Changes to British Identity and Attitude Since the 1950s

How has British identity and attitude changed since the 1950s?

Introduction

Many people find it difficult to cope with changes in people’s attitudes and identity, particularly since the 1950s. They struggle with the direction in which society appears to be going. The expanding nature of contemporary society means that there are more opportunities for people, this coupled with an expansion in skills and a less authoritarian attitude in the workplace gives people greater individual freedom. However, the continuing changes that have taken place in society over the last fifty years requires that people develop a greater adaptability in regards to their personal identities their attitude towards self and society. They need to be ready to move along with the rate of change and this requires a corresponding change in how they understand themselves. Thus, for Giddens (1991), the self is an ongoing project whereby identity is made and remade to meet the conditions of modern life.

This paper will look at how British identity and attitude have changed since the 1950s. There will be a brief look at what life was like in nineteen fifties and how identity was understood. This will then be compared to attitudes and identity today to highlight the changes.

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1950s Britain

Post-war Britain was quite different to today. In the early 1950s there was still a good deal of war damage which led the Government to introduce massive building programmes to ensure adequate housing for the population. Immediately after the war the welfare state was set up. The funding of this was based on the notion that the (predominantly male) workforce would continue to have full employment, which led the Government to claim that it would be able to look after its citizens from the cradle to the grave. They were overly idealistic in their views and in the last fifty years Britain has witnessed massive changes in both welfare and employment work and welfare. Attitudes have changed towards family structures and this, along with other cultural changes, has had corresponding implications for peoples’ identities.

In the years following the Second World War people felt that they were secure in their employment. In industry working class men were conditioned to the view that if they worked hard then they would have a job for life, even though they may not have earned a lot of money (Giddens, 2001). This is no longer the case however, and is one of the many reasons that there are now so many women in the workforce (Abbott and Wallace, 1997).

In 1950s Britain society was clearly class ridden and people did not often move from one class to another. The class into which a person was born therefore was very often the one in which they stayed and this had implications for their life chances in other areas. People did not have the choices that they have nowadays few women went out to work and it was the father’s responsibility to go out and earn money to support his family (Walby, 1986).

In the years since the nineteen fifties the face of Britain has altered. There have been massive changes in employment patterns and this has, in many cases, led to changing roles in society which has had further implications for people’s sense of identity. Post-War immigration along with rapid social and technological change has brought with it n increasing focus on contemporary racialised and ethnicised identities. This mixing of new identities along with older ones, and the introduction of new cultural forms contributes to the sense of uncertainty that many people feel is a feature of modern life (Hall, 1992).

British Identity

The concept of identity is extremely important in sociological thinking, furthermore, constructions of identity are also closely linked to culture and people’s identities are reflected in the cultures and sub-cultures to which they belong (Willis, 1967).Smith (1991) claims that in Britain in the 1950s there was a fairly homogenous cultural, aristocratic sense of Britishness, which dated back to the sixteenth century. The British nation state, therefore was, essentially, seen as English with elements taken from Wales and Scotland. Langlands (1999) maintains that:

As it is true of all national identities, the meanings and saliency attached to Englishness are fluid and have varied considerably; it has at some times drawn upon Celtic sources; and at other times it has been conflated with Britishness (the myth of our island race for instance) (Langlands, 1999:60).

The Arts Council was established in 1947. This was an attempt to bring art to as many people as possible. Ballet, Opera and the theatre were publicity and held up as models of British cultural life. During the 1950s collectivist policies were pursued which resulted in cultural stability. Cultural heritage is of great importance. (the National Heritage site tells us) it is also crucial to the construction of identities and to social behaviour (Turnpenny, 2004). These policies which promoted what were seen as ‘high’ culture were stable until the late nineteen sixties and seventies. The growing number of immigrants was changing the way Britain looked and the way it had to find new understandings of itself By the 1970s things had changed and opinions on the far left held all cultural values as a reflection of the interests of white middle class males (Abbott and Wallace, 1997)..

In the nineteen eighties the market principles of Margaret Thatcher’s Government meant that art had to justify its continued existence on the basis of its marketability. In 1986 the cultural policy advisors to the Greater London Council wrote:

In an age when we know longer expect to find a single all- encompassing truth, the best strategies for survival often involve creating alternative, exclusive realms, which reject dominant modes (Mulgan and Worpole, 1986:32)

When New Labour came to power in the 1990s it took over elements of the left and the right in an attempt to promote a more diverse and inclusive view of culture and cultural heritage (Pearce, 2000). Pearce contends that:

Cultural heritage is something that can be inherited, which enables the inheritors to enter into their rightful states and be their true selves (Pearce, 2000:59).

This cultural heritage consists of artefacts, practices, objects and cultural spaces which people recognise as part of their cultural heritage. Turnpenny (2004) maintains that this heritage relates to all aspects of a nation’s life. Current cultural policy concentrates on buildings or monument, making heritage very tightly defined and denying wider cultural interpretation (Turnpenny, ibid).

Social practices which are a source of group identity have been omitted from Government legislation on cultural heritage yet they traditional, and cultural significance and should therefore be considered as part of our cultural heritage (Jones, 1996). Turnpenny (2004) argues that this is oppressive as it does not take into account community values and the communities’ perceptions of their cultural heritage and it thus contributes to social exclusion. Current cultural policy, in its neglect of the intangible, separates fact from value. In doing so it imposes a form of national identity that does not truly reflect the identity of community groups in Britain.

Changes in society affect social structures which in turn affect people’s identities in myriad ways. Because identities are no longer fixed, but as Bradley (1996) has argued are fractured, they are a source of continuing uncertainty. This uncertainty leads to further changes in the social structure. Contemporary people’s identities are unsettled because the changes mentioned above tend to cross ethnic boundaries. For example the changing role of women and their greater inclusion in the labour market has affected not only women’s and men’s identities, it has also led to changes in family structures.

Changing Attitudes and the Family

Over the last fifty years, Britain has witnessed changes in marriage, household, and family forms that would not have been thought possible prior to the Second World War (Giddens, 2001). The rise in the divorce rate and the number of single parent families, has largely been blamed on the 1960s rise of the feminist movement. There has also been a growth in the rate of women who have children but have not married (Social Trends, 2000). Attitudes have changed considerably in this regard and it is rare to hear of the lonely old spinster. People do not think that women who don’t want to marry are in some way strange.

Parsons (1955) argued that (what has been called)the traditional family serves two major purposes that are common to societies, the primary socialisation of children into the norms and values of society, and the stabilisation of adult personalities. For Parsons the institution of the family provided the mutual love and support needed by individuals in order for them to be fit enough to take their places in society (Giddens, 2001).

In 1997 when Blair’s Government came to power the above ideology of the family that had existed in Britain for almost a century was breaking down and unemployment was continuing to rise. Death, divorce, and the rise in the number of single parent families meant that the traditional ideal of the male breadwinner and the female carer/homemaker were becoming less common (Giddens, 2001). Single mothers (although not a strong favorite) were no longer seen as shamed women, as they might have been in the nineteen fifties. The concerns of the Welfare State were with the traditional, nuclear family where the man was the breadwinner and the woman cared for the home and children. It was not therefore, set up to deal with single parent households. In this way changing family structures result in an increase in other social problems, particularly poverty (Giddens, 2001). Traditional family structures are no longer the norm in the UK and this has led to a change of attitudes towards those who do not live in the traditional nuclear family that Parsons described. However, this leads to other social problems because the state system is not equipped to deal with either the increased burden on the benefits system or in making the employment and childcare systems more equitable.

Conclusion

British identities and attitudes have changed considerably since the 1950s. This is largely as a result of changing employment patterns, cultural policy, mass immigration, and changes in family structures.

Human behaviour is based on guidelines that are shared by a group and in order for that group/society to function effectively the guidelines must apply to all its members. Thus culture is learned and shared and without it members of a society would be unable to communicate effectively and chaos would result (Giddens, 2001). This is why attitudes have had to change in Britain and this has had corresponding effects on how people understand both their Britishness and their identities.

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