Lise Butler* University College Oxford1

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Michael Young, the Instituteof Community Studies, andthe Politics of Kinship

AbstractThis article examines the East London-based Institute of Community Studies, andits founder, Michael Young, to show that sociology and social research offeredavenues for left-wing political expression in the 1950s. Young, who hadpreviously been Head of the Labour Party Research Department during theAttlee government, drew upon existing currents of psychological and sociologicalresearch to emphasize the continuing relevance of the extended family inindustrial society and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity andmutual support not tied to productive work. Young and his colleagues at theInstitute of Community Studies promoted the supportive kinship networks of theurban working class, and an idealized conception of the relationships betweenwomen, to suggest that family had been overlooked by the left and should bereclaimed as a progressive force. The article shows that the Institute’s sociologicalwork was informed by a pre-existing concern with family as a model forcooperative socialism, and suggests that sociology and social research should beseen as important sources of political commentary for scholars of post-warpolitics.

Introduction

After the general election of 1950 Michael Young felt drained anddisillusioned. Young, Head of the Labour Party Research Department,had been tasked with reinvigorating the party’s policy programme forthe 1950 election. Though he had also been primarily responsible for the

*E-mail: lise.butler@univ.ox.ac.uk1 I warmly thank my supervisor Ben Jackson, anonymous reviewers for Twentieth

Century British History, Jon Lawrence, James Vernon, John Davis, Christina de Bellaigue,Stuart White, Paula Butler, Kit Kowol, and Christina Black for their invaluable comments,suggestions and edits, and remember the help of the late A.H. Halsey. Thanks also to theparticipants of the Oxford Modern British History Seminar, Oxford History of PoliticalThought Seminar, and the Berkeley Graduate Conference in the History of British PoliticalThought for helping me to shape this article.

Twentieth Century British History, 2015, page 1 of 22 doi:10.1093/tcbh/hwu063

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party’s 1945 election manifesto, Let Us Face the Future, which hadcontributed to the resounding victory of the first Attlee government, hefound post-war policy development to be a much greater challenge.Young was not terribly proud of Let Us Face the Future, which, herecalled, had ‘sort of wrote itself’.2 He characterized the document as anintellectual mix of ‘Beveridge plus Keynes plus Socialism’ and theproduct of ‘centuries of socialist propaganda’, recalling ‘I didn’t think itwas particularly good. It wasn’t well written, but nor did it need to be’.But the manifesto was of secondary importance as a policy document: a‘champagne fizz’ was in the air, a mood of inexorable change hadswept politics, and ‘[a]lmost anything the Labour Party said was goingto carry them’.3

After the exhilarating election victory of the summer of 1945, Youngfound the next phase of policy development to be an uphill battle.Labour’s arguments for reconstruction, the health service, socialsecurity and post-war housing policy had been developed over decadesin opposition, and had crystallized during the war. But after 5 years ingovernment, new policies were more difficult to come by. Youngpresided over ‘umpteen committees’ seeking fresh ideas and policysolutions to bring to the 1950 election, and eventually produced thesomewhat awkwardly titled election manifesto, Let Us Win ThroughTogether, which promised full employment, new homes, more power tolocal government, a consumer advice service, the promotion of privateenterprise and industrial democracy.4 But Young, upon reflection, stillthought the 1950 programme ‘a pretty tawdry thing’ devoid ofintellectual spirit or substance. He recalled that despite his best efforts,he and his colleagues had failed to find a satisfactory new policydirection.5 Nonetheless, the Labour Party won the election of 1950 by aslim majority of only five seats in stark contrast to its 146 seat majorityof 1945, and would go on to be defeated in a second general election18 months later. Disillusioned, Young resigned from the ResearchDepartment after the 1950 election, accepting the Labour Party’sgenerous offer of a 6-month sabbatical to travel to New Zealand,Australia, Israel, and India. But when he arrived back in Britain, Youngreturned not to public policy, but sociology. And it was throughsociology that he would mount a critique of the post-war settlement.

2 Churchill Archive Center, Cambridge, Michael Young Papers, [hereafter YUNG] 10/2, National Life Story Collection: Leading Citizens, Lord Young of Dartington interviewedby Professor Paul Thompson, 12 May 1990, 70.

3 YUNG 10/2, National Life Story Collection, 69; Peter Hennessy, ‘The 1945 GeneralElection and the Post War Period Remembered’, Contemporary Record, 9:1 (Summer 1995),81, 84; YUNG 10/3, Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll 1, 22 March 1994, 16.

4 YUNG 6/39, Let Us Face the Future: A Declaration of Labour Party Policy for theConsideration of the Nation, September 1945.

5 YUNG 10/2, National Life Story Collection, 69.

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Michael Young’s ideas have recently enjoyed a small renaissance inLabour circles concerned with devolution and local government. Anumber of publicly facing and more scholarly accounts have portrayedYoung as a proponent of decentralization against the centralizingtendencies of the post-war left, and placed Young’s thought in thecontext of a longer liberal pluralist or ethical socialist tradition thatfavoured communitarian and cooperative forms of political association.6

But Young’s ideas should not just be set against dominant intellectualtrends within the Labour Party, past and present, but also seen as theproducts of a sustained engagement with the social research and socialsciences of his day, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology.

As Stephen Brooke, Martin Francis and Jeremy Nuttall have allshown, a strand of social scientific thought informed debates about theideological direction of the Labour Party in the 1940s.7 This socialscience inflected socialism did not disappear with Evan Durbin’spremature death in 1948, or the Labour Party’s election loss in 1951, butblossomed in the realms of social research and sociology. As BenJackson has described, sociologists like Richard Titmuss, PeterTownsend, and Michael Young contributed to a mutualist andorganicist strand of left-wing political thought in the 1950s. Inspiredby the socially transformative experience of wartime, these groupslooked to working-class social practices, traditional ways of life, and theextended family for inspiration.8

In 1953 Young founded the Institute of Community Studies (ICS) inthe East London district of Bethnal Green and would soon be joined byTownsend and fellow social researchers Peter Willmott and Peter

6 Jon Cruddas, speech to the New Local Government Network, February 2014, http://www.nlgn.org.uk/public/2014/power-and-one-nation/; Jon Cruddas and JonathanRutherford, One Nation: Labour’s Political Renewal (London, 2014), 13; David Goodhart,A Post-Liberal Future? (London, 2014); Anthony Painter, ‘A Late Triumph for MichaelYoung’, in Progress, 12 February 2014. http://www.progressonline.org.uk/2014/02/12/a-late-triumph-for-michael-young/; Stephen Meredith, ‘Michael Young: A Social DemocraticAlternative’ in Peter Ackers and Alastair Reid, eds, Other Worlds of Labour (Basingstoke,2015).

