Desperate housewives and model amoebae: The invention of suburban neurosis in inter-war Britain

Health and the Modern Home

Volumn , Issue , 2007, Pages 42-62

  Hayward, Rhodri ^a  

^a QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 49749153242     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.4324/9780203932414     Document Type: Chapter

References (178)

1. On Taylor, see his autobiography, A Natural History of Everyday Life (London: The Memoir Club, 1988);
2. 'Lord Taylor of Harlow, MD, FRCP, FRCGP, FFOM', British Medical Journal 1 (1988): 578.
3. Stephen Taylor, 'The suburban neurosis', Lancet (26 March 1938): 759-761.
4. See also [Stephen Taylor], 'Grains and scruples by a Voice in the Wilderness', Lancet (1 and 29 October 1938), 801-03, 1021-22 repr.
5. 'The biology of war and a word on the modern woman', in Henry Bashford (ed.), Doctors in Shirt Sleeves (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co., 1939), 241-48.
6. On the flight to the suburbs see: J. Burnett, A Social History of Housing (London: Methuen, 1986), 254-7;
7. D. Feldman, 'Migration', in M. Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 185-206, esp. 202-04.
8. Approximately 2,886,000 private homes were built between 1 January 1919 and 31 March 1939: Marian Bowley, Housing and the State (New York: Garland, [1954] 1985), 271, appendix II, table II.
9. Roughly half of these (49.1%) were owner occupied: M. Swenarton and S. Taylor, 'The scale and nature of the growth of owner occupation in Britain between the Wars', Economic History Review 2, 38 (1985): 373-92 (383).
10. On the growth of leisure, see Claire Langhamer, Women's Leisure in England, 1920-1960 (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2000).
11. Taylor, 'Suburban neuroses', 759.
12. D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998), 34-8;
13. R. Colls, Identity of England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217-19;
14. D. L. North, 'Middle Class Suburban Lifestyles and Culture in England' (D. Phil. diss, University of Oxford, 1989), 29-39;
15. M. Swenarton, 'Tudor Walters and Tudorbethan: reassessing Britiain's inter-war suburbs', Planning Perspectives 17 (2002): 267-76.
16. J. B. Priestley, English Journey (London: Heinemann, [1934] 1984), 92.
17. Clough Williams Ellis, England and the Octopus (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1928), 40.
18. For overviews of inter-war suburban contempt: D. L. North, 'Middle Class Suburban Lifestyles', 41-54;
19. Andrzej Olechnowicz, Working Class Housing in England between the Wars: The Beacontree Estat (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 145-48;
20. Paul Oliver, Ian Davis and Ian Bentley, Dunroamin: The Suburban Semi and its Enemies (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1981), 27-53, 86-90;
21. V. Cunningham, British Writers of the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 256-60.
22. Guy Chapman, Culture and Survival (London: Edward Arnold, 1940).
23. Charles Duff, Anthropological Report on a London Suburb by Professor Vladimir Chernichowski (London: Grayson and Grayson, 1935), 60.
24. G. Orwell, Coming up for Air [1939], (London: Penguin Books, 1998).
25. On 'stockbroker tudor' and suburban architectural taste, see: Osbert Lancaster, Pillar to Post (London: John Murray, [1938] 1956).
26. On the dangers of men being infected by their wives' suburban aspirations, see James Hammerton, 'Pooterism or partnership? Marriage and masculine identity in the lower middle class, 1870-1920', Journal of British Studies 38 (1999): 291-321.
27. D. Beddoe, Back to Home and Duty: Women between the Wars, 1918-1939, (London: Pandora, 1989);
28. Adrian Bingham, '"An era of domesticity": histories of women and gender in interwar Britain', Cultural and Social History 1 (2004): 225-33.
29. R. Samuel, 'Suburbs under siege', New Socialist (May/June 1983): 29.
30. R. McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England, 1918-1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 82-3.
31. J. Giles and T. Middleton (eds.), Writing Englishness 1900-1950 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), 230-9.
32. J. Giles, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), 80.
33. Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Post War England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 5-16.
34. M. Young and P. Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (London: Pelican, 1957).
35. L. Mumford, The City in History (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, [1961] 1975), 512.
36. T. Blackwell and J. Seabrook, A World Still to Win (London, 1985)
37. quoted in Mark Clapson, Suburban Century: Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 127.
