were the breadwinners and paternal protectors. But when men went off to fight, women were invited to enter the labour force and proved reluctant to resume their place in the kitchen after the troops returned home.
Prominent social commentators argued it was mothers neglecting their household responsibilities who were to blame for the wave of divorce and delinquency: latch-key children up to mischief while their parents were both at work; the birth-rate tumbling as marriages failed. The question became how to woo women back to the hearth. The answer was to redraft the contract. Men and women should resume their traditional roles, it was decided, but with husband and wife enjoying equal status. Education programmes trained girls for domesticity and motherhood, while promising personal fulfilment in a ‘relationship’ rather than an ‘institution’. This romantic ideal proved popular with women, even if the reality was often very different. Many men struggled to adapt.
The hope had been that the ‘companionate family’ model would sustain the institution of marriage through a tricky patch. The reality was that it often raised unattainable expectations and was later accused of being a major contributor to marital disillusionment and the rise in the divorce rate. By the end of the 1960s it was clear that government would have to think again if the traditional family was to survive the fallout from revolutionary sexual politics.
It was no longer possible to try and shame married couples into staying together. Plan B was to encourage those who did divorce to re-marry. It was an admission that not every couple could or should stay together ‘til death us do part. Instead, the idea was that even when individual marriages failed, the institution would survive.
The Divorce Reform Act of 1969 made it much quicker and easier for couples to split and re-tie the knot, and initially it seemed the tactic might work. In 1972, the year after the law came into force, more veils were lifted, brides kissed and confetti scattered than at any time since the frantic days of 1940 when the troops were leaving. The number of marriages dissolved had jumped 60 per cent to 119,000 but, crucially, the number of divorcees who remarried was 121,000.
Optimism was short-lived, however: 1972 marked a highpoint for marriage in the UK. It has been in continuous decline ever since, a steep downward curve that provided traditionalists with a graphic depiction of how British society slid into a moral cesspit of deviance, selfishness and sin.
What had really changed, though, was Britain’s understanding of what constituted ‘normal’ family life. An unmarried couple sharing a bed had moved from scandal to convention within thirty years. By 2010, almost half of children in the UK were born outside wedlock. Indeed, the majority of babies in Wales and the north of England were delivered to parents who were not married, rising to 75 per cent in some towns.
For Britain’s ethnic minorities the definition of a normal family varied substantially, dependent on cultural heritage. Within the British-born Caribbean community, the key features had become very low rates of marriage, high rates of single parenthood and high rates of mixed marriage: 63 per cent of men with a partner lived with a white woman; 45 per cent of women with a partner lived with a white man; only around a quarter of Caribbean children lived with two black parents.
In contrast, the key features of family life in South Asian communities were very high rates of marriage, low rates of single-parenthood and low rates of mixed marriage. Around three quarters of Pakistani and Bangladeshi women were married by the age of twenty-five, and a clear majority saw their role as looking after the home and family.
Interpreting the data, academics at the Institute for Social & Economic Research concluded that there had been a general shift from what they called ‘old-fashioned values’ towards ‘modern individualism’ among all ethnic groups in Britain, but changing at different paces. ‘Pakistanis and Bangladeshis are behind that trend. Caribbeans are in front. In fact, all the groups studied are moving in the same direction.’
Britain’s white population was somewhere in between, with a range of acceptable family options now available. Gay or straight, married or cohabiting, open or monogamous, when it came to family structure in the twenty-first century, researchers concluded there was no longer a recognised thing to do.
Reaction to the ‘anything goes’ attitude to family life could be divided into two camps. For some it was evidence of the corrosion of society and character by an increase in selfish individualism. For others it was the victory of personal liberation and freedom over outdated moralist values and structures.
During the New Labour era, government thinking on family life was heavily influenced by the ideas of Anthony Giddens, the architect of Tony Blair’s ‘third way’ political philosophy. He argued that marriage and the nuclear family had become shell institutions, urging ministers to base their social policy, not on shoring up traditional structures, but on encouraging what he called ‘pure relationships’. He imagined these being based on ‘the acceptance on the part of each partner, until further notice, that each gains sufficient benefit from the relationship to make its continuance worthwhile’.
Giddens called it a democracy of the emotions, but to more conservative commentators, it was the road to hell, a philosophy for a society set to self-destruct on selfishness and sin. The ideological battle lines were clearly drawn, with Giddens describing the potential showdown as fundamentalism against cosmopolitan tolerance. It was clear where the loyalties of Tony Blair’s guru lay. ‘Cosmopolitans welcome and embrace this cultural complexity. Fundamentalists find it disturbing and dangerous. We can legitimately hope that a cosmopolitan outlook will win out.’
The politics of the family were heating up to the point where, in 2009, the British Academy (a learned body which acts as a mother-ship for social scientists) decided that analysing family patterns should be a top priority. A report the following year noted how many political claims on the topic were based ‘solely on value systems’ and ‘vary hugely in their source and solidity’. In short, the boffins were saying that politicians often talked a lot of tosh when it came to families, confusing personal views with objective evidence.
The academy set out to separate the science from the politics, a delicate operation at the best of times, but particularly fraught in the area of family policy. First, they examined the assertion that divorce
Family break-up had also been linked to children doing badly at school and suffering depression, but was it
What about the claim that traditional marriage is better for children than cohabitation? The report found ‘abundant evidence to conclude that committed loving relationships between parents benefit children’ and ‘married people are more likely to be strongly committed to living together than was the case with the unmarried but cohabiting.’ But this didn’t mean that marriage itself was better for children. It might well be that the kind of people who get married are better at bringing up kids.
When the researchers looked at the profile of parents who have children outside marriage they found they were likely to have less money and lower educational attainments than couples who were married. They were also more likely to have had underage sex and to have been a teenage parent — factors statistically linked to poorer parenting.
The scientists wondered what would happen to marriage stability if more people in the high-risk group tied the knot. ‘The evidence suggests that probably it would lessen and that the differences between the married and cohabiting would diminish.’ In other words, it wasn’t marriage that improved children’s chances, but the kind of people who chose to marry.
At the same time as the British Academy was questioning the magic of marriage, the OECD (the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the think tank for rich countries) was questioning the received wisdom that children raised by single mums do less well than those brought up by two parents. Having examined the evidence from twenty-five countries, they suggested the causal effects of being raised in a single- parent family were smaller than hitherto believed, or even zero. The OECD was honest about the limitations of its analysis but it summarised the research findings like this: ‘Overall, if there are indeed negative effects of being raised in a single-parent family, the effect is small.’
Once again, the point was that the important driver in successful families was less its form than its function.