7 Jeremy Nuttall, ‘‘‘Psychological Socialist’’; ‘‘militant moderate’’: Evan Durbin and thePolitics of the synthesis’, Labour History Review, 28:2 (2003), 235–52; Stephen Brooke, ‘EvanDurbin: Reassessing a Labour ‘‘Revisionist’’’, Twentieth Century British History, 7:1 (1996),27–52; Stephen Brooke, ‘Revisionists and Fundamentalists: the Labour Party andEconomic Policy during the Second World War’, Historical Journal, 32 (1989), 157–75;Martin Francis, ‘Economics and Ethics: The Nature of Labour’s Socialism, 1945-51’,Twentieth Century British History, 6:2 (1995), 220–43.

8 Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study of Progressive Political Thought, 1900-64 (Manchester, 2007), esp. 188–91. See also Lawrence Black, ‘Social Democracy as a Wayof Life: Fellowship and the Socialist Union, 1951-9’, Twentieth Century British History, 10:4(1999).

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Marris. The new organization’s stated purpose was to examine theinteraction of the family, the community and the social services. Itpromised to study the way in which ordinary people interacted withthe newly expanded social service sector, and asked whether the organsof the state were in cooperation or conflict with established patterns offamily support and mutual aid. Bethnal Green had long suffered fromovercrowding and poor housing conditions, and was subject to massslum clearance and replanning in the decade after the war. By 1958, asYoung and Willmott would report in a radio broadcast, something likeone family left the area every day, often for the housing estates of ruralEssex.9 The Institute’s first and probably best-known book, Young andWillmott’s Family and Kinship in East London, contrasted Bethnal Greenwith the newly constructed Essex suburb of Debden, called ‘Greenleigh’in the study. Young and Willmott suggested that extended family tiesand kinship networks provided an essential web of support for theresidents of Bethnal Green, and that those who moved to the suburbssuffered from a decline in quality of life as a result of their relativeisolation. Invoking a conception of working-class culture rooted infamily and neighbourhood, which historians have also associated withcontemporary Richard Hoggart’s classic The Uses of Literacy, Young andWillmott’s Family and Kinship in East London and Townsend’s The FamilyLife of Old People challenged a view that the extended family was indecline, and argued that kinship ties provided an important source ofcommunity and practical support in Bethnal Green.10

The ICS has been referred to as probably the most widely knownsocial research institute in Britain.11 And the message of its earlypublications influenced a generation of sociologists and social historiansand helped to create a nostalgic picture of urban life that survivestoday, notwithstanding suggestions that the mutualist spirit observedby Young and Willmott may have had less to do with an ethos of civicvirtue amongst the working class, and more to do with ‘the fact thatthey lacked power’.12 The ICS’ emphasis on the working-class familywas in fact informed by a wealth of contemporary social scientificinfluences. And, as this article seeks to show, Young’s work with theInstitute represented a deliberate intellectual and political project toemphasize the continuing relevance of the extended family in industrialsociety, and to offer a model of socialist citizenship, solidarity andcommunity tied to the family rather than the workplace.

9 Churchill Archive Center Cambridge, Sasha Moorsom [Young] Papers YONG/4/2,transcript of radio program for ‘Families on the Move’, 14 May 1958, 8–9.

10 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, 2000).11 Jennifer Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green: An Evaluation of the Work of the Institute

of Community Studies (London, 1971), 1.12 Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London, 2014), 176.

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The ICS, Socialism and Sociology

The first meeting of the Institute of Community Studies AdvisoryCommittee was held at the Westminster headquarters of the think tankPolitical and Economic Planning (PEP) on 9 November 1953, and waschaired by London School of Economics (LSE) Professor of SocialAdministration Richard Titmuss. The Institute’s Advisory Committeeinitially consisted of the child psychologist John Bowlby, the sociologistBarbara Wootton, and Alan Jarvis, the Canadian Director of the OxfordHouse social settlement, who would soon go on to become Head of theNational Gallery of Canada.13 In the late 1950s and early 1960s theresearch staff of the ICS would include the historian Raphael Samuel,the medical researcher Ann Cartwright, and the sociologists BrianJackson and Dennis Marsden. And the Institute’s Advisory Boardwould later include Charles Madge, better known for his work withMass Observation, the anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, and SirAlexander Carr Saunders, Director of the LSE.14 The Institute wassupported by the Nuffield Foundation and the Elmgrant Trust, a fundassociated with Dartington Hall, the cooperative community in Devonestablished by Leonard and Dorothy Elmhirst to which both Young andJarvis had ties. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and CulturalOrganization supplied ‘[o]ne or more typewriters’, and the Americansociologist Edward Shils channelled several hundred pounds of hisown research funding from the Ford Foundation into the new unit.15

The Institute survives today as the Young Foundation in its originalBethnal Green location. As in 1953, it is non-partisan but retains astrong informal association with the Labour Party: former AssociateDirector Rushanara Ali is Labour MP for Bethnal and Bow, and itsformer director Geoff Mulgan was Director of Policy at 10 DowningStreet under Tony Blair.

Young and Willmott described their focus on the extended family inBethnal Green as a natural outgrowth of empirical research. In Familyand Kinship in East London, they insisted that ‘[w]e were surprised todiscover that the wider family, far from having disappeared, was still

13 British Library of Political and Economic Science [hereafter BLPES], Richard TitmussPapers [hereafter Titmuss] 2/136, Minutes of first meeting of the Institute of CommunityStudies, 9 November 1953; for more on Alan Jarvis, see Asa Briggs, Michael Young: SocialEntrepreneur (London, 2001), 132, and Andrew Horrall, Bringing Art to Life: a Biography ofAlan Jarvis (Montreal; Ithaca, 2009).

14 Young Foundation private papers, ‘Institute of Community Studies AdvisoryCommittee Minute Book, 1953–1963’.

15 Titmuss 2/136, Notes from talk with Michael Young, 9 February 1954; Letter toRichard Titmuss from the National Corporation of Old People, 25 November 1953. Younghad also considered a funding application to the Eugenics Society, and wouldunsuccessfully seek support from the National Corporation for the Care of Old People.

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very much alive in the middle of London’.16 Their Bethnal Greenrespondents, they claimed, inevitably described their experiences of thesocial services ‘against the background of the extended families towhich they belonged’.17 Young and Willmott presented the Institute’semphasis upon extended family as a concern that derived fromobjective, methodologically careful research—they wrote about theextended family, they said, because they had discovered that it wasimportant to their subjects.

This was not entirely true. Young would later admit that he and hiscolleagues had ‘generally lied in a small way when [they] said that[they had] ‘‘stumbled on’’ a kinship system we didn’t know existedwhen we started work in Bethnal Green’.18 And Jon Lawrence’s recentre-examination of field notes from Young’s 1953 to 1955 interviews inBethnal Green supports this admission, suggesting that Young andWillmott did not fully acknowledge their informants ‘much moreequivocal attitudes towards neighbours, neighbourhood and kin’ andmight have seen ‘what their politics wanted them to see’ in BethnalGreen.19 Young and Willmott’s fierce emphasis upon family life inFamily and Kinship in East London was not fully the product, as theyclaimed, of unbiased investigative research, but rather of a pre-existingconcern with the family.

Most scholars interested in the ICS have focused primarily on Familyand Kinship in East London. In his influential study of British sociology,Mike Savage suggests that the Institute represented a distinctive andnovel approach to British social research that treated Bethnal Green as a‘capsule’ where broader processes of social change could be discerned.Contrasting Family and Kinship in East London, in particular, withNorman Dennis’ 1957 study of a West Yorkshire coal miningcommunity, Savage argues that rather than emphasizing the difference,particularity and otherness of working-class communities, the re-searchers of the ICS treated the social changes affecting the lives of theirEast London subjects as symptomatic of broader processes ofreconstruction and modernization.20 Nick Tiratsoo and Mark Clapsonhave examined the ICS’ relationship with the Ford Foundation, whichgranted the Institute $70,000 in 1957 to support studies of contemporary

16 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London (Middlesex,1968 [1957]), 12.

17 Michael Young and Peter Willmott, ‘Research Report No. 3: Institute of CommunityStudies, Bethnal Green’, The Sociological Review, (July 1961), 203–6.

18 YUNG 10/3, Michael Young interviewed by Kate Gavron, 22 March 1994, Roll No. 3,4.

19 Jon Lawrence, ‘Inventing the ‘‘Traditional Working Class’’: a Re-analysis ofInterviews from Young and Willmott’s Family and Kinship in East London’, History AfterHobsbawm Conference, 29 April–1 May 2014, London.

20 Mike Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method(Oxford, 2010), 156–9.

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British Society.21 Christian Topalov has situated Family and Kinship in aninternational sociological literature on urban slums and working-classneighbourhoods addressing transatlantic trends towards slum clear-ance, urban redevelopment and suburbanization in the post-wardecades. He situates Family and Kinship in East London within aninternational collection of publications including Herbert Gans’ 1962study of the Boston West End, and Henri Coing’s 1963 study of the 13tharrondissement of Paris.22 Angela Davis suggests that Young andWillmott’s concern with family should be set in the context of a generalpost-war optimism ‘about the stability of marriage and family life.’23

And in his biography of Young, Asa Briggs compares the communi-tarian thrust of the ICS to that of Dartington Hall, the alternativecommunity and school run by Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst whereYoung had studied as a teenager, suggesting that though very different,both places offered models of community and belonging that informedYoung’s work.24

In 1971 the sociologist Jennifer Platt published the first and onlycomprehensive study of the Institute. Platt’s assessment was highlycritical—as a professional sociologist, she condemned the ICS for itsperhaps naı̈vely optimistic view of working-class communities which,she pointed out, could prove stultifying as well as supportive. Mostdamningly, perhaps, she referred to the Institute as a ‘special sort ofpressure group’ more concerned to promote a particular vision of thegood society than to conduct empirically rigorous sociologicalresearch.25 In a sense, Platt was right: the ICS was a pressure group.But perhaps Platt did not go far enough. The Institute did not aim atempiricism but fall back on dogma: it had been conceived from the startas a public policy think tank. The ICS was explicitly modelled afterPolitical and Economic Planning, where Young had served as Secretarybefore joining the Labour Party Research Department in 1945, andsought to promote the integration of social science in policymaking.26

21 Nick Tiratoo and Mark Clapson, ‘The Ford Foundation and Social Planning inBritain: The Case of the Institute of Community Studies and Family and Kinship in EastLondon’, in Gemelli, Giuliana, ed., American Foundations and Large-Scale Research:Construction and Transfer of Knowledge (Bologna, 2001), 206.

22 Christian Topolov, ‘‘‘Traditional Working-Class Neighborhoods’’: An Inquiry into theEmergence of a Sociological Model in the 1950s and 1960s’, Osiris, 18 (2003), 212–33.

23 Angela Davis, ‘A Critical Perspective on British Social Surveys and CommunityStudies and their Accounts of Married Life c, 1945-70’, Cultural and Social History, 6:1(2009), 47–64, 47.

24 Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, 110–154.25 Jennifer Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green, 31.26 On Political and Economic Planning’s engagement with the social sciences and its

Active Democracy project see Raymond Goodman, ‘The First Post-War Decade’, in JohnPinder, ed., Fifty Years of Political and Economic Planning (London, 1981); Abigail Beach,‘Forging a ‘‘nation of participants’’: Political and Economic Planning in Labour’s Britain’,in Richard Weight and Abigail Beach, eds, The Right to Belong, Citizenship and National

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Though the ICS was a sociological research institute, it also provided anexplicit outlet for Young’s frustrations with the Labour Party. It was notso much that politics informed sociology—though it did—but ratherthat sociology provided a vehicle for political expression.

Young’s interest in sociology and the scientific study of humanbehaviour dated from at least the early 1940s. Young studied Economicsat the LSE and was called to the bar in the summer of 1939, but wasprevented from going into chambers by the advent of war.27 Instead, hetook a position at PEP, which had published his first pamphlet onmanpower policy while he was still a student. There he developed aninterest in the work of the army psychologists who selected officers andpromoted morale in the armed forces, and also in the application ofmotivational psychology to industrial relations. Young left PEP in 1945to become Head of the Labour Party’s Research Department, though hecontinued to play a major role in PEP through its Active Democracyproject, producing and contributing to broadsheets on local elections,the role of clubs and non-state associations in participatory democracy,as well as studies of the London suburb of Watling, and humanrelations in industry.28 During this period he was influenced by theideas of Evan Durbin, an economist and MP interested in thepsychological motivations of political behaviour. Young attendedDurbin’s 1945 Conference on the Psychological and SociologicalProblems of Modern Socialism in Oxford, which was co-organized byG.D.H. and Margaret Cole and the child psychologist John Bowlby.Though Young complained that he ‘had not obtained much directguidance from the psychologists’ at the conference, he was veryconcerned with how planners and policymakers could cultivate activeand participatory democracy, and became increasingly interested inpsychology and sociology.29

Young described his influences during this intellectually fruitfulperiod of his life as ‘[a] lot of American ideas; social science,psychology. Sort of very Utopian stuff. And I had a lot of confidence inthat’.30 While still working for the Labour Party, Young had begun aPhD on the organization of local political parties supervised by HaroldLaski, but soon abandoned that project to undertake a study of the

Identity in Britain, 1930-1960 (London, 1998). For more on Political and Economic Planningin the 1930s see Daniel Ritschel, ‘Political and Economic Planning: The PEP group’, in ThePolitics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford, 2007).

27 See Briggs, Michael Young: Social Entrepreneur, 46.28 PEP ‘Active Democracy—A Local Election’; ‘Clubs, Societies and Democracy’;

‘Watling Revisited’; ‘The Human Factor in Industry’.29 London School of Economics Library Evan Durbin Papers 4/8, ‘Weekend Conference

on the Psychological and Sociological Problems of Modern Socialism’, 15–16 September1945.

