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is of an illustrative nature. We hope to indicate through it areas of importance in
any attempt to approach literary production in this way.
We would argue that women’s position in the family is a necessary starting-
point for any analysis of their relation to other social institutions and to the
sphere of literary production. While we ourselves would not see the family as a
natural, given object of study but rather as an institution socially structured
through a range of ideological practices, it is important to examine how the
family was seen in the thirties.
The nuclear family was ideologically constructed as the natural basic unit of
social organization. Whether we looked at the ideology of the Conservative Party
or at that of the Labour Party, we found women’s position to be over-determined
by an unquestioned primary location of women within the nuclear family.
Although legally equal to men as citizens after the granting of full adult suffrage
in 1928, they were seen as having a different role to play from men and were subject
to discrimination as women irrespective of whether, in the aftermath of the First
World War, they were able to marry and have children. Women’s primary
location was often, and was always seen to be, in the family. The effects of this
were manifold: for example, inequality in education, pay and employment. In
1931 domestic service still provided a quarter of all employment for women. The
conditions of employment for these women in waged work in the personal sphere
of the home (albeit not their own home) highlighted the ideological contradiction
between and within waged work and housework, which women ‘naturally’ did
without need for recompense. For example, although kitchen maids were trained
in government training centres to alleviate unemployment, they were not covered
by the national insurance scheme and were thus excluded from unemployment
benefit.
We found another example of the over-determining ideological importance of
women’s primary location within the home in the panic which the fall in the birth
rate provoked and its direct effect on the demands made on women. In 1933 the
birth rate touched its lowest point in any peacetime year before or since. It might
be expected that fewer pregnancies and the reduced burden of child care would
begin to give women more freedom outside the home. Instead of this, MPs began
to demand that women return to their duty, to provide ‘citizens of the right
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breed’ for ‘the countries of the British Empire’. Similarly, the publication of
Twilight of Parenthood by Dr Enid Charles in 1934, arguing that the decline in
the birth rate was a threat to national security, caused widespread concern. In
these debates on women’s role from the perspective of eugenics we can glimpse
the continuation of the ideological nexus connecting the family, the nation and
the Empire, and the subordination of women with that of other races and nations.
By the mid thirties this panic had virtually silenced arguments about the
importance of birth control. There was a concurrent shift towards pressure for
family allowance schemes (that is, better provision for child rearing) and there
were developments in education for ‘scientific motherhood’ and domestic
science.