Inside the Welfare State

Virginia Noble

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135990930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

By moving beyond consideration of the welfare legislation enacted in the 1940s, this book explains how government aid was actually provided in the new British welfare state created just after World War II. Revealing dimensions of social policy that have been neglected by scholars, this study uncovers the practices of the officials who decided how welfare would be distributed. Between 1945 and 1965, social policy was in a state of flux, as officials sought to reconcile the new welfare state's message of unqualified inclusion with deeply ingrained norms that militated against providing state aid to working-age men, to women who had even a tenuous connection to a male wage-earner, or to black and Asian immigrants who lacked an authentic "British" identity. Fusing the rationales of the poor law and the technologies of the modern bureaucratic state, various government branches tried to shape the behavior and attitudes of those seeking benefits. These mechanisms of welfare distribution created a bureaucratic language and logic that foreshadowed the more publicized, politicized anxieties that would surface as the welfare state itself came under attack later in the 20th century.

1
Limits and Possibilities of Social Citizenship

The Gendered Boundaries of National Insurance and Unemployment Benefit

In its 1951 election manifesto, the Labour Party congratulated itself on the extension of social security, through the National Insurance Act of 1946, to all British citizens. Juxtaposing the post-war welfare state against the inadequate social policies of the 1930s, Labour basked in the glow of its revolutionary achievement:

[In the inter-war years] millions suffered from insecurity and want. Now we have social security for every man, woman and child….Now we have a national insurance system covering the whole population…. ¹

Such characterizations of national insurance—as a universal, comprehensive system that would protect all British citizens against loss of income—predominated in the optimistic political climate of the 1940s and 1950s. Some historians have echoed the Labour Party’s assessment, with Peter Baldwin going so far as to describe the expansion of state welfare after the war as “an historic event equivalent in importance and stature to the French and Russian Revolutions.”² Rodney Lowe contends that the national insurance system that emerged after the war:

transformed the fundamental nature of the relationship between the state and its citizens…. For the first time in history all citizens were to be insured ‘from the cradle to the grave’ against every eventuality which might lead to the inadvertent loss of their income.³

As has been pointed out by other scholars, however, the citizenship that accompanied national insurance was far from universal. It could only be secured through fairly regular employment, which meant that many women could not participate. National insurance was for wage-earners, and women who did not have paid work could only benefit as dependents of their husbands, not in their own right. Female dependency on male breadwinners was thus reinforced, and many women experienced the much-touted citizenship in post-war national insurance only derivatively, if at all.⁴ This assessment, which focuses on the basic terms of the National Insurance Act of 1946, certainly captures the negative effect of a wage-based social security system on women as a group. Less attention has been paid, however, to the prospects of employed women—particularly married women—in the newly restructured welfare state. On what terms were working women covered by national insurance, and, if insured, on what terms were they granted benefits?

In this chapter, I focus on employed women’s eligibility for national insurance and their claims for one of its primary rewards, unemployment benefit. Defining women’s rights in the new welfare state was an ongoing, dynamic process that grew out of the shifting policies and practices of the officials who administered benefit programs. After the war, economic growth and increased female labor force participation changed the context in which policymakers determined the conditions under which working women participated in and benefited from the welfare state. Officials continually assessed the meaning and value of women’s employment: they rewarded work they deemed as significant with insured status and refused to insure work they considered marginal. The results for women were mixed. After 1946, more and more women found themselves uninsured, but insured women found that some of the barriers to claiming benefits during unemployment gradually eroded.

GENDER AND UNEMPLOYMENT BEFORE WORLD WAR II

Aid for the unemployed has been provided by charities, churches, friendly and other mutual aid societies, and trade unions. Until the early twentieth century, however, poor relief administered by local authorities was the only governmental remedy for the hardships caused by unemployment. The Poor Law guardians had far-reaching discretion in deciding who deserved aid, and in the nineteenth century, the conventions of Victorian morality weighed heavily on their choices. Unemployment tended to be seen as an individual failing, rather than an unavoidable feature of a capitalist economy, and those dispensing relief were often reluctant to subsidize what they viewed as idleness. However, by the early twentieth century, these attitudes softened as policymakers began to see unemployment as a structural, social problem that required a coordinated response from the state. The 1911 Unemployment Insurance Act marked the first attempt by the national government to address the problem of unemployment in a systematic fash-ion.⁵ The scheme required the workers it covered to make weekly, flat-rate contributions to the insurance fund, contributions that were matched by employers and the government. When unemployed, those workers could draw a flat-rate benefit (all received the same weekly benefit, regardless of their previous wages). But the 1911 Act created a selective system that covered only 2.25 million workers. State-sponsored unemployment insurance offered protections to employees in a few trades in which unemployment was thought to be temporary and relatively predictable; trades characterized by cyclical unemployment.

