A University of Sussex Phd Thesis Available Online Via Sussex
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A University of Sussex PhD thesis Available online via Sussex Research Online: http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/ This thesis is protected by copyright which belongs to the author. This thesis cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the Author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the Author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Please visit Sussex Research Online for more information and further details z The matchmaking industry and singles culture in Britain, 1970-2000 1 Zoe Strimpel Submitted for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy The University of Sussex July 2017 1Image from The London Weekly Advertiser, 16-22 May 1973, p. 53. Declaration: I, Zoe Strimpel, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. Signed: Date: ii Abstract This thesis charts the expansion of the British dating industry after 1970, using singles services as a lens for assessing the impact of a period of rapid sexual and gender-political change on romantic aspiration. Its central contention is that by studying mediated courtship, we gain a new window onto the very heart of change in late 20th century Britain – namely, the transformation of the gender order. Courtship lets us see how this transformation – normally studied in political, sexual, demographic or cultural terms – was played out in the everyday affective and social lives of individuals. The thesis is arranged in four chapters, with sources centring on first person testimony (Mass Observation diaries, oral history, reader letters, television interviews, memoirs) and newspaper discourse. The first chapter discusses the demographic, cultural and discursive context in which Britain’s expanding population of single people increasingly sought commercial, third-party romantic aid. Chapters Two and Three set out the structure of the mediated dating industry and its most prominent characters alongside an analysis of the flashpoints that shaped how it was perceived. In the final chapter, I turn to daters’ memory and experience in terms of their self-identifications, expectations and encounters. The evidence analysed here is used to argue for the emergence of a new and distinctive ‘single’ identity in the period. Moreover, by interrogating the production of romance and the conditions in which it could take place, I show that at the heart of heterosexuality in late 20th century Britain there existed a relationship between rapid change and older feelings. This dynamic has not so far been adequately accounted for by historians and is, I argue, integral to a full understanding of relational life in the period. iii Contents Acknowledgements v List of figures vi Introduction 1 Thesis Interventions 4 Research Context 16 Methods and sources 32 Structure 50 Chapter One: Live alone and like it? Singleness in late 20th century Britain 52 Singles: an emerging group 56 ‘The age of the meaningful relationship’: self and other 63 The problem of loneliness 78 Solutions: romantic self-management 94 Chapter Two: The matchmaking industry, 1970-2000 102 Context: the growth of the Industry 103 Personal ads 105 Introduction agencies 121 Computer dating 129 Chapter Three: Representations and flashpoints 137 Anonymity, illegibility and peril: anxieties about dating strangers 140 Mediated dating and social status 146 A sexual gulf? Dating as antagonistic encounter 153 Chapter Four: Mediated daters and the experience of matchmaking 160 Mediated dating: motivations and usages 163 Dating as consumption 179 The date 189 Conclusion 209 Appendix 219 Bibliography 220 iv Acknowledgements My first thanks goes to the University of Sussex and the donors of the Asa Briggs PhD scholarship: without the award, I would not have been able to pursue this research. Just as integral to the completion of this thesis has been the absolutely tireless support – academic, moral, administrative – of my supervisor, Claire Langhamer. I also benefited greatly from the support and inspiration of conversations with Carol Dyhouse, Michael Ledger Lomas and Harry Cocks. Thanks must next go to my oral history interviewees, who donated their time and memories with great enthusiasm and generosity as well as to the industry figures – former Time Out staffers Tony Elliott, Irene Campbell, Jane Rackham, Suzie Marwood, Peter Knights and Simon Garfield, as well as matchmakers Sandy Nye, Mary Balfour, Heather Heber Percy, and ‘Julia’ – all of whom who provided essential insights. As usual, the unfailing intellectual and personal support of Tom Stammers was invaluable, while Simon Mills and Anna Tobert also offered sustained encouragement. Itay Noy lent extremely generous technical assistance and humour. Thanks finally to my family, to whom I am deeply indebted for their lifelong moral support and generosity of wisdom. v List of figures Figure 1: Ideal relationship in five years time by marital status (Natsal-2) 61 Figure 2: Ideal relationship in five years time by social class (Natsal-2) 62 Figure 3: Property size for private sector and total housing completion (Mintel) 85 Figure 4: Causes of loneliness chart (Singles) 91 Figure 5: ‘How singles live’ chart (Singles) 92 vi Introduction In February 1981, Elaine Weeks, a newly trained nurse working at St Mary’s Paddington, was still single. She was 31 and had tried various means of meeting men – membership at the BFI, a series of subscriptions with a computer dating firm, and even a temporary office job where she knew there would be more male colleagues than there were in nursing. But nobody special enough emerged. So she decided to look at the well-known lonely hearts section of Time Out. Among a sea of men ‘bigging themselves up’, one ad caught her eye.1 This one didn’t boast about his directorship of a company (what those companies were almost always remained vague); instead it read: ‘“NOT a thrusting CEO, but rather, a calm, articulate arts graduate’. ‘That sounds more like it,’ Weeks remembered thinking, and wrote to him. Their first date at a pub in Paddington led to subsequent dates and an eventual happy marriage. Elaine, born in 1951, was – like many of her contemporaries – a new kind of woman: the first in her family to go to university, the first in generations to leave northern England for London, the first to take the Pill as an unmarried woman, the first to work alongside ‘brazen’ socialist feminists. Her romantic story has a happier ending than many, but she was also just one of thousands of people who for the first time had moved away, either figuratively or literally, from their social and family networks and turned to mediated matchmaking between 1970 and 2000.2 Singles like Elaine faced an expanded field of businesses pitching solutions to their romantic status, from singles clubs to lonely hearts adverts to dating agencies. Indeed in the three decades preceding the rise of internet dating in Britain, matchmaking services proliferated sharply, not only cashing in on a swelling supply of singles resulting from soaring divorce rates and loosening in attitudes towards sex and marriage, but gaining visibility in print and on broadcast media.3 Matchmaking services in Britain were centuries-old, but had, since the matrimonial adverts of the 17th century, been both disparate and ephemeral. 1Interview with Zoe Strimpel (ZS hereafter). Oral history interviews with ZS hereafter referred to simply as ‘interview’ unless further clarification needed, 13 April 2016, London. 2Mediated matchmaking is defined in this thesis as the search for dates via a paid-for third party. 3In Britain, the percentage of adults married at any one time fell from 65 in the mid-1960s to 53 in 2006. The 1970s saw the sharpest rise in divorce rates. ‘Divorces in England and Wales, 2010’, Office of National Statistics, www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171778_246403.pdf, p. 2 and Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence: Self Control and Wellbeing in the United States and Great Britain since 1950 (Oxford, 2006), p. 336. Verifiable statistics representing numbers of matchmaking companies at any time during this period are unavailable, and this problem will be discussed in depth later on. 1 Ephemerality remained a defining feature, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that commercial solutions to singleness began to form a critical mass. In one article on the subject in 1970, The Daily Mail noted that ‘the lonely hearts business is booming as never before’.4 By 1992, one newspaper estimated that 130,000 people were using agencies, most of which had been set up since 1970, with a spike in the 1980s.5 In 2000, the British dating industry was estimated at a still relatively modest £50m but was attracting 6 ever more extreme forecasts of growth, in line with rising numbers of single people. The dating industry in Britain in the three decades preceding the normalisation of internet dating – 1970-2000 – is the subject of this thesis. Despite its rapid growth both in real terms and visibility in this period, mediated dating remained a relatively uncommon method of finding a partner through the end of the 20th century. Based on the conservative figure above of 130,000 (not including those who placed or responded to lonely hearts adverts), only about 3 per cent of an unmarried population of around 6 million were using mediated dating. As will be discussed in more detail below, precise or reliable figures for how many people were actually using these services at any given time are not available. Moreover, there are inconsistencies in how ‘single’ was defined, since actual romantic status could be obscured by terms such as ‘single person household’, ‘cohabitation’ and ‘unmarried’.