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I Introduction
In 1960 the minutes of an area organisers’ meeting of the National Childbirth Trust (NCT), founded four years earlier to promote natural childbirth, announced the birth to ‘C. Macdonald (Weston-S-Mare) 3rd, a boy, 9 lbs 4 oz. She had amazed her doctor who had kept exclaiming “Look at that CONTROL! Astonishing!”’Footnote 1 Macdonald had subscribed to the methods of the NCT which promoted the philosophy and methods of natural childbirth advocate Grantly Dick-Read via antenatal classes organised by its local branches, countering the medicalisation they experienced in hospital. ‘I went to classes, not so much because I had yet become apprehensive about having my child, but because I very much wanted to enjoy the experience as fully as possible, and to feel in control of the situation – to have my own child rather than be half-doped and dull while others “had it” for me,’ explained Viscountess Enfield upon the opening of the London headquarters in 1964.Footnote 2 The Trust sought to empower women with the confidence to take ownership of their own birth plans and to consign to history the experience of being treated ‘like a machine’ in hospital.Footnote 3 ‘Until the women of this country who have experienced the NCT get up and do something about it,’ commented an NCT activist, ‘you may be sure nothing will be done and the old fashioned system of castor oil, drugs, forceps and stitches will continue to be the fashion.’Footnote 4
Do-it-yourself women's organisations have so far been largely neglected in the emerging history of post-war womanhood in the United Kingdom and yet they offered millions of women the opportunity for self-development, self-confidence and independence.Footnote 5 They were numerous and varied in their objectives. The NCT was one of several so-called self-help organisations founded in the 1950s and 60s, many of them with the help of the Manchester Guardian newspaper.Footnote 6 The 1960s was, as Guardian women's page editor Mary Stott termed it, the ‘do-it-yourself decade’.Footnote 7 Through giving space to women's issues, the Guardian was instrumental in helping to launch a number of other organisations including the National Council for the Single Woman and her Dependants, Mothercare for Children in Hospital and, more significant in respect of longevity, membership numbers and geographical spread, the National Housewives' Register (NHR) and the Pre-School Playgroups Association (PPA).Footnote 8 All emerged at a pivotal moment in Britain when women of the so-called ‘transition generation’ (those who grew to maturity in the post-war decades) began to discover the gap between their expectations and the realities of their lives and took it upon themselves to fill that gap with autonomous activity which met their needs, rather than looking to existing organisations or the state to act on their behalf.Footnote 9 The historiographical neglect of these groups has been symptomatic of a failure of perception. It is in part a hangover from the condescension of those who have regarded such organisations as not being sufficiently critical of gender relations and thus not sufficiently radical to be considered part of the post-war feminist narrative.Footnote 10 Self-help initiatives which addressed concerns around childbirth, motherhood, childcare and the isolation of housewives have been seen as reinforcing rather than overturning the subordination of women and thus not integral to dominant contemporary and historical narratives of post-war womanhood and especially of feminism. The result is that organisations that sought to address the tension between women's maternal and domestic roles and self-expression and self-development have, so far, not been integrated into interpretations of post-war change. Rather, the key interpretive frameworks for understanding women's experience in this period are firstly the dual role – the model whereby women engaged in the labour force before marriage and motherhood and then re-entered the workforce when the children were school age or older – and second, the emergence of women's liberation.Footnote 11
In what follows it is argued that these nationwide organisations were a grass-roots response to the post-war reconfiguring of women's life cycles.Footnote 12 By conceptualising the self-help organisations in this way we can see how they allowed women to negotiate a route towards personal growth to meet their needs which, in most cases, consisted of conjoining family and motherhood with self-development outside the home. For many, mainly educated women, self-help voluntarist organisations were not merely a stopgap before picking up their career again. Rather, active involvement could be a springboard to a new career and a new identity. This was to be one of the foundations of what would become by the 1970s the widespread feminist transformation of women's lives.