Despite the narrowness of coverage, the 1911 Act has been hailed as an important first step in the evolution of the welfare state, significant because “the national Government of Great Britain entered for the first time the life of the ordinary, adult, male able-bodied workman.”⁶ The Act’s focus on male workers was not controversial or even noteworthy to contemporaries, nor has it been the subject of discussion in much of the literature on the British welfare state. From the inception of unemployment insurance, its intended beneficiaries were male breadwinners; accordingly, the 1911 Act excluded trades in which large numbers of women were employed.⁷ Between 1911 and the Second World War, the scope of unemployment insurance expanded to include more and more workers, but the understanding that benefits were primarily for men remained a constant theme in policy and practice.

The gendering of unemployment benefit continued in the economic dislocations that followed World War I. After the war, social policy worked in tandem with the labor market to marginalize women’s positions as paid workers and ensure their dependence within families. In 1919, thousands of displaced female workers lost the “out-of-work donation” provided to former war-industry workers because they refused low-paying jobs in laundry work or domestic service. Officials reasoned that these women should be penalized for refusing “suitable work,” a rationale that rarely surfaced in the consideration of men’s cases. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, women applying for unemployment benefit could be forced to undergo training in domestic service. Women found their claims for benefit denied at a much higher rate than men’s, and these practices severely undermined women’s ability to claim unemployment in their own right as workers.⁸ The overall effect of the unemployment insurance scheme, which, by the early 1920s, included dependents’ allowances, was to benefit women (even those who had been wage-earners) only indirectly, as dependents of their husbands.⁹

Though industrial needs during World War I had allowed women to break into male jobs, employers and trade unions quickly re-established the sexual division of paid work after the war. In addition, the “marriage bar” to female employment persisted throughout the 1920s in many areas and in many industries, often with governmental and union support.¹⁰ Many employers either refused to employ married women or fired them first, regardless of seniority. Women’s employment, viewed through the lens of the male breadwinner norm, was seen as marginal, and was certainly not a priority in unemployment relief policy.¹¹ Throughout the 1920s, women, far more often than men, were disqualified from receiving benefits because they were not “genuinely seeking work.” A woman could not possibly want a job, insurance officers claimed, if her husband was employed.¹²

The economic depression of the late 1920s and 1930s strained the unemployment insurance system almost to the breaking point, which compounded the difficulties women faced in claiming benefits. When pressure on the unemployment insurance fund triggered a scramble to cut costs, married women’s benefits were the first target. After an investigation by a Royal Commission, Parliament passed the Anomalies Act of 1931, which formalized and intensified the discriminatory treatment married women had received since the First World War. Under the 1931 Act, married women had to prove not only that they were actively seeking work, but that local industries regularly hired married women. Accordingly, a woman who had worked and made compulsory contributions to the insurance fund, but lost her job when she married, was likely to face an uphill battle in trying to claim benefit. For local insurance officials, employers’ discrimination against married women constituted proof that they were unemployable. Those women who did not have a “reasonable expectation” of finding work were denied benefit. Because of the Anomalies Act, 48% of women’s claims were denied in the last quarter of 1931, as compared to 4% of men’s.¹³ Governments of the 1930s were reluctant to treat married women as citizens who had legitimate claims on unemployment funds.¹⁴

Men did not face the insurmountable obstacles of the Anomalies Act, but they did have to deal, as women did, with the despised means test. The 1934 Unemployment Act imposed a household (rather than an individual) means test on the long-term unemployed. If the total household income was considered to be adequate for subsistence, an unemployed individual could not receive benefit. Officials’ intrusive and demeaning investigations of household finances became infamous in the 1930s, as did the poverty that was exacerbated by the denial of claims. The ineffective relief of unemployment in the 1930s was seared into popular memory, symbolized by the humiliated male breadwinner who was reduced to dependence on family members, even children.¹⁵ J. B. Priestly’s 1934 description of the crisis of working-class masculinity wrought by unemployment was typical of contemporary accounts: unemployed men “felt defeated and somehow tainted. Their self-respect was shredding away. Their very manhood was going.”¹⁶ The benefit rate was about half the value of the average wage, so that even those who received unemployment benefit lived at or near the poverty line.¹⁷

