Social Customs

Arthur Marwick

When it comes to social customs, life styles, patterns of behaviour, appeal must be made, as in the previous chapter, to novels, newspapers and films. The break is not as sharp as in Russia and Germany because the western societies were less obviously autocratic in 1914. 'The jazz age' and 'the Roaring Twenties' are well known cliche phrases: they describe, if at all, life in the upper reaches of society. Yet, in a way which had never ever been true in history before they are not - because of the growth of film, the rapid spread of broadcasting, the building of dog-tracks and dance halls, and the margin of time and money for leisure gained in the war by most workers - totally inapplicable to the whole society. The U.S. 'withdrawal' from Europe at the end of the war is much stressed; but the decision of April 1917 had brought not just American military support, but the canons of American popular culture to Europe no decision of Congress could end that traffic.

 It is always fun to read, and write, about changes in sexual morality, and the historian has the sanction of the great Macaulay's declaration that 'the mutual relations between the two sexes seem to us to be at least as important as the mutual relations of any two governments in the world' Seen in the perspective of the first seventy years of the twentieth century the changes of the First-World-War period do not seem too staggering seen, indeed, in the light of the one major fact of true historical and sociological significance, that after seventy years marriage and the family stood almost unchanged as fundamental social institutions (though the disruptions of war played a part in trend away from the 'extended' to the 'nuclear' family), none of the changes across the century seem too cataclysmic. Among the controls governing human sexual behaviour are the following: social and religious sanctions: accepted standards of what is 'normal' and 'proper' (differing between different groups, and, usually, between the sexes; what is thought' normal' may at the same time be thought 'improper', which may add to its appeal); personal inhibitions and complexes; physical fears (of, for example, pregnancy or venereal diseases); lack of opportunity. Directly or indirectly the war involved adjustments to each of these controls, though once the war was over there were many adjustments back again. When, in war, life itself seemed so cheap, older restraints often seemed scarcely worth maintaining. Authority in general, and religious authority in particular, was severely dented - 'whatever your pastors and masters tell you had best be assumed to be just a bellyful of east wind."' In pre" war days a few blithe spirits had argued the merits of sex dissociated from marriage, but it is in the post-war years that sex begins its progress towards becoming a central topic of public discussion - the pace being set in Berlin by the newly established Institute for Sexual Science and in Hollywood by Cecil B. de Mille who, as has been said (! cannot remember by whom), 'devoted his earlier works to showing people in great detail and at great length what they ought not to do'. Obviously Freud, or rather Freud traduced and popularised, was a more potent force than the war; still the war situation had made possible, indeed necessary, the franker discussion of such matters as venereal diseases and 'war babies'. Though in face of much hostility, it became possible to argue again (as had been freely accepted until the nineteenth century) that sex was for women to enjoy as well as men. A lot of talk, not so much action, would seem to be a fair reflection on the 1920s (women in Britain complained to social investigators that their husbands 'used' them so many times a week); yet it is through reading and discussion and through the precept, apparent or real, of others that the individual begins a revaluation of his own standards. Prophylactics were distributed to the troops during the war (prophylaxis against venereal disease, not pregnancy). The subject of contraception remained on the borders of taboo throughout the inter-war period, but at least the knowledge was being spread around that there were mechanical ways of intervening between the sin and divine retribution. Above all else, the disruptions of war created opportunity: and the destruction of old close-knit communities, the sudden creation of new urban areas, and increased mobility were permanent facts.

 Where there were changes, the war played a distinctive part. For the student of history, though, it is, as suggested above, probably more important to be clear about the definite limits upon these changes. The single most illuminating source I know is a film made by the celebrated (and in her own day infamous) advocate of birth control, Marie Stopes. Originally the film was to have had the same title as her most famous polemical work, Married Love, but such was the notoriety attaching to that title that the film had to be released as Maisie's Marriage. It tells the story of Maisie, daughter of an overcrowded slum family, who refuses to marry the suitor she loves because she fears being borne down by childbirth as her mother has been. She makes a bravely defiant speech on behalf of independent womanhood to the super-chauvinist male pig of a magistrate who sends her to prison for running away from home and attempting suicide. She is taken into service by a rich family (little evidence here of any departure from Edwardian class attitudes, it must be admitted). In an incredible sequence in which we see roses being pruned with a pair of secateurs, her mistress allegedly explains to Maisie the secrets of birth control. The delicate obscurity of the whole thing is a telling comment on what little progress sexual liberation had made by the 1920s: whether men thereafter went in holy dread of encountering young ladies armed with secateurs is not known, but without doubt large sections of the British public must have remained very mixed up in their ideas about sex.

From:  Arthur Marwick, War and Social Change in the Twentieth Century (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp.92-94.