Love and courtship in mid-twentieth-century England

This article contributes to the on-going study of modern affective life by exploring the ways in which love was understood, invoked, and deployed within heterosexual courtships. `Love itself is approached as a highly mutable and flexible concept whose meanings and uses are contingent upon historical moment, gender, status, and generation. Whilst the article does not claim to offer a comprehensive history of love across the central years of the twentieth century, it suggests that some of the everyday meanings and uses of that emotion can be illuminated through consideration of this particular aspect of social life. Rather than placing discursive constructions centre stage, the piece uses life history material to effect an analysis embedded in everyday practices. Courtship itself is understood as a transitional stage between youth and adulthood: a life stage during which the meanings and uses of `love were implicitly or explicitly confronted, where gender relationships were potentially unstable, and where aspiration and desire could conflict in the making of the self. Courtship therefore constituted an important rite of passage which could provide an opportunity to perform, reject, and refine new roles and responsibilities, whilst negotiating future status and identity. The article explores the power dynamics which underlined romantic encounters, but argues that through their everyday practice young women exercised real, if bounded, agency within this sphere of social life

The meanings of happiness in Mass Observation's Bolton

In April 1938, the social investigative organization, Mass Observation conducted an inquiry into the happiness of Bolton people. In this article we analyse the letters and questionnaire responses generated through a competition that asked, ‘What is happiness?’ We examine the extent to which these competition entrants were representative of Bolton population and conclude that they were broadly representative in terms of occupation and sex, but less so in terms of social class. We describe the factors which according to competition entrants determined individual happiness. These were remarkably stable across age groups and gender. Economic security emerged as the dominant consideration, whilst personal pleasure was represented as playing little part in generating happiness. A detailed analysis of the happiness letters and questionnaires suggests that introspective and relational factors were also important determinants of well-being. We demonstrate that these introspective factors were framed by an individual’s personal moral framework and that relational factors were under-pinned by gendered conceptions of domestic happiness

An archive of feeling? Mass observation and the mid-century moment

This working paper has two objectives: one is methodological and the other is empirical. First it explores the issues at stake in accessing feelings in the past. How do historians ‘get at’ emotion and what feeling-evidence is available to us? Here I am particularly interested in identifying sources that allow access to the feelings of ‘ordinary’ people and to the messiness of everyday emotional life. I will focus in particular upon the material generated by the British social investigative organization – Mass Observation – in the middle years of the twentieth century. In the second part of the paper I will demonstrate how a small sample of this Mass Observation material – discursive responses to open ended questionnaires sent to a panel of volunteer writers in May and August 1945 – can be used to enhance our understanding of the British transition from war to peace. Specifically I will use Mass Observation material to illuminate the work that emotion did, and was called upon to do. I will argue that emotion-management was a powerful frame for individual as well as public reconstruction narratives; that individual feeling and experience was valorised within this context; and that an emerging ‘right to feel’ was an important aspect of a broader post-1945 rights discourse

'Who the hell are ordinary people?' Ordinariness as a category of historical analysis

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who’ve taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles, and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate postwar period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’

Feeling, women and work in the long 1950s

The emotional and occupational cultures of Britain underwent significant shifts during the long 1950s. This article explores the intersection between the two, using a range of social survey material – including Mass Observation sources - to explore feelings about paid work, the impact of paid employment on emotional well-being, and the management of feelings in the workplace. It article suggests that women workers were consistently constructed as both inherently emotional, and therefore unsuited for the higher occupational ranks, and as talented emotional workers able to perform unremunerated emotional labour. Whilst paid employment has often been presented as the antidote to domestic discontent, experiential evidence suggests that it also often involved the migration of private emotion work into the public domain

