Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship

So Much Honest Poverty in Britain, 1870-1930

M. Levine-Clark

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137393227
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book examines how, from the late nineteenth century through the 1920s, British policymakers, welfare providers, and working-class men struggled to accommodate men's dependence on the state within understandings of masculine citizenship.

1

“So Much Honest Poverty”: Introduction

“A large muster of unemployed” assembled in the Vegetable Market in the West Midlands town of Dudley in mid-September 1921. Many of the men present had been out of work for long stretches and had used up their eligibility for national unemployment benefits. They met to discuss strategies for approaching local government bodies for assistance. The featured speaker of the gathering was James Wilson, the Labour Member of Parliament for Dudley. He rallied the crowd, insisting that

the unemployed of Dudley did not want doles, and they had not met there that afternoon to ask for doles. What they wanted was genuine employment. (Hear, hear.) They were not loafers, but were men who protested against unemployment and were entitled to approach their local authorities … and ask them to do all they could to remove unemployment and provide useful and productive schemes which would find them work.

Wilson recognized the limitations of existing national unemployment policies, so he urged unemployed men to exercise their right to demand relief at the local level from the Board of Guardians, who administered the long-stigmatized Poor Law:

There were men who felt their manhood would be affected by going to the Guardians … but he told them that to cherish those feelings they would be worse than cowards if they allowed women and children to starve as a result. They were entitled to go to the Guardians and claim, when the right to work was not met, such sustenance as would enable them to keep their women-folk and their kiddies healthy.

Wilson concluded by exhorting the crowd “to continue to protest against the conditions and enforce their ideals; to continue to make approaches to their local Councils and Boards of Guardians and compel them to do their duty; and also in every way to bring pressure upon the central Government to do its duty.”¹

Wilson’s powerful speech captures fundamental themes in the politics of unemployment and welfare in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. While Wilson addressed his gathering in the early 1920s, his themes would have resonated in the late nineteenth century, when the “problem of unemployment” first became part of people’s vocabularies and experiences. Wilson identified the unemployed as men who desperately wanted to work – “They were not loafers, but men” – equating being a man with the desire to work. By admonishing the men in the crowd for putting their own feelings above the survival of their wives and children, Wilson also associated “men” with those who were responsible for families, whose “manhood” was contingent upon providing for “their women-folk and their kiddies.” According to Wilson, a man’s dependence on public funds did not threaten his manhood if his aim was to support his wife and children. In fact, “men” were entitled to ask for welfare in the name of their families when there was no work available for them. That right extended from local to national resources.

The men that Wilson addressed were members of the “honest poor.” From the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Britons confronted the modern realities of chronic and mass unemployment and commonly referred to “honest poverty” and the “honest poor” to bemoan the extent of suffering among “deserving” people. In 1919, for example, the Dudley Herald editor lamented that the region was experiencing “so much honest poverty” that the increased expenditures of poor law boards of guardians were justified.² I take up the phrase “honest poverty” as an analytical tool to examine relationships among unemployment, welfare, and citizenship. From this perspective, honest poverty was a category applying to men (“honest” when referring to women had predominantly sexual rather than class connotations). Honest poverty describes a model of working-class masculine status built on the pillars of the male breadwinner ideal: the work imperative, which required men to demonstrate that they were willing to work, and family liability, which required men to support their families responsibly. A man who performed these roles signified his respectability – he could be poor and still fulfill the expectations of what it meant to be a man – but many working-class men faced regular challenges to their abilities to work and maintain families. Many found themselves needing help from the state. I introduce “honest poverty” as a way to think about a working-class masculine citizenship status tied explicitly to welfare.

This book asks two big questions: 1) what happened when working-class men, who were expected to fulfill the male breadwinner ideal by working and maintaining dependants, either were unable or unwilling to take on these responsibilities? and 2) how did attempts by the British government and local officials to address that inability or unwillingness – and poor men’s interactions with these attempts – shape new boundaries around what it meant to be a citizen? I argue that, from the late nineteenth century, the visibility of unemployment and demands from new voters pushed policymakers, welfare providers, and unemployed men to reconceptualize relationships among unemployment, welfare, and citizenship. This reconceptualization incorporated dependence on the state into constructions of respectable working-class masculinity and citizenship. This was “honest poverty.” The work-welfare system associated with the male breadwinner ideal insisted on self-sufficiency and independence.³ The honest poverty work-welfare system opened a space for working-class men to remain “men” even when they depended on public welfare.

Unemployment and welfare

Sociologist Mike Savage has argued that “structural insecurity” has been the “distinctive feature of working-class life,” forcing workers “to find strategies for dealing with the chronic insecurity of everyday life.”⁴ One of those strategies has been to turn to public welfare provisions. For the purposes of this study, I use the term “welfare” to mean social policies and practices intended to contribute to (but not necessarily meet) basic living needs. I focus on welfare in relationship to unemployment, so many of the programs I discuss relate specifically to providing poor law relief or government benefits to men out of work. Because unemployment insurance was never untangled from non-contributory benefits in the period I cover, I talk broadly about unemployment benefits as welfare. I also include other forms of assistance, such as court-ordered “maintenance payments” for elderly parents and neglected wives and children, as part of the welfare system of the time. Men and women moved among different forms of welfare, sometimes concurrently, sometimes serially, seeking survival from the district poor law authorities, national benefit providers, and local courts. They also drew on private charity and their friends and families to help them through hard times. Scholars have stressed the significance of this “mixed economy of welfare.”⁵ While my focus in this book is on public forms of assistance, the contributions of friendly societies, voluntary relief committees, charities, trade unions, and other non-government forms of relief were significant. Indeed, central and local government actors for much of the period expected the poor to cobble together a subsistence income from a combination of public and private resources. And, until after the First World War, the central government expected local bodies to take on the bulk of the welfare burden. Most of that burden fell on the Poor Law.

