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Eleanor Gordon et al., "Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Podcast Host
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Katie Barclay
hello
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today because we get to talk about quite an interesting book published by Oxford University Press in 2025, titled Working Class Courtship, Marriage and Divorce in Scot 1855-1939, which is a book that looks at kind of not where we often focus, right? Often when we're talking about courtship and marriage in the 1800s, we're looking at the upper classes or maybe the middle classes, but we don't usually look at the working class, maybe because we often assume there aren't sources. This book, however, shows us that there really is quite a lot to look at and talk about and analyze if we take this particular approach. So it was written by three authors, Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Kate, Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meek. And I have the pleasure of having Eleanor and Katie with me on the podcast to tell us about it. So Katie and Eleanor, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for having us. Before we get too far into the details of the project that the three of you have put together, could you each introduce yourselves a Little bit. And tell us why you decided to do this as a group. Eleanor, maybe you can start us off.
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Eleanor Gordon
Yes, I was getting particularly hot and bothered about a number of articles in the press just before we started the project, which kept going on about the breakdown of the traditional family. I mean, the use of traditional was never actually made clear and sometimes it was used contradictorily. So, as you said, in fact, lots of the studies of families, certainly book length studies, have been of upper class, middle class, for fairly obvious reasons. It is definitely easier to get sources in that group. But we felt that it would be useful to look at this through the lens of the working class. Now, obviously, I mean, historians have written for a number of years that families in the past have not necessarily been stable units, that there have been a variety of forms of the family, that families have been fluid in the past. But we wanted to look particularly at working class families because we felt, as you've already said, that they'd been particularly neglected. And we also, as mainly historians of Scotland, we wanted to look at Scotland because although there had been some articles written, particularly by historical demographers, there really hadn't been much written on the Scottish working class. So it was for those two main reasons, basically, to fill in gaps and in place and space. That was the motivation behind it. And also we were aware that the working classes were not a homogenous class. And so we thought we'd try and have a look at whether there were any differences within the working class again, whether, you know, in terms of geography or place or whatever. So we decided that we would look at different areas, contrasting areas, terms of economic and occupational structure, and have a look whether there weren't any differences within the working classes as well. So that was really the motivation behind it.
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Katie Barclay
Yeah, I came onto this project slightly later than Eleanor. Jeff and Eleanor were kind of there from the beginning, but I had written a book on lower order Scots, we might call them, then, from the period sort of 1650-1830s or so. And I was. So I had kind of been interested in their love life, their family life, their. That rich complexity of the lower orders that would then become the working class. And so then when Eleanor started this amazing project, basically on the period that immediately followed my project, and having completed my project and she invited me to come on and get involved, I was really keen to do that because I was like, yeah, let's find out what happens and next. Where do my people go? What happens with modernity and those kinds of new questions? So it was a really Great opportunity to come and extend the conversation from what I'd been doing originally.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's always such an interesting thing to kind of go, okay, I finished my project. Oh, wait, I can keep going. Right. And to address, Eleanor, as you said, kind of issues within the historiographical literature, but also kind of the things that then make the news as well. Right. This makes sense as a whole combination of reasons that you'd all want to want to work on this project. So getting into then to what you all found in this time period. Right, so we're talking again, 1855 to 1939. What are the main types of family formation found in Scotland? And Eleanor, picking up your point, do we see, for example, urban versus rural variation? We don't obviously want to fall into the trap of saying, like, every family is a mum and a dad and two kids. Right. So what are the types of family formation that we're seeing?
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Eleanor Gordon
Well, unsurprisingly, actually the picture is quite muddied. Although if you were to take a snapshot, you would say that the dominant kind of family was nuclear, that is parents with children, and that that was the dominant kind of family over the entire period. However, once you dig a bit deeper, you find that, no, it's not quite as simple as that. If you're talking about pure nuclear in the sense of just two parents and their children, then no, it's not the dominant kind of family. Because what we found was that there was a huge number of boarders and lodgers and families, particularly in urban areas. And if you included them, and it's important to remember that many of these boarders and lodgers were related to the parent family, including those immigrants who came from Europe, Eastern Europe. Many of them were related or had ties with the family that they were lodging with. So if you look at just parents, two parents and children, no, the nuclear family isn't dominant at all. And in fact, the combination of all types of households, like extended, where there are wider family members, single parents, et cetera, outnumber the pure nuclear units. What we did find, you mentioned about rural and urban differences was that extended families where there were wider family members living with parents and children, were more common in rural and island areas than in urban areas. And that's basically related to different occupational and economic structures. For example, in Skye, you find that because of the crofting, small scale farming, they're pretty reliant on family members for that. So that makes sense that family members are more likely to live with them in the more, let's say Large scale farming areas in the capitalist farming if you like, in Aberdeenshire, again, they're more reliant on family labor, although perhaps not quite as much. So there are definitely rural and urban differences in terms of extended families being more common in rural areas. But you can't actually talk about a uniform rural pattern. So there are differences there. And certainly what we found was a huge number of single parent families ranging anything from 17% to to 25%. And the large majority of them, three quarters and more were female headed. And again, I guess that's not terribly surprising because there are a number of reasons that you would get large numbers of single parent families like death, desertion, husbands, migrating. And although widows were certainly the highest category, because in the census there isn't a category or there aren't categories for deserted and divorced, it's actually difficult to establish the extent of that. So it looks like widows were the highest percentage of single parent. But for example, in sky, we found that a quarter of the single parent female headed single parent families were actually married or put down in the census that were married. So that's probably, probably indicates a temporary separation because many of the men who were in employed were in fishing and would have been away from home. And the other kind of family we found, although unfortunately not really possible to give the precise extent of it, is blended families. Clearly not a new phenomenon. Again, death and desertion provide a fairly big pool of married people without a partner. And as I said, a sense. This isn't really very helpful for telling you the extent of blended families because if a man remarries a woman who doesn't have children, we have no way of knowing what the relationship of these children is to the mother. But if you do look at other records like birth records, marriage record, poor law applications, that does help you unearthly blended families that appear in the census to be either simple nuclear families or extended units. But I think the takeaway from family types in this period, probably as in any period, is that individual families change their shape across time. A parent dies, an elderly or younger relative comes to live with the family husbands deserve. So in fact there's a kaleidoscope of family forms.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
So thank you for taking us through the different types of family and kind of the reasons for which we might see those variations. It's definitely helpful to understand that some of these terms that might seem really modern actually do have roots further back than we might think. But for those family formations that you mentioned that do have marriages in them, can you tell us more about how Those marriages formed. I mean, what sorts of courting practices, for example, do we see?
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Eleanor Gordon
Well, I think probably I'd want to look at the pew before the First World War and then look at the interwar period. I think what struck us was that both in both rural and urban areas, courtship was usually formed confined to the familiar territories of neighborhood, kinship and friendship networks. For example, in Highland and island communities where you often met outdoors, young people might gather in a familiar place and have spontaneous with music and dancing. But even when these young people migrated to the mainland and. And many of them did, family networks continued to be an important source of meeting people. I mean, Glasgow, for example, had a dense network of social and cultural Gaelic institutions and it made it easy to meet up with fellow Gaels. Also, I quite like the fact that a friend of mine's great grandparents met. They were from, well, Lewis, under what we call in Glasgow the Hielandman's umbrella, which is the Highlandman's umbrella, which actually is the bridge under Central Station, so called because it was a favorite spot for Highlanders. For Gaels to meet up under the bridge meant that they wouldn't get wet on a Saturday, usually a Saturday, the weekend that they met up. So there was family networks, you know, spanned across, across place. Obviously, towns and cities provided more opportunities for casual encounters in an anonymous settings. Like, we had sales down the cloud, we had fairs. Then, of course, you've got the street culture. In Aberdeen, it was called walking the mat, which basically means, you know, throngs of young people walking up and down the. The center of town, the tablets to see and be seen and just have a fun and banter with the opposite sex. And although there were greater opportunities for more anonymous encounters in towns and cities, it was still the case that local groups like church groups or youth groups were the primary means of meeting the opposite sex. And another feature of the period, and this is true across regions, is trying to escape the scrutiny of parents and the community, which of course could lead to all sorts of ingenious ways for a couple trying to get together. Like there's examples in Barra and Lewis of meeting during the night in the cellar of a house. In towns, it would be in what we call the back court at the back of the close. So in towns as it is, as well as in Highland and island areas, it was quite difficult to try and escape the parental gaze. And this one practice, which is referred to quite a lot, called bundling in Shetland, which is where parents thought they're going to get together anyway, so they might as well get together in the house. And so a couple would maybe lie in a bed fully clothed and the parents would feel, well, at least we know they're there, they're not out getting up to goodness knows what, we have some control over them. So the kind of parental control and regulation was something that featured in the kind of network, being very small, in which people would meet up. The interwar years did bring significant changes for the period, I suppose, particularly in, in the towns. Because of course you've got the growth of commercial leisure like dance halls and cinemas. I mean, the number of cinemas even in small towns was amazing. I mean, Dundee, which is Scotland's smallest