Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain ed. by Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain ed. by Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor Lorraine McEvoy Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain. Edited by Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor. London: University of London Press, 2021. xvi + 285 pp. Cloth £40.00. Also distributed by the University of Chicago Press, Cloth $55.00. Siân Pooley and Jonathan Taylor's thoughtfully edited collection is the result of a workshop on "Children's Experiences of Welfare" that was held at the University of Oxford in 2020. Delivering on the title's promise to place children's perspectives front and center, Children's Experiences of Welfare in Modern Britain brings together ten chapters, each of which clearly contributes to the overall argument that "the young were integral to the making, interpretation, delivery and impact of welfare services, and that their involvement has left a distinctive imprint on the shape of welfare in modern Britain" (1). The chapters, which deal with a wide range of case studies (the first four begin in the nineteenth century and the remaining six in the twentieth), locate children's experiences through a multiplicity of sources created by children themselves and by welfare providers. A strength of the collection is the diverse modes of welfare provision considered—including institutions, family and peer networks, schools, hospitals, emigration programs, and more—and the success with which the chapters situate their findings within broader contexts and historiographical debates. [End Page 446] Pooley and Taylor's introduction makes a convincing argument for the relevance of the volume, clearly delineating the insights and innovations it provides into histories of welfare, childhood, and modern Britain. The volume is guided by "three conceptual foundations": an approach to children's encounters with welfare that, "[r]ather than telling the story of a single institution or policy . . . seeks to understand the experience of mobility, instability, uncertainty—and sometimes power—that emerged from being the nexus of multiple inconsistent investments"; a contention that the significance of human relationships to welfare can be better understood by examining children's experiences; and the assertion that individual experiences and qualitative, longitudinal evidence should be used alongside more quantitative and adult provider–determined measures of progress and impact (2–3). The chapters are arranged chronologically in order to challenge familiar accounts of welfare history that tell tales of linear progress and to argue that "children became less able to shape the expanded mid-twentieth-century welfare services from which they were assumed to benefit" (21). Notwithstanding the range of subjects, the collection is pleasantly cohesive due to editorial clarity of purpose and the way chapters cross-reference each other, interweaving common themes to enrich conceptualizations of children as more than passive recipients and to highlight their roles in shaping welfare provision. The focus on children's voices, which are woven throughout the collection, is compelling, and the volume is a welcome addition to discussions concerning children's agency. The collected chapters present a "spectrum of everyday responses to welfare provision" and highlight the various ways that children exercised agency through resistance, expression, rebellion, compliance, negotiation, play and even silence (13). While Gordon Lynch's chapter on postwar child migrants to Australia highlights instances where children's agency was constrained, Rebecca Swartz illustrates how "young people lived on a continuum between powerful and powerless" (48) as part of the Children's Friends Societies colonial emigration schemes, and Laura Tisdall explores how students understood their own agency, or lack thereof, in their relationships with adults and educational hierarchies. Chapters by Gillian Lamb on the backgrounds of children who experienced institutional welfare, Pooley on working-class children's letters in local newspaper columns, Taylor on children's views of postwar Britain and its welfare services, and Valerie Wright on children's play in Glasgow's high-rise estates in the 1960s and 1970s challenge national government-centered narratives and highlight the importance of local authorities, social, familial and communal networks in children's experiences and perceptions of welfare. At the same [End Page 447] time, Caroline Rusterholz emphasizes the benefits of age-based analyses, arguing that controversies restricted younger teenagers' access to sexual welfare services, thus complicating the "common...