Kate Fisher has argued, ‘Oral history provides the historian with dense and rich qualitative material rather than strength in numbers.’Footnote 18 Interviewees were principally found through community groups and social clubs, and by women recommending other women to me. Kate Field argues this ‘snowballing’, where each respondent gives the name of another person to participate, is a particularly appropriate method for finding elderly respondents for a local study because it helps secure the trust of interviewees through being ‘recommended’ to them by their friends.Footnote 19 The group of graduates of Somerville were found through the alumni association for the college.
The sample was self selecting in that all the women volunteered to be interviewed, however the women were specifically chosen to provide a range of ages, localities and educational backgrounds (from minimum age school leavers to graduates) to see how locality, education and class influenced women's experiences. The interviews were semi-structured following the model described by Penny SummerfieldFootnote 20 and were typically between one and two hours long. When silences, literal and figurative, were encountered in the narratives, time was always given to respondents to allow them to decide how they wished to proceed. No specific attempts was made to activate or avoid emotive topics. Furthermore, to address some of the ethical issues surrounding oral history, potential respondents were informed in advance of the interview about the aims of the research, which placed them in a more powerful position as they had the chance in advance of the interview to make some decisions about what they would choose to divulge.Footnote 21 This advance notification also prevented any difference in expectation between interviewer and interviewee. All interviewees were asked to sign copyright forms at the end of the interview where they had the chance to specify any restrictions on their contributions they wished to make, and pseudonyms have been used to preserve the anonymity of the interviewees.Footnote 22
Interviews were based upon the life cycle to encourage the interviewees to reflect upon their own lives, those of their parents’ generation and their children's generation, to see their perceptions of how women's lives had changed. There is evidence that the life-cycle structure mirrors the way in which women tend to construct and articulate their narratives. Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame,Footnote 23 has noted that women are less likely than men to place themselves at the centre of public events; downplaying their own activities, emphasising the role of other family members in their recollections. To use Susan Geiger's phrase, women's ‘embeddedness in familial life’Footnote 24 may shape their view of the world, and even consciousness of historical time. In addition, the life-story approach was selected because, as Marie-Françoise Chanfrault-Duchet has argued, it:
Makes it possible to go beyond the preconstituted discourses and ‘surface assertions’ collected through survey research. It highlights the complexity, the ambiguities, and even the contradictions of the relations between the subject and the ideological image of woman – i.e., how women live, internalize, and more or less consciously interpret their status.Footnote 25
The life cycle model allowed the women interviewed to tell their own stories, to minimise the possible effect of the interviewer on the testimony provided, and allow as much testimony as possible to emerge with as little intervention from the interviewer as possible. However, following the life cycle also enabled some comparability between the interviews as they all covered the same key themes. The oral history interviews conducted for this research have been used to fulfil two aims: firstly, to provide information about the experience of motherhood in the post-war decades; and secondly, through an analysis of the structure and presentation of the women's accounts, to explore the subjectivity of their testimony.
Oral history has come under criticism because it is reliant on memories, usually of older people, and these have sometimes been considered sentimental, vague, or inaccurate. There are some particular difficulties attributed to the use of oral data, due to the way people remember. While people are able to remember accurately, memory can also be distorted by external constraints. Memory is selective and subject to self-censorship. In his interviews with Australian First World War veterans Alistair Thomson found his respondents remembered events in such a way as would provide acceptable accounts of their war service to their present selves.Footnote 26 In consequence what respondents do not say can be as important sources of information as what they do say, and the way people remember is as important as what they remember. Even when the facts someone gives are wrong, the reasons why they do so can tell us about the society at the time they are describing and that of the present. When using oral sources historians need to be aware of the methods of storytelling that interviewees adopt and the complexity of people's memories must be observed. As in the case of all sources, oral data need, where possible, to be cross-referenced and compared with other accounts. However, oral historians have offered many convincing defences for the practice.Footnote 27 Moreover, the very subjectivity of oral history can also be its advantage, as in the case of this research. As Alessandro Portelli has argued, ‘oral sources tell us not just what people did, but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were doing, and what they now think they did’.Footnote 28 Hence oral history allows women to be the central figures of this analysis, both by being involved in creating this history though the oral history interview, and by being the principal focus of the study.
