In the Nation's Image: The Gendered Limits of Social Citizenship in the Depression Era

Abstract

The story of my childhood would have been quite different without the British welfare state. I grew up in postwar Britain in a refugee family that the Beveridge plan served well. I was housed in public housing; clothed with the help of a mother's allowance; and watched over by national health insurance, which detected nearsightedness before I could read, looked after my teeth, and provided vaccines on schedule. I had my first lessons in Latin, German, and French in the new grammar schools where, fed by school dinners and clothed in a uniform meant to obscure poverty and disguise class, I was prepared to prevail over both. The welfare state served the Britain of my nobly. Blissfully ignorant of the price it exacted of labor elsewhere, as well as of its injunctions to keep married women at home, I cannot have been alone in absorbing its munificence with my childhood lessons.2 I accepted the public largess as no more than my due. It appeared as an offering of thanks to a that had sacrificed everything to the war against Adolf Hitler and sustained pride in a country rapidly denuding itself of the spoils of colonialism. The I have constructed-my nation of memory -is neither racist nor imperialist, but a place where commitment to public cooperation provided an