About the research
Pat Thane is Research Professor at King’s College, London and Professor Emerita of the University of London. Dr Tanya Evans is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University. This project was conducted at the Contemporary British History Unit in the Institute of Historical Research, University of London.
Little is known, in specific terms, about unmarried mothers between the First World War and the mid-1990s. Ignorance about the subject has had important ramifications for policy making and for the representation of unmarried mothers. This project, by Thane and Evans was the first detailed study of unmarried motherhood in England and Wales between World War I and the 1970s.
The project included a reanalysis of previously unused archived data – including the Dennis Marsden study Mothers Alone: Poverty and the Fatherless Family and material on One Parent Families from The National Archives. These findings provided evidence of changes since 1918 in the experiences of unmarried mothers and their children. It also highlighted some of the attitudes towards them and their treatment by the local community and by official and unofficial agencies. The findings postulate that the growth in unmarried motherhood since the 1970s has a longer history then is generally appreciated and that recent attitudinal and structural aspects of family life are not new. Indeed, since the 1970s there has been a return to much older norms of serial partnerships, complex families, and late marriage ages, though in a different mortality regime and legal and cultural context from that of earlier periods.
Publications
Pat Thane (2011), ‘Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth-Century England’, Women’s History Review, 20(1): pp. 11-29.
Tanya Evans and Pat Thane (2006), ‘Secondary Analysis of Dennis Marsden Mothers Alone’, Methodological Innovations Online, 1(2).