The perception problem at the root of the feminist narrative hitherto has been a mistaken need to distinguish feminist women's organisations of the ‘second wave’ from non-feminist organisations of the preceding generation. Women's activity of the early 1960s to the late 1970s has been cast as a necessary corrective to earlier initiatives characterised as self-satisfied and uncritical of the structures that framed their dilemmas. Historians of women's voluntary organisations such as the Townswomen's Guild, Women's Citizens’ Associations and the National Council of Women have been at pains to portray inter-war women's activism as bridging the gap from first to second wave movements by recasting the work of these groups as ‘democratic citizenship’.Footnote 13 But early historians of the women's liberation movement have rarely been so generous, contrasting the women's liberation movement's analysis of women's oppression in the home and campaigns such as Wages for Housework with the position of organisations like the PPA which did not question the ‘burden of care’ and according to one interpretation were ‘primarily oriented towards helping mothers to do their work more happily’.Footnote 14 Others have struck a middle way, arguing that the frustration and disenchantment experienced by so many women in the late 1950s and early 60s was channelled into activity that departed from the positions of feminist social researchers who were obsessed with the issue of the dual role and which developed new organisational models to enable women to achieve a new kind of equality on their own terms.Footnote 15 The fact that they did this through organisations that attended to what might be considered ‘domestic’ concerns – motherhood, childcare, housework and so on – should not detract from the critical interventions they made, both practical and analytical. Indeed, recent contributions have argued that whilst second-wave feminism questioned many post-war assumptions about appropriate models of mothering, women formulated a multitude of individual and collective responses to the challenges posed by the new post-war contract, both practical and political.Footnote 16 Moreover, at the level of individual women, these organisations were often integral to their retaining or reframing a sense of self and autonomy at a life stage when that self so often became buried and even lost in the identity imposed on them of housewife and mother.
There is also a larger point here about the way we write the history of Western women in the post-war period. In interpretations of change in women's lives, such has been the gravitational pull felt by feminist historians towards the feminist movement and the liberation narrative that historians have tended to ascribe the movement of the 1970s pivotal significance. The wave analogy has been robustly critiqued, but what has begun to take its place is a feminist continuum narrative in which historians have sought to bridge the more distinct phases of feminist activism, or they have identified precursors to or inheritors of particular campaigns and moments.Footnote 17 The result is a myopia to other forms of women's actions, an episodic narrative of feminism, and a lack of inclusivity for women who did much to construct the practical, everyday feminism of modern Britain. Rather than bridging the waves, I suggest our scholarship should turn to perceive the causeway through the decades across which women's organisations traversed. Causeways are grounded links; they facilitate movement in both directions through, rather than over, turbulent and shifting waters. This approach might encompass a very wide range of organisations and positions, from the political activism of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament to the self-care of keep-fit.Footnote 18 Indeed, it might be more profitable to broaden the perspective so that the women's liberation movement is regarded as a minority sport albeit one with significance greater than its size would suggest. Let us start to see the women's liberation movement as one of many social movements and organisations which emerged as a female response to a broad and complex trajectory of social change since the 1940s encompassing women's education and work, increasing rejection of religious morality, decline in family size and control of fertility, social and geographical mobility and the growth of self-therapies and therapeutic practices.Footnote 19 Within such a picture, what we understand as women's liberation, encompassing the interrogation of personal life as well as advancing interpretations of inequality and working to implement change across a diverse range of issues, might be seen as merely one form of response to the question of how a woman was to live.
The self-help or do-it-yourself women's groups of the 1960s and 70s are the focus here. I argue that these were potentially transformative spaces which enabled women to develop the social relationships, largely with other women, that are integral to the realisation of female autonomy or self-determination. Here the concept of relational autonomy developed by feminist philosophers is helpful. It holds that female selves are inherently social, can only be constituted by social relations and that an autonomous life depends upon healthy relations with others.Footnote 20 This is in contrast to the liberal, individualist, rationalistic concept of autonomy associated with free-acting men. However, while historians have written about the self-actualising currents of the ‘expressive revolution’ of the 1960s when the liberationist movements of that era, including feminism, offered women and men the space to self-fashion, taking in everything from sexual choices to clothing and music, these are generally understood as separate from ‘traditional’ roles and structures such as the heterosexual family and motherhood and are achieved through oppositional behaviour or self-examination (consciousness-raising, for instance, or psychotherapy).Footnote 21 This interpretive framework is too rigid. It does not allow space for self-actualising behaviour, particularly amongst women, alongside marriage and childcare. Whilst this cohort of predominantly middle-class women who lived through the era of near-universal marriage and the opening up of further and higher education and the employment market experienced acute conflicts between the roles expected of them, they nevertheless did find practical ways of pursuing autonomy which intersected with their everyday lives. This was, as often as not, an autonomy that was dependent upon mutually constitutive social connections, especially with other women. And autonomy with these qualities was nurtured by many women in self-help organisations relating to children, education and the home.