town, had 31 dance halls. And even in a small town like clydebank, there'd be six or seven cinemas, there'd be 800 cinemas all over Scotland. So they provided pretty good opportunities for couples to meet up and developed and increased the opportunities for casual encounters in anonymous settings. In rural and island areas, obviously commercial leisure was much less developed. But even there there was technological advances like the motorized charabag, which was able to transport people to various areas and so could boost the number that could attend venues. So yeah, the interwar period did bring about significant changes in courtship practices. Mainly the fact that there was more anonymous settings in the urban areas. But I think you can exaggerate the extent which young people could participate in the, in these leisure, commercialized leisure activities because we're limited by gender, income, locality and of course, parental regulations. So I think yes, there were changes, but we were also struck by the continuities with the pre war period. Informal and communal networks of kin, friends and neighborhood still provided important courtship opportunities. And of course, parental regulation did not go away. Many women when interviewed referred to the fact that they were watched like a hawk by their parents. So yeah, I guess the interwar period did bring about changes, but I think we have to be aware of the continuities as well. One area that we were interested in though, was extent to which the choice of marriage partner was governed by different factors. So much has been written about the rise of romantic love in the 20th century. You know, the kind of triumph of love over money in choosing a life partner. But the evidence that we looked at suggested that pragmatic considerations were more often to the fore for the working classes. And the qualities that are really valued in a partner by young women were reliability, stability, respectability. And I think it's summed up by two women from the west of Scotland. When asked why they chose their husbands, one replied, well, he didn't get into trouble. And the other one said, well, his mother set a lovely table. So you can see how respectability, reliability were pretty important. That isn't to say that young working class people weren't interested in romantic love, just that maybe it wasn't sufficient in itself to sustain a relationship given the economic insecurities of working class existence. But the other factor in Katie's this is one of her areas of interest. Pragmatic considerations certainly don't exclude love. And the women were clearly knew all the hot about romance because films of the period, the novels of the period, but we've tended to place emphasis on emotional intimacy as a primary marker of love, when in fact love can be expressed in different ways. It can take many forms. It can be expressed in practical care and sharing. So although we found that pragmatic considerations were the primary ones for young working class people choosing a partner, if you expand and explore the meanings of love, then you can say that love too was a factor, but expressed differently. I don't know if you want to say anything about that, Katie.
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Katie Barclay
Yeah, I think it's, I guess even today, like if you ask people now, what is a sign that you're in Britain, what's a sign that your partner loves you? And they all go to the fact that they bring tea to them in the morning, right. And so the cup of tea is a kind of iconic symbol of love in British families. And so I think it's that kind of idea that they saw the pragmatic kinds of care that the provision from men or the housework from women, women, not as just, you know, things that you did in the house, but actually ways that you demonstrated your love and care. So it kind of wraps in the practice practices, the gendered practices that you do in the everyday life into the experience of love for this group.
- [21:46]
Eleanor Gordon
I could, I just heard, I thought quite an amusing story the other day and it was about someone's partner and she said to her husband, look, love is a doing word, it's a verb. And this was usually said when he hadn't emptied the dishwasher. So I thought that quite a good illustration of the pragmatic aspect of love.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's quite a good example there to get an insight into kind of what this all means for daily, you know, everyday life. So thank you for helping us understand those aspects and the change as well with the interwar period. Thinking about, I don't remember now which of you mentioned it, but kind of the Scotland specificness of this one thing that I found really interesting was the discussion in the book about why there were more illegitimate births of children in Scotland as compared to England throughout the period, or obviously seen to be more illegitimate births in Scotland than England. Can we talk about what's going on there?
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Katie Barclay
Yep, I can do that if you like. It's quite an interesting question, first of all, about how much more illegitimacy there is in Scotland. It used to be considered the classic country for illegitimacy that we hit very high rates. And it's certainly true that there are some places, like Aberdeen, for example, where we do seem to have very exceptionally high rates of illegitimate. But across, I guess the period of this study, at least they kind of sit between 5 and 10% of births are illegitimate births. So that's a good number. It's not a minority experience, but it's not a tiny experience or a rare experience. You probably know plenty of people who were born outside of marriage, if one in 10 people are. But on the other hand, if we start to go out to Europe, Austria has higher rates than that. England's are lower, but they're not a huge amount lower. And so we get. So there's a kind of interesting question of how exceptional is Scotland really? And why is it exceptional? Why would that be the case? And so then we kind of look at the groups where we are seeing high rates of villages missing. I think this is where the occupation and the family set up matters a lot. So in Aberdeen, where we get really high rates, they have. They live on farms with lots of young people who are living together as servants. So the have lots of opportunities to meet people who. Who they with. So there's more opportunities for sex and there's a kind of structure there where those illegitimate children are taken in by the grandparents and so the stigma is less high. And it may well be that they're kind of. Also, they do it as a prelude to marriage. So even if you have the child outside the outside of marriage, it doesn't ever marry. And so there's a kind of a different kind of culture operating that creates more. More space for kind of accidents, shall we say, of the legitimate child and for that not to be so substantive in your life. But we can go across to Shetland where the. Or to the islands where they have very, very low rates of illegitimacy and where they have much, very strict moral rules and where that might be much more significant to your life if something like that happened.
- [25:02]
Eleanor Gordon
Yeah, but I think if I can come in here, I think it's Also important to talk about the variety. Katie's talked about Aberdeenshire, but even within rural Aberdeenshire, communities vary in the extent of illegitimacy. That's not to say that Katie was explaining isn't the case. I think just the regional variation isn't just a feature of Scotland and not just regional variation. Variation within rural communities and even island communities. And although, again, we must remember we're dealing with very small numbers to talk about, percentages might be skewing it a bit, but there's definitely differences amongst Ireland communities as well. And that kind of regional variation is very common throughout Europe. Would you agree with that, Katie?
