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Scottish Tradition Vol. 27 2002 WORKING CLASS CULTURE, FAMILY LIFE AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE ON CLYDESIDE, C 1918-1939: A VIEW FROM BELOW. ‘People have no idea how the poor lived in those days. They seemed to be at loggerheads all the time.’ 1 he inter-war years were distinguished by marked changes that affected the lives and neighbourhoods of Tmany working class men and women. These changes would prove to have positive and negative implications for working-class family life. New employment opportunities extended the breadth of jobs open to working class people, espe- cially in the new consumer industries that employed significant numbers of women. Correspondingly, the commercialisation of leisure expanded the possibilities of pleasure. Information on birth control and the greater ease of availability of contraceptives also offered a better potential to postpone marriage and reduce family size. Yet, the new employment opportunities did little to alter the ‘pin money’ wages of women and women’s economic dependency on marriage. Marriage was still seen as an attractive alternative to employment in the longer term.2 Marriage and motherhood were actively promoted as the natural and fulfilling aspirations for women by the state, state agencies, the clergy, religious organisations and the media. Adding to the appeal was the ideal of the ‘companionate marriage’ in which husbands were expected to share chores, child-care, leisure and provide love and companionship. It seems that this was a ‘fairly norma- tive’ aspiration amongst many sectors of the working class between the wars, at least amongst women. Change, however, was not just ideological.3 After World War I, the building of ‘homes fit for heroes’ and the growth of ‘new garden cities’, were linked with ideals of the companionate marriage, maternalism, privacy, respectable domesticity and the growth of male home- centred pastimes.
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