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.
The Gendered Economy of Family Liability: Intergenerational Relationships and Poor Law Relief in England's Black Country, 1871–1911
E T., a seventy-one-year-old widow from Stourbridge in Worcestershire, applied to her Union poor law officials for financial relief in April 1871. Her application indicates that she was a non-able-bodied charwoman, suffering from general debility. Although the records note her occupation, there was no report of any income. Her age and infirmity should have made her a likely candidate for a pension. Yet the record of her application also reveals that Elizabeth had a son James, whom the relieving officer believed “ought to do a little.” This assumption, suggesting the son’s ability to provide for his elderly mother, limited the type of assistance to which Elizabeth was thought to be entitled. Instead of providing monetary relief to be used as Elizabeth needed on her own terms, the relieving officer offered the workhouse. On 2 July 1891, in the Stourbridge Union parish of Kingswinford, Staffordshire, there were five applicants over the age of fifty-five who approached the relieving officer for poor law assistance. Of these five, four were widows and one was a
Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s: Some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History
For a long time I have hesitated to write a book on woman. The subject is irritating, especially to women; and it is not new.... The voluminous nonsense uttered during the last century seems to have done little to illuminate the problem. After all, is there a problem? And if so, what is it? Are there women, really? . . . One wonders if women still exist, if they will always exist, whether or not it is desirable that they should, what place they occupy in this world, what their place should be. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949