- [25:57]
Katie Barclay
Yeah, I mean, it's quite interesting that also that some countries where you get a lot of urban illegitimacy, and then other countries it's all pathetically around, and it's the rural spaces where you get lots of illegitimacy. So it's actually really hard to kind of say, oh, yeah, there's a pattern. If you all go and live in towns, you'll have illegitimate children. That's not really the case at all. It's very kind of. I guess it varies a lot. And trying to figure out those patterns, I think has stumped quite a lot of us.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, figuring out patterns like that can definitely be tricky, but interesting to kind of get an insight of what's going on here, obviously, in terms of statistics, but also like this kind of social relations. Right. And all of this is kind of what people make of it. So that's a really helpful aspect of insight to have into this. And obviously, I would imagine one of the tricky parts of figuring this out is because kind of what the officials, right, who are generally not working class, are saying about all of this. Right. Going back almost, Eleanor, to what you're saying about kind of news reports now around the breakdown of marriage. Right. Like, we certainly see those kinds of things in this time period, too. So what were legislators and officials trying to make working class marriages kind of fit into? Like, what were they sort of encouraging people to do with rules or norms or news reports? What were they trying to make happen?
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Katie Barclay
So a great question. And also because we can think about moral panics and what they are concerned with, but what they actually want as a result of that is not always as clear. But the illegitimacy question is really interesting because illegitimacy has been known in Scotland well before the period of our study. But suddenly, in 1855, you start to register births, and suddenly that makes it very evident on the Record, right, that. Oh, hang on, there's all these illegitimate children. We can count them now. We can see them very visibly. And so then there's a big moral panic in the press and all the moral commentators come out to say, isn't it shocking all these terrible women, they're poor. Some are very Victorian in this. I guess they think, oh, the poor women, they've been completely corrupted by the quality of the housing and the fact they live on top of each other and they really need to save from those conditions. And other people think, oh, no, these are all hussies. And really they're all just naturally sinful. And so there's kind of a public debate, I guess, around what the problem is. And then also then how you would resolve the problem. But it's also a problem that's created by records. Until they started counting, we didn't actually know the scale of this problem. They never really approved of illegitimacy, but they didn't think it was necessarily a huge problem until you saw on, I guess, the page. And so it's kind of interesting, a kind of statistical event creates a particular kind of response and a kind of set of questions around, well, how do we actually deal with this? But I mean, more generally, they are. This is a period where they're looking at families in general, marriage in general. They're trying to say, well, how do we make this more regular, more organized? How do we ensure that people have access to the rights and resources that become attached to marriage? That becomes very important during the wars when, if your husband goes off to war, then you're entitled to money, to a pension, and so you need that marriage certificate. And so there's kind of these hot points in history, I guess, where events happen that put pressure on the system, which then suddenly creates a problem where you need to prove a marriage and you suddenly discover all these women who aren't married or who you thought were married but don't have a certificate.
- [29:32]
Eleanor Gordon
And what does that mean?
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Katie Barclay
And so it's kind of interesting that they see these kind of problems and they're trying to create new regulations to kind of manage that. And so we start to see the requirements to register marriages. And so you have to have that registration or that you. That they try to get rid of certain forms of marriage where irregular marriages, which were legal in Scotland, they thought we should get rid of that because we should try to make it as simple as possible for people to know that they're married and to prove that they're married. And so they're kind of bringing in these rules that in a way are actually disciplining people and disciplining them into a particular form of marriage, but which is often actually driven by a sense of their need to protect the working class, that they see them as people who don't know how to navigate systems that they need to manage. I think we can question that. I think often working class people are astute, or some of them certainly are, know what they're doing and how they're navigating these systems. But it's a kind of interesting back and forth as two groups of people are trying to kind of negotiate what moral life, what family life should be, and how the state will sort of create regulation to support that.
- [30:41]
Eleanor Gordon
I think that's. Yeah, that. That's all very true. But I think one other thing that is really important to emphasize is that although we're talking about illegitimacy here, it kind of sounds as if those who had illegitimate children were somehow socially distinct from the rest of the population. But I think you have to place it in the context of marriage practices, meanings of marriage, the legal regulations or the legalities surrounding marriage. And what you find is that there was actually a lot of sex outside marriage during this time. Not all of it resulted in illegitimate children. We don't actually get official figures of bridal pregnancies, for example, until 1939, when it's estimated about 30% of children were born before the parents were married. So if you put illegitimacy figures in bridal pregnancy to pregnancies together, I think you get quite an interesting picture of working class attitudes to sex outside marriage, because it suggests that it was pretty commonplace. Not saying that indicated an alternative sexual culture on the part of the working class. That very often sexual relationships were associated with normal courtship practices, particularly when married or a stable non marital union was the expected outcome. Certainly legitimacy on occasions resulted from casual sexual encounters. But generally it can't really be understood without referring to the kind of courtship customs and marriage processes. And in Scotland in particular, the fluidity and the ambiguity, the meaning of marriage. I mean, very often the parents of illegitimate children were actually in stable relationships. There are certainly ones that involved them living together. If you look at birth records, for example, in both Glasgow and Kilmarnock, you find that quite a large number of children who were registered as illegitimate had parents who were living together. Well, they certainly gave the same address. Maybe we couldn't make the assumption that all of them live together. So there's a really, really broad line between Illegitimacy and let's say the rest of the population who've maybe had sex before marriage, when, as I say, probably marriage was the expected outcome, I guess, you know, with courtship, when it got derailed for whatever reason, illegitimacy or an illegitimate child could be the outcome. So I think it's quite important to say that although the working class may not have an alternative sexual culture, nonetheless their attitude to sex outside marriage was more pragmatic and certainly not shaped solely by the moral discourses of elite society.
- [34:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting to be able to understand kind of the variations that the official records kind of do and don't sort of know how to make sense of. Are there any other sorts of relationships that we want to talk about outside these definitions of marriage?
- [34:19]
Eleanor Gordon
Well, this is the kind of what you might call non traditional relationships. Basically, there are three types. Katie's mentioned irregular marriage, which had been abolished in actually most European countries long before it was abolished in Scotland, which was 1939. I mean, in 1753, Hardwicke's act abolished irregular marriage in England. What it meant, irregular marriage was a simple exchange of consent without formal solemnization or notice. And as Katie suggested, over our time period, the definition of irregular marriage tightened to such an extent and was controlled more so that it resembled more civil marriage. But initially, for much of the period, irregular marriage simply meant, you know, exchanging consent. With the advent of more and more benefits, state benefits, which required proof of marriage, you find that there is, you know, an increase in registered irregular marriages, because that's another way that the state tried to control irregular marriages. They really weren't really happy with it. But one way of controlling was to say, okay, you say you're married irregular, you exchanged consent, but you need to register it to prove that you are married. And so you find within more state benefits been introduced that you get a higher number of irregular marriages registered. For example, in the First World War, with separate introduction of separation allowance and widows pensions, et cetera, you find a huge increase in the number of registered irregular marriages. It was something like 25% of all marriages in the two towns, Glasgow and the two cities rather. And even after the war, the extent of irregular marriage averaged about 12% in the country as a whole. So that was pretty unusual in the European context. And of course, Katie's talked about cohabitation and again, not really possible to determine the extent of it. But you look at records like criminal prosecutions for desertion, poor law applications, charitable society records, and you get an indication of the extent of cohabitation, although it is only touching the tip of the iceberg, because if you don't encounter any of the institutions of the state, you know, if you're not requiring benefits or whatever, well, you'll remain under the radar. Certainly authorities became concerned at the high numbers of people cohabiting, not during the first world War. They became concerned about it because they realized if all these people were registering an irregular marriage in order to get a benefit, it probably meant that they'd been living together. So we can only kind of poke away and get indications of the extent of cohabitation. So can't say the exact numbers, but it certainly wasn't unusual. And of course bigamy, I guess, is another form of irregular union. And again, that's usually related to the difficulties surrounding divorce and the kind of cost, I suppose, of divorce, amongst other things. But bigamy has a huge spike during and after the first world War because of obviously the disruptions and the of importance for separation of couples. Again, with bigamy, you only know the ones that are found out and there'll be a whole swathe of people that bigamously married unlike. And it always amuses me that people think of bigamy as the sort of archetypal cases, some man usually maintaining two separate families and they don't know about each other. But actually the cases that we found, and there were 3,000 cases of bigamy in Scotland between 1859 and 1939, compared now to about five or six prosecutions a year. It usually involves again, usually a man who's deserted their family or they've agreed to separate, sometimes called self divorce. And the partner, often the woman, usually doesn't know about it. Sometimes they do, but often as not they don't. And again, why commit bigamy? Well, again, the barriers to divorce and legal separation could lead to bigamous unions. You often found that maybe couples where they knew that the other person had a partner, maybe lived together, and then when the woman became pregnant, they may marry bigamously, of course. So some people perhaps mistakenly believed too that if they separated from a spouse and it had been mutually agreed, then they were entitled to remarry. And that had to be believed in self divorce, which of course wasn't actually the case. So again, there's a variety of unions outside legally valid marriage.
- [39:53]
Katie Barclay
And I think that the reason we see more men here is actually just about the reasons that prosecutions happen. And so we, the reason we find that about bigamy is usually because a woman has been deserted and calls on the the state or an organization in order to. To get out some sort of support. And they say, well, where's your husband? And then they go off and they look for him and then they discover him married to someone else. And it's that, that moment of encounter with the state that causes a prosecution to happen. And I think you just don't see it the other way around. In the same way, men don't come to these institutions and ask for support. And so because of the imbalance and who's asking for support is creating a kind of idea that men do it more. But I suspect actually you see, have a lot of women in bigamish relationships as well because their marriages break down, you know, they move on. Mother lives as people do today, and they just forget that key step, which is you should have got divorced at some point.
- [40:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, so what I'm hearing is kind of a lot of disconnect, I suppose, in sort of what's officially on paper and what people are actually doing with their lives. So is there anything else we want to discuss in terms of people's everyday experiences of marriage, kind of whether or not they meet legislative expectations?
- [41:09]
Katie Barclay
Yeah, I mean, I guess another part of the story is also I say about the regulation of married life, which perhaps impacts the poor maybe more than other groups. So, you know, there's rules around whether you're allowed to be married and who you're allowed to be married to and what counts as a valid marriage. But then there's also sort of social expectations around how you behave in marriage. Should you provide for your wife, should you keep your house clean, should you look after your children and educate them and make sure they're kept up to certain standards? And so there's kind of these everyday experiences that are married. And what we kind of see in this period is that people become increasingly concerned with poverty as a sign of neglect, as a sign of lack of respectability. And so you have these institutions, especially when there's children involved coming in and interfering, going, oh, that child not well fed enough, or that child isn't clean enough. And then they come into the house and they go, this house isn't clean enough. It needs to be cleaner if you're going to have children in this house. And so you've kind of got this sort of regulatory structure that kind of has a. This particular model for family life or for cleanliness or respectability, that if you want support, you definitely need to kind of conform. But even if you don't, as say, the Society for the Protection of Children appears and they are more interested in policing behavior. You suddenly get people disciplining you much more overtly and openly than perhaps you would have had a century before. And so in some ways, this kind of negotiation, negotiation about between, like, how you can live because of how much money you've got and what's possible if you're both out at work and you're raising children. And this kind of expectation that is being regulated by institutions, by people inspecting your house and by schools would be the one. When you send your kids to school,
- [42:52]
Eleanor Gordon
they're keeping an eye on this stuff.
- [42:54]
Katie Barclay
And so there's kind of these interesting tensions, I guess, that are being produced here.
- [43:01]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
What does that mean in terms of kind of how people relate to each other, like, with care and affection? Right. I mean, there was one great example, I think, Eleanor, you threw in earlier around kind of deal with the dishes, you know, being an expression of love. What did that mean? When we're talking, for example, about kids and skills, like, did parents go around saying I love you to their children? Like, what. What were those kinds of emotional aspects of these relationships? How were those expressed?
- [43:29]
Katie Barclay
These are some of the challenging things to really get at. And so what we had to do here is we looked at some oral histories of people talking about their childhood and their relationship with their parents. And we sometimes have diaries, memoirs, usually written by people who become, like, trade unionists and who are a little bit more educated. So you're kind of trying to get these personal records to get at these emotions. But what we're kind of seeing here is what we suggested earlier about courtship is that love in working class households kind of becomes informed by these kind of gendered norms, these expectations of respectability. And so what they want is a husband who shows his love by going to work and working hard and bringing home, you know, money or other things to support the family. And what you want from a wife is somebody who makes sure the children are clean and looks clean when they go to school. And so you kind of show your affection through what you do, through how you behave. And so then there's this great question which we were thinking about is, so do you say I love you to each other? Is that something that happens? And we think perhaps they did in private. And of course, there's not very many, but occasional letter that survives from the script sometimes does will say express love to each other. But what we also kind of learned from the oral history are people that not like talking about this. And so we kind of got this impression that there was a sort of Reticence around expressing emotion publicly, but especially to people outside of the marital unit. And so there was a kind of sense of which you can show your love, you can display that to anybody who's watching, but you don't actually articulate it or say it. And then when we asked, when they looked at the kids and said, were they being told that their parents loved them? And. And they didn't really have many examples of that. They weren't. The children weren't saying, yeah, dad said he loved me. But they did. On the other hand, they did get kisses. Some of them did. And they did get hugs. The children talked about fun experiences that they had with the parents. Not all parents, but lots of parents. You know, they remember baking with a loving father, or they remember a mother who took them on a nice trip. So they had, like all children, these childhood memories that stood out as moments of family affection. So again, there wasn't like loud acclamations of love, but there was these kind of events or practices that children, as adults, because they've been interviewed as adults, remembered as demonstrating they had a loving parent or a loving family life. And I guess the other side of that is, of course, what happens when love fails. And I think that was also the interesting thing for us is when we looked at the really extreme cases of domestic violence, the ones that come before the courts, where you see, like, quite a lot of. We have a lot of information for which are really the worst cases. Often what you saw wasn't just an example of somebody who was violent, but somebody who didn't provide. So it's usually men who are violent, not exclusively, but often didn't provide for their wives. They oftentimes had deserted them, came back. There was tensions in the household around money and resources and how the household functioned. And so what you kind of got from these stories was that when people actually pushed for prosecutions around violence, everything was pretty miserable already. And that made us suspect that, in fact, that perhaps some of these other households tolerated domestic violence. But if everything else was good, your husband brought the money home to the household, you had a nice house and your children were well fed and clean, that you actually tolerated certain kinds of violence because everything else was loving. Right. It was one bad thing in a loving relationship. And it was really when everything. When the signs of love had really dissipated across the board that suddenly people. It's worthwhile for them to actually go to court to seek prosecutions. And I think that's kind of interesting as well.
- [47:23]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that is really interesting. Can we talk More about kind of what the end of marriages look like and the extent to which they were kind of always seen as a failure or a massive problem versus not.
- [47:33]
Eleanor Gordon
Well, again, if you're talking about attitudes, you know, there isn't one attitude either amongst the elite groups or working classes. I mean, the main ways of marriages to end in this period were widowhood, divorce, separation and desertion. And unsurprisingly, the most common way for marriages to end in this period is the death of one of the spouses. Perhaps more surprisingly, the death of a spouse. Also the most common way for marriages to end in the 21st century. I mean, all the talk about, you know, divorce, lone parents, et cetera, you think, you know, a partner dying, you know, doesn't figure terribly much the way marriages end. But it's the same now. So widowhood was the Rather death was the main way that marriage was ended. I suppose the difference between then and now, our period and now, is that there was a significant number of young widows, and I mean under 45, probably the. A fifth, 20% of widows were young. And that's definitely different from now. Divorce and separation actually were relatively rare, even in Scotland, where we had much more liberal divorce laws than England, and they did in many other European countries. I mean, in Scotland, men and women had access to divorce based on adultery. Equal access from the Reformation. And from about 1573, desertion became an additional ground. Cruelty wasn't grounds for divorce, but it was until 1938, but it was grounds for a separation. But despite, you know, the more liberal divorce laws, the incidence of divorce is actually pretty modest. And before the First World War, the number never reached more than 300 and odd. And there was a gradual increase after the war until about 1939, when, with the introduction of cruelty as grounds, that led to a significant increase. So by the end of our period, 1939, there are about 900 divorces recorded. So it's increased triple fold from before the war to the end of the period. So if it was easy, why didn't more people do it? Well, yeah, okay, it was relatively cheap again, compared to England, and legal aid was actually available, but it still required quite a big outlay because you had to travel through to Edinburgh in the Court of Session. But I suppose one of the main reasons that it wasn't more common was the lack of economic independence that most women had. And that was a powerful motive for staying in a happy marriage. And as well as financial barriers, there was like legal and social barriers. I mean, legal requirements are hedged for those sorts of conditions. The other way for marriage is to end. A common way we've talked about is desertion. Again, we can't accurately say how many marriages ended in desertion. The census is useless. Well, pretty useless when we're trying to find out the extent of desertion. We do know it was significant because there are other sources that tell us about it. But given the kind of obstacles to. To divorce that I've mentioned, it was actually an easier and more convenient way to end a marriage. And of course, desertion became more common with the rise of urbanization, immigration schemes, improved transport. So increased anonymity certainly made desertion a whole lot easier. Again, it's poor law records, charitable institution records, et cetera, that give you some insight into the extent. But again, it's just the tip of the iceberg. What you can say is before the First World War, there was over a thousand women, deserted women in Glasgow who were on the poor roll. And again, not all deserted women would have been in the poor roll. What we do see is the First World War making a huge impact on families and including all the ways of ending a marriage. Dramatic increase in the number of widows divorced and deserted, which obviously affected the stability of the family and changed the emotional landscape of the family. And importantly, we can't forget children. There was a dramatic increase in the number of children with only one parent. So desertion, widowhood, divorce, all increase as a result of the First World War and after it. And I suppose that it's again, as Katie was saying about records being kept, that increasing bureaucratization of the state and record keeping means. We've got a better insight into. Although, as I say, with desertion, it's a tricky one. It's very, very difficult to just get the true extent of it. Certainly in Scotland, I suppose we should say that one of the things that was marked was that it's usually acknowledged that a higher percentage of Scottish soldiers died during the First World War than elsewhere. And although the figures disputed it, it's actually been suggested that it was nearly double the number. Whether that's correct or not, I think it's acknowledged that more Scottish soldiers died. Now, though more Scottish soldiers were unmarried, it did actually. That's what increase exponentially the number of widows in Scotland. You were talking about the attitudes to marriage is ending. Well, I suppose what we talk about is attitudes to lone parents, really. And attitudes were contradictory and pretty complex. And of course, they shifted over time. By and large, the lone parents were subject to the kind of moralizing gaze of the Authorities, if they did, didn't conform to respectable standards of behavior and sexual morality was certainly very important as well as all the household keeping, keeping that. It was deemed, you know, to be of a high, it should be of a high standard. As well as that. We find, you know, the women were policed about their sexuality, particularly during the war where I guess it was a bit of a moral panic because there were so many lone women, separated women, so you find that benefits are removed if women breach the codes of respectability, if they seem to have a child, an illegitimate child, or they're cohabiting or whatever, then benefits are immediately stopped. And lots of, of lone women suffered as a result of that. And although there was a slightly more sympathetic attitude to widows, certainly before the war, during the war and after, actually widows are just subject to the same kind of pejorative and judgmental gaze as other lone parents. Attitudes do shift a bit over time depending on the social and the economic context. You begin to see the emergence of new organizations at the Scottish National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children or the National Council for Unmarried Women. And they've got a more sympathetic attitude towards unmarried mothers, illegitimacy and lone parents. So in terms of attitudes, well, there isn't just one in the part of the father. It's different and it changes over time. In terms of how the working class communities viewed lone parents, I think the prevalence of brotherhood and desertion amongst the working class would suggest that they weren't viewed as outsiders or a problem in the way that many elite groups did. So yeah, there was a pejorative attitude, definitely, but there was also different attitudes and there was also a bit of a change over time. But we certainly can't assume that the working classes had the same attitudes as authorities.
- [56:51]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Very interesting indeed. Katie, is there anything you'd like to add about this or any other aspect of the book we want to bring into our discussion before I draw it to a close?
- [57:01]
Katie Barclay
Not especially. I guess we could say how did we conclude? And that was. I think we felt that often because of the kinds of records we were using, we were accessing the poorest of people in Scotland and we were sometimes seeing them at their worst. We were seeing them in courts or when they had to go in front of the Poor Relief Council and ask for money because they were destitute. And so you kind of, you capture a lot of people at their worst. But we also hope that through looking at some oral histories, through looking at some other kinds records, we also got some, some of the more positive and perhaps actually more ordinary experiences of working class life. And not every working class person was so poor that they fell into kind of need, into the need for institutional care or engagement with the authorities. And so we kind of came to the conclusion in the end that they had rich lives. Many of them expressed happiness and satisfaction with their families, with the love that they had with a partner or with their children. And so we hope we capture some of that lovely complexity and humanness of our subjects, as well as all these kind of regulations and conditions that they lived under.
- [58:14]
Eleanor Gordon
Yes, I would echo that. And I think it's also important to say and restore to the working class some agency, because shifts in working class family practices and relationships have often been assumed to trail in the wake of choices made by the middle classes. And we really haven't found that. Obviously there was constraints, but within these constraints, the working class manage to make their own history, albeit in conditions what they are making.
- [58:46]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, I think that's a very good place, in fact, to end our discussion on the book. So my last question is just simply whether either of you, you have anything you're currently working on that you'd like to give us a sneak preview of. Perhaps Eleanor, you'd like to go first?
- [58:59]
Eleanor Gordon
Yes. Well, I'm retired, so I'm a professor emerita and I've taken that opportunity to do some research which I've just started on, on the women's in my own hometown, my own community, Clydebank, which is a working class area as town in the west of Scotland known for the Clydebank Blitz, and for the fact that there's a cradle of ship building and heavy industry from the late 19th century, right the way through till after the First World, Second World War. And in that story, certainly there have been women mentioned, but because it's been about the Blitz, because it's been the cradle of heavy industry or women in Clyde bank really have, they've disappeared under the radar. So I want to have a look at them and what they did in their own communities and their families and how the lives of people that are kind of overlooked and not talked about are actually as important as anybody else's who manages to hit the headlines.
- [60:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Lovely. Well, that certainly sounds interesting. Katie, what about you?
- [60:14]
Katie Barclay
Oh, well, I guess because I'm not retired, I'm getting paid to do some research. I've got a big grant at the moment called how to Feel Safe at the End of the World. But it actually looks at early modern children. So early modern is sort of 60 for me, 1600 to 1800. And I'm interested in families and children and how when you think the world is ending, which in the early modern period, some people did that mini ice age. You've got weird weather events and you've got famine and you've got plague. So there's plenty of signs that things are not well. And so people kind of live under the sense that the end is nigh. And I'm interested that when you live under those conditions, how do you get out of bed in the morning? But how do you create conditions of safety and security for your children? How do you imagine a future for. For them? How do you kind of keep moving forward and envision a new world when you're not sure that world is going to come? And you can imagine that there was maybe some modern and contemporary motivations for thinking about this problem.
- [61:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that doesn't sound relevant at all. Right. I mean, goodness. So clearly the both of you will be keeping very busy with fascinating projects, so, of course, best of luck with those. And while you're pursuing them, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Working Class Courtship, Marriage and Divorce in Scotland, 1855-1939, published by Oxford University Press in 2025. Eleanor, Katie, thank you both so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [61:47]
Katie Barclay
Oh, thank you for having.