‘What if?’ Early marriage and the ‘shadow selves’ of young women from the late 1950s to early 1970s

Abstract The value of producing counterfactual history has been hotly debated, but principally in relation to major public events. Drawing on oral history interviews with women who grew up in Britain in the late 1950s to early 1970s, this article presents a case for studying alternative personal histories; in interviews these are often glimpsed in the form of shadow selves, these are the selves that interviewees think they might have been if their lives had unfolded differently. Early marriage was a common source of shadow selves for interviewees, and the article explores what can be learnt from these about women’s experiences of marriage in, and about, a period of heightened social and cultural change. Addressing shadow selves does have implications for research practice. While the interviewee’s composure of a self is a recognized feature of oral history interviews, I propose that researchers also attend to evidence of alternative selves that are not usually or easily integrated into a singular, coherent self, and which are often sidelined, muted, or discarded. Ethical ways of doing this are outlined.