ABSTRACT
Although most commentators and social historians charting the changes which have taken place in marriage and domestic life since the end of the Second World War emphasise the importance of marriage as a now almost universal experience, there is much less agreement about the direction and significance of change within marriage itself. Such uncertainties and potential disagreements do of course have many origins. On the one hand, beliefs safeguarding the privacy of domestic life, and couple relationships in particular, make it very difficult to know what actually goes on in families and households from day to day. This is in turn compounded by our often uncritical acceptance of social arrangements within society to the extent that family circumstances may be seen to be determined by the ‘facts’ of human nature, requiring no explanation or interpretation. Also, and somewhat paradoxically, despite this bedrock of taken-forgranted beliefs about the naturalness of our own family patterns, episodes of mediagenerated public concern about the apparent erosion of commitment to conventional patterns of marriage in the post-war period, particularly among women, have periodically transformed marriage into what C. Wright Mills describes as a ‘public issue’, when ‘some value cherished by publics is felt to be threatened’ (Wright Mills 1959:15). Thus members of the generation that in their twenties married immediately after the Second World War have not only witnessed the increasing popularity of marriage among younger generations, but have also had to come to terms with the way increases in divorce, remarriage, and unmarried cohabitation seem to have undermined these ‘cherished values’.
