The 1950s Stigma: Divorce and LGBT Community

Miserable in Marriage 

In 1950, if you were a divorcee looking for love, you had to find a partner willing to handle social prejudices and the stigma divorce carried. It was so uncommon that many would rather stay miserable in marriage than face society’s wrath. The deterioration of marriage was arguably due to the pressure of WWII.

In America, there were 385,000 divorces in 1950 which rose to 395,000 by 1959. Contrast that with 1,135,000 in 1998 and we can see the trend.

LGBT Community 

Forty years ago in Britain, loving the wrong person could make you a criminal. Homosexuality was illegal and thousands of men feared being arrested by police who wanted easy convictions.

It’s hard for us to imagine now how repressive the atmosphere was surrounding homosexuality in the 1950’s. Not only that, large sections of the population had no idea homosexuality existed. If you were gay and wanted to date, you had to enter a world of secrets: 

“It was so little spoken about; you could be well into late adolescence before you even realised it was a crime,’ says Allan Horsfall, who campaigned for legal change in the north west of England, where he lived with his partner. He comments on how the newspapers would call it ‘gross indecency’ because they couldn’t bring themselves to mention it. Thus young people were lucky if they could work out what exactly was going on. 

Since this time, the progress of the LGBT community (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) in Britain has been very successful however there is still a long way to go. To mark exactly 50 years since homosexuality was partly decriminalised in the UK, Nikhita Chulani and Charlotte Brehaut arranged a timeline of gay rights in the UK:

                                               
End of Blog 3. Stay tuned for blog 4 (to be posted on Wednesday) as we travel through further decades!