38. Beth Jones, Satisfied Lives for Desperate Housewives: God's Word on Proverbs 31 (Portage, MI: Valley Press, 2005);
39. Robert Strand, Desperate Housewives of the Bible (Mobile, AL: Evergreen Press, 2005).
40. On training with Yellowlees, see: Taylor, Natural History, 189.
41. For Yellowlees' promotion of psychodynamic approaches, see his, 'Psychology and medicine', Lancet 217 (1929): 1129-1135 repr. in Clinical Lectures on Mental Disease. (London: Heninemann, 1932), ch. 15.
42. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 760.
43. For discussions of the sexual instinct in British social psychology, see: W. MacDougall, 'The definition of the sexual instinct', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 7-3 (1913-14): 65-78.
44. On the herd instinct, see: W. McDougall, An Introduction to Social Psychology, 23rd ed. (London: Methuen, [1908] 1936);
45. idem, The Group Mine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920);
46. Wilfred Trotter, 'The herd instinct and its bearing on the psychology of civilised man', Sociological Review 1 (1908): 227-48;
47. idem, Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 9th ed. [1916] 1924);
48. R. N. Soffer, 'New elitism: social psychology in pre-war England', Journal of British Studies 8.2 (1969): 111-40;
49. Mathew Thomson, '"Savage civilisation": Race, culture and mind in Britain, 1898-1939', in W. Ernst and B. Harris (eds.), Race, Science and Medicine: Racial Categories and the Production of Medical Knowledge, 1700-1960 (Routledge, 1999).
50. F. G. Crookshank, 'Organ States and Emotional Correlatives', Psyche 10 (1930): 65-79;
51. Karin Stephen, Psycho-analysis and Medicine: A Study of the Wish to Fall Ill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933), 19-28;
52. A. Blanco-White, Worries in Women (London: Gollanz, 1941), 46-47;
53. A. Goodwin, 'The health of a married woman', Journal of State Medicine 44 (1936): 253.
54. For further discussion, see Rhodri Hayward, 'From Clever Hans to Michael Balint: Emotion, influence and the unconscious in British medical practice', in Fay Bound (ed.), Medicine, Emotion and Diseases (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006), 144-68.
55. Edward F. Griffith, 'Marriage and family life', in Noel G. Harris (ed.), Modern Trends in Psychological Medicine (London: Butterworth Medical, 1948), 155-56.
56. For interwar notions of positive sublimation, see: Katherine Holden, '"Nature takes no notice of morality": Singleness and Married Lov. in Interwar Britain', Women's History Review 11.3 (2002): 481-504;
57. Alison Oram, 'Repressed and thwarted, or the bearer of the new world? The spinster in inter-war feminist discourses', Women's History Review 1.3 (1992): 413-33;
58. Fiona Hackney, '"Use your hands for happiness': Home craft and make-do-and-mend in British women's magazines in the 1920s and 1930s', Journal of Design History 19 (2006): 23-38.
59. See for example Marion Milner's widely read self analysis in Joanna Field (pseud.), A Life of One's Own (Harmondsworth: Pelican, [1934] 1952), esp. Ch. 10.
60. N. Mitchison, Home and the Changing Civilisation (London: Bodley Head, 1934), 150.
61. On Taylor's friendship with Mitchison, see his Natural History of Everyday Life, 237.
62. S. Freud, 'The justification for detaching from neurasthenia a particular syndrome: the anxiety neurosis', in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud vol. III, eds. J. Strachey and A. Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 87-115.
63. Hugh Crichton-Miller, 'Anxiety states: The mother complex', in Hugh Crichton-Miller (ed.), Functional Nerve Disease: An Epitome of Wartime Experience for the Practitioner (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1920), 120.
64. See: E. Jones, 'The psychopathology of anxiety', British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929): 17-25;
65. W. R. D. Fairbairn, 'Some points of importance in the psychology of anxiety', British Journal of Medical Psychology 9 (1929): 303-31.
66. G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 48-9.
67. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 761;
68. Taylor, 'Grains and scruples', 1021.
69. C. Lawrence, 'Still Incommunicable: Clinical Holists and Medical Knowledge in Inter-war Britain', in Christopher Lawrence and George Weisz (eds.), Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920-50 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 94-111;
70. David Cantor, 'The Name and the Word: Neo-Hippocratism and Language in Interwar Britain', in David Cantor (ed.), Reinventing Hippocrates (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 280-301.