Adultery in post-war England

Recent histories of twentieth-century heterosexual behaviour have tended to place the practices of young people centre-stage in accounts of social change. Trends in premarital intercourse have been presented as evidence of changing sexual mores: the varied experiences of married people, beyond the realm of fertility, have less often been interrogated. Yet in the years after the Second World War, extended access to fault-based divorce, a state-sponsored determination to remake family life and an increasing emphasis upon the relational aspects of marriage ensured that marital infidelity was prominent in public discussions of sexual and emotional life. This article therefore investigates illegitimate sexual and emotional intimacies involving married rather than single heterosexuals, unpacking the social meanings and significance of adultery in post-war England. It explains why attitudes towards adultery hardened across the period, even as the practice became apparently more common, by exploring the growing centrality of love and sex to discursive constructions of marriage. In so doing this article offers an account which destabilizes a ‘golden age’ characterization of post-war marriage and challenges linear models of sexual and emotional change

[Review] Selina Todd (2005) Young women, work and family in England, 1918-1950

Young women, work and family in England, 1918–1950. By Selina Todd. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp. xiii+272. ISBN 0-19-928275-7. £50.00

Mass observing the atom bomb: the emotional politics of August 1945

In August 1945 the social investigative organisation, Mass-Observation, asked its panel of volunteer writers to ‘Describe in detail your own feelings and views about the atom bomb, and those of the people you meet.’ This article uses the responses to explore the emotional politics of ‘nuclearity’ in the immediate aftermath of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. First it examines the impact that the atomic explosions had upon ways of narrating, and managing, the emotional self. Second it explores the influence of nuclear knowledge on felt social relations. The article argues that first use of the atom bomb had a profound impact upon British people’s understandings of the past, the present and the political future; and that the responses of ordinary people in turn helped to shape a messy and contradictory popular nuclear culture within which feeling operated as a way of knowing, and intervening in, the world

Feeling through practice: subjectivity and emotion in children’s writing

This article analyzes how children in 1930s’ Britain narrated their everyday behavior, feelings and fantasies when asked to do so by their teachers. It is based upon a study of over one thousand essays that were written by children in 1937 and 1938, which were collected by the British social investigative organization, Mass Observation, as part of its Worktown Project. The argument is situated within the history of emotions and we interrogate the utility of recent conceptual frameworks for the better understanding of children’s subjectivities. The essays show that children were able to juggle contradictory demands and expectations, learn emotional codes and match emotional style to spatial context when moving between school, home and leisure arenas. To some extent, then, children adapted and shaped their behavior to comply with specific emotional communities. However, we argue that this model offers only a partial account of children’s emotional practices. In the second part of the article we suggest a move away from thinking about emotional communities or emotional styles as pre-dominantly value-based and spatially-defined (by the school, home, street – spaces which children inhabited and might have influenced but which were conceived and built by adults) and argue instead for increased attention to be paid to the material context and, particularly, the relationships that operated within and across these spaces. Ultimately, we argue, children’s emotional experiences were less about “learning to feel” than feeling through practice

Children, class and the search for security: writing the future in 1930s Britain

This article is based on 269 essays written in 1937 by Middlesbrough schoolboys aged 12-16 on the topic ‘When I leave school’, which were collected by the social research organisation Mass Observation. The essays provide a counterpoint to social scientific surveys of ordinary people and allow us to work with the boys’ own understandings of the world they inhabited. They offer an alternative lens on a period which, at least in relation to the industrial areas of Britain, is often characterised by poverty and unemployment. This representation is largely absent from the children’s essays: instead, an overwhelming sense of possibility characterises their writing, from their wildest fantasies to their most concrete plans. Most dreamt of lives that would be long, fulfilling, domesticated and happy. This is not to say that they were oblivious to the world around them; indeed an emphasis on security and planning suggested an implicit awareness of material context. Nonetheless these boys expressed a marked determination that their lives would be better than those of their parents. As such, they embodied the educational and occupational aspirations that are more often seen as characteristic of postwar Britain. Their essays illustrate emergent and widely-held expectations of social mobility and dreams of cradle-to-grave security in the years before the Second World War, articulated – as they were being lived – by a generation which would go on to elect the 1945 Labour government