Abstract
In the uncertain economic climate following the First World War, the Stourbridge Poor Law Board of Guardians had opened the workhouse labor yard so unemployed men could break stone to prove their willingness to work for relief. As the summer of 1919 approached and outdoor occupations became more readily available, guardian George Parkes argued that the board should close the stoneyard, because “the men would be able to find employment to tide them over until trade revived.” Guardian John Downing countered that the region still suffered significant unemployment, lamenting that “there were so many men in the Halesowen and Cradley district who were in distress, and who were willing to work if they could get it.” The Reverend T.J. McNulty, a long-time Liberal guardian representing Quarry Bank, agreed. He admitted,
Some of the people who came to him were, no doubt, undeserving; but whether they were deserving or not, they were not single men, but had wives and families who were suffering acutely. The men who went from Quarry Bank to the labour yard were honest men, and only went there through sheer necessity. They felt ashamed that they had to go there to break stones; but they went there rather than see their wives and families pine away.
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Notes
Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 46. For more on this version of masculinity,
see Keith McClelland, “‘England’s Greatness, the Working Man,’” in Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867, ