Content warning: this blog post contains description of domestic abuse, addiction and suicide. Please read with care – information on where to find support is listed at the end of this blog.
Becoming a girl or a boy
Scotland remained a deeply patriarchal society into the second half of the 20th century in its laws, policy, education, religion, workplaces and culture. It was also still attached to a glorified and very male version of its history, full of violence, hard man tropes and the romanticising of warriors, explorers and political heroes. Patriarchal marriage and the traditional patriarchal family of male provider/female homemaker was the first encounter with this culture for children who began absorbing important lessons about men and women from a very early age. For those experiencing domestic abuse as children, these messages came through loud and clear. These were deeply gendered lessons which helped sustain patriarchal norms down the generations.
According to Engels, ‘the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male in monogamous marriage’. Biology determined and differentiated female and male gender roles. Historically, these roles became established in the patriarchal family, and were transmitted in the way children were socialised.
At home, girls and boys learned different ways of behaving and playing, through toys and games and in the way they were treated by adults. They watched and learned how the family money was earned and spent, who had the last word, who did the housework, who got the privileges.
Families play important roles in patriarchal endorsement both at the individual and the neighbourhood levels.
For most girls and boys, it was their Mums who looked after them and they watched as their Mums did the housework, cooking and shopping whilst their Dads went out to full time jobs and were less involved in domestic chores.
My Mum was a typical woman, left with six kids to bring up while he goes off and he doesnae have that responsibility.
Children soaked all this up.
My childhood was very traditional…I was the oldest girl, I was expected to be the carer, the babysitter, helping Mum while my two older brothers went out to play on their bikes with their mates and stuff.
In some families, violence was used to reinforce what girls were expected to do at home.
I was a wee lassie… maybe seven and you’d have homework to do and sometimes you’d forget to peel the tatties or tidy up or dae the dishes and you know I’d get beaten up for that.
Living with domestic abuse
Eight of the sixteen women I interviewed lived with domestic abuse as children. They recalled the everyday terror of living with their fathers’ unpredictable violence and its aftermath. Women described mothers so badly injured that their fathers locked them away out of sight, having to clean up their mother’s blood or looking on terrified and helpless as their fathers beat their mothers in front of them – too wee and scared to intervene.
He hid her from us. He’d beaten her that badly she couldnae see out of her eyes… we sneaked in to see her. She just put her heid out the covers, she went “you need to go!” and eventually they took her away to hospital.
Their memories of fathers destroying their cherished toys or being cruel to family pets contrasted with the outward personae of proud, dominant fathers showing off their children in public and fussing over their ‘little princesses’. While their children often went hungry or without proper clothes, bedding or home comforts, fathers spent their wages on drinking, gambling and socialising.
They always got paid on a Thursday …the money was gone, there was no food left in the house by a Sunday and basically we were starved.
Mothers struggled to care for their children in the midst of this violence.
He was bad to her and it didn’t allow her to be able to parent. She couldn’t do anything for fear…. My stepfather was a binge drinker and my mother was never without a black eye. We all lived in fear of him.
Alcohol, depression and their mothers’ suicide attempts featured prominently in some women’s childhoods with fathers using alcohol to control their mothers.
He poured drink down my Mum’s throat, my Mum wouldn’t drink. He turned my Mum into an alcoholic… She didn’t go out, my Mum didn’t drink till she was thirty odds.
There were harrowing accounts of children never knowing what to expect when they came home from school.
Ye didn’t know what you were going home to. If my Mum was going to be in fae her work, if she was lying drunk, or if she’d been beaten. That was what started happening and I presume he liked it that way. She went missing for days… she didn’t take us we’d get sent to find her.
Others recalled coping with mother attempting suicide, or disappearing on ‘benders’ sometimes for weeks at a time with many remembering their mothers being almost permanently depressed. Older girls had to grow up very quickly and learn to take their mothers’ place.
We would come in from school and find her lying on the couch with an overdose. You went up to the street and got an ambulance, she would be carted away and I would have to look after my brother. I was about ten then and I used to cook, wash, do all the household chores.
Embedded in the lessons taught by such violence was the ambivalence children felt towards violent fathers. Private cruelty and selfishness coexisted with public displays of patriarchal fatherhood: physical strength and prowess went along with the outward image of a respectable and indulgent family provider. Girls were learning that performance of gender roles was different in the public sphere from what went on at home and they began to struggle with a growing internal dissonance.The girls were learning they had to love their fathers, that they should love their fathers, despite the way they behaved at home.
I actually felt that at that age I had to learn to love my father because it wasn’t his fault and so I had to grapple with that for rather a long time.
He had a lot of good elements that he taught us but the other ones…
Girls were receiving strong but complex messages about gender roles and hierarchies and their parents’ sometimes bewildering relationship dynamics. They also watched as men took privileged positions in the family and who used violence if things were not to their liking. Parents stressed the need for clear boundaries between family life and the outside world, including its problems and its violence. Children quickly learned the importance of keeping family matters private and of maintaining an image of respectability.