II Do-it-yourself
In February 1960 Maureen Nicol, a young mother, had a letter published on The Guardian’s ‘Mainly for Women’ page in which she suggested that ‘housebound wives with liberal interests and a desire to remain individuals could form a national register’. Maureen, who had recently moved with her husband to a new area, was responding to an article in the same column by Guardian journalist Betty Jerman railing against suburbia and its dulling effects, in the style of Betty Friedan except Jerman challenged women to do something about it. ‘They stay here all day. They set the tone. Many of them look back with regret to the days when they worked in an office. Their work kept them alert. Home and child-minding can have a blunting effect on a woman's mind. But only she can sharpen it.’Footnote 22 The result of Jerman's goading and Nicol's practical suggestion was the formation of the National Housewives' Register, literally a national register of local groups of women initially run from Maureen's kitchen table. Within ten years there were 8,000 members, and groups in every county. Nicol described the NHR as ‘a great groundswell of lively-minded, reasonably educated mothers, torn from family and friends by mobile husbands … largely solving their feelings of mental stagnation and loneliness by getting together and expanding their own lives’.Footnote 23 A few months later in 1961 Belle Tutaev, a former teacher with pre-school children in London, wrote to the same woman's page on the subject of ‘Do-it-Yourself Nurseries’. Responding to the absence of pre-school provision, Belle started a campaign – the campaign for Nursery Education – but when this failed to have an impact she set up her own playgroup in Marylebone. Her letter was a call to arms to ‘mothers and teachers who would like to create their own solutions to their problems’.Footnote 24
The National Housewives' Register – originally the Housebound Wives Register, and much later renamed the National Women's Register – occupied a place in British society somewhere between the Women's Institute and Women's Liberation. It was set up in response to the crying need from young mothers for somewhere to engage in ‘mental exercise’, to ‘escape from cabbage syndrome’ with like-minded women, many of whom had tertiary or higher education and who were isolated, bored at home and in desperate need of stimulation. In its earliest incarnation the NHR was run from Maureen Nicol's home as she established a ‘register’ of names of women across the country who wrote in response to her Guardian letter. Quickly regional organisers were identified who maintained the register in their area and facilitated meetings of local groups. Meetings took place in members’ homes, babies and toddlers were minded on a rota system, ‘competitive’ baking was not permitted, and most importantly, there was a ‘no domestic trivia’ rule.Footnote 25 What were described as ‘mind-stretching chat sessions’ characterised most meetings; topics for discussion, often led by a member who had been tasked to do the research in the local library, ranged widely from classical art to eugenics, transcendental meditation to homosexuality. The Worthing, Lancing and Littlehampton group was typical, with topics including comprehensive schools, what to do in the event of a nuclear attack and the pill.Footnote 26 ‘I feel personally that it will ensure that my brain does not “seize up” during the years I am away from my profession as a teacher,’ wrote one member. ‘So much one does in the home seems to be of a trivial nature that the effort one makes towards NHR, i.e. Research, preparation of a “speech” and reading, is so refreshing.’Footnote 27
From the start the NHR was determined to distinguish itself and its purpose. ‘Intelligent women’ not ‘cake-icers’ summed up the demographic they were seeking to recruit.Footnote 28 Advertising in popular women's magazines like Woman attracted what were described as ‘un-register like’ women, a problem overcome in the Lewisham group by the area organiser obtaining the addresses to which her newsagent delivered The Guardian and in Northwich where a letter advertising NHR was inserted in copies of She and Nova magazines in an attempt to attract the ‘right kind’ of members, not those who merely wished for a mothers and toddlers club.Footnote 29 A 1966 survey of NHR members reported that 19 per cent of those who responded were graduates and 50 per cent had a professional training.
