‘Who the Hell Are Ordinary People?’ Ordinariness as a Category of Historical Analysis

Abstract

Ordinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who've taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim, Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper, I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’.

Ordinary Exemplars: Cultivating “the Everyday” in the Birthplace of Fascism

“…Predappiesi do so in an attempt to escape from the apparently intractable grasp the history of their home holds over them. So too, in different ways, do populist politicians, as illustrated by the historical case of Mussolini's "ordinarification" by his regime (see also Langhammer 2018 for an insightful analysis of a similar process in postwar Britain). It will be easier for us to examine such instances if, instead of treating "the ordinary" and "the everyday" as if they qualify anything about the phenomena to which they are attached, we look instead at what the phenomena in question reveal about what we and the people we study really mean by "ordinariness," and how we and they create our sense of it.…”

Women’s voices, emotion and empathy: engaging different publics with ‘everyday’ health histories

“…In their appeal to women as consumers and caregivers, they carried extensive health-related content, and so help us to chart those ideas about health and illness that formed the backdrop of 'ordinary' life (itself a concept that gained increasing cultural and political purchase in the postwar period). 6 This content appeared across multiple formats (features, first-person accounts, interviews, readers' letters, 'expert' columns and advertising), produced by named intermediaries including feature writers, columnists, doctors and agony aunts. From the early 1960s, magazines also started to introduce more interactive and reader-generated content, as part of the attempt to build readers' loyalty.…”

A Magna Carta for Marriage: Love, Catholic Masculinities and the Humanae Vitae Contraception Crisis in 1968 Britain

“…In this respect, the criteria for critique and claimed expertise echoed the broader societal premium noted by historians of the sixties on appeals to experience, authenticity and 'ordinary' commonsense. 52 Farnham resident Mrs Muriel Greenwood conformed to this pattern when writing to The Tablet, by commencing her correspondence with a confession of past doubts and a present-day conversion: Now, however, having read and pondered Humanae Vitae, which as a wife and mother I must say I found so moving I could hardly believe it was written by a mere manwere he not the Pope -and having also duly noted the temper of the criticism which has been leveled against him and it, I am now the Pope's man and in favour of retaining the law as it stands. 53 A similar statement of support from Janet de Gaynesford in Buckinghamshire situated her response as a 'Catholic wife and mother, and one therefore deeply affected by the matters of Humanae Vitae'.…”