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.
Tracking the Gendered Life Courses of Care Leavers in 19th-Century Britain
The adult outcomes of children raised in care are a matter of much concern in Britain today. Care leavers account for a quarter of the adult prison population, a tenth of the young homeless population, and over two thirds of sex workers (Centre for Social Justice, 2015: 4). This article argues that, by contrast, the first generation of boys and girls passing through the early care system were more likely to have experienced a modest improvement in their life chances. It explores three key questions. First, what mechanisms shaped adult outcomes of care in the past? Second, did these vary by gender? Third, what might life course approaches to these issues gain from engaging both with historical- and gender-inflected analysis? The article draws on our wider analysis of the life courses and life chances of 400 adults who passed through the early youth justice and care systems as children in the northwest of England from the 1860s to the 1920s. These systems were closely interlinked. Within that, the article focuses on the experiences of a subgroup sent to a more care-oriented institution. It compares their collective outcomes with those of the wider group and within-group by gender. It offers a selection of case studies of women’s lives before and after care to highlight the value of, and challenges involved in, undertaking gender analysis in life course research of this kind.
The distinctiveness of Belfast medicine and its medical school.
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