‘DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’ AND THE DOMESTIC ENVIRONMENT IN POST-WAR BRITAIN: INDIVIDUAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

This article examines the recollections of middle-class British housewives who experienced symptoms of neurosis, anxiety or depression during the post Second World War period. It specifically addresses the claim made by feminist commentators, that the banality and stultification of the domestic role caused mental illness in women. The oral testimonies suggest that, in many cases, housewives of the 1950s and 1960s found contentment in their role, identifying instead problematic interpersonal relationships or trauma during childhood as the cause of their symptoms. The article argues that the causes of anxiety and depression were more complex than has previously been suggested and seeks to provide a more sophisticated analysis of women’s experience.

Since the inter-war years, the ‘desperate housewife’ has become a familiar image, regularly emerging under multifarious guises at specific historical moments.¹ From the ‘suburban neurosis’² that was said to have affected isolated young wives on new housing estates following the First World War, to the darkly comedic television depiction of Wysteria Lane in twenty-first century United States suburbia,³ the banality of domestic life has invariably been portrayed as pathogenic. More broadly, the association between femininity, desperation and irrationality also has a long and well-documented history. Since Betty Friedan’s seminal text The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Phyllis Chesler’s ground-breaking critique of gender and psychiatry Women and Madness (1972), feminist historians and social commentators have suggested that symptoms of anxiety and depression in women have been directly related to the stresses inherent in domestic work and other disadvantageous aspects of the female role.⁴ Agnes Miles, for example, argued in her book Women and Mental Illness (1988) that ‘the home can become, for the full-time housewife, a setting which by its peculiar strains “drives her mad”’.⁵ Ruth Cooperstock and Henry Lennard further proposed that ‘tranquillizer use in women [is] largely related to difficulties experienced with maintaining the given social role of wife, mother and house-worker’.⁶

During the 1960s and 1970s, early feminist novels also depicted housewives as ‘befuddled, a little dopey – a lot doped – a state generally induced by a combined overdose of Valium and vacuuming’.⁷ Doris Lessing, Sue Kaufman and Penelope Mortimer were among those who characterised the neurotic housewife in their novels, and Marilyn French’s much-publicised The Women’s Room (1978) has been described as ‘a turning point for “madwomen” who did not yet know how to be mad women’.⁸ The image of the ‘desperate housewife’ thus undoubtedly resonates within popular culture, across time, particularly during the second half of the twentieth-century. However, to what extent did this stereotype accurately reflect the experiences of ordinary suburban women who married and raised their families immediately following the Second World War? This question was central to the research undertaken for my doctoral thesis (2008) which explored the relationship between middle-class housewives, domesticity and mental illness in Britain.⁹ Drawing on a wide range of archival and published sources and oral testimonies, the research refined feminist assertions that have linked mental illness unproblematically with domestic duties. It also questioned recent studies that suggested pharmaceutical companies targeted women in particular in their marketing of psychotropic drugs.¹⁰ Indeed, a close examination of marketing material produced by pharmaceutical companies during the late 1950s and 1960s suggests that, although a degree of stereotyping was evident in promotional images, manufacturers in fact attempted to expand their market share by directing medications for nervous disorders at a wide range of individuals of both sexes and all ages.

This article will examine the recollections of women who were wives and mothers in the post-war period, whose voices have largely been silent in this debate. Respondents were drawn from the National Women’s Register, an organisation formerly known as the National Housewives’ Register. This group, still active today, originated in 1960 when a housewife, Maureen Nicol, wrote to The Guardian suggesting that ‘housebound housewives with liberal interests’ should form a national register in order that groups could explore interests outside the domestic arena.¹¹ Nicol had moved with her husband to a new neighbourhood and soon found herself isolated from friends and family. Following the publication of her letter, she received what she described as an ‘avalanche’ of responses from other readers and began to compile a national register from which local groups were organised.¹² Significantly, the National Housewives’ Register was not a pressure group for any particular cause. Its primary objective was ‘to put people in touch with one another’ in order that they could meet to discuss intellectually stimulating topics. Thus, although many members had left fulfilling careers in order to raise a family, the objective was not to spurn domesticity. Instead, women sought to fill an intellectual vacuum with useful discussion. Needing ‘more’ than domestic life did not mean the rejection of their role as wives and mothers and the organisation simply provided a ‘safety valve’ for women during the transition period while their children were small.¹³

Thirty-five women participated in the project and they originated from a wide geographical area over England, Wales and Scotland. All of the women were married and their dates of birth ranged from 1915 to 1950. All had experience of domestic life during the 1950s and 1960s.¹⁴ The women are loosely described as ‘middle-class’, either because they were raised in a family with a professional or managerial background, or because they were able to aspire to middle-class values following the implementation of the Butler Education Act (1944) and the new educational opportunities provided by the 11+ exam. This was an important factor in the recruitment of interviewees since feminist debate about the domestic role has centred largely on the pathogenic effects of boredom and stultification, which were seen as particularly damaging to academically able, educated women. Approximately half of the women interviewed endured symptoms of anxiety or depression, and their responses are organised in this article around two key themes: their views about the causes of illness; and their experiences of treatment.¹⁵

WOMEN’S PERCEPTION OF THE CAUSE OF ILLNESS

During the 1950s and 1960s psychiatrists began to direct attention away from the psychoses and other serious forms of mental illness towards the more minor symptoms observed in relation to anxiety states and depressive disorders.¹⁶ As has been well documented, there was a corresponding rise in the prescribing of new tranquillizing drugs and antidepressants.¹⁷ During the 1980s, Walter Gove argued that married women were more likely to develop psychiatric symptoms than men from all marital categories.¹⁸ He suggested that it was ‘reasonable to assume that a large number of women find their major instrumental activities – raising children and keeping house – frustrating’.¹⁹ He further claimed that the housewife’s role was ‘invisible’ and that the lack of structure may allow women to ‘brood’ over their problems.²⁰ Echoing the work of many feminist authors, Gove thus assumed that the most notable difficulties experienced by married women were related to their role as home-makers and mothers. However, this claim is at variance with the views of women interviewed for this project who, by and large, believed they were undertaking a worthwhile role and often found great satisfaction in it. Fundamentally, although the experiences of marriage, homemaking and mothering are in many ways interwoven, women were able to draw clear distinctions between the functional aspects of day-to-day domestic life and the emotional aspects of marriage. Many respondents identified emotional difficulties in the sphere of interpersonal relationships with spouses and other family members. However, their testimonies suggest that even when the need for intimacy and understanding was not met within these relationships, women were still able to gain joy and satisfaction from their role as mothers and homemakers.

Two prominent themes emerged from the interviews as perceived causes of illness: marital discord (which was cited most frequently); and traumatic experience during childhood or adolescence. However, these two themes were by no means mutually exclusive. Several respondents, for example, located marital breakdown as the cause of their problems, but also implied that other events during childhood could be included as contributory factors. A small number of respondents, based on a familial history of mental illness, felt that they were predisposed to affective disorders.²¹ Nevertheless, women most commonly related the onset of symptoms to the infidelity of their husbands, or to the breakdown of their marriage. Eileen Bailey, for example, had ‘always wanted to be married with a family’, but indicated early on in the interview that she had ‘married the wrong man’.²² Eileen married in 1943, aged twenty-one, and had three daughters. Soon after her marriage she became aware of her husband’s numerous extramarital relationships; however, she remained married for twenty-five years. She recalled:

It was awful that you couldn’t trust him. And I think it happened a lot at the tennis club. And I knew that other people knew and were probably talking about it. And that doesn’t make you feel very good.²³

Due to this pressure, Eileen remembered things ‘getting on top of her’ at times. She described this as ‘just a feeling’ which disappeared following her divorce some years later. Her evaluation was that the feelings ‘had been caused by the situation and by the time I’d left him, I felt much better’.²⁴

Nora Kelly also traced the roots of her illness to an unhappy marriage. Married in England in 1961, she moved briefly to Australia and then to America with her new husband. Nora not only felt isolated so far away from her family, but she soon feared that she had made a mistake in marrying. Shortly after the birth of her first child, she made what she felt to be a courageous decision, to return to England without her husband:

I was actually depressed by the time I’d left my ex-husband because he was an awful person… I was with [him] for about six weeks after we arrived in America and then I said ‘I want to leave you’. And I would just burst into tears all the time. And I wonder if then it was the baby blues, that we hadn’t sort of acknowledged at that time – although it was pretty difficult living with the ex-husband, half the time not speaking.²⁵