Women in post-war Oxfordshire: family, neighbourhood and class
The institution that the women interviewed reported as being of primary importance to them was the family and this was demonstrated by the priority they gave to their families in their narratives. Families were important both materially and emotionally. Extended families often provided women with their social life. Maud was born in Churchill Heath in 1921, moving to nearby Milton-under-Wychwood after her marriage in 1940. She recalled how her extended family remained the centre of her life throughout her childhood and adulthood, explaining that, ‘you know we had parties for everything under the sun, with a big family you've always got something haven't you? Somebody was either going to be married or [a] christening, so we were always something happening.’Footnote 29 The extended family remained important in rural areas right through the period and it was not only friends but even husbands who were met through the family circle. Maud's husband was a friend of the family whom she met through the Baptist church. She remembered how her husband had asked her father for her hand in marriage:
He went properly, and so they appreciated, they approved you see really, but of course they knew him, they knew his people, they knew his father, well we called them uncle and aunty . . . but then of course they became my mother-in-law and father-in-law.Footnote 30
Implied within Maud's account is the belief that marriage was as much between the families of the couple as individuals themselves. The extended family was clearly still an important source of leisure and companionship within the lives of many women in the 1940s and beyond.
In addition, the extended family also remained important as a site for the exchange of services. Childcare was perhaps the most important support the extended family provided to mothers at this time. Madge was born in Shipton-under-Wychwood in 1918 and grew up there, moving to the neighbouring village of Milton-under-Wychwood when she married in 1939. She described how she relied on many members of her kin to look after her children when she was unwell:
I had a friend who not only had her own children, she used to foster them [too], and I was very friendly with her . . . and she was the one who looked after [my children], and then she went on holiday and my sister had him, they had quite a different variety of mothers to look after them. And then I had others who I was friendly you know. I had a great aunt who was living next to me and she used to take them out in a pram for a walk, oh yes I had quite a lot of help.Footnote 31
It is interesting to note how friends and relatives were interchangeable in Madge's discussion of the aid she received. In contrast to contemporary sociological thought, she did not consider a dichotomy to exist between them. In addition while there was concern that the extended family was declining due to the increasing mobility of its members, women in Oxfordshire felt that grandmothers today often played a greater part in the provision of childcare due to the increasing numbers of working mothers. Ingrid told an anecdote about a conversation with her granddaughter to illustrate this point: ‘certainly [my granddaughter] only the other day she said, ‘Granny we've never had an au pair’, and then said, ‘Well I suppose really you're our au pair aren't you?’Footnote 32 The majority of women did not present themselves as being any less involved with their grandchildren than their mother's generation had been. The fact that they were so keen to portray themselves in this way, indicates that they thought that grandmothers were still central to the family, but also that at a time when family ties are deemed less strong, they felt it necessary to defend their role.
Nonetheless, one notable difference between the generations was that fewer women now lived with members of their extended family. Women recalled how their extended families had provided them with housing, particularly in the 1940s and 1950s. Farmers’ wives were the most obvious group as they moved to live with their husband's families on the farms that they ran. However, the housing shortage during and after the Second World War meant that many women marrying in the 1940s and early 1950s had no choice but to live with members of their family. Phyllis was originally from Burton-on-Trent, but joined the Land Army during the war and was sent to Shipton-under-Wychwood. She met her husband there and they married at the end of the war. Discussing this difficulty of finding housing, Phyllis detailed the moves the couple made:
To start with, with my sister-in-law and then, coz accommodation was very hard to get, and then went into a farm cottage and then went from there to live with my mother-in-law and then from that when my eldest daughter was about three we moved into a council house.Footnote 33
As with many women at this time, Phyllis recalled her delight at moving into this council house, the first home of her own. Bobbie and her family were from Milton-under-Wychwood. Like Phyllis she met her husband, who was originally from Brighton, during the war when they were both engaged in war-work at De Havilland's aircraft factory. Her husband chose to remain in Oxfordshire and joined Bobbie and her mother in the family home after they married in 1948. She explained that, ‘you couldn't get houses so we lived here with Mum, and we stayed here.’Footnote 34 The resigned manner in which Bobbie articulated this decision indicates she had mixed feelings about the couple living with her mother. While she had a close relationship with her mother who was a widow, and felt some degree of duty to remain with her, it seems the couple would also have liked to have had some privacy and started their married life in their own home.
