Nuclear Housework and Atomic Washing Machines? The Role of the 'Traditional' Housewife in the Early Cold War
Since the dawn of civilisation, when stone age humans began bashing each other around the head with clubs, men have traditionally been the ones who did the fighting. Men went off to war, men did the slaughtering necessary to get the job done; men kept the women at home safe from marauding enemies.
Then came the atomic bomb.
Suddenly, battlefields were a thing of the past. Men couldn’t attack radiation with bayonets. Firestorms couldn’t be held back by a gun. With the advent of the atomic age, every home in every town, city and village became a target. Home was the new battlefield. In the 1940s and 1950s, the old adage, ‘a woman’s place is in the home,’ was still held as very much true, and as a result women became the new soldiers of the Cold War. Every pantry stocked with enough tinned goods to enable mum, dad and the kids to ride out the (believed at the time) brief period of inconvenience following an atomic attack was a victory for the Western world. Don’t mess with Mum: she’s armed with a tin opener and she’s not afraid to use it.
Let’s explore women’s role in the early Cold War…
The 1940s
In January 1946, the radioactive glow of the first atomic bombs had faded over the horizon. Winston Churchill was yet to make his infamous speech declaring that an iron curtain had descended across the continent. Experts predicted that the Soviet Union would not have nuclear weapons until the mid-1950s. And yet, people were worried, for not even a year after World War Two had ended, newspaper reports of the time tell us that politicians were ‘talking about a third world war’ and of ‘hurling atomic bombs at the Soviet Union.’
While governments were ramping up the research on nuclear weapons, the nervous public were frequently reminded to focus on the positives of atomic power. A local vicar claimed in The Lancaster Guardian on August 24th 1945, that atomic energy ‘may have been a gift from God’, sent to enable ‘mankind [not womankind, of course] to discover the secrets of His amazing universe.’ The fact that atomic energy had killed thousands in Japan only a few weeks earlier doesn’t seem to have much troubled the vicar; he was confident that humanity ‘need not fear, and should go forward in faith and hope.’
Faith and hope for the future was the theme of the day on January 19th 1946, when a Women’s Luncheon Club in Morecambe was given a speech by journalist, Mr. Shaw Desmond. Entitled, ‘The Atomic Bomb and the Post War World’, Desmond’s talk presented a ‘Jules Verne picture of what the world [would] be like when atomic energy [had] been developed to the full’. He warned the frightened women ‘not to believe three-fifths of what they read in the newspapers about atomic energy’, because most of it was ‘distorted to warp the imaginations of readers’.
Rather, the atomic age was one of promise and wonder, Mr. Desmond told the ladies. Nuclear-fuelled planes would fly at 2,000 mph! Trains previously seen running on the London Underground would (somehow) travel under the sea by means of atomic fuel!
The most exciting development waiting over the horizon for the average housewife, however, was… the ‘Magic Button’. This atomic miracle would allow ‘housewives to simply push a button and get all her housework done – and for no cost!’ Presumably, on pressing the button some sort of thermonuclear explosion would rip through Mrs. Smith’s three bed semi, obliterating the creases from her husband’s shirts and vaporising the dirty dishes in the sink. The shockwave would then shake the children’s toys back into the toy box and rattle the dust from the plates on the dresser. Who said a woman’s work is never done?
Having spent much of their adult lives as housewives, the women at the meeting were naturally anxious about what would become of them once atomic power had relegated domestic chores to the past. ‘If, as you say, all housework will be done at the push of a button,’ one lady asked, ‘then what will happen to the women?’
Mr Desmond had an interesting suggestion of how women may spend their new found free time: ‘Woman will be able to turn her full-time attention to the enhancement of her body through gymnastics.’ It’s unclear where Mr. Desmond plucked this bizarre suggestion from; perhaps he felt that his own wife would benefit from taking up a new keep fit regime? Equally befuddled were the women in the audience. ‘Might not women use their free time to enhance their brains?’ asked one. Mr. Desmond conceded that they might, although confessed that a woman with a developed brain ‘was the one thing men feared the most.’
Yes, forget third world wars and nuclear annihilation. All of that paled into insignificance when men were faced with the ultimate terror… an educated woman. Yikes! Take cover, danger approaching!
The Cold War is often described as a conflict of ideologies: two opposing sides with clashing ways of life. In much the same way, the home often became a Cold Warzone, with the desires of men and women at loggerheads just as much as East and West were. During World War Two, women flooded into factories, farms and the forces, toiling over manually and mentally taxing jobs that had long been the sole reserve of men. As Rosie the Riveter declared on the legendary US War Production recruitment poster, women could do It, and they could do It well.
Come VE Day, women were expected to hang up their welding visors, park their Spitfires on the runway and scurry back home for good, just in time to get dinner in the oven for their recently demobbed hubby. Understandably, many women weren’t keen on eschewing their independence and reverting back to the old ways. Men, on the other hand, were all too enthusiastic about renewing traditional roles. Forget a planet divided into East and West, a divided living room was where the true tensions of the early Cold War lay.
The Morecambe Guardian of 5th January 1946 espoused the virtues of women returning to the home in order to safeguard the future of the country:
‘It is a significant sign of the times that though many men wish to return to civilian life, a great proportion of women prefer to remain in jobs which take them outside the home, competing with men on equal terms. We would urge them to remember that there is one job in which they have no competitors; ie, making a home where youth can feel secure and protected – where he can acquire in the formative years of life the right sense of values which will make him a useful and worthy member of our great nation and great tradition.’
You’ll notice here how the concept of ‘the Youth’ is afforded the pronoun ‘he’: it was boys and the men they would become who would shape the future of the nation. Female youth could be ignored. There was no need to equip girls with life skills suited to the wider world, because in keeping with the ‘great traditions’ of the past, she would remain at home, as she always had been.
An article in The Morecambe Guardian on 6th April 1946 insisted that ‘the future of England [lay] in the hands of women. Women must be homemakers because the homemakers of the world are the peacemakers. If the Atom Bomb in a few years brings about the collapse of society, there must still be a family to survive.’ So, the theory went that if men were happy at home, with their dinner on the table at the correct time and their trousers neatly pressed, there would be no more wars and they wouldn’t go around dropping atomic bombs on each other. Phew.
While for the male population atomic power promised a golden future of cheaper mobility, increased speed and exciting exploration, it was quite the opposite for women: what use would a woman have of an atom-powered car when she could have an atom-powered oven or nuclear vacuum cleaner at home? Life for housewives was apparently going to be easy-peasy, glamorous and free from drudgery; why wouldn’t women want to go retie their apron strings and head back into the kitchen, especially if future peace on the planet depended on it?
Finally, it’s important to note that most women were smart enough not to believe the propaganda traditionalists were pressing on them. Societies such as the Women’s Citizen Association refused to accept a slide back into prewar roles:
‘If women don’t continue to present their viewpoint plainly and firmly,’ the organisation’s national secretary, Mrs Mourat-Jones said, ‘they will sink back into slavery and unimportance.’
In an atomic reactor, nuclear energy is realised in a chain reaction. When one atom splits, it triggers a change in the next, then the next, and the next… Human energy works much in the same way. In the early Cold War, when one woman had the courage to defy convention, she would trigger a change in the next woman, then the next, and the next… As Mrs Mourat-Jones wisely said:
‘Let every woman say now that she will make her power and influence count in her own small community. Women combined are all powerful'.
Rebecca Shaw
Sources
The Morecambe Visitor, 19th January 1946; 19th November 1952.
The Morecambe Guardian, 5th January 1946; 6th April 1946; 9th November 1946.
The Lancaster Guardian, 25th August 1945.
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