The hardships of the 1930s were to have a tremendous impact on the reshaping of the welfare state after World War II. The widely held conviction that the unemployed had been treated badly made a more effective, less stigmatizing system of social security a political necessity. The willingness of the electorate and politicians to allow an increased role for the state in the provision of social security also grew out of the experience of the war itself. Domestic and social issues had been tabled, for the most part, in order to secure a military victory, and the deprivations of the war left a craving for security and a renewed appreciation of the virtues of mutual aid. Politicians of both parties realized the nation was ready to turn its attention inward. The war had also accustomed the public to unprecedented governmental involvement in innumerable features of everyday life. From economic central planning to food rationing to civilian defense, the state was a ubiquitous presence; thus, the notion of a greatly expanded network of government agencies to deal with health and welfare was not as alarming as it might previously have been.

THE BEVERIDGE REPORT’S INFLUENCE ON NATIONAL INSURANCE

Even during the war, the coalition government began exploring the possibilities for a comprehensive scheme of social security that would prevent the poverty caused by unemployment, illness, disability, and old age. In 1942, an interdepartmental committee issued the famous Beveridge Report (named for committee chairman William Beveridge), which would become the blueprint for the post-war welfare state.¹⁸ Beveridge described the report’s proposal for social security as “a plan to win freedom from want by maintaining incomes.”¹⁹ His concept of the relationship between the state and its citizens was crucial in the ideological grounding of post-war social policy.

The Beveridge Report’s plan for social insurance was translated, in modified form, into legislation in the National Insurance Act of 1946. The Act integrated various insurance-based benefits into one system that would be funded by contributions from employees, employers, and the government. National insurance occupied a privileged place in the new welfare state because its benefits were not accompanied by demeaning inquiries to verify need. The new scheme operated on the same principle as prior unemployment insurance arrangements, but it extended coverage, in theory, to all workers (previously only certain trades and certain income levels had been covered). In addition, by virtue of their contributions through employment, insured workers would enjoy sickness, old age, and maternity benefits as well. The Beveridge Report’s implicit linking of citizenship and welfare state rights—particularly participation in national insurance—reflected the popular sentiment that the state should act to ensure the security of its people. Mass-Observation surveys in the 1940s revealed a widely held belief that misfortunes such as unemployment were not the result of individual failings, and that the state was obliged to provide relief, “not as a favour but as a right.”²⁰

The necessary inclusion of welfare rights in citizenship also found theoretical expression in the work of prominent academics in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1949, influential social policy scholar, T. H. Marshall, outlined a theory of modern citizenship that focused on social rights. Citizenship in the twentieth century, Marshall argued, was dependent on the extension of welfare rights that derived from the state. These rights had intrinsic value in providing social security, but were also necessary for the meaningful exercise of civil and political rights.²¹ The notion of social citizenship in the welfare state centered on national insurance, which posited a contract of mutual obligation between the state and it citizens. “Social security,” Beveridge insisted, “must be achieved by co-operation between the State and the individual. The State should offer security for service and contribution.”²² Workers secured their rights through mandatory contributions to the insurance fund. In return, national insurance supplied benefits for wage-earners who lost income because of unemployment, sickness, or old age.

Despite the implication that the right to participate in national insurance was open to all citizens, the terms and conditions of social citizenship were, in fact, determined by sex and marital status.²³ The Beveridge Report, on which the 1946 National Insurance Act was based, had proposed drastic limitations on married women’s direct participation in national insurance. Beveridge reasoned that the vast majority of married women did not need insurance against loss of income because they did not earn wages. Extrapolating from the 1931 census, Beveridge estimated that only one in seven married women engaged in paid work in 1941. Even employed women did not need to be insured against wage loss, he contended, because their earnings were not required for the family’s subsistence. In times of unemployment, a married woman could always rely on her husband’s earnings or his benefit if his earnings had been interrupted. Beveridge observed that social practice and law prescribed women’s dependence; social policy, he concluded, operated most effectively by reinforcing those arrangements. “All women by marriage acquire a new economic and social status, with risks and rights different from the unmarried,” Beveridge wrote. “On marriage a woman ...

Table of contents

• British Politics and Society
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Limits and Possibilities of Social Citizenship
• 2 “Not the Normal Mode of Maintenance”
• 3 Reform and Deterrence
• 4 Paradoxes of Imperialism
• 5 “Dirt, Degradation, and Disorder”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index