"Mother-in-law" avoidance is a formal rule of social behaviour in many primitive societies. It has latterly become the tacit foundation of British housing policy. The speculative builder's advertisement invariably offers the new home on the outskirts of the city to the newly wed couple, who apparently have neither kith nor kin, or want to get well away from them. Council housing is offered overwhelmingly to the married couple with young children - the family in its most nuclear form. There is, of course, sound sense in the slogan, "a separate dwelling for each family," since ungovernable tensions can be generated when two housewives share a kitchen or a young couple have to start married life under the critical eye of a mother-in-law actually in the house.
Yet to most ordinary folk the family is more than the nuclear group of husband, wife, and young children; and most families in this latter narrow sense want to live near some at least of their kin, usually their parents or parents-in-law. For, without living on top of each other, the three-generation family and the wider kinship surrounding it still seem to be part of the fabric of the lives at least of working-class folk, a main source of mutual aid, strength in adversity, and fellowship, for which the best social services are a poor substitute. When local authorities rehouse people at a distance, and take as tenants virtually none but young couples and children, they damage these kinship ties. Does this matter? Dr. Sheldon's survey of the old in Wolverhampton has shown that there are few old folk, apparently living alone, who are not in almost daily contact with a relative, usually a married daughter living near by. Remove the daughter to a housing estate only five miles away, and the care of the aged becomes a social problem. Family and Kinship in East London (the first study to be issued by the new Institute of Community Studies) shows, however, that the impact of housing policy runs much deeper.
While the fact that the "extended" family - the family embracing three generations and several households - is still a social reality hardly needs proving, what distinguishes this new inquiry is its vivid picture of the actual nature and quality of kinship ties in Bethnal Green and their significance in the social affairs of a settled working-class community. Bethnal Green is perhaps exceptionally settled, since the wide range of jobs available reduces the desire to move elsewhere. Though to the outsider it may seem physically drab and culturally restricted, "very few people wish to leave the East End. They are attached to Mum and Dad, to the markets, to the pubs and settlements, to Club Row and the London Hospital." Familiarity breeds content. They may want all sorts of improvements, but they want them on the spot, not in Dagenham or Harold Hill or Debden. They have their settled ways and find security in the fellowship of family and kindred. How this works, its advantages and drawbacks, are explored in detail. "Mum," the young wife's mother, emerges as the key figure, in almost daily touch with her married children and their children, helper and helped in turn, the focus of family news and family solidarity.
Much the same picture will probably be found in all large cities. But this kind of solidarity depends essentially on nearness. When Bethnal Green families move to "Greenleigh," an L.C.C. estate nearly twenty miles away, solidarity largely collapses. Not only are kin cut off by distance and mutual aid expensively replaced by social services, if available. Community ties have to be created anew under disadvantage. There is a pub for every 400 people in Bethnal Green and a shop for every forty-four. In Greenleigh there is a pub for every 5,000 and a shop for every 300, and residents are spread out at a fifth of the Bethnal Green density. "Low density does not encourage sociability."
Will not new and stronger community ties develop as the new estate settles down? Perhaps, but the example of Dagenham is not encouraging. The children of the first generation of L.C.C. tenants there, now grown up and founding their own families, are largely denied occupation of local houses because they are not Londoners by birth. Strangers "over-spilled" from London still get most of the vacancies. Of Greenleigh it can be foreseen now that, when the children of the present tenants themselves marry in the 1970s, there will be no room for most of them on the estate. They would need 2,500 additional houses, for which there are no sites. They will have to go elsewhere; and the difficulties will be aggravated if twenty years hence the L.C.C. is still filling vacancies at Greenleigh with young families sent out from London. To improve housing by geographically separating the generations impoverishes community life in the older districts without permitting the growth of a richer life in the new areas. If housing conditions are to be raised without creating fresh social problems, far more emphasis will be needed on improvements on the spot - modernizing old houses, rebuilding as tightly as possible, putting factories rather than dwellings into flatted structures, not being lavish with gardens and open spaces. And such a policy is incompatible with the low-density development which is still the prevailing fashion.
.lcThis article starts with a rather tired stereotype of mothers-in-law, but goes on to make some good points about how modern housing policy has broken down valuable family links between the generations.
