As Stephanie Coontz has argued, the immediate post-war period was a unique moment in the history of marriage. In Western Europe and the United States, the cultural consensus that everyone should marry and form a male breadwinner family was like a steamroller that crushed every alternative view. In Britain, although the Second World War had inevitably disrupted the normal pattern of married life, it had done nothing to diminish the popularity of marriage, and the marriage rate quickly rose to above the pre-war level. Following a brief rise in divorce petitions filed immediately after the war, the numbers sank rapidly from 60,000 in 1947 to 31,000 in 1950, and dropped again to a low of 23,000 in 1958. During the ten-year period beginning around 1950, Roderick Phillips notes that virtually all the countries of the West experienced an almost stationary divorce rate.

Since the 1970s historians have been critical of progressive, teleological accounts of marriage and the family. They have uncovered contrasting pictures of ‘families past’, and suggest that it is misleading to assume that there ever was a time when home and family were ‘all they were meant to be’.