The majority of members are ‘bound’ in that they are restricted to a routine probably more confining than anything they have hitherto encountered. Intelligent women with small children under school age, who have held interesting, stimulating and responsible jobs, now find their lives centred around the home as never before. They take a pride in their homes and families, accepting the restrictions and responsibilities inherent in their situation, but they find themselves mentally frustrated with the curtailment of their personal freedom.Footnote 30
It is clear, however, that NHR tapped into an existential need of many women to rediscover their identity, their self-confidence and self-respect which was subsumed in the daily round of housework and childcare. Sheila Hunt's cri de cœur in the 1966 NHR newsletter spoke for many: ‘Organising children, housework etc is surely not the real difficulty. My crying need is for time to be myself, not mother or housekeeper, ten minutes to look at the newspaper when it arrives, instead of in the evening? Must one really give up oneself so much?’Footnote 31 The sense that self and the possibilities for self-development were buried within the all-consuming banality of the everyday was acutely summed up by Sheila Partington, NHR national committee member and ex-Guardian journalist, in a letter to the NHR national organiser purportedly to discuss some aspect of NHR business: ‘Have you read the Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan that someone mentioned in the newsletter? Oh dear. The gasman long-awaited has appeared: also the baker and the dustmen. Must go.’Footnote 32 Women joined NHR to meet like-minded women, to get out of the house once a fortnight, to talk about something other than children and to prove to themselves and to others that ‘mother’ was not their only identity and that they had not put their ‘minds into cold-storage’.Footnote 33 ‘I seemed to belong and for these evenings at least I was not just Cliff's wife or James’ mum. At last I could come to terms with being a housewife because I could still be me as well’ was how NHR member Chris White put it.Footnote 34 Responses to publicity for a new group in Cardiff in 1966 reflect just these frustrations: ‘I think I'm going round the bend/up the wall/crazy’; ‘I'm in such a rut’; ‘I've been in a steady decline for ages’; ‘thank god someone else feels the same’; ‘I never see a soul’; ‘I can't seem to meet people’; ‘no-one to talk to’; and so on and so on.Footnote 35
The National Housewives’ Register was one conduit for the outpouring of frustration, mainly amongst women who had formerly been employed in professional and semi-professional roles. It was primarily a social network, albeit some groups did involve themselves in political issues and, unlike the Women's Institute, they were not prevented from discussing religion or politics.Footnote 36 In 1966 a third of groups had taken action on issues such as cervical smear testing, abortion law reform, primary school overcrowding and pre-school provision.Footnote 37 But the NHR's organisational reticence at adopting a political stance concealed its role as a Petri dish facilitating intellectual and political fermentation. NHR gave women the platform and the permission to question. ‘I wonder how different maternity services would be if run by women – particularly if they have borne children?’ asked a member from Pevensey in the 1965 Newsletter.Footnote 38 ‘And would we not allow abortion to any woman who could not face carrying any particular baby – or allow her to “put away” an obviously severely defective baby?’ The following edition featured an invitation from a member in Cheshire to join her in contributing to the abortion debate.
Last night we had a talk on Abortion Law Reform, and the general feeling was that we would like to voice our opinion on this subject. The speaker suggested that we write to our MP and we later thought that we might write to Lady Phillips. After all, we are an articulate, thinking group of women and when we have a strong opinion on some controversial subject like this, we would like to add our weight to any movement in our direction.Footnote 39
Nonetheless, external perceptions of NHR tended to patronise or criticise. With the headline ‘Think Tank for Women in the Suburbs’, one regional newspaper described NHR as ‘this thriving enterprise which aims to prove that suburbia can be a “think zone” by arranging mind stretching chat sessions in members’ homes’.Footnote 40 An article in the Sunday Times reporting on NHR's weekend gathering in Buxton, by journalist Moira Keenan, was critical of what she saw as the failure of NHR to use its collective voice to influence policy. She was perplexed at what she had witnessed: ‘At the very first conference in seven years their choice of subject for a talk on the second day was not on abortion or birth control, drug addiction, comprehensive schools, under fives or any other subject of concern to young parents – but about the Peak District.’ ‘This seems like a serious criticism of a large body of intelligent and energetic women.’Footnote 41 Yet NHR was unabashed at accusations of lethargy and refused to become a pressure group; and the publicity gave membership a fillip, with more than 1,000 enquiries being received following the article's publication.Footnote 42 The insistence on not being a feminist organisation became shriller in the 1980s as NHR increasingly positioned itself in opposition to a stereotypical representation of feminism – ‘But don't be put off because your interests are needlework, driving, squash or macramé,’ announced one Kent newspaper in 1981. ‘You will not be parading a banner, fighting a cause or demanding equal rights.’Footnote 43 Yet, at the same time, local groups were making the case for better nursery provision and raising awareness of initiatives to protect women against sexual assault, to name just two campaigning issues.Footnote 44 And for individual women NHR provided a space in which they could reconnect with their former selves and an environment in which to think about the future. Kathleen, who had been a draughtswoman before she had children, described her experience thus:
There was a bit of a black hole in your life if you'd lost your work colleagues, so having sort of, you know, a meeting where you could discuss, I don't know … suicide, or a book group or divorce or any current issue of the day, you know … miners’ strikes, um, you know, anything, it was quite interesting actually. And then later on, as NWR progressed, women of my age were then talking about going back to work, you know, further education, that sort of thing.Footnote 45
It was arguably NHR's flexibility, its ability at local level to encompass a range of positions, that was both its weakness and its strength as Keenan had identified. As the organisation grew, its national committee and annual conferences gave some women opportunities to develop new skills or to put to use experience they had gained in the workplace. By the 1970s with a membership in the thousands, running NHR was an operation involving hundreds of women as area organisers or national committee members. And many of them used that knowledge as a stepping stone to further education (especially the Open University) and to careers in the voluntary sector.Footnote 46
The Pre-School Playgroups Association on the other hand, with which many NHR members were also involved, was more multifaceted, providing social contact for mothers and their children but also informal and formal educational and training opportunities for women, and political engagement for some, with education policy, urban planning, social inequality and early years provision.Footnote 47 In this sense, PPA straddled the personal and the political in more concrete ways than any of the other self-help organisations of the post-war era. Some of the same frustrations of ‘housebound mothers’, allied to the absence of pre-school nursery or playschool provision, gave rise to the PPA. There was a gaping hole in any form of pre-school provision for children under five and particularly those under three, exacerbated in some areas – primarily new housing estates in urban areas – by the lack of play provision for the very young.Footnote 48 Whilst playgroups, which offered a few hours of supervised play activity, were ostensibly set up to provide pre-school children with social contact and supervised play, it was mothers who arguably gained the most from volunteering as helpers and, in the case of some, becoming more involved as supervisors. In the first issue of Playgroup News, a PPA newsletter for parents, Moya Codling who started a playgroup with her neighbours, initially meeting in their own homes in Bracknell new town before moving to a local community hall, expressed the feelings of many women in the same boat:
You will know how lonely mums can be if you have ever locked the bathroom door and just sobbed. Have you ever rushed out of the house to run anywhere, just to come back again at the end of the garden path? … Have you ever thrown the sugar bowl at the piano or the nappies out of the kitchen window and two minutes later picked them up and washed them for the nine hundredth and ninety-ninth time?Footnote 49
Whereas in 1967 Brenda Crowe, the PPA's first national organiser, observed that ‘it wasn't done to mention mothers’ needs’, just two years later she noted that supervisors and members were beginning to say, ‘I'm sure that I shouldn't be saying it – but I can't help feeling that mothers need playgroups as much as the children do.’Footnote 50 Cynthia Robinson, formerly a journalist before she had three children, credited her local playgroup in Norwich with giving her back her confidence:
In the first three years as a mother it seemed as if I had lost all status and excitement from my life. I slipped into a depressed state and was prescribed the then ‘wonder’ pill Librium. But here in the playgroup was a new beginning. I was greeted warmly, made to feel I had something to offer the group and then applauded for my usefulness.Footnote 51
Cynthia quickly became a mother helper, was elected to the committee of her local group and went on to take playgroup courses, all the while learning about child development in general and her own boys’ needs in particular. For Cynthia, the playgroup movement was the stepping stone to a new career. ‘Over the next decade I moved on with confidence through further courses, tutor group, and then to a national PPA committee. At home I watched our sons grow with new enthusiasm and was soon involved with Open University courses in my “spare” time. This led to a Social Services post as Playgroups and Childminding Officer covering a third of Norfolk and then an MA in Social Work.’Footnote 52 And an anonymous contributor from Essex who became a playgroup leader wrote in similar terms. ‘It has given me confidence … I forget problems at home … Since becoming involved my life has changed. I attend courses, talk to parents, counsellors, our MP and leave the family for the weekend to represent my group at the National PPA AGM.’Footnote 53
The sentiment that playgroups were for mothers as much as children was core to the PPA's raison d’être, and from the start playgroups were dependent on an army of parent-helpers, not only those who supported children's play but those who made the hall bookings, undertook fund-raising, dealt with local authorities and all the other day-to-day requirements of running a community organisation. In a national survey conducted in the 1980s, the vast majority of the 459 mothers who responded said the playgroup helped them get on with their child better and they ‘gained confidence in themselves as mothers and individuals’.Footnote 54 This had been the mantra of Brenda Crowe who had a background in Froebel nurseries. She acknowledged the various needs of mothers, from distraction from the monotony of everyday routine at home to the opportunity to share their frustration and guilt for those who found it ‘more difficult to adapt to a maternal role’.Footnote 55 Linnet McMahon, a parent co-founder of a village playgroup in 1968 who went on to become a playgroup course tutor, concurred: ‘What mothers were doing was, like their children, learning through play, in the sense that they were able to try things out – or try new ways of being – in an emotionally facilitating environment where it felt safe, where it was alright to make mistakes. In the process they created something new or became someone different. They were developing a sense of autonomy and identity.’Footnote 56 And they were doing this in relation to other women. While attempts to include and involve fathers were regularly made, PPA was a women-centred and woman-led organisation.