71. Olga Amsterdamska, 'Demarcating epidemiology', Science, Technology and Human Values 30.1 (2005): 17-51;
72. A. J. Mendelsohn, 'Medicine and the making of bodily inequality in twentieth-century Europe' in Jean-Paul Gaudillière and Ilana Löwy (eds.), Heredity and Infection: The History of Disease Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 21-79, esp. 33.
73. Edward Higgs, 'Medical Statistics, Patronage and the State: The Development of the MRC Statistical Unit, 1911-1948', Medical History 44 (2000): 323-40;
74. E. Magnello, 'The introduction of mathematical statistics into medical research', in E. Magnello and A. Hardy (eds.), The Road to Medical Statistics (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2002), 95-123.
75. Major Greenwood and May Smith, Some pioneers of medical psychology II', British Journal of Medical Psychology 14 (1934): 158-191;
76. J. Halliday, 'Principles of aetiology', British Journal of Medical Psychology 19 (1943): 367-380.
77. J. L. Halliday, Psychosocial Medicine: A Study of the Sick Society (London: William Heinemann Medical Books, 1949), 111-26.
78. J. L. Halliday, 'The rising incidence of psycho-somatic illness', British Medical Journal (2 July 1938): 11-14.
79. M. Jackson, Allergy: The History of a Modern Malady (London: Reaktion, 2006), 185-86; see also Chapter 8 in this volume.
80. J. L. Halliday, 'Psycho-somatic medicine and the declining birth rate', Lancet (12 May 1945): 605;
81. Halliday, Psychosocial Medicine (London: William Heinemann, 1949), 138.
82. E. Charles, The Menace of Under-Population (London: Watts, 1936);
83. essays by Charles and Glass in Hogben, Political Arithmetic (London: Allen and Unwin, 1938).
84. Brock, 'Social pathology', British Medical Journal (8/10/1938): 762.
85. On Brock, see: David Cantor, 'Between Galen, Geddes, and the Gael: Arthur Brock, Modernity, and Medical Humanism in Early Twentieth-Century Scotland', Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 60.1 (2005): 1-41.
86. I. H. Pearse and G. S. Williamson, The Case for Action (London: Faber and Faber, 1931).
87. Jane Lewis and B. Brookes, 'The Peckham Health Centre, "PEP" and the concept of general practice during the 1930s and 1940s' Medical History 2 (1983): 152-53;
88. Abigail Beach, 'Potential for participation: health centres and the ideal of citizenship, c. 1920-1940', in C. Lawrence and A-K. Mayer (eds), Regenerating England: Science, Medicine and Culture between the War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 203-30.
89. Jane Lewis, 'The Peckham Health Centre: An inquiry into the nature of living', Bulletin of the Social History of Medicine 30-31 (1982): 39-43;
90. idem, 'A reassessment of the work of the Peckham Health Centre, 1926-51', Milbank Memorial Fund Quarterly 61.2 (1983): 307-51.
91. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis': 761.
92. I. Pearse, 'Pioneering in London: the Peckham Experiment', in [Community Service Society], The Family in a Democratic Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 170.
93. On their neglect of psychological models, see: I. H. Pearse and L H. Crocker, The Peckham Experiment: A Study of the Living Structure of Society (London; George Allen and Unwin, 1943), 272-73.
94. See Lewis and Brookes, 'Reassessment', 313-14.
95. See the posthumous statement in G. S. Williamson and I. H. Pearse, Science, Synthesis and Sanity: An Inquiry into the Nature of Living by the Founders of the Peckham Experiment (London: Collins, 1965), 76-84.
96. I. H. Pearse and L H. Crocker, Peckham Experiment, 21-22.
97. On the surveillance mechanisms deployed at Peckham, see: David Armstrong, The Political Anatomy of the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 36-38.
98. I. H. Pearse and G. Scott Williamson, Biologists in Search of Material (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 47.
99. Pearse and Crocker, Peckham Experiment, 249-50;
100. Pearse and Williamson, The Case for Action, 32-3.
101. Pearse and Crocker, Peckham Experiment, 259.
102. Wellcome Library for the History and Public Understaning of Medicine, Contemporary Medical Archives (CMAC), SA/PHC/D.3/22/1/10 G. Scott Williamson, 'Homsesteads and Nutrition as the Basis for Industrial Planning' [1945], 2-3;
103. Pearse and Williamson, The Case for Action, 52-6.
104. Pearse and Crocker, Peckham Experiment, 248;
105. Pearse, 'Houses vs. Homes', CMAC SA/PHC/e.9;
106. Pearse, 'Pioneering', 182.
107. 'Did your ears burn?', Daily Herald (9 February 1938);
108. 'Science aids the Friendless', The People (19 February 1939); and other cuttings held in CMAC SA/PHC/A.