The only system of state assistance available to the poor before the 1911 Unemployment Insurance Act came through the Poor Law, originally Elizabethan, but which took its nineteenth-century form from the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 (the “New” Poor Law). The Poor Law Amendment Act transformed a system of relief being criticized for its cost to local ratepayers, its supposed encouragement of dependence on public funds as opposed to independent initiative, and its outdated administrative machinery. Collecting small parishes into larger unions overseen by the newly-created Boards of Guardians, the New Poor Law was funded by local taxes (rates), but the central government took on more responsibility with a Poor Law Commission to establish national policy and monitor practice. The Commission was replaced by the Poor Law Board in 1847, which in its turn was replaced by the Local Government Board in 1871, which oversaw all local government bodies, including the Poor Law Guardians. Finally, the new Ministry of Health took over management of the Poor Law in 1919.⁶

The ideology of the New Poor Law helped enforce economic independence as the masculine norm.⁷ It insisted that able-bodied men without gainful employment were blameworthy agents of their jobless status; they were not innocent victims of economic forces. While they could be viewed as the unfortunate sufferers of temporary slumps, they were supposed to have anticipated and saved for this possibility to maintain their self-sufficiency. The New Poor Law mandated that, in order to obtain assistance, able-bodied men prove their desperate circumstances by accepting indoor workhouse relief. If a man was married and had children, his family had to follow him into the workhouse, reinforcing both assumptions about the husband/father’s responsibility for his family and his failure to fulfill those breadwinner obligations. Life in the workhouse meant families separated into different wards, regimented days of task work such as picking oakum and breaking stone, wearing uniforms, and eating barely nutritious food. The intention was to create a humiliating test of people’s claims of destitution, and the poor universally hated the workhouse.⁸

The poor law bureaucracy closely investigated poor law operations and produced volumes of reports that reflect an attempt to refine policies to better control local conditions.⁹ Practice was often far different from policy, however, and many poor law unions continued to award outrelief, relief in cash or in kind outside the workhouse, especially when the economic environment made it impossible to offer the workhouse to all who needed help. The early 1870s saw a reassertion of the principles of 1834, the “crusade against outrelief,” an effort to clamp down on poor law unions that inspectors identified as being too generous with outdoor assistance.¹⁰ All poor law relief, however, was designed to stigmatize, and when working men were politically enfranchised in the late nineteenth century, becoming a “pauper” by accepting relief meant relinquishing the vote. A man who depended on public assistance was not a full citizen. Or was he?

In the last third of the nineteenth century, poor law authorities faced new types of applicants: men they regarded as honest even though they were unemployed. These seemingly honest jobless men challenged poor law assumptions, for they were not the unskilled and casual laborers that officials expected to become paupers. They were not the “residuum,” whose “vices, drunkenness, improvidence, mendicancy, bad language, filthy habits, gambling, low amusements, and ignorance,” according to Gareth Stedman Jones, authorities essentially equated with pauperism.¹¹ In this context, policymakers introduced the idea of “unemployment” to try to capture the structural rather than the individual causes of joblessness.¹² The problem of unemployment in the late nineteenth century came to be framed above all by the social survey literature of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree.¹³ Yet even before the publication of Life and Labour of the People of London (1889–1903) and Poverty: A Study of Town Life (1901), “unemployment” was conceptually taking shape. Economic analyses of industrial capitalism combined with demonstrations by unemployed men, argues Matt Perry, to force a recognition that unemployment could exist even when a man was aggressively searching for work.¹⁴ Indeed, unemployment was a “problem” precisely because men who clearly were looking for work could not find any. The development and increasing use of the term “unemployment” in the 1880s acknowledged a problem beyond individual fault.¹⁵

If people could understand joblessness as more of an economic than a moral problem (or at least consider a combination of structural and individual factors), then able-bodied, unemployed men could be “honest,” which meant the state could legitimately assist them in non-stigmatizing ways outside the poor law framework, and unemployed men could continue to vote. “New liberal” thinkers emphasized a positive role for the state that focused on facilitating civic and economic agency for honest poor men.¹⁶ While these ideas began circulating in the 1880s, it was with the Liberal “landslide” of 1906 that the national government actively began to legislate new welfare provisions informed by this thinking.¹⁷ William Beveridge’s 1909 publication of Unemployment: A Problem of Industry explicitly framed the problem of unemployment as economic in nature and beyond the control of individual unemployed people, which contributed to government approaches.¹⁸ The Unemployment Insurance Act of 1911 introduced the first national system of unemployment insurance, designed for honest poor men, which Parliament expanded and revised throughout the 1920s. Yet the limitations of national insurance meant the unemployed continued to rely on the Poor Law and also on the non-contributory benefits system the government developed in the 1920s. National policy and local practice inte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures, Tables, and Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “So Much Honest Poverty”: Introduction
• Part I Unemployment and the Continuities of Honest Poverty
• Part II Honest Poverty in National Crisis
• Part III Honest Poverty and the Intimacies of Policy
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index