In contrast to the National Housewives’ Register, which largely retained its original format and purpose as a social network for women at home and which explicitly stated its separation from women's liberation, the PPA quickly expanded in size and purpose, from do-it-yourself and home-based playgroups to a national network with funding from local and national government and a structured training regime for those who wished to qualify as playgroup leaders and early years educators. And it is this expansion of PPA which took it beyond its initial constituency of mainly middle-class parents and children. Whereas NHR had always been somewhat picky about its members – identifying its constituency as ‘lively-minded’ and distinguishing itself from the ‘Tupperware scene’Footnote 57 – the PPA early on, and perhaps acknowledging that it had ‘got stuck with the middle class tag’, engaged with working-class communities in urban areas where the need for pre-school facilities of all kinds, from playgroups to nurseries, was more acute.Footnote 58 PPA was conscious that its mode of operation, which required time, money (to hire halls and buy equipment) and connections, could not be easily replicated in ‘deprived’ areas; they also acknowledged that playgroups were not the only solution for mothers and children in such areas. On a visit to Birmingham in 1968, Brenda Crowe observed that ‘playgroups can't be a solution’ in deprived areas where mothers possessed less social capital and where many were in part-time employment.Footnote 59 Working mothers needed day care where they could leave the children.
The difficulty of the do-it-yourself approach when it left the leafy suburbs was highlighted in Glasgow where thousands of city inhabitants had been rehoused in new council housing estates and high flats in the 1960s and 70s and where there was a shortage of suitable accommodation for a playgroup or indeed a lack of any appropriate indoor or outdoor space for pre-school children to play safely. New estates had been built quickly and plans for play parks were rarely implemented.Footnote 60 The Scottish PPA's suggestion of building a ‘simple hutted structure on the rooftop of a multi-storey block’ was presumably not taken seriously.Footnote 61 Here too mothers’ part-time working was an issue. The PPA had established a playgroup in a high flat in the city with a paid supervisor for just one term in acknowledgement of the inability of local mothers to manage it on their own. But once the supervisor was withdrawn, Brenda Crowe recognised this playgroup had no future, echoing the contemporaneous observations of social researcher Pearl Jephcott who, in the 1960s, was undertaking a major study of the city's high flats and who had a particular interest in the provision for children's play. Her research team worked with local women in one of the study areas, Royston, to establish a playgroup but soon understood that without support the playgroup would not be sustained.Footnote 62 The women there just did not have the capacity to maintain it given their own challenging circumstances. While the spokesperson for the Scottish Playgroups Association wrote of ‘the seeming apathy and indifference on the part of the mothers’ in some playgroups and their ‘unreliability’ for the rota of helpers, she also acknowledged that ‘the needs of mothers to talk about their problems and their lives seem equal to their children's need to play’.Footnote 63 When the Scottish PPA undertook a study of playgroups in areas of need in 1977 they discovered that the majority had been initiated by outside agencies, usually social workers, and were grant aided; not surprising given the poor circumstances in which many families were living: in poor-quality housing, poor economic circumstances and often unsupported by other family members. In these conditions the PPA's philosophy of the centrality of voluntary parental involvement (in practice this meant mothers) was seriously challenged. In the early days of these groups the mothers were reluctant to get involved, preferring to treat the playgroup as a safe space for their children to play. It took time for mothers to participate. ‘Some families have sunk so low in their self esteem that they cannot compete with the neighbours who can cope, and who despise them,’ observed the report. ‘They need to come together first and gain in dignity before venturing into the wider playgroup context where the more efficient mums can easily overwhelm them.’Footnote 64
It is not easy to see how the women discussed in this report, and elsewhere in the PPA's work with ‘deprived’ communities, could achieve the growth and confidence through involvement with playgroups so commonly reported by more affluent women. The autonomy achieved by middle-class women through the many relationships PPA facilitated was not easily transferable to working-class women in areas of deprivation. Many women were bringing up children in conditions of material and cultural poverty in the 1960s and 70s, and isolation in high-rise flats compounded their problems. It was unlikely that involvement in a playgroup once a week would lift them out of their position, although it might have alleviated their isolation somewhat.Footnote 65 Women's liberation groups recognised this, preferring to argue for twenty-four-hour nurseries and childcare provision over playgroups which would enable women to take on paid work. The PPA, on the other