The Duty to Provide: Fathers, Families and the Workhouse in England, 1880–1914
This chapter explores the ways that the poor laws in England were designed around the norms and ideals of the provider role in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and how in practice the result- ing structures rarely matched the more fluid realities of the lives of the poor. In the decades around 1900, Poor Law provision in England was under intense scrutiny as meanings of poverty and of welfare more generally were being challenged. Growing critiques of the excluding side-effects of the Poor Law accompanied debates about how to bring the male working class into the nation state by reconceptualizing citi- zenship around long-standing social-moral norms of obligation to pro- vide for women, children and the elderly within families. The provider role was thus highly gendered, with husbands and fathers normally required to support their dependents, but the relationship between providing and masculinity was a complex one, particularly amongst the very poorest who availed themselves of Poor Law relief. Those who failed to provide found themselves increasingly vulnerable to pauper- ism, at the same time as its stigma powerfully reinforced the ‘deviant’ position of those claiming relief. However, relationships between wel- fare institutions and families were not totally determined by the state and philanthropic agencies, but were actively used and contested at the individual level by those seeking relief and by collective working-class struggles. The voice of the very poor is notoriously difficult to access, but some fragmentary autobiographical accounts of encounters with pauperism provide opportunities to explore these dynamic relation- ships between the Poor Law and its subjects through the perceptions and reactions of the poor themselves.
Soup kitchens and Yugoslav poor relief between the two world wars
Abstract The article examines the activities of Prehrana, one of the most prominent charity organisations in Zagreb and in Croatia between the two world wars, whose main activity was to provide hot meals for the needy. The analysis firstly shows how this organization, which had been established in the Habsburg period, became part of the local Jewish philanthropic tradition, and an integral part of public assistance to the poor during the interwar years, thus somewhat blurring the border between the private and the public. Secondly, I show how Prehrana, although quite a traditional charity institution with regard to its organisation and gender division of labour, nonetheless shaped its philanthropic activity in new ways: existing practices were remodelled and new infrastructures were created. This case study is emblematic of the prominent role played by voluntary associations in the interwar Eastern European transition from traditional poor relief to the socialist welfare regime. Finally, the article argues that voluntary and public organizations were both deeply concerned with the issue of social control. Carefully distinguishing the poor along hierarchised social scales, refining and deepening gender and social differences, humanitarian associations like Prehrana significantly contributed to shaping and disciplining poverty in Yugoslav interwar society.
European Neutrality in Historical Perspective
This chapter places the neutrality policies of the established European neutral states—Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland—in historical context. It explores the origins of neutrality in the idea of non-belligerency in war and the history of neutrality in modern European international politics, highlighting the way in which quite a wide variety of states were or sought to be neutral at various points in the nineteenth century or the first half of the twentieth century. The chapter then shows how the Cold War division of Europe resulted in Austria, Finland, Ireland, Sweden and Switzerland (along with Yugoslavia) emerging as a distinctive neutral group of states between the two blocs. The chapter also reviews how the European neutral states’ foreign and security policies have adapted since the end of the Cold War. It finishes with some conclusions about neutrality in general and the neutrality of the established European neutral states in particular.