The topic of this chapter is the household. It begins with a focus on women: how they were consigned to the home and how their status and power over household resources have been historically shaped by men. As I described in the last chapter, during the Second World War many women had taken the place of men in the workplace. As Elizabeth Wilson (1980: 26) contends in Halfway to paradise ‘the housewife was the heroic figure of the Second World War and additionally so because she was often a worker as well’. However, while women had achieved a degree of emancipation and the role of housewife a degree of status and importance previously lacking, the return of male servicemen to their homes and communities following the end of the war raised policy issues on several fronts. A number of needs had to be met: servicemen had to be found work and the demographic decline needed reversing, requiring women to be child bearers and homemakers. Furthermore, the lack of domestic servants during the war meant that the middle classes began to experience the drudgery of housework and there were a variety of demands throughout the political system for support for housewives including community services, state financial support and a Housewife's Charter (Wilson, 1980: 21– 3). Beveridge and other policy makers turned their attention to these, often competing, policy demands. But ultimately the sexual division of labour in the household was not questioned; so men remained the main breadwinners and the principle prevailed that first and foremost women should devote themselves to their families and be dependent on men's earnings.

The 1950s saw no resolution to the problem of women's financial dependence on men. Indeed, housekeeping money was ‘the dark secret in the family’ (Zweig, 1952). In the early 1950s, Michael Young (cited in Wilson, 1980) noted that full employment and inflation led to a loss of real income for housewives. He further noted men's failure to increase their wives’ housekeeping when an extra child was born into a poor family (Wilson, 1980). This resulted in greater financial burden not on the household as a whole but on the mother and her other children (Wilson, 1980: 31). In this context public provision such as school meals, the National Health Service, and food subsidies were important in helping to reduce the effects of housewives’ lack of and reductions in real income.