Imagining Home

Belonging and ‘Unbelonging’: Jewish refugee and survivor women in 1950s Britain

“…44 However, Webster has shown how 'black women were not constructed as economic dependents of men', and in consequence their 'main role in the post-war welfare state was to subsidize it through their labour'. 45 For Jewish women the opposite was true and they were less likely to be economically active than their non-Jewish counterparts. In a 1950 Jewish Chronicle survey, which included just under 2000 women, only 11% of Jewish women were economically active, as compared to 34% in the general population.…”

“…24 Webster has shown that while 'Black migrants sometimes made the journey to Britain with optimism', their 'accounts of arrival record a sense of shock' that the England they arrived to did not live to their imagination and that they were not welcome there. 25 The experience for Jewish refugees was somewhat different. They also recalled that austere, wartime or post-war England was not the glamorous place they had expected.…”

“…In a similar fashion to other migrant groups in the post-war decades, 93 several interviewees recalled how they socialised almost exclusively with other people who had a similar background to themselves. For example, describing life in the 1940s and 1950s, Ilse Sinclair said:…”

“…I didn't have to--share with anybody, you know, we all shared one bathroom, the whole houseful, you know, and nobody could tell me what I was allowed to cook and what I wasn't allowed to cook, because it smelt. 74 However, as their accounts indicate, the interviewees, like other post-war migrant groups, 75 found they were often at the bottom of the housing ladder and had to live in the areas from which British Jews were moving out. 76 Ruth Foster and her husband lived in Tottenham throughout the 1950s.…”

Home, Colonial and Foreign: Europe, Empire and the History of Migration in 20th‐century Britain

“…Studies of immigration in the 1960s variously defined Cypriots as 'white Commonwealth immigrants' and 'coloured Commonwealth citizens'. 52 The credentials of Dominions migrants as white were never questioned and, while generally lacking visibility, they became visible in government discussions in the 1950s about restricting Commonwealth migration which expressed the desire to preserve their rights of free entry. One reason for decisions to use informal rather than legislative methods to discourage black and Asian migration in the 1950s was concern that such rights could not be preserved without conceding that legislation was designed to prevent what the Conservative Committee of Ministers' report called 'a coloured invasion of Britain'.…”