Between 1944 and 1962 Britain was rebuilding after war. Women were needed at work, but many people still believed a woman's place was in the home. Sexual minorities faced a different problem: for men, the law itself made some private relationships a crime. This lesson looks at both, and asks what changed and what stayed the same.
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Unlock This CourseIn the Second World War millions of women did war work, and unmarried women were conscripted from 1941. When the war ended in 1945, many women left their jobs as men came home, and most wartime nurseries closed. Yet life did not simply go back to how it had been.
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Britain's factories, offices, schools and the new NHS all needed staff. Employers turned to women, including married women, who often worked part-time around their families. The number of married women in paid work rose through the 1950s.
Growing numbers of nurses, teachers and office workers opened more jobs to women. Even so, most women worked in a narrow range of jobs, such as teaching, nursing, clerical and shop work, and were paid less than men.
A marriage bar was a rule that forced a woman to give up her job when she married. Between the wars it was common. After the war the bars began to go. The 1944 Education Act ended the bar for women teachers, and the civil service dropped its bar in 1946. The reason was simple: there were not enough teachers, nurses and clerks, and the country could not afford to lose trained married women.
Attitudes changed more slowly than the rules. The welfare state of the 1940s still largely assumed that a husband earned the family's money and a wife looked after the home. Many people thought a mother should stay at home with young children.
In 1944 MPs voted in favour of equal pay for women teachers, but Prime Minister Winston Churchill treated the vote as a test of confidence in his government, and it was reversed. Women teachers and civil servants, backed by their unions, kept campaigning. In 1955 the government agreed to bring in equal pay for women in public service in stages. It was fully in place by 1961.
This was a real step, but a limited one. It covered only public service. Women in factories, shops and most private firms still earned less than men for similar work. That did not change until the Equal Pay Act, which you meet in the lesson on feminism, Dagenham and the Equal Pay and Sex Discrimination Acts.
In the 1950s sex between men, even in private, was a criminal offence in England and Wales. (Sex between women had never been against the law.) A man found guilty of "gross indecency" could go to prison, lose his job and be shamed in the newspapers. Prosecutions rose after the war, and police drives against gay men made things worse. Some politicians and newspapers also linked homosexuality with spying scares, such as the 1951 defection of Burgess and Maclean, which added to public suspicion.
The mathematician Alan Turing was convicted in 1952, and in 1954 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and two other men were convicted in a case that filled the newspapers. Many people began to ask whether the law was fair or even workable.
Doctors, lawyers and some church groups argued that the law caused suffering and stopped nothing. There was also public worry about street prostitution. The government's answer, in 1954, was to set up one committee to look at both subjects.
The committee was led by Sir John Wolfenden, a university head. Its report, the Wolfenden Report, came out in September 1957. It said the law should protect public order and protect people from harm, not police private behaviour. Its main recommendation was that homosexual acts between consenting adults, in private, should no longer be a crime. It did not say such behaviour was morally right. It said the law had no business in the private lives of adults. On prostitution, it recommended tougher action against street offences, and the government acted on this in the Street Offences Act 1959.
Some newspapers, doctors, lawyers and church figures welcomed the report. In 1958 supporters founded the Homosexual Law Reform Society to campaign for the law to change.
Many MPs, newspapers and ordinary people were against it. The judge Patrick Devlin argued in 1959 that a society has a right to use the law to protect its shared moral beliefs.
The government decided public opinion was not ready, and did nothing about homosexual acts. The law stayed the same for another ten years. The report mattered because it began the debate and gave campaigners something to point to. The change came with the Sexual Offences Act 1967, covered in its own lesson on rights for sexual minorities.
Change and continuity: by 1962 married women could keep their jobs and many teachers and civil servants had equal pay. But most women were still paid less and expected to be homemakers, and sex between men was still a crime.
This is a Paper 2, Section B type (b) question. Each cause needs a precise fact and an explanation of how it led to the outcome.
Explain TWO causes of the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee in 1954. [8 marks]
One cause was a series of high-profile trials. Alan Turing was convicted in 1952, and in 1954 Lord Montagu of Beaulieu and two other men were convicted in a case that filled the newspapers. Because these cases involved well-known men, many people began to ask whether the law on sex between men was fair or workable. This public unease made it harder for the government to ignore the issue and pushed it towards an official review.
A second cause was pressure from doctors, lawyers and church groups, along with worry about street prostitution. These groups argued that the law caused suffering without stopping anything, and prosecutions had risen since the war. Because the government faced pressure on both homosexuality and prostitution, it set up one committee in 1954 to look at both subjects, which became the Wolfenden Committee.
What lifts it to the top level: each cause has a precise fact and a clear link showing how it led to the committee being set up.
Finish each paragraph with a sentence that starts "This led to..." or "Because of this...", so the examiner can see you explaining how the cause produced the result.