109. Taylor, 'Grains and scruples', 851.
110. Taylor, 'Grains and scruples', 1022;
111. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 760.
112. Viscountess Rhondda, Leisured Women (London: Hogarth Press, 1928), 28-9.
113. C. E. M. Joad, 'The plight of marriage in the jazz age', in Samuel D. Schmalhausen (ed.), Our Neurotic Age: A Consultation (New York: Farrar and Reinhart, 1932), 286-308, 295-96.
114. See also, B. Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930), 188-89, 210-50.
115. Susan Bowden and Avner Offer, 'The technological revolution that never was: gender, class and the diffusion of household in interwar England', in Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough (eds.), The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 244-75.
116. Geoffrey Gorer, Hot Strip Tease and Other Notes on American Culture (1937)
117. quoted in G. Chapman, Culure and Survival (London: Jonathan Cape, 1940), 195.
118. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 759;
119. Taylor, 'Grains and scruples', 1021.
120. On the equivalence of the home and the interior life in inter-war culture, see: Alison Light, Forever England: Feminity, Literature and Conservatism between the War (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 121-28;
121. J. Giles, 'A home of one's own: Women and domesticity in England, 1918-1950', Women's Studies International Forum 16.3 (1993): 239-55;
122. idem, Women, Identity and Private Life in Britain, 1900-50 (New York: St, Martins Press, 1995), 141-4;
123. Claire Langhammer, 'The meanings of home in post-war Britain', Journal of Contemporary History 40.2 (2005): 341-62.
124. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 760.
125. S. Taylor, 'Mental illness as a clue to normality', Lancet 238 (1940): 677-80, 730-4.
126. E. Mapother, 'Tough or tender? A plea for nominalism in psychiatry', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 27 (1934): 1687-1712.
127. For commentary: R. Hayward, 'Making psychiatry English: The Maudsley Hospital and the Munich model', in Volker Roelcke and Paul Weindling (eds.), Inspiration, Co-operation, Migration: British-American-German Relations in Psychiatry, 1870-1945 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, forthcoming).
128. Taylor, 'Mental illness as a clue to normality', 731.
129. F. L. Golla, 'The objective study of neurosis', Lancet (20 August 1921): 377.
130. Otniel E. Dror 'The affect of experiment: The turn to emotions on Anglo-American physiology, 1900-1940.' Isis 90 (1999): 205-237;
131. Robert Frank, 'The telltale heart: Physiological instruments, graphic methods and clinical hopes, 1854-1914', in William Coleman and Frederic Holmes (eds.), The Investigative Enterprise: Experimental Physiology in Nineteenth-Century Medicine (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
132. Otniel E. Dror 'Techniques of the brain and the paradox of emotions, 1880-1930', Science in Contex 14.4 (2001): 643-60;
133. Otniel E. Dror, 'The scientific image of emotion: experience and technologies of inscription', Configuration 7 (1999): 355-401;
134. Rhodri Hayward, 'The tortoise and the love-machine: Grey Walter and the politics of electro-encephalography', Science in Contex 14.4 (2001): 615-641;
135. Geoff Bunn 'The lie detector, Wonder Woman and liberty: the life and work of William Moulton Marston', History of the Human Sciences 10 (1999): 91-119.
136. F. L. Golla, 'The organic basis of the hysterical syndrome', Proc. RSM (Section of Psychiatry) 16 (1923): 1-13;
137. A. D. Waller, 'The measurement of human emotion and of its voluntary control', Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 13 (1919-20): 41-56;
138. Eric Wittkower, 'Studies on the influence of emotions on the functions of the organs', Journal of Mental Science 81, (1935): 533-682.
139. A. Lewis and E. Mapother, 'Psychological medicine', in F. W. Price (ed.), A Textbook of the Practice of Medicine, 5th ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 1870.
140. C. P. Blacker, Human Values in Psychological Medicine (Oxford: Oxford Medical Publications, 1932), 80, 84.
141. H. Devine, Recent Advances in Psychiatry (London: J. & A. Churchill, 1929), 86;
142. D. K. Henderson and R. D. Gillespie, A Textbook of Psychiatry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1927] 1956), 154-55.