As indicated above, circumstance rather than choice could bring families together. Some of the women who remembered seeing other family members regularly recalled that this was out of duress rather than choice. Doris and Tina, who were sisters-in-law from Benson, recalled the ambivalence they felt towards their mother-in-law. Doris had been born and brought up in the area, and her family lived in Benson, while Tina moved to Wallingford as a child to live with foster parents after her own parents separated, and moved into Benson upon her marriage. They both recalled their mother-in-law as being an extremely influential, but difficult figure in their lives when they were raising their children in the 1960s and 1970s:
Doris: We used to have to go up there nearly every day didn't we?
Tina: Yeah. If you didn't go up every day, if you were late it was, ‘you should have been here half hour ago’. So if the kids needed feeding or something you didn't do it because of the routine.Footnote 35
Tina felt this uneasy relationship with her mother-in-law was exacerbated by the fact that unlike Doris, she did not have her own mother to turn to:
I think actually she didn't mean it, it came across wrongly. I always thought that. But she'd say the most awful things, I was always in tears. I think I spent the first years just in tears because of something that she'd said. Like she'd come in without any notice, she'd just come up and walk in, and I can remember one day I was using the pressure cooker, which was the thing in the sixties, the pressure cooker, and she said, ‘Ken's never had food cooked in a pressure cooker’, she said, ‘I don't know what you're doing to him?’ And now I would just say well that's how I want to cook and that's it. But it was sort of really upsetting at the time, because I had no one to really go and talk to about it. It really upset me.Footnote 36
While there may have been an element of the almost stereotypical antagonism between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law at work in Tina's narrative, she also touched on an important point about the vulnerability of women who did not have their family around. Peggy's mother had died when she was a child and like Tina she felt that this left her particularly susceptible to the criticisms of her mother-in-law. After a number of years spent following her husband, a seaman, around the country, Peggy settled in Middleton Cheney, her husband's home village, in the mid-1950s. Despite her mother-in-law living, ‘up the avenue’, she was totally unsupportive of Peggy. Peggy remembered how she told her she was:
‘Not good enough for my son’, I don't know what she thought he was going to have, yes she told me, ‘You're not good enough for my son’, she said, ‘That's it, you've got no education’, I thought, ‘We'll see about this’, but oh she was hateful.Footnote 37
The extended family provided women with help and assistance, friendship and support. While ties tended to be stronger in traditional rural communities, and among working-class families, there was no strict rule in patterns of behaviour. Peter Willmott and Michael Young's description of the mother-daughter relationship and strength of the extended family in Bethnal Green, did not take into account the tensions and ambiguities that could also occur within families which were so apparent in Oxfordshire. While families were always important to women, they were not always benign.
There was also a class element at work as the ties of extended family were generally stronger for working-class women. Social and geographical mobility meant that middle-class women often lived further from their families, although they did recall they would have liked help if it had been available. Megan lived in St Clements when her children were born in the early 1970s, away from her family who were from London. Megan felt she suffered because of this separation: ‘My mother didn't live near, and neither did my mother-in-law, so I did feel very isolated, I think that was difficult.’Footnote 38 Middle-class women and their families often made efforts to remain in contact with one another despite the distances between them, and had greater access to cars and telephones which helped enable them to do so. Discussing the suburb of Woodford in East London, Willmott and Young wrote how:
Cars, telephones and letters are all means by which middle-class people can straddle the distance they have interposed between themselves and their relatives. With these technical aids, the middle-class people of Woodford keep in touch with relatives almost as much as working-class people do, although they do not live as close.Footnote 39
It is noteworthy, however, that none of the Oxfordshire women, irrespective of class, recalled the close mother-daughter relationship, which significantly came at the expense of husbands, that Madeline Kerr presented as occurring in inner-city Liverpool where she found that the attitude, ‘I couldn't get on without my mother. I could get on without my husband. I don't notice him’, was not unusual.Footnote 40 While some women were close to their mothers, when reviewing these relationships from their current perspective (often as the mothers of adult daughters themselves), they remembered them as being more nuanced and less intimate than those described by contemporary investigators.
Neighbours were also recalled as providing a notable support network for women. Willmott and Young stressed that in urban working-class communities, neighbours were acquaintances rather than friends.Footnote 41 There was some evidence of this distinction in the narratives of the Oxfordshire women. Maud lived in the village of Milton-under-Wychwood after her marriage in 1940. She stressed the strong sense of community that existed and the support members provided to one another, but did not approve of what she considered to be the modern practice of neighbours forming friendships, arguing that, ‘I think there'll be a lot of fighting before it's finished.’Footnote 42 However, as well as friendship, there was also an exchange of goods and services between neighbours on a more mundane day-to-day basis. Reminiscing about Benson life during her childhood in the 1940s and 1950s Gloria described an interdependency in the village which was based on:
Knowing families and knowing they're there if you need each other. And sort of old people, I can see my mum now, we lived in the high street and we were surrounded by elderly people, and no way would those people have been neglected. You didn't lock your doors or anything like that.Footnote 43
There was sadness in Gloria's account as she was recalling what she believed to be a lost world, and this was particularly upsetting as it also highlighted the passing of a happy time in her life which may have caused her to exaggerate this closeness. Theresa recalled the solidarity that she felt existed between working-class women in Edgecote. She stated that:
If anything was desperate I would just say to somebody you know perhaps, ‘Will you just keep an eye on the kids?’, there was a woman opposite who had small children. And, ‘I'll nip up and buy, and get so and so’, or she would come to me and say, ‘Oh will you watch mine, I'm off on [my bike].’Footnote 44
What is interesting from the Oxfordshire evidence is that the patterns of neighbourhood and community that social scientists believed characterised traditional working-class urban areas could also be seen in rural localities.
In contrast to the stable working-class community life depicted above, commenting in 1944 on new suburban housing, Kate Liepmann thought that there had been social disintegration due to ‘the newness of the dormitories and the thinness of the urban fabric’ in these areas.Footnote 45 Indeed Elizabeth Bott thought that by the 1940s it had become part of folklore that the estates had been responsible for marked losses of working-class sociability.Footnote 46 Whereas in Bethnal Green, Willmott and Young found that residents had acquaintances in every direction, they thought ‘Greenleigh’ was a far lonelier place. Comparing the two localities they asserted that, ‘In Bethnal Green, the kindred are at hand every day of the week. At Greenleigh the family has to wait for summer, for week-ends, for holidays, before they appear.’Footnote 47 However, Willmott and Young portrayed life in the suburb of Woodford (which they considered to be middle-classFootnote 48) in a far more positive light than in ‘Greenleigh’. Residents were deemed to be friendlier, more cooperative and supportive of one another. Willmott and Young thought that this difference between the two areas was a result of class. They categorised Woodford as a middle-class suburb and suggested that the middle-class residents of Woodford had a certain capacity or skill at ‘making friends’. In contrast Bethnal Greeners did not need this capacity because, whether they made any effort or not, they had plenty of friends around them. Willmott and Young concluded that this was why Bethnal Greeners, ‘were so lost when they were transported to the strange environment of the housing estate.’Footnote 49 They argued that it was friends, rather than family, who were central to middle-class life, and these friends were recruited amongst their neighbours.Footnote 50
This portrayal of new estates as being places with a strong sense of community and identity was a feature of women's narratives and women from all areas of the county who lived in new privately built housing estates recalled enjoying the friendship and support of their neighbours. The group of women who lived in Polly's street, which was on a private estate built in Benson in the 1960s, developed an informal playgroup. Each mother had all the children for the morning one day a week, which allowed the other mothers some free time. Fiona lived on the same Benson estate as Polly. She thought that:
I suppose really my closest friends were the people who lived near us. Lived on the same estate. It just so happened that there were people of like mind you know. And we used to have a lovely time sometimes. We went down to the river, there's a paddling pool down at the river and I've got lots of lovely photos of the kiddies running there.Footnote 51
Indeed she had enjoyed life on the estate she previously lived on in Brighton so that she had been determined to live on one again. For Agnes, the neighbours on her estate also formed her social life. She lived on a newly built private estate in Ewelme and felt that because they were all newcomers to the village and struggled to integrate with the native villages, they formed a tight-knit group.Footnote 52 Moreover on moving from a traditional established community to a new housing estate some women actually discovered the patterns of neighbourliness that researchers had thought were confined to old areas. Glenda moved from London to Banbury in the mid-1950s. She discussed the benefits of relocating: ‘it was very boring in London, extremely boring, because you were sat in this little house all day long from morning to night, it was a bit lonely.’ In contrast when the family moved to Banbury:
We moved into a new house in a group of eight and everybody was very friendly, so for a start it was so much more friendly, this idea that London's all that pally is not true. It was very pleasant, we had three small children, we had quite a nice house, and it was a very pleasant little town.Footnote 53
Furthermore, in contrast to the findings of Willmott and Young in ‘Greenleigh’, working-class women in Oxfordshire remembered the same camaraderie existing on their estates as their middle-class counterparts. Doreen and Peggy are neighbours from a council estate built in the 1950s in the village of Middleton Cheney on the Oxfordshire/Northamptonshire border. They have enjoyed a close friendship from the time that they moved into their houses up to the present day, and in the course of their interview (they chose to be interviewed together) both stressed how significant this had been throughout their lives. Peggy summed up what their friendship had meant to her, ‘Yeah it's good to have a friend like that, no matter what happens.’ She also stressed how happy she had been to move into the house saying, ‘I've never moved since, I wouldn't, the next place I go is over the back to the cemetery . . . I waited long enough for this, my god I did.’Footnote 54 Peggy's house and the support of the neighbours she had there were a central theme of her narrative demonstrating their importance to her. Rita was born and brought up in Adderbury and initially she and her husband lived there with her parents after they married before moving to a newly built council house on an estate in Kings Sutton in the mid-1950s. She recalled the distance from her family as being difficult. After her mother died she used to walk with the baby in the pram to Adderbury three miles away for the afternoon to visit her father, but she still spoke of the improvement to their lives that the move brought and her happiness that they had made the change. She remembered the friendship and support on the estate that she received from her neighbours, again sharing childcare together.Footnote 55
It is clear that in Oxfordshire, women with a variety of class backgrounds and who lived in new estates across the county, whether in suburban areas or villages, and whether council or privately built, found that estates provided a strong sense of community and neighbours were referred to as being extremely significant people in the women's lives. However, some notable class differences did emerge in the attitudes towards neighbourhood and community of the women interviewed. While most women seemed to form friendships from amongst their neighbours, middle-class women were also more likely to join organisations in order to find companionship. This was a trend that was commented on by social investigators at the time, for example Peter Willmott and Michael Young found that in Woodford fifty-seven per cent of all inhabitants belonged to some kind of club or association.Footnote 56 In Oxfordshire, the most popular organised groups seem to have been linked to the church, with Young Wives and Mothers Union groups being those to which the interviewees most commonly referred. However, class differences were not absolute, and several working-class women also attended these groups. Judy, who was the most active member of organisations in the sample and was involved in running the Florence Park community centre, came from a working-class background.Footnote 57
Another class difference that emerged from the Oxfordshire evidence is that the women interviewed who presented themselves as being the most isolated, in that they said that they did not have a friendship network or even need this support, were all highly educated and enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle when their children were born, although they themselves did not necessarily come from middle-class backgrounds. For example Rose came from a working-class background in Yorkshire, but won a scholarship to Oxford, and went on to marry an Oxford don. When asked how much socialising she did with other mothers she regretfully replied:
Virtually none . . . I think this is maybe the bugbear of a very academic background. What I valued most was time for myself and all the time the children were growing up I never, I can see that now I'm much older, went in for making friends.Footnote 58
Hannah continued to work full-time after her children were born as a university researcher and felt that she had little in common with other mothers, and subsequently did not enjoy their company. She recalled that, ‘we used to go out to dinner, and then after dinner people would separate and I used to be bored stiff listening to the conversation of, no I found, yes I did socially I felt quite isolated.’Footnote 59 Similarly, when asked how easy she found it to make friends when she moved from Oxford to Manchester, Kelly replied that:
It wasn't, there were hardly any women in the university . . . I really had made no friends in Manchester, there were some people basically the parents of children who knew each other, I think everybody had their problems and no one really understood mine or was interested in mine.Footnote 60
This theme of having no close female friends ran throughout Kelly's narrative. Indeed the points in her story when she revealed her difficulties in adjusting to motherhood were also moments when she expressed sadness at having no female friends to support her.
Conclusions
Both the class background of the women interviewed and the neighbourhoods in which they lived clearly had a considerable influence on women's experiences of life in post-war Oxfordshire. Moreover, ‘women’ cannot be seen as an undifferentiated group and there was significant diversity amongst the women interviewed in terms of their generational, regional and class backgrounds. These differences between the women affected their experiences as much as their shared gender. Moreover, terms such as gender and class are not unproblematic. The difficulties in assigning women to a class were also seen amongst the women interviewed. Marilyn felt she came from a working-class background in Lewisham. Her mother was a shop assistant, who worked throughout her childhood, her father was an office worker, and she herself left school at sixteen to work as a typist. She felt that she and her middle-class husband were from very different backgrounds and was not happy to be viewed as middle-class herself.Footnote 61 Indeed she found it uncomfortable to discuss the class difference between her own and her husband's family. Siobhan was married to a dentist and was herself university educated. She was, however, the daughter of a cooper from a family of Irish immigrants. She later worked as a receptionist at her husband's practice. If her class was to be determined by her father's occupation, her husband's occupation and her own occupation each would have a different outcome. Siobhan herself did not think she was strongly attached to any class.Footnote 62
Some women married below their class. Lindsay's father was a civil engineer and her mother was a doctor. She was herself an Oxford graduate, but she married a local Oxford man who worked on the lowest grade at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell and they lived in St Clements. While Lindsay did not explicitly say that she had fallen down the class hierarchy, at several points in her narrative she explained that she had not enjoyed the same standard of living as her parents had done.Footnote 63 In their accounts, the women who had moved between classes expressed the difficulties that they had experienced. For example Claudia, who came from a lower-middle class background in Yorkshire felt uncomfortable when she went to Oxford University because she felt like the ‘poor relation’ commenting ‘Oh I was very intimidated by all the posh accents and the fact that most of the other girls came from private schools. I can certainly remember feeling that.’Footnote 64 Rose had also experienced difficulties in adjusting when she moved from Yorkshire to Oxford. Both her parents had worked in the local textile industry, although her mother stopped work upon marriage. She felt her education produced a degree of tension between her and her parents:
I zoomed up the educational ladder [pause]. There had to be a certain amount of informal negotiating of the relationship but [pause] always it was a close relationship in which they clearly cared a lot for me and I felt a great deal of obligation to them.Footnote 65
She also found it difficult to talk about her relationship with her parents, and at this point her narrative became disjointed which is indicative of her ambiguous feelings.
However while defining themselves along class lines was problematic for some women, many adopted the language of class in constructing their identities. Gloria's perception of herself as a native Benson villager was bound up with her class identity. For Gloria the feeling of community in Benson was linked to class, since it was the working-class residents who shared a common way of life and were all in the, ‘same boat’.Footnote 66 In addition, women often used class as a way of determining what they were not, with class distinctions becoming most apparent when they met people they considered to be outside their own class. For example Camilla came from a middle-class background in Sheffield and had been university educated, but she found it an intense culture shock when confronted with upper-middle class life after husband got a job at Rugby School. She recalled an anecdote that one of senior wives had said, ‘My dear you must remember that we never push out our own children and nobody in the mornings’.Footnote 67 However, rather than simply a division between middle and working class, the alternative dichotomy between traditional and non-traditional residents that Margaret Stacey used in describing residents of BanburyFootnote 68 seems most applicable when talking about the rural communities in Oxfordshire as well. Agnes and Diana both moved into Ewelme in the 1950s and recalled the ‘great deal of suspicion’Footnote 69 with which they were greeted by the native villagers. They felt that this reaction was particularly strong because, as Stacey had also found in Banbury, they challenged the existing social hierarchy.Footnote 70 Diana explained:
It was the early 1960s and the, the only new houses that had been built since the war were council houses, so all the rest of the houses, as you know, had been there a long time, and they were either big houses or cottages. And then there were four bungalows built, on a little ridge, and we bought one of those. So I was a bit different from people who lived in small cottagey places, coz they rented, so that made a difference. And it was when the children, well when my son started going to school and his best friend use to come and play but my son was never invited to go there, although they're still in touch now interestingly enough. In their mid-forties. But it was, we were sort of kept separate, we were in a different category altogether. We weren't village people, we weren't big house people.’Footnote 71
Jackie faced a similar reception when she moved into Milton-under-Wychwood. The other villagers thought:
We were very exotic as people, ‘A’ we came from London and ‘B’ we were in politics . . . so in a way we were a bit celebrities, people didn't know quite what to make of us, we were also very poor, and usually celebrities quote unquote, are quite well off [laughing] and we weren't at all and we lived in this very small cottage, people didn't know what to make of us at all I don't think.Footnote 72
However, working-class women who moved into villages faced the same distrust and even hostility as their middle-class counterparts. Peggy had been born in Redditch, but spent much of her childhood in Banbury. When she moved into the nearby village of Middleton Cheney, which was where her husband was from, she found the villagers unfriendly.Footnote 73 Peggy's neighbour Doreen had been born and brought up in Lancashire and moved to the village to join her husband after the war. When asked what it was like to move into the village she replied:
Well first of all I'd been in the forces, and when I got married, I mean there's always girls around you then when I got married . . . I didn't know a soul down there. The only people I knew was [my husband's] family up in the village here, so it was a big shock to me, shock to the system like, you know, yeah it was.Footnote 74
The native villagers did express ambivalent feelings about incomers to their villages. Alice, who lived in Middle Barton, thought people who moved into the village from towns were unsuited to village life, missed the amenities of towns, and therefore, ‘didn't last long, a couple of years and they were gone again’.Footnote 75 Similarly commenting upon changes which had occurred in Benson, Florence said:
There's a lot of people who only sleep here, yeah go to town to work, to London or to Oxford and they literally only come home at night, but also they don't all participate in things in the village, which I always think is a pity.Footnote 76
In addition, if women who chose to leave these villages were interviewed they would surely have provided contrasting accounts of the communities in which they had lived.
However, while Margaret Stacey's conception of women as a group with shared characteristics does need to be qualified, it seems clear from this research that there were similarities for women in their experiences of motherhood which existed irrespective of class or locality. Whatever the type of neighbourhood women lived in, having children seemed to provide them with an entry into the community, and other mothers of young children provided their principal support networks. Despite sociologists suggesting that in ‘old’ communities kin provided support, and in ‘new’ communities friends did, this dichotomy does not seem to hold up for the experiences of young mothers. Neighbours provided women in both areas with their principal social contacts. Gloria was born and brought up in Benson and had a large extended family around her. However, she recalled it was her neighbour, rather than relatives, with whom she spent most of her time.Footnote 77 Karen lived in Garsington when her first baby was born in 1967. She was an immigrant to the village, but still remembered that it was her neighbours in the village, rather than her friends who lived outside it, who offered her help and companionship: ‘there were two other women of around my age which was twenty-one . . . who had children of around the same age as [my son] . . . and so we got quite friendly and one of them ended up being my childminder when I went back to university for a year, and in fact she child-minded, she minded, the other mother's son as well so it was quite a good set up.’Footnote 78 Rebecca summed up what she believed to have been the common experience for women having children in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘I think like many mothers of my generation a lot of very good friends started with meeting at the school gate.’Footnote 79 Women used their shared circumstance of being mothers of young children to develop social networks. While the ways in which they did so and their level of success depended on factors such as their background and the locality they lived in, motherhood still served as a unifying experience for women in the post-war decades.
