Eleanor Gordon et al., "Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Mar 5, 2026

Katie Barclay, historian of family practices, and Eleanor Gordon, scholar of Scottish social history, discuss working-class courtship, marriage, and divorce in Scotland from 1855–1939. They trace regional diversity, courtship rituals before and after WWI, patterns of illegitimacy and non-marital sex, household forms and cohabitation, and how marriages broke down amid war and social change.

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INSIGHT

Nuclear Family Snapshot Masks Household Complexity

Nuclear families appeared dominant in snapshots but were often outnumbered by households with boarders, lodgers, or extended kin.
Urban areas had many unrelated lodgers; rural/island areas showed more multilocal extended households tied to family labour like crofting.

INSIGHT

Courtship Stayed Local Even As Cities Offered New Spaces

Courtship remained rooted in kin, neighbourhood and friendship networks, with local spots (e.g., Glasgow's 'Highlandman's Umbrella') serving as meeting points.
Interwar commercial leisure (dance halls, cinemas) expanded anonymous encounters but continuities and parental surveillance persisted.

ANECDOTE

Highlandman's Umbrella Became A Courtship Landmark

Glasgow's Highland communities used familiar meeting places like the bridge under Central Station as safe rendezvous for courting Highlanders.
Such spots let migrants preserve kin-based meeting patterns while avoiding wet weather on Saturdays.

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Working-Class Courtship, Marriage, and Divorce in Scotland, 1855–1939 (Oxford UP, 2025) by Professor Eleanor Gordon, Professor Katie Barclay, and Dr. Jeff Meeks is the first book-length study of the history of working-class courtship and marriage in Scotland, from the establishment of civil registration to the introduction in 1939 of legislation which abolished irregular marriage and introduced civil marriage. Adopting a 'life course' approach, the book explores the social, economic, and cultural contexts of romantic partnerships, from courtship through to marital or family dissolution.
Drawing from a wide range of sources that capture official accounts and discourses on the one hand, and the testimony and experience of working-class people on the other, the book offers a uniquely broad and textured view of courtship and marriage in this period. In so doing, it advances recent historiographical debates surrounding marriage in the Anglophone world, particularly the mutability of 'love', and whether the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a social and cultural 'turning point' for the working classes in terms of choice of marriage partner, the nature of the marital relationship, and the parent-child relationship. The book also engages with debates about extra-marital sexual activity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whether the family was more or less 'stable' than the contemporary family, and the different ways that marriages broke down before the advent of divorce reform. This has important implications for wider European and North American historiography, and raises timely questions about the primacy of the 'traditional family' in policy and public discourse.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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