143. North, 'Middle-class suburban lifestyles', 315-20.
144. Taylor, 'Grains and scruples', 802.
145. Taylor, 'Suburban neurosis', 761.
146. Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979).
147. S. Taylor, Battle for Health: A Primer of Social Medicine (London: Nicholson and Watson, 1944), 123-24;
148. S. Taylor, 'Socialism and public opinion', in David Munro (ed.), Socialism: The British War (London: Essential Books), 223-55.
149. On links between the Labour party programme of social and psychological reconstruction, see: Stephen Fielding, 'To make men and women better than they are? Labour and the building of socialism in the 1940s', in J. Fyrth (ed.), Labour's Promised Land? Culture and Socieity in Labour Britain, 1945-51 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), 16-25;
150. J. Nuttall, Psychological Socialism: The Labour Party and the Qualities of Mind and Character (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).
151. Taylor, Natural History, 393-95.
152. Sir Frederick Gibberd, Harlow New Town: A Plan Prepared for Harlow Development Corporation (London: HMSO, 1947).
153. Taylor, Natural History, 397-98.
154. Mark Llewellyn, 'Producing and experiencing Harlow: Neighbourhood units and narratives of New Town life 1947-53', Planning Perspectives 19 (2004): 155-74.
155. J. Attfield 'Inside pram town: A case study of Harlow house interiors, 1951-61', in J. Attfield and P. Kirkham (eds.), A View From the Interior: Feminism, Women and Design (London: The Women's Press, 1989), 215-37;
156. Taylor, Natural History, 397-98.
157. See Sidney Chave, 'Making the Plan' [Diary], CMAC: GC/178/A2/1.
158. M. Warren, 'Prologue: an appreciation of Sidney Chave', in M. Warren and H. Francis (eds.), Recalling the Medical Officer of Health: Writings by Sidney Chave (London: King Edward's Hospital Fund, 1987), 15-18;
159. F. M. Martin, J. H. F. Brotherston, and S. P. W. Chave. 'Incidence of neurosis on a new housing estate', British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine 11 (1957): 196-202.
160. S. Chave, 'Mental health in Harlow New Town', Journal of Psychosomatic Research 10 (1966): 39.
161. S. Taylor and S. Chave, Mental Health and Environment (London: Longmans, 1964).
162. Sidney Chave 'Diary' (Wellcome CMAC: GC/178/A.2/10). Entry for 5 September.
163. W. P. D. Logan and A. Cushion, Morbidity Statistics from General Practice [General Studies on Medical and Population Subjects no. 14] (London: HMSO, 1958).
164. J. H. F. Brotherstone and S. P. W. Chave, 'General practice on a new housing estate', British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine 10 (1956): 200-07;
165. F. M. Martin, J. H. F. Brotherstone, and S. P. W. Chave, 'Incidence of neurosis in a new housing estate', British Journal of Preventative and Social Medicine 11 (1957): 196-202;
166. [Anonymous], 'Suburban neurosis up to date', Lancet (18 January 1958): 146-47.
167. Young and Willmott, Family and Kinship, pp. 147-64;
168. H. V. Dicks, 'The Predicament of the Family in the Modern World', Lancet (5 February 1955): 295-97.
169. Taylor and Chave, Mental Health and Environment, 125-26.
170. Chave, 'Mental health in Harlow New Town', 43.
171. As Harlow's doctors commented, anxiety states 'tend to be self-curing as hire purchase payments come to an end', C. Taylor et al, 'The health centres of Harlow: An essay in cooperation', Lancet (22 October 1955): 863.
172. For examples of suburban contentment in comparison to other housing, see: [Mass Observation/Advertising Service Guild], An Enquiry into People's Homes (London: John Murray, 1943): 178, 191;
173. Stella Instone, 'The Welfare of the Housewife', Lancet (4 December 1948): 899-901;
174. Dagmar Wilson, 'Surveying the Housewife', Public Health 62 (1949): 139-42
175. See: Chapter 5 in this volume;
176. Ali Haggett, 'Housewives, neuroses and the domestic environment, 1945-70', PhD thesis, University of Exeter, 2007.
177. See also: Christopher M. Callahan and German E. Berrios, Reinventing Depression: A History of the Treatment of Depression in Primary Care (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005);
178. Nikolas Rose, 'Neurochemical Selves', Society (November/December, 2003): 46-59.