hand, emphasised the need of the child for its mother in the first three years of life, but, as the author of an article in the Times Educational Supplement on playgroups for working mothers astutely remarked: ‘the logical conclusion seems to be that no mother with a child under 5 can work. Many clearly do. So where are all their children? And can it be that all the children who are excluded from playgroups – those deprived of their mothers all day – are precisely the group who need them the most?’Footnote 66 This writer was part of a wider debate about playgroups within the context of government provision of childcare and early years education which acknowledged that playgroups were not the solution their advocates claimed. The voluntary principle of PPA which underpinned parental involvement was difficult to implement in working-class areas, which meant that playgroups soon folded without outside support.Footnote 67 More fundamentally some were concerned that the playgroup model of provision merely entrenched the existing advantages of middle-class children and presumably the mothers too.Footnote 68
The PPA, whilst making serious efforts to expand provision to working-class areas and acknowledging that mothers’ needs were often as urgent as those of their children, maintained its stance on voluntarism and the benefits to mothers of active participation. Some of its activists were more evangelical than others. Barbara Keeley, one of the founders of the movement, was outspoken in her belief that involvement with playgroups was ‘an introduction to a career-like sequence of development’.Footnote 69 Indeed she suggested that women would not have realised the same potential if they had ‘returned to the subordinate paid employment that they would have been expected to take’, and dubbed voluntary work as ‘employment-like’.Footnote 70 For Keeley, child-rearing and care was equal in value to paid work – not in economic terms but in terms of personal satisfaction and growth. She cites the example of ‘Carol’ who left school at sixteen, found employment as a dental nurse and then married and had three children which precipitated a period of depression. Becoming a parent volunteer at the playgroup led to her becoming secretary of her local PPA, a tutor for playgroup courses followed by work in a private nursery and then as a home visitor for a local authority-run nursery school. Carol said, ‘Without the playgroup and tutoring experience I wouldn't have stood a chance – but then I wouldn't have had the confidence to apply anyhow!’Footnote 71 Clearly PPA had done wonders for Carol's sense of self, but what Keeley failed to consider sufficiently was the economic ramifications of a woman choosing to undertake voluntary work with a playgroup as opposed to paid work. And the PPA never engaged with the kind of thinking that made a case for valuing childcare in macro-economic terms.
One might regard playgroups as the quintessential middle-class organisation run by middle-class women for themselves and their children who in turn benefited in respect of improved social contacts, access to training and, for some, a track to a career in early years care and education.Footnote 72 This might suggest that the relational autonomy model yields benefits for those who have the economic and cultural capital in the first place. Yet the picture is more nuanced. Davis's oral history research on motherhood in Oxfordshire indicates that working-class women did benefit socially from the playgroups, and contemporary studies in areas of need in Southwark in London and in Scotland demonstrate that mothers were willing to participate as organisers and helpers although they were not usually the initiators of groups.Footnote 73 In Scotland a study of eleven playgroups by the Scottish PPA identified that mothers in deprived areas were unlikely to initiate playgroups on account of the difficulties they faced with housing, poverty, family problems and the environment in which they lived. ‘The difficulties these women face are enormous,’ noted the study authors, ‘and all … face them alone inasmuch as their families are usually unable or unwilling to provide any support and the husbands or co-habitees feel little or no obligation to the children.’Footnote 74 The mothers needed the playgroup for social chat and sharing of anxieties as much as the children needed it for play. ‘The mothers' desperate needs override those of the children,’ remarked one playleader. ‘The mothers have a need to come and be calmed down.’ Some worked part time, some were ‘unreliable’ and others were reluctant to become involved, regarding the group as a social work department initiative. The study authors remained optimistic however, recommending that more emphasis in these playgroups needed to be on mothers learning alongside their children and in workshops and meetings in order to bolster the mothers’ confidence. ‘Through learning there is growth of confidence in one's abilities, and this can then be used to take both learning and experience further.’Footnote 75 Although there is little evidence to support that optimism in the short term, the Scottish PPA report did lead to the Stepping Stones project which explicitly recognised the challenges faced by families in areas of deprivation and began to question the commitment hitherto to being a voluntary, parent-led, self-help organisation and recognised the need for paid workers as facilitators.
