Love and Courtship in Mid-Twentieth-Century England

Abstract

This article contributes to the on-going study of modern affective life by exploring the ways in which love was understood, invoked, and deployed within heterosexual courtships. ‘Love’ itself is approached as a highly mutable and flexible concept whose meanings and uses are contingent upon historical moment, gender, status, and generation. Whilst the article does not claim to offer a comprehensive history of love across the central years of the twentieth century, it suggests that some of the everyday meanings and uses of that emotion can be illuminated through consideration of this particular aspect of social life. Rather than placing discursive constructions centre stage, the article uses life history material to effect an analysis embedded in everyday practices. Courtship itself is understood as a transitional stage between youth and adulthood: a life stage during which the meanings and uses of ‘love’ were implicitly or explicitly confronted, where gender relationships were potentially unstable, and where aspiration and desire could conflict in the making of the self. Courtship therefore constituted an important rite of passage which could provide an opportunity to perform, reject, and refine new roles and responsibilities, whilst negotiating future status and identity. The article explores the power dynamics which underlined romantic encounters, but argues that through their everyday practice young women exercised real, if bounded, agency within this sphere of social life.

‘Slumming’ in Swinging London?

“…68 Langhamer has also suggested that an emphasis upon greater expectations of marriage may have sown the seeds of later disaffection. 69 In her study The Captive Wife (1966), for example, Hannah Gavron highlighted the dissatisfaction of working-class wives in North London and St Pancras. 70 Up the Junction shows little sense of an ideal of domesticity or companionability.…”

Intimate Desires: Dalit Women and Religious Conversions in Colonial India

“…By focusing on personal Dalit women's conversions, I wish to also historicize love and romance, which are mutable concepts (Collin 2003;Langhamer 2007), whose meanings are contingent on gender, caste, and religious identities. Scholars have emphasized shifting meanings of romantic love in colonial India (Orsini 2007, 30-34).…”

‘Nationalising Hundreds and Thousands of Women’: a domestic response to a national problem

“…Evacuees' foster mothers received a letter from the King and Queen at the end of the war, thanking them for caring for 'children who were in danger'; in so doing they acknowledged the national importance of their domestic labour. 82 Many young women had, as Claire Langhamer suggests, fantasised about romance in wartime and placed increasing emphasis on intimacy; 83 with peace many women attempted to translate their dreams into marriage. Although the post-war housing crisis made establishing a home problematic, as Denise Riley has argued, many young women had what could be seen as a traditional view of the family and longed to give up work on marriage.…”