Although Nora located the cause of her long battle with anxiety and depression to her unhappy marriage, she also hinted at deeper problems that had affected her as a child. Her father had suffered from depression in later life and she admitted that this had badly damaged her relationship with him since he was often ‘really bad tempered’ and ‘used to get really irritable’.²⁶

Many of the respondents who were happily married also provided anecdotal evidence of the link between marital discord and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Margaret Windsor, for example, could not recall ever experiencing nervous symptoms herself; however, she was aware of others among her peer-group who had. She maintained that ‘the old terminology was “nervous breakdown”, and that was usually connected with relationship breakdown’.²⁷ Betty Sanderson, although happily married herself, also observed:

I had a close friend at one point when the children were young who became very nervy – but that was because she discovered her husband was philandering and her marriage was actually starting to break up at this point. I was aware that she was becoming on the point of a nervous breakdown really. But I knew why.²⁸

Another interviewee, Doris Carter, remembered that anxiety disorder had affected a member of her own family and spoke of an aunt who had suffered from ‘terrible nerves’. This, she argued, was entirely due to her husband deserting her, leaving her to bring up a small daughter alone.²⁹

Although the women who endured symptoms of emotional disorder clearly encountered difficult and challenging times, without exception they indicated that domestic life itself was not the cause of emotional disorder. Eileen Bailey, for instance, asserted that she was happy to have been a full-time mother and was emphatic about the importance of her role:

I think I may have been a natural mum. I enjoyed being a mum… I think your children need you at all ages. And a lot of people say ‘oh I’ll go to work when they go to school’, but I think they need you just as much. As they come in the front door: ‘MUM…!’ I think once a mother, always a mother.³⁰

Nora Kelly also maintained that the ‘best memories’ were of the time spent with her son: ‘I was absolutely smitten with James, despite the other problems. I got fascinated with child-development and thought it was absolutely wonderful’.³¹

Not all respondents diagnosed with anxiety or depressive disorders were able to trace the cause to their own marriages. A notable number recalled significant incidents or traumatic experiences that were to affect them in later life. Others were under the impression that discord between their own parents had seriously impacted upon their emotional well-being. A small number of women believed that they were predisposed to mental illness due to their family history. Collectively, their accounts support the notion that domestic life had little to do with neuroses, since the onset of symptoms often occurred long before they were married.

Frances Wilson, for example, experienced what she described as ‘a breakdown’ at seventeen. To Frances, there were clear and straightforward reasons for this, and she was keen to assert early on in the interview that ‘it had nothing to do with domesticity’.³² Frances described her parents as ‘terribly unhappy’ and that living in intolerable circumstances as a child had caused an ‘adolescent anxiety state’ which in her view was ‘a perfectly normal response to incredible stress’.³³ Although Frances later married happily and had two children, she experienced difficulties with her husband’s family which further reinforced her low-self esteem. However, she was eventually able to transcend family problems by immersing herself in activities such as the Townswomen’s Guild and the National Housewives’ Register. When asked how she felt about domesticity and her role as a mother, she affirmed:

Domesticity suited me very well. I was content with that. And of course the children just made it so super. Family life was good. I have to say that although I’d had very poor parenting myself, from somewhere or other I’d got a good idea of what I wanted. And although nobody told me that shouting was bad for self-esteem, I knew it was. I never said ‘shut up’ to them.³⁴

Similar circumstances were reflected in the testimony of another interviewee, Judith Morgan, who remarked that her parent’s marriage was very unhappy. She also remembered that her mother was anxious and overprotective – traits that Judith believed were consequently projected onto her as a child: ‘I’m convinced, having had psychiatric help that it actually has rubbed off; that, you know, you’re not born with fear, it’s something you learn’.³⁵ Judith reflected with some sadness upon her parent’s relationship:

It was very volatile. Very, very volatile. My father drank quite a lot in the early stages of the marriage, which my mother wasn’t happy about. And he became belligerent and aggressive. And so there were times when he used to hit her about. And I remember this as a young child, and being very upset by the fact that there was this unease all the time. And he was going to leave, but he never did… and they bickered and quarrelled and fought until their dying day. We were just brought up on that which is not very nice.³⁶

A number of women indicated that extraordinary traumatic life-events had triggered psychological symptoms. Eve Raddon, for instance, observed that her great aunt had suffered ‘a bit of a breakdown’. However, she was sure that this was due to a bomb exploding near to her house during an air raid in the Second World War. She also remembered a colleague at work who was prescribed tranquillizers following the suicide of her husband. Thus, Eve emphasised that breakdown was usually due to ‘something extraordinary’.³⁷ Eileen Roberts, who was raised during the war in London, not only remembered harrowing events herself, but also remarked that the strain had badly affected relationships within her family:

My father, because of the war, became very religious. He became very strict – Baptist. I wasn’t evacuated, because of this religious thing. We went to the air-raid shelter, and then he decided that no, we weren’t going to do that. If we were going to get killed, we were going to get killed, and that was that. So we slept in the house all the time, right through the blitz… you just don’t get over anything like that really.³⁸

Eileen’s assessment was that the war had affected her father’s psychological health. His behaviour became erratic and normal family activities were suddenly banned: ‘We weren’t allowed to go to the pictures; he threw my mother’s make-up away; he used to read the bible to us every night – a complete change’.³⁹ She firmly maintained that the symptoms of depression she experienced were unrelated to her role as a wife and mother since she remembered feeling unwell as a young, working woman, long before her marriage. She recalled: ‘I was like this when I was travelling up to London, I couldn’t keep awake and I’d get into the office and I’d go into the cloakroom and I’d sit down and go to sleep’.⁴⁰

Thus, the common theme that emerged strongly from these interviews was that, despite having to contend with tough and often intractable circumstances, by and large women seemed satisfied with their experience of homemaking and mothering. Their evidence therefore raises questions about the implicit link between mental illness and the stultification of domestic life, echoed in much feminist writing since the 1960s.

EXPERIENCE DURING ILLNESS

Post-war psychiatry was undoubtedly dominated by the discovery in 1952 of the anti-psychotic effects of chlorpromazine, the first major tranquillizer. David Healy argues that this discovery was the critical event in the foundation of psychopharmacology, since it led to the synthesis of antidepressant drugs and anxiolytics used for nervous problems.⁴¹ As Shorter has observed, psychiatry became increasingly interested in the kinds of patients previously seen by family doctors, or not seen medically at all. Thus, the threshold for the diagnosis of affective disorders was lowered dramatically.⁴² Historians have argued that a gender bias existed in pharmacological advertising and prescribing patterns, and that increasingly, women were prescribed tranquillizing drugs in order to ‘adjust’ them to a domestic role within which they were unhappy.⁴³ Certainly, it is now widely accepted that by the 1970s the over-prescribing of anxiolytic drugs had resulted in serious problems with over-use and dependency.⁴⁴ However, Callahan and Berrios have recently explored the controversy surrounding the prescribing of tranquillizing drugs during this period. They argue that the minor tranquillizers emerged in what was effectively a ‘therapeutic vacuum’ and thus, primary care physicians soon discovered that the medications filled an important unmet need for their patients.⁴⁵ Most importantly, they illustrate how popular demand for the drugs also fuelled the phenomenon as ‘patients relayed their satisfaction with the medications not only to their physicians, but also to their friends and family’.⁴⁶

Interestingly, the women interviewed for this project who sought medical advice for nervous or depressive disorders were by no means automatically prescribed pharmacological treatments for their problems. However, those that were prescribed psychotropic medication largely viewed the treatment in a positive light. They accepted that tranquillizers and antidepressants did not provide a permanent solution to their problems, but nonetheless maintained that symptomatic relief was beneficial during the period of treatment. Indeed, it was not uncommon for women to remark that medication gave them clarity of thought and an opportunity to assess their life circumstances with a view to change.

The life story of one respondent, Ann Coles, is a case in point. Ann described a long battle with depressive disorders, the roots of which she felt stemmed from her Catholic upbringing. She married at eighteen and had five pregnancies in quick succession. Her husband later suffered from serious psychological problems himself:

I was nearly nineteen when my daughter was born. I then had a baby every year, for four years – then there was a gap of less than three years before the fifth one was born… I hadn’t wanted to get married – I hadn’t wanted to get pregnant at that point, and with hindsight, I was depressed. I was pregnant nearly the whole of the time. You know, I just felt like for most of the sixties I was just surviving. I was just getting by… [My husband] had a personality disorder. And that was part of the problem that brought me to the end of my wits… as the years went by, this obsessive behaviour became more compulsive and he would get into cleaning… He would re-do things I’d already done… you know he would take the money from his purse and polish his pennies with Duraglitz. He was really running into trouble. And no-one recognised this, so there wasn’t any help.⁴⁷

When Ann’s youngest child was two, she received a visit from her health visitor which she described as a turning point in her life:

[She] recognised that I was depressed and advised me to see my doctor, which I did. And he prescribed antidepressants. And it was when the antidepressants kicked in that I packed my bags and left… it was at that point that I found the wherewithal – it helped me see what was stopping me leaving… so having seen through that, as a result of the antidepressants, I think probably within about a month of starting [them], I left with the children. It sort of freed me up in terms of being able to recognise what was keeping me in this situation. And I think, having taken control, and leaving, I was into a new life.⁴⁸

Echoing the sentiments of the other respondents, Ann maintained that her problems had little to do with her domestic role. She firmly related the cause to her difficult marriage and the lack of control over her fertility:

I’ve never had a planned pregnancy… I suppose the Pope was always sitting on the bottom of the bed. It took me a long time to rebel… much later I remarried, and if we had had more children, I would have done it very differently. It would have been done very much by choice and I think I would have savoured the experience. There was no savouring the experience, there was only surviving it, and that was to do with my particular circumstances.⁴⁹

Despite the confusion surrounding the diagnosis of affective disorders, and the short consultation times allocated to general practitioners under the NHS, a surprising number of women described ‘sympathetic’ family doctors who were happy to provide brief counselling sessions. Eileen Bailey, for example, suffered from periods of anxiety that were triggered by her husband’s extra-marital affairs. However, she found that communicating her concerns to her doctor helped significantly:

I’d go and see my doctor who knew. And he’d say, ‘oh you’ve got the old trouble again?’… When I went to see him, it was because I felt ‘I can’t cope any longer’. I don’t think he gave me anything. But just to talk to someone was nice.⁵⁰

Similar sentiments were evident in Nora Kelly’s testimony. She also felt that the positive relationship fostered by her family doctor contributed greatly to her coping with long-term anxiety and depression. She received various psychopharmacological remedies from her doctor which she felt helped to alleviate the worst of her symptoms while she struggled to combine teacher-training college with lone-parenting. Although counselling sessions did not appear to be an official option, Nora ‘felt lucky’ to have a doctor who was very understanding:

I think for that time he was very good. He gave me some kind of tranquillizers… and he said, ‘I can’t even cope with my own kids; I don’t know how you are coping with your own and a class room!’⁵¹

Other women developed alternative coping mechanisms, such as immersing themselves in activities with friends or undertaking charity work. Some women felt lucky to have supportive families and found this to be invaluable. Rebecca Heane, for instance, felt sure that ‘many women would have been defeated’ by the treatment she received from her husband. However, she ‘made the best of a bad job’ and ‘refused to be put down’, firmly asserting that her strength of character and high self-esteem were a result of her parents unconditional love.⁵² A recurring feature in the lives of these women was also the support of ‘one good friend’ (or a small group of exclusive friends) with whom it was possible to discuss anything:

The saving grace really has been one good friend… she had a large family as well, and one day a week we had each other’s family. So one day a week, we had nine children! But it gave the other a day off. And if things were going wrong, if you were fed up with husbands – anything – you’d pick up the phone. And we had a coded message; we’d pick up and say ‘I need a cup of coffee!’ And you’d immediately know there was a problem.⁵³

The opportunity to confide in someone trustworthy was of paramount importance during a period when it was not seen as ‘the done thing’ to admit publicly to marital difficulties. Jean Bills observed that ‘you thought all marriages were “wonderful” unless you saw something obvious sticking out’.⁵⁴

CONCLUSION

This research suggests that previous accounts which have emphasised the link between women, mental illness and domesticity have paid too little attention to alternative contributory factors. Reflecting upon their lives, the women interviewed for this project who endured psychological symptoms did not locate the cause of their problems in their role as homemakers. Instead, they recounted memories of distressing childhood events, unhappy marriages and occasionally a familial predisposition to mental illness. However, symptoms often diminished once life circumstances had changed. Significantly, domestic life provided many of them with a role that they valued and, in many cases enjoyed. Indeed, in 1963, Mary Stott, the woman’s editor of The Guardian expressed her concern about ‘the myth of the whining graduate housewife’ that was taking root.⁵⁵ She asserted that her page was ‘not inundated with letters from discontented young mothers wailing that their education was wasted and that their intellects were withering while they [were] tied to the kitchen sink’. On the contrary, she confirmed that the majority of those who wrote in expressed pleasure about the company of children who were often described ‘as a source of constant interest, surprise and amusement’.⁵⁶

The present study builds upon recent scholarship that has begun to explore the variety and complexity of attitudes revealed by women during the post-war period. As Katherine Borland has pointed out, writing women’s history from a feminist perspective involves a contradiction; on the one hand, feminists seek to empower women by revaluing their lives in a world that has systematically ignored or trivialised women’s culture. On the other, they ‘hold an explicitly political vision of the structural conditions that lead to particular social behaviours, a vision that many… who do not consider themselves feminists, may not recognise as valid’.⁵⁷ Recently, a number of historians have attempted to address this paradox by focusing less upon the pursuit of ‘authenticity’ in oral narrative, and more upon the ways in which people construct memories of their past and attempt to make sense of them. Penny Summerfield, for example, in her study of women during the Second World War, has shown how the narratives she collected could not be considered outside the wartime ‘discursive constructions’ of the mother-child relationship, war work and post-war expectations.⁵⁸ Some of her interviewees thus drew upon the discourse of wartime patriotism and evaluated their position as ‘liberating’; whereas others drew upon the discourse of family life and looked forward to demobilisation and a return to full-time domesticity. Similarly, Judy Giles has shown that, although the ‘discourse of domesticity’ promoted by government and official bodies was not always favourable to women, not all housewives experienced their role simply as exhausting or stultifying. Indeed, many felt they had an important role to play in the future of the nation.⁵⁹ Lesley Johnson and Justine Lloyd have also argued in their research on Australian housewives, that the myth of the bored housewife was ‘conjured up by feminism in the attempt to construct a narrative that would make sense of, and dispel, the sense of contradiction and tension women felt between public achievement and femininity’.⁶⁰

It is certainly possible that for early second-wave feminists, the experience of being a suburban housewife was shaped by factors that were unrepresentative of most middle-class wives, resulting in an alternative evaluation of the role. The biographies of contemporary social commentators indeed suggest that they emerged from untypical backgrounds that were highly educated or politically motivated. Betty Friedan, for example, claimed that her feminism had its roots in suburban captivity; however, Daniel Horowitz and Judy Giles have recently shown convincingly that, to the contrary, her experiences as a labour journalist and her involvement with the Popular Front played a significant role in fostering her feminism.⁶¹ Thus, as Giles points out, ‘those who wrote or spoke about suburbia in Britain or America did so from positions outside the phenomenon they so roundly condemned’.⁶² She promotes a more productive historical approach that neither pathologises nor pities the millions of women for whom domesticity was a primary concern.⁶³

The women interviewed for this project were arguably drawing upon the discourse of domesticity that was dominant in the immediate postwar period. However, their responses also reflected a common-sense, pragmatic approach whereby the ups and downs of daily life were regarded as commonplace and accepted as a normal facet of domestic life. It is possible that they were also responding in some way to the second-wave feminist discourse that was critical of the homemaker’s role. Indeed, a number of women initially assumed that the prime objective of this research would be to illustrate discontent and disillusion among women of the period. Betty Sanderson, for example, was concerned that she ‘hadn’t been a very good person to interview’, because she was unable to recall any real discontent with her role.⁶⁴ It is indeed possible that, given the new opportunities that emerged for women during the late 1960s and 1970s, some women may have made different choices; their hopes and aspirations must thus be understood as a product of a specific historical moment.⁶⁵ Although a project of this size cannot hope to offer definitive conclusions about housewives’ experience in the post-war period, juxtaposed to research by Giles and others, it provides a basis for continued historical research into alternative aspects of life and their possible association with mental illness.