III Conclusions
Women's self-help groups in this period were spaces for reconstituting female autonomy and rediscovery of the self. They facilitated a set of social relationships that were freely chosen rather than imposed and which enabled some women to pursue new directions in education, training and work. In addition, these organisations facilitated new and necessary forms of social relations in the absence, often, of extended family or community support, that enabled women to free themselves and their thinking from patriarchal frameworks. None of the self-help organisations of this era described themselves as feminist but each played a role in expanding women's horizons and expertise, in turn underpinning women's active engagement with social policy and social expectations. This is most evident in the case of the NCT which supported women to challenge medical professionals and to educate and train themselves to take control of the birth process. The network of NCT groups, area organisers, trainers and helpers provided support for pregnant women and new mothers but in itself constituted a set of often long-term social relationships for the women who became part of the organisation.Footnote 76 Likewise, the National Housewives' Register and Pre-School Playgroups Association created local and national social networks which provided a structure for women to develop their knowledge, skills and confidence, whether it was via organising a conference, acting as treasurer or secretary for a local branch or embarking on training courses.Footnote 77 ‘PPA enabled me to grow, regain confidence in myself as a learner, to make long and lasting friendships and be an active member of the community,’ recorded a Bedfordshire woman who graduated from being a ‘Mum help’ to a governor at an LEA nursery.Footnote 78 And in 1966, in an article in The Guardian entitled ‘The sultanas of surburbia’, Betty Jerman summed up the significance of NHR:
I came to regard suburban life as a heavy rice pudding with a few well-met sultanas here and there. Women have immense capacity. Most of it is unused. Enough women with confidence to chair a meeting, sit on a committee, organise action and we should not be moaning about bad schools, poor maternity services, too few nursery schools. We should be battling for our daughters’ education if we want marriage to be a partnership. We should learn to distinguish between a home and a house that looks as though a staff of servants maintain it. But mostly we can break down the tiny family units by helping each other to get out of the house to develop new or old interests simply by taking over each other's children now and again.Footnote 79
Here the social activity engendered by NHR is critical to change on a personal level. In the case of the PPA, involvement, according to one of its key activists, ‘did not just equip its beneficiaries with a few quick tips on laying out a playroom or writing a letter to the head of social services; it made them into different people’. ‘I have found myself again as a person in my own right,’ remarked one activist. A Scottish volunteer put it more pithily.Footnote 80 ‘See me! I used to be deid.’Footnote 81
The organisations discussed here have been subject to some critical comment by those who regard them as insufficiently challenging of the gender and social relations that underpinned women's inequality. More benignly some have accepted their value to women who suffered isolation but note that such organisations worked within the system, rarely challenging patriarchal structures and ideologies and ignoring social inequalities.Footnote 82 In essence it is suggested they recognised the roots of women's subordination lay in the home and in their prime responsibility for childcare, but in their actions they replicated gender inequalities through their organisations. Yet, these were mass organisations involving thousands of women at every level. Testimonies from those who participated elicit life-changing narratives in which self-help organisations play a pivotal role. As historians we need to take these testimonies seriously. Feminist philosophers have argued that women's sense of self is ‘enmeshed in relationality’.Footnote 83 This study of three women's self-help organisations of the 1960s supports the view that women lean towards the social in order to shore up their sense of self as opposed to pursuing the path of differentiation and detachment from others. The women who engaged in do-it-yourself, primarily although not exclusively educated women of the middle classes, recognised the value of voluntaristic relational responsibilities as a means of meeting their own needs and those of others, primarily their children. They understood how cooperation and collective effort could benefit them and they believed this model could be made to work more generally. Women could assume multiple roles within these complex social networks and could use them to grow in confidence and ability. Those with the economic and social capital to do so, used the domain of the self-help organisation with its many levels and opportunities to pursue autonomy.
Do-it-yourself women's organisations were a practical response to a conundrum. That conundrum – how to maintain some semblance of autonomy and self-respect whilst ‘lost in the exhausting daily round’ of family and childcare– spurred women into action, armed with the economic and intellectual capital many had accrued prior to marriage. These organisations should not be regarded as the poor sisters of women's liberation or even a forerunner to the critical thinking and activism that avowedly feminist organisations came to espouse. Rather, women's collective voluntarism should be understood as a practical and grass-roots response to fundamental changes in women's lives in the post-war decades which endeavoured to meet both the needs of women for practical support and social and intellectual engagement and the same desires of those women to fulfil their roles as mothers and partners. Self-help organisations allowed women to be in control.