30 YUNG 10/2 ‘National Life Story Collection’, 70.

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extended family in Bethnal Green under the supervision of RichardTitmuss.31 While at the Labour Party Research Department, hepublished several policy papers calling for greater governmentpromotion and coordination of the social sciences, as well as the 1948pamphlet Small Man: Big World, which called for neighbourhooddemocracy and support for the social sciences, and presented the familyas a model for cooperative community.32 After departing from theLabour Party Research Department and returning from his Party-funded world tour, he found himself ‘more or less unemployed’ as acasual research associate at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations,an organization devoted to the study of group behaviour, during whichtime he produced ‘a long unreadable kind of manuscript’ called ‘ForRicher, for Poorer’ which he described as ‘sort of really half waybetween a socialist tract and a sociological hypothesis building’.33

Subtitled ‘Essays on Family, Community and Socialism’, the manuscriptpleaded that the Labour Party should ‘give some prominence to theneeds of the family’ and championed the family allowance distributeddirectly to mothers.34 Young presented this document to the LabourParty Policy Committee in 1952, but recalled that with the exception ofthe MP Edith Summerskill, few of his Labour colleagues took the workseriously. The document would provide the basis, however, for Young’sfirst published work of academic sociology, ‘Distribution of Incomewithin the Family’ which used Rowntree’s concept of the ‘secondarypoverty’ of women and children to call for more research into theeconomics of dependency.35 Inspired by the academic success of hisfriend and fellow PEP alumnus Charles Madge, Young would applyunsuccessfully for an assistant lectureship in sociology at the Universityof Birmingham, and for a fellowship at Nuffield College Oxford.36

Failing to secure either position and disillusioned with both politics andthe formal pathways of the academy, he formed the ICS in 1953.Young’s LSE PhD thesis, A Study of the Extended Family in East London,was completed in 1955.

31 YUNG 10/6, ‘Interview 6 by Phyllis Willmott with Michael Young (Lord Young ofDartington) on 11th July 2001’, 5; Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in EastLondon’, PhD thesis, London School of Economics, 1955.

32 Bodleian Library Labour Party Research Department Archives, Research DepartmentMemoranda, 118 (June 1948); 172 (October 1948); Michael Young, ‘What might havebeen?’ reprint of ‘Social Science and the Labour Party Programme’ [1949], New Society, 2November 1972.

33 YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll No. 2’, 22 March 1994, 2.34 London School of Economics Library, Peter Shore Papers 4/48, ‘For Richer for

Poorer: Essays on Family, Community and Socialism’, November 1952.35 Michael Young, ‘Distribution of Income within the Family’, The British Journal of

Sociology, 3:4 (December 1952), 305–21.36 YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 75.

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Young’s embrace of sociology, and his founding of the ICS, should beset against both the novelty and the shallow institutional roots of thisnew discipline. Savage paints a picture of social science, and sociologyin particular, gradually gaining intellectual traction within the Britishacademy in the post-war period. In 1939, he reports, only 5 per cent ofuniversity professors in Britain taught in social science subjects, and theLSE was the only university to offer courses in sociology in 1949. But inthe 1950s and 1960s, social science departments spread rapidly,particularly in what Savage calls the new ‘plate glass’ universitiessuch as Essex and Sussex, and sociology emerged as a major intellectualforce.37 Contemporaries observed that sociology had achieved a broadcultural credence: as Anthony Crosland would remark in his 1956 TheFuture of Socialism, ‘[t]he new style executive prides himself on being agood committee-man; and subconsciously he longs for the approval ofthe sociologist’.38

Looking back on the founding of the Institute, Young admitted thathis ambition had been to ‘reform the Labour Party through sociology’.39

His disillusionment with the Labour Party and simultaneous embraceof sociology and psychology serve as an almost farcically perfectillustration of the French sociologist Raymond Aron’s famous remark,reported by A.H. Halsey, that ‘British sociology [was] essentially anattempt to make intellectual sense of the political problems of theLabour Party’.40 He later admitted that his ambition was a touch hazy,naı̈ve, or ‘fuzzy headed’.41 ‘[I]t was as if’, Young recalled in 1994, ‘I wastaken in by the ease with which you can mix up the two words,socialism and sociology!’42

The Institute bridged the worlds of academic sociology and politics.None of its members were seasoned sociologists—and Willmott andYoung later admitted that they had ‘to learn on the job’.43 Townsendhad studied anthropology as an undergraduate at Cambridge, Marrishad studied psychology, and Peter Willmott had no post-secondaryqualifications. Like Young, Willmott had previously worked for the

37 Savage, Identities and Social Change in Britain, 124–33.38 Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism (London, 1985), 19.39 YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 81.40 A.H. Halsey, ‘Provincials and Professionals: the British Post-War Sociologists’ in

Martin Bulmer, ed., Essays on the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge, 1985),151; Halsey, No Discouragement: An Autobiography (Basingstoke, 1996), 44; Halsey,‘Provincials and Professionals: the British post-war sociologists’ European Journal ofSociology, 23:1 (May 1982), 1.

41 YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 81.42 YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young interview by Jane Gabriel, Roll No. 2’, 22 March

1994, 2.43 Young and Willmott, ‘Institute of Community Studies, Bethnal Green’, The

Sociological Review: New Series (July 1961), 204; Michael Young, ‘A Study of theExtended Family in East London’, PhD thesis, University of London, 1955.

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Labour Party Research Department at Transport House, and Townsendcame to the ICS directly from PEP.44 They were, as Willmott admitted,‘untrained and unproven’, and ‘more concerned with political actionthan with the academy’.45 Their publications were deliberatelyaccessible, and, like the better-known social research organizationMass Observation, sought to marry an anthropological and sociologicalapproach by embedding researchers in the communities that theystudied.

Cynically, the Institute could be understood as a collection ofamateurs with cavalier attitudes towards academic sociology: they werecommitted to ‘reforming politicians and public servants rather thaneducating a new generation of sociologists’ and were only sometimesinterested in sociological theory.46 Less cynically, the Institute’s workcan be understood as a genuine attempt to apply social research to thevastly expanded post-war social service sector: Young’s Proposal forEstablishing a London Institute for Community Studies argued that thestate was too focused on treating the symptoms rather than the causesof social deprivation in social service provision. Rather than focusing onthe consequences of poverty and social breakdown, the Institute ofCommunity Studies’ approach was to suggest that the social servicesought to adopt a more holistic approach to social welfare whichadministered prevention alongside cure.47 And the best prevention forsocial disease, Young argued, was in a better understanding of the‘relationship between the social services and working-class familylife’.48

Why the Family?

In his biography of Young, Asa Briggs suggests that the family was ‘atthe core of all Michael’s thinking, feeling, and writing’.49 There weresignificant biographical motivations for Young’s intellectual concernwith the family. Young’s upbringing had been bohemian and unhappy:his mother Edith, an ‘advanced thinker’ of her time, had rejectedtraditional family life (as he put it, she ‘was very interested in men and

44 Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, in Martin Bulmer, ed., Essayson the History of British Sociological Research (Cambridge, 1985), 138.

45 Peter Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, 144.46 Willmott, ‘The Institute of Community Studies’, 145.47 Titmuss 2/136, Michael Young, ‘Proposal for Establishing a London Institute of

Community Studies’, July 1953.48 Young and Willmott, ‘Institute of Community Studies, Bethnal Green’, 203.49 Briggs, Michael Young, Social Entrepreneur, 10.

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had lots and lots of them’), and he once caught his father, too, in acompromising position with a female friend. Young recalled that hisparents had briefly considered giving him up for adoption, but thefamily moved to Australia during Young’s infancy and early childhood,where his grandparents had cared for him. This early experience mayhave given Young an appreciation of the supportive potential of theextended family.50

While working at PEP and the Labour Party Research Department,Young had read biographies of George Lansbury and Ben Tillett, whichhad highlighted the centrality of the extended family to working-classlife.51 And Young’s 1949 Small Man: Big World, and 1952 For Richer forPoorer and ‘Distribution of Income within the Family’, had alreadypresented the family as the ultimate cooperative unit and the basis of asuccessful socialism.52 But Young credited his PhD supervisor RichardTitmuss with ‘the central idea’ of the ICS ‘that individuals should beseen as members of family groups’.53 Titmuss had written extensivelyon family and population during the interwar period in response to thedecline in birth rates in France, Germany and the UK. The 1942 ParentsRevolt, which Titmuss co-wrote with his wife Kay Titmuss, argued thatthe birth rate had fallen because of the competitiveness, individualismand social disconnection associated with acquisitive capitalism, a socialmodel which he saw as incapable of delivering incentives forstewardship.54 The Titmusses argued that the solution to the birthrate crisis lay in the promotion of community spirit and more altruisticeconomics.

Though Titmuss’ interest in family policy derived from concernsabout population decline, it would survive the reversal of this trend.After the demographic anxieties of the 1920s and 1930s, the 1950srepresented a high water mark for marriage rates.55 In his 1958 Essayson The Welfare State, Titmuss would point out that though family andmarriage had become more culturally important, they were occurringalongside an overall decline in the size and demands of the family. Aworking-class mother of the 1890s might have spent 15 years of her lifepregnant or nursing, and her counterpart in the 1950s would spendonly 4 in the same state. Despite this apparent decline in the real

50 YUNG 10/6, ‘Interview 1 with Michael Young (Lord Young of Dartington)’, 10November 2000, 10–13.

51 YUNG 10/2, ‘National Life Story Collection’, 72.52 Michael Young, ‘Small Man: Big World: A Discussion of Socialist Democracy’,

Towards Tomorrow, No. 4 (London, 1949) 3.53 Titmuss 2/136, Letter from Young to Titmuss, 11 November 1953.54 David Reisman, Richard Titmuss: Welfare and Society (Basingstoke, 2001).55 Pat Thane, ‘Family Life and ‘‘Normality’’ in Postwar British Culture’, in Richard

Bessell and Dirk Schumann, eds, Life After Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social Historyof Europe during the 1940s and 1950s (Cambridge, 2003), 196–8.

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importance of the family, Titmuss observed, ‘we have gradually come toexpect more and more of our marriages’.56 In spite of diminishing socialand legal restraints on women, marriage had become more popularsince the 1930s, and was also occurring at a younger age.57 Thispervasive and increasingly important aspect of people’s lives, however,had yet to be reflected fully in social research. Titmuss’ inspiration forstudying the family also owed much to industrial psychology. Thoughhe embraced the work of Elton Mayo, who argued that the factoryshould be understood as a social environment, Titmuss also sought tobroaden this sphere of investigation away from workplace dynamics tothe families, communities and friendship networks in which individ-uals formed their identities and lived their non-working lives.58

Industrial psychology, from Titmuss’ perspective, had been intellec-tually critical to the humanization of labour, but Titmuss called for it tooperate in tandem with a social psychology of community that treatedfamily as one of the central institutions of industrial society.59

A second, less acknowledged force behind the Institute’s focus on thefamily was the child psychologist John Bowlby. Bowlby is best knownfor his work on ‘attachment theory’ and the thesis that lovingattachment relationships with a primary parent are essential to infantand child brain development and an individual’s subsequent capacityto create and maintain close personal relationships later in life. ThoughBowlby was trained in psychoanalysis by Melanie Klein, whointerpreted children’s emotional problems as a product of internalpsychic conflicts between aggressive and libidinal drives, he came toobject vociferously to the Kleinian approach to child psychology,arguing that children’s families and primary relationships should befactored into their treatment.60 When Bowlby became the Head of thechildren’s department at the London Tavistock Clinic in 1948 herenamed it the Department for Children and Parents and sought tooffer therapy that involved both the individual patient and his or herkin.61 After contributing to both the 1946 Curtis Report on the Care ofChildren and the 1948 Children Act, which made childcare theresponsibility of local authorities and consolidated existing childcareservices, Bowlby was commissioned by the World Health Organization(WHO) to write a report on the care of displaced and delinquentchildren. This report was published in 1951 with the title Maternal Care

56 ‘The position of women’ in Welfare and Wellbeing: Richard Titmuss’s Contribution toSocial Policy (Bristol, 2001), 32; Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State (London, 1958), 98.

57 Richard Titmuss, Essays on the Welfare State, 99–101.58 Elton Mayo, The Social Problems of an Industrialized Civilization (London, 1949), 5–7.59 Richard Titmuss, ‘Industrialization and the Family’, in Essays on The Welfare State,

111.60 Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (London, 1986), 402.61 Suzanne Van Dijken, John Bowlby: His Early Life (London, 1998), 132.

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and Mental Health, and suggested that for healthy mental development,it was essential that ‘the infant and young child should experience awarm, intimate and continuous relation with his mother’.62 In thisreport and his other publications, Bowlby argued that if children didnot have the advantage of a strong childhood bond with a primaryparent, they would not develop the capacity to form and retainpersistent, stable attachment relationships, and would fail to developinto self-reliant adults.63 Bowlby’s emphasis upon maternal love as abiological requirement for healthy childhood development has beencriticized for its highly gendered emphasis upon mothering itself, and ithas been suggested that his WHO report, which sold 400,000 copies,may have contributed to a post-war cult of domesticity in the USA andelsewhere.64 But Bowlby’s ideas remain pervasive and widely acceptedin mainstream social psychology.65

Bowlby is not mentioned once in Briggs’ account of Young’s life. Buthis influence on the Institute is clear from both its papers and itspublications. Bowlby attended the first meeting of the Institute’sadvisory board in 1953 to supervise Peter Willmott’s report on ‘SocialPolicy and the Broken Home’, a field study that examined how socialservice providers, such as Children’s Officers, ‘Home Helps’ andProbation Officers, interacted with Hackney families that had been‘broken’ by divorce or the death or imprisonment of one of theirmembers.66 Willmott’s study opened by citing Bowlby’s WHO reportMaternal Care and Mental Health, and took as its basic premises that‘children can be greatly damaged as a result of maternal deprivation’,that ‘even a ‘‘bad’’ home can be better than no home at all’ and that ‘thepurpose of social policy [should be] to assist families in difficultywithin their own homes, rather than to remove the children’. The reportconcluded that the best resources for broken families were often foundin their wider kinship network.67

In a 1955 talk to the Family Welfare Association, Young made hisintellectual debt to Bowlby explicit. Arguing that it was ‘not for theState to try and take the place of the extended family, but for the Stateand voluntary bodies to give it all the help and support they can’, hecited Bowlby’s view that ‘even a pretty bad family . . . is better than a

62 John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva, 1951).63 John Bowlby, The Making and Breaking of Affectional Bonds (Abingdon, 1949).64 Marga Vicedo, ‘The Social Nature of the Mother’s Tie to Her Child: John Bowlby’s

Theory of Attachment in Post-War America’, The British Journal for the History of Science(September 2011), 402.

65 See, for example, Jonathan Haidt, ‘Love and Attachments’, in The HappinessHypothesis (London, 2006), 112–17.

66 Titmuss 2/136, ‘Institute of Community Studies Advisory Committee’, 9 November1953.

67 Titmuss 2/136, Peter Willmott, ‘Social Policy and the Broken Home’, date unknown,1, 11.

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good institution’.68 Bowlby’s foreword to Peter Marris’ 1958 Widows andtheir Families lamented that because the National Insurance Act of 1946only provided widows with a basic allowance not equivalent to a man’swage, widowhood placed women under ‘relentless economic pressure’to neglect their children by undertaking additional employment.69 AndPeter Marris’ study of urban redevelopment in Nigeria would makeexplicit reference to Bowlby’s Child Care and the Growth of Love bysuggesting that economic insecurity could force Nigerians to adoptitinerant lifestyles, which in turn could produce unstable familyrelationships and mother–child separations which stunted the emo-tional development of children.70 Attachment theory, in short, providedan intellectual argument for the ICS to promote and defend socialpolicies that kept children with their mothers, and mothers with theirchildren.

But the influence that most shaped the Institute’s work on familymay have been anthropology. Young’s 1955 PhD thesis, submitted 2years after the founding of the ICS, critiqued the work of mainlymiddle-class urban planners and social service providers, who, hecharged, had falsely assumed that working-class families looked likethe middle-class ‘nuclear’ family consisting of parents and youngchildren, and had therefore overlooked the importance of the extendedfamily in working-class life.71 And importantly Young’s thesis, and theInstitute’s first two major publications, Family and Kinship in East Londonand Peter Townsend’s The Family Life of Old People, responded not onlyto planners, but to the claims of American sociologists such as GeorgeHomans and Talcott Parsons, who regarded extended family structuresas having lost their function in economic, spiritual and social life andsaw the nuclear family as the dominant kinship unit in industrialsociety.72 Though ‘sociologists and psychologists ha[d] often spoken asthough the immediate family was the only kind of family in modernsociety’, Young believed this view to be mistaken.73 Drawing onanthropology, Family and Kinship in East London and The Family Life of

68 YUNG 3/1/1 ‘Family and Kinship: Talk Given by Michael Young at the AnnualConference of the Family Welfare Association’, 4 November 1955.

69 John Bowlby, foreword to Peter Marris, Widows and their Families (London, 1958), x.70 Marris, Family and Social Change in an African City (London, 1961), 64; John Bowlby,

Child Care and the Growth of Love (Baltimore, 1953).71 Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London’, PhD thesis,

University of London, 1955, 7.72 Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London’, PhD thesis,

University of London, 1955, 16; Peter Townsend, Postscript 1963 to The Family Life of OldPeople, 251, citing George Homans, The Human Group, (London, 1951), 263; Talcott Parsons,‘The American Family: Its Relations to Personality and to the Social Structure’, in TalcottParsons and Robert F. Bales, eds, Family, Socialization and Interaction Process (Glencoe,1955), 16.

73 Michael Young, ‘A Study of the Extended Family in East London,’ 15.

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Old People both sought to show that the ‘wider’ family or extendedfamily remained a socially vital institution in Bethnal Green.

Young, Willmott and Townsend were by no means the first socialscientists to emphasize the continuing importance of the extendedfamily in a working-class community. Their work was in fact arelatively novice incursion into what was already a well-establishedfield of intellectual inquiry. In 1947 the LSE anthropologist RaymondFirth and his colleagues had formed a research group and seminarfocused on kinship, which started from the central proposition that ‘theelementary family of parents and young children is not, even inWestern urban conditions, an isolated social unit’.74 Firth’s research waseventually published in the 1956 Two Studies of Kinship in London, whichincluded a study of the kinship networks of South London and of thecity’s more geographically dispersed Italian community. Firth and hiscollaborator Judith Djamour argued that extended family ties were vitalaspects of the communities they studied, providing an instrument ofcommunication and a frame of reference for social action.75 Firth’sstudy would be followed by Elizabeth Bott’s 1957 Family and the SocialNetwork, a product of a programme of research into the ‘normal family’jointly sponsored by the Tavistock Institute, the Family WelfareAssociation, the Nuffield Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation.Drawing on a relatively limited sample of only twenty families, Bott’sstudy was concerned with the division of labour and differentiation oftasks between husband and wife, suggesting that the more closely knitthe extended family network in which a family was embedded, thegreater the separation of roles between husband and wife.76

Young’s early research on East London, published in a short 1954article in the anthropology journal Man, aligned itself with Firth’s claimthat the extended family remained a vital institution.77 But Young andTownsend made more ambitious claims than Firth about the socialimportance of relationships between women. Firth’s South Londonstudy had identified a matri-centred or matral kinship system orientedaround the relationships between mothers and their adult children, butthough Firth noted that familial relationships tended to develop and beperpetuated through women, he saw this as a strictly informal tie.78 InNovember of 1954 Young and Townsend both gave papers to Firth’s

74 Raymond Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London (London, 1956), 23.75 Raymond Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London, 29.76 Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network (London, 1957), preface, xvi; Bott’s study

was unfavourably reviewed by Peter Townsend, ‘Sociology and the Relationship betweenMan and Wife’ in Case Conference, 4:10, April 1958.

77 Michael Young, ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, Man (September 1954).78 Firth, Two Studies of Kinship in London, 41–2.

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seminar on ‘Kinship in Western Society’.79 Like Firth, Young alsoidentified a female-centred pattern of kinship structure in BethnalGreen similar to that which Firth had found in Bermondsey. But heaccorded far more weight to the informal dominance of women inworking-class social, cultural and economic life than Firth had done.Bethnal Green, he argued, was a matrilineage, in which the relation-ships between mothers and their daughters played ‘economic,recreational, ceremonial and mutual service functions of greatimportance’.80

Young and Townsend were at odds with Firth about the degree towhich South and East London should be characterized as female-centric, and disagreed over the specific terminology that should beapplied to these communities: Firth suggested ‘defacto matrilineage’,‘matricapital’, or ‘short-term matrilineal’, while Young preferred‘truncated matrilineage’ or ‘matricapital group’.81 And Young wouldrecall his interaction with Firth and the anthropological networks of theLSE unfavourably (the anthropologists at Firth’s seminar, he recalled,‘were in a rather nose-in-the-air fashion, a sniffy fashion’), and recalledbeing castigated by Firth for failing to acknowledge his intellectualdebts to anthropology and his own work.82 But Firth’s work on kinshipwas an essential forerunner and source of intellectual inspiration thatinformed the Institute’s willingness to characterize the inhabitants ofBethnal Green and Bermondsey as inhabiting a world that was not justfamily-centric, but female-centric. Though Firth and his colleagues atthe LSE first identified the importance of the mother–daughter tie inLondon communities, Young would politicize it. Venturing into a worldof research on urban kinship patterns already mapped by professionalanthropologists, Young, Townsend and Willmott applied an anthropo-logical notion of matrilineal, matri-central or matriarchal familystructure to working-class communities. Perhaps most tellingly, Young

79 Peter Townsend Papers (hereafter Townsend) 56/1, Peter Townsend ‘Method andStudy of the Family’ and Young ‘Kinship in Bethnal Green’, November 1954.

80 Townsend 56/1, Michael Young, ‘Kinship in Bethnal Green’ (26 November 1954), 2;Though Young and Willmott did not make use of the bolder formulation ‘matriarchal’ inFamily and Kinship in East London, their argument did cite Madeline Kerr’s finding that theworking class community of Ship Street in Liverpool was a ‘flourishing matriarch[y]’. SeeFamily and Kinship in East London, 195, citing Madeleine Kerr, ‘Comparative Study ofDeprivation in Jamaica and Liverpool’, delivered to the British Association in 1953.

81 Raymond Firth Papers (hereafter Firth) 3/1/16 ‘Mr. Young’s Kinship Study ofBethnal Green’, 26 November 1954; Townsend Papers 56/1, Bott to Townsend, 28September 1955.

82 YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young Interview by Jane Gabriel, 22 March 1994, Roll No. 1’,4; BLPES Raymond Firth Papers 3/8/1, Letter from Raymond Firth to Michael Young, 6May 1953.

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and Willmott’s draft outline of Family and Kinship in East London wasprovisionally titled ‘Mothers and Daughters’.83

The Politics of Kinship

Family and Kinship in East London should be understood as part ofYoung’s larger and more intellectually ambitious project, dating back tohis work with PEP, to grapple with the status of women and other non-working dependents in industrial society.84 Young, like other historians,sociologists and anthropologists of his era, ascribed to a developmentalmodel of history according to which pre-industrial Britain had been amore socially integrated and family-centred society in which men andwomen participated simultaneously in economic activity often centredaround the home. According to this account, the Industrial Revolution,legislation against child labour, and the growth of cities had divorcedhome and workplace, and the family, as a result, had been reduced tothe nuclear family of parents and children.85 Young believed thatindustrialization had made women more dependent on men, the state,and each other for the well-being of themselves and their children.86

But Young also believed that women in working-class communities,like those in the ‘primitive societies’ of other cultures, had adaptedstrong female-dominated extended family networks as a result of theirshared identity as childrearers, their position outside of formalemployment, and their common vulnerability to their husbands’unemployment, deaths and desertions. And Young felt that women’sdependency on men and the state, and the female-centric form ofsocial solidarity or ‘matrilineage’ that he and his colleagues saw inBethnal Green, had been overlooked by left-wing policymakers. Youngbelieved that the Labour Party had emphasized work over the otheraspects of people lives, and workers over women, the unemployed, orthe elderly. In its quest to promote jobs and maximize industrialefficiency, the Labour Party, he argued, had become constrained by apolitics of production that understood individuals in primarily

83 Titmuss 2/155, outline of ‘Mothers and Daughters: A Study of Family and Kinshipin East London’, 1 June 1956.

84 See PEP ‘Watling Revisited’, 82.85 ‘For Richer for Poorer’, Chapters 2, 7; Young’s conception of the social consequences

of the industrial revolution owed much to Maurice Dobb’s Studies in the Development ofCapitalism (London, 1946), 262–7 cited in Family and Kinship in East London, 188. Titmussshared this developmental conception of industrial society, saying that ‘[i]ndustrialization[had] demanded the breakdown of mutual relationships of the extended family’ Titmuss,‘Industrialization and the Family’, 110.

86 YUNG 3/2/2/11 lecture, ‘The Rise of Women’s Status’, 1–2.

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economic terms. The weakness of the ‘Beveridge system’, Youngreflected, was:

that it is related to work, so much of it, and it doesn’t work well forwomen who don’t work at any time; they’re not entitled to pensionsthen except through their husbands, if they have them, and certainlynot through their cohabiting partners if they have them. And itdoesn’t work well at all for the growing numbers of theunemployed.87

Young was not simply a critic of the welfare state: his 1952 ‘ForRicher for Poorer’ and ‘Distribution of Income Within the Family’ hadboth been concerned with family policy and championed familyallowances distributed directly to mothers. But his sociological workwith the ICS was more concerned with uncovering the informal female-centric support networks already in place within the urban workingclass. Using politically potent language, Young and Willmott suggestedthat working-class women, who suffered from insecurity due to theirpartners’ unemployment, deaths, and desertions, as well as the risks ofchild-bearing, belonged to their own ‘trade union’. The solidarity of theextended family, ‘organized in the main by women and for women’,offered them ‘protection against being alone’.88 Mothers and mothers-in-law, Young and Willmott suggested, offered an alternative form ofhealth and childcare provision, which policymakers should treat as a‘mutual aid agency’.89

Because the extended family was so central to working-class life, Youngcalled for urban planners to treat the family as a dynamic and ever-evolving entity and build homes that reflected that reality rather than thatof the ‘formula’ or nuclear family consisting of a married couple withyoung children.90 Other ICS publications by Townsend, Willmott andPhillip Barbour called for older people to be treated as an inseparable partof the family group, and challenged city planners to plan accordingly.91

And Peter Marris applied this argument to his work on Nigeria, wherenew European-style housing developments had isolated individualcouples from work and relatives, failed to account for the commonpractice of polygamous marriage, and led to high rates of divorce and a

87 Interview with Jane Gabriel, 12.88 Young, ‘Kinship and Family in East London’, 137–9; Family and Kinship in East

London, 189.89 Peter Willmott, ‘Social Administration and Social Class’, Case Conference, 4:7 (January

1958), 194–8, 196.90 Young, ‘The Planners and the Planned’, 134.91 Peter Willmott and Philip Barbour, ‘Housing of Old People in a Rural Parish’, Social

Service Quarterly, 31:4 (Spring 1958), 158–61; Peter Townsend, The Family Life of Old People(London, 1957); Peter Townsend, ‘The Family Life of Old People’, Sociological Review, 3:2(December 1955).

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resultant devaluation of the institution of marriage itself.92 The Institutealso promoted kinship as an alternate form of social organization. Underthe Poor Law, even adult children and grandchildren had been able toclaim for support from their kin, and children could be held similarlyliable to maintain their parents. Willmott argued that by universalizingaccess to social support, the Beveridge model of National Insurance hadundermined kinship responsibilities by making social insurance theresponsibility of the national community as a whole. Many individualsstill took on kinship obligations voluntarily, creating a system of dualmoral and legal obligation in which the institutions of state and familycooperated to provide alternate models of social support—a dual supportsystem that Willmott argued should be formally recognized in the existingadministration of state support.93

Young and Townsend saw their embrace of the family as a counter-cultural reaction to an older view among ‘advanced thinkers in theLabour Party’ that the family was a ‘fetter’ on women’s potential.94 In a1954 talk to the Town Planning Institute, Young suggested that thefamily should be treated as a progressive rather than conservative forceand supported rather than undermined by urban planners. He asked,

Now that there is no Wells and no Shaw to denounce the family, nowthat Bertrand Russell and D.H. Lawrence have attained respectabil-ity—one in the House of Lords and the other in the Penguin Series—can we not all agree that a primary purpose of planning is tomaintain, support, and strengthen the family[?]95

Townsend would echo Young’s sentiment several years later in the1958 Conviction. ‘Traditionally’, he argued, ‘Socialists have ignored thefamily or they have openly tried to weaken it’ but ‘[t]he chief means offulfillment in life is to be a member of, and reproduce a family’.96

Young and Townsend’s embrace of family would not go unchallenged.Jennifer Platt would note critically that in the Institute’s studies, ‘[f]amilyrelationships seem at some points to be regarded as having an absoluteand inherent value’.97 And in 1966 the socialist feminist and psychoanalystJuliet Mitchell would attack Townsend, specifically, for his enthusiasm forthe family, asking how it was that the social position of women had cometo be treated uncritically by post-war socialists.98 For Young, Townsend

92 Peter Marris, ‘Social Change and Social Class’, International Journal of ComparativeSociology (March 1960), 122–4.

93 Peter Willmott, ‘Kinship and Social Legislation’, British Journal of Sociology, 4:2 (June1958), 126–42.

94 YUNG 10/3, ‘Michael Young Interview by Kate Gavron, Roll No. 3’, 22 March 1994, 11.95 Michael Young, ‘The Planners and the Planned’, 134.96 ‘A Society for People’, in Norman Mackenzie, ed., Conviction, (London, 1958), 119–20.97 Platt, Social Research in Bethnal Green, 15.98 Juliet Mitchell, ‘Women: the Longest Revolution’, New Left Review, 40 (December 1966), 12.

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and Willmott, the matrilineal kinship networks of Bethnal Green wereimportant because they provided a defense against economic and socialinsecurity and represented a model of social solidarity that symbolicallychallenged work. Engaging with maternalist feminism, social policy,sociology, and anthropology, Young brought together public policy andthe social sciences to address the social position of women, and putdependency at the centre of a sociological critique of the welfare state.

Conclusion

Family and Kinship in East London was republished by Penguin fourteentimes between 1961 and 1980, influencing a generation of planners,sociologists and social historians and contributing to what the historianMark Clapson has called ‘an extraordinarily pervasive anti-suburbanmyth in English culture’.99 The theme of family remained embedded inthe Institute’s research on urban planning throughout the 1950s andcontinued to figure in its work thereafter, but its urban planning-focused publications from 1960 onwards largely abandoned its earlierclose focus on the family to adopt a more general, community-orientedconcern with sociability. In the 1960s the Institute’s publications becamemore concerned with suburban living in places like Woodfordand Dagenham, and more critical of the urban slum, especially inthe USA.100

Young remained Director of the ICS, but his life and research interestsbecame impressively polymathic. In 1956 he set up the ConsumersAssociation from the garage of the Bethnal Green headquarters of theInstitute, and founded its flagship magazine Which?, which tested andassessed consumer durables to equip shoppers, faced with an unprece-dented level of consumer choice, to make informed shopping decisions.101

Young published The Rise of the Meritocracy in 1958, was appointed lecturerin Sociology at Churchill College Cambridge in 1961, and first Chairman of

99 Mark Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and SocialDispersal in Post-War England (Manchester, 1998), 1, 66–67.

100 See for example Peter Willmott, The Evolution of a Community (London, 1963); PeterWillmott and Michael Young, ‘The Social Implications of Urban Redevelopment’, Journal ofthe American Institute of Planners, xxviii (August 1962); Peter Marris, ‘A Report on UrbanRenewal in the United States’ in Leonard J. Duhl, ed., The Urban Condition (New York, 1963).

101 On the Consumers Association, see Lawrence Black, ‘Which?Craft in Post-War Britain:The Consumers’ Association and the Politics of Affluence’, Albion: A Quarterly JournalConcerned with British Studies, 36:1 (Spring 2004), 52–82; Lawrence Black, Redefining BritishPolitics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation, 1954–70 (Basingstoke, 2010); Matthew Hilton,‘The Fable of the Sheep, or, Private Virtues, Public Vices: The Consumer Revolution of theTwentieth Century’, Past & Present, 176 (August 2002). Hilton, ‘Michael Young and theConsumer Movement’, Contemporary British History, 19:3 (September 2005), 312.

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the Social Science Research Council in 1965, and would continue his careeras an eclectic thinker, social researcher, and innovator.

But the concern with family that had underpinned Family and Kinshipin East London would also inform Young’s concern with the consumer.In 1960 Young published The Chipped White Cups of Dover. Thispamphlet, which was initially rejected for publication by the FabianSociety but subsequently distributed by The Observer, suggested thatpolitics was becoming ‘less and less the politics of production and moreand more the politics of consumption’ and called for the establishmentof a new political party in the interest of consumers.102 The Consumers’Association and Consumer Movement have been interpreted by onecommentator as primarily concerned with the promotion of ‘order,objectivity, and the strength of individual character’.103 But The ChippedWhite Cups of Dover presented consumer-focused politics as anexpression not only of rational individualism, but of ‘the establishmentof the family . . . as the unit of society’.104 In sociology lectures deliveredbetween 1961 and 1963 Young suggested that the family, which hadbeen displaced as the unit of production by the Industrial Revolution,had been restored ‘to another kind of eminence, as the unit ofconsumption’.105 Rather than representing a departure from the family-centric sociology that had underpinned the development of the ICS, theideas underpinning Young’s involvement with the ConsumersAssociation and Consumer Movement were a continuation of thosewhich had informed his studies of Bethnal Green.

The ICS emerged out of Young’s frustrations with the Labour Party andhis embrace of social science, and responded to a wealth of intellectualcurrents in psychology, sociology, anthropology and social administrationthat emphasized the social function of the family. Family and Kinship in EastLondon was both a community study of Bethnal Green, and a deliberateintellectual and political project to show the continuing importance of theextended family in industrial society. Young’s politics were shaped bysociological conception of family, and especially the relationships betweenwomen, as a source of mutual support and social solidarity. His work atthe ICS speaks to a broader interrelation between post-war social scienceand politics, and offers a useful reminder that present-day strands ofnostalgic, relational, and communitarian thinking within the British leftderive from a rich intellectual lineage.

102 Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 11, 18–19.103 Hilton, ‘The Fable of the Sheep’, 237.104 Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 9.105 Young, ‘The Chipped White Cups of Dover’, 11.

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