Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: “So Much Honest Poverty” in Britain, 1870–1930 by Marjorie Levine-Clark

Abstract

Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship: So Much Honest Poverty in Britain, 1870-1930, by Marjorie Levine-Clark. Houndmills & New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. xix, 304 pp. $90.00 US (cloth). This is not simply another book about the problem of unemployment in Modern Britain. Rather, this is book about how unemployment and provision were intimately connected to shifting definitions of gendered working-class citizenship in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It tracks how (and sometimes dishonest) poor men, their families, employers, poor law authorities, and policy-makers framed their place in society when they were jobless. A fitting progression from Marjorie Levine-Clark's work on gender, poverty, and family, this is highly original contribution to the vast corpus of research on unemployment in British history and is key reading for British social and political historians and students. Levine-Clark adopts the phrase honest poverty from local newspaper in the Black Country, region in the West Midlands of England and the focus of much of her book. She uses honest poverty to describe 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 (2). Together, she argues poverty, the work imperative, and family liability demonstrated men's respectability and deservedness. This trifecta of respectable working-class identities was forged alongside what Levine-Clark aptly terms welfare heteronormativity (10), system in which married men, particularly fathers, were privileged over women and single men in the dispensation of poor relief. In chapter six, we see how the 1918 Out-of-Work Donation program pitted unmarried ex-servicemen against married ex-servicemen with children and in chapter eight how single sons were expected to provide for elderly parents in ways married sons were not before, and even after, the introduction of the Old-Age Pensions Act in 1908. The marital preference was compromised when fathers went on strike or neglected their family responsibilities, as illustrated in chapters seven and nine. Mostly, though, married fathers embodied the definition of honest poverty for the entirety of this period. One of the book's greatest merits is Levine-Clark's attention to the enduring strength of honest poverty as the constant ideological thread that persisted through significant policy shifts in British provision. Honest poor married fathers, whose wives and children were seen as innocent sufferers, posed problem to poor law authorities bound by the deterrent aims of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act designed to punish the poor for their unemployment. …