When she regained consciousness after a really violent attack my mother tried to kill herself with an overdose. I ran to neighbours who called an ambulance. I knew to tell them nothing about what was wrong with my Mum or why. I kept my father’s violence a secret, and told no one.
Children were thus socialised into the habits of silence and family secrecy. Those experiencing violence knew not to tell anyone about it – that it was no one else’s business what went on between a man and his wife. Only one woman recalled the police ever being called to deal with their fathers’ violence. Working class communities in Scotland had a long-standing hostility to the police or the public authorities being involved in their lives thus adding an additional layer to family privacy.
No one called the police where I lived. No one EVER called the police.
Extended families and local communities were often aware of what was going on but married women knew they had made their bed and had to lie in it – trapped in marriages with violent men.
Devoid of support and sanctuary, children supported their younger siblings or snatched brief moments of joy with their mothers or grandparents where they could. For some, friends and school became a lifeline.
I worked really hard at school… I made some early decisions, very early on when I was five, that school was the safe place for me. I never felt safe as a child ever.
They mostly just got on with their lives absorbing these highly gendered lessons, coping with their fathers’ sometimes capricious and unpredictable violence as they went along.
Some women witnessed their mothers’ ultimately futile attempts to separate from their violent husbands. Women in this period were hampered by a welfare state based on the traditional patriarchal family of male breadwinner/female homemaker. Women had poor housing options, were often denied tenancies in their own right and faced restrictive conditions when claiming benefits. Divorce law was unreformed and expensive; women risked losing custody of their children on separation; childcare was hard to come by and expensive for those on low or part-time wages; paid work was difficult to organise around caring responsibilities. Lone mothers faced all of this alongside the stigma and isolation of divorce or separation well into the 1980s. These were the years before the creation of Scotland’s network of Women’s Aid refuges. With the patriarchal system heavily stacked against them, only two of the women’s mothers succeeded in separating; one did so after numerous attempts and the other was a teacher who earned enough to support her children. Most remained married even after their children grew up and left home and continued to be abused by their husbands. The women who could not leave experienced long-term health problems, some succumbed to alcoholism and struggled with poor mental health into old age. There was a story however of one courageous woman who, in the early 1970s, against all the odds and after many unsuccessful attempts, finally succeeded in separating while her husband was in prison.
My Mum got this letter and it says ‘Well [mum’s name] that’s me I’ll be home soon. The minute you’re reading this letter I should be walking in the door and I’m looking forward to home-made poached egg and toast.” And she looked at me and she went “Oh! He’s coming hame the day”. She looked at the date and she went, well hen it’s the morra, go and get that van… and everybody a’ came into ma Ma’s hoos that day and packed what we were taking…. but d’you know what she did? She left him a note, she left him a packet of eggs and a couple slice of bread and she went ‘Aye make yer ain’ poached egg and fucking toast! We never saw him for another year.
The biographies I examined show that from early childhood, all of the women, without exception, learned very traditional lessons about patriarchal marriage whether or not they grew up with violent fathers. Girls learned that being a girl was closely tied to unpaid domestic work – housework and childcare – and that working mothers managed a double burden of paid and unpaid work. Those women who lived with domestic abuse as children learned that their fathers had a free hand in violently enforcing highly patriarchal family regimes with impunity. The women learned very early on that it was dangerous for their mothers if they did not fulfil their traditional role; that as children they had to toe the line, and disclosing their fathers’ violence to anyone outside the family was forbidden. Patriarchal masculinity in this period continued to be closely tied to men’s traditionally dominant role as provider and head of the family. Patriarchal masculinity for married men included having wives who fulfilled their role as mothers and homemakers and ensuring the family front door quite literally kept the outside world at bay. These lessons were reinforced by neighbourhood and community customs which sustained the patriarchal family form and its right to privacy and non-interference.
These glimpses into the lives of some families in Scotland’s recent past reveal the interplay between patriarchal norms, gender roles and identities on individual lives. These oral histories provide unique insights into how children learned and absorbed key lessons about what it meant to be a girl or a boy, about the sanctity of the patriarchal family and its gendered hierarchy. The sanctity of the patriarchal family and the invisible boundaries separating its private relationships and internal affairs from the wider world became deeply embedded in childhood learning. For those children living with domestic abuse, particular lessons were absorbed about the conjunction of gender, power, violence and silence.
This is the second of five essays being posted in spring 2021 to accompany a webinar series hosted by Scottish Women’s Aid during April and May 2021. Forthcoming essays and webinar titles:
- Living with domestic abuse – women changing experiences of abuse from the 1950s to the 1990s.
- Police, criminal justice and social work responses to domestic abuse in post-war Scotland.
- Getting free – the impact of domestic abuse and leaving an abusive relationship 1960s – 1990s.
To find out more about the webinars and to book your place click here.
The next essay in this series:
Living with domestic abuse – women changing experiences of abuse from the 1950s to the 1990s.
If you feel scared of your partner or ex-partner, or if you are worried about someone you know, get in touch with Scotland’s 24-hour Domestic Abuse and Forced Marriage Helpline on 0800 027 1234 for support and information. You can also email and web chat from www.sdafmh.org.uk. There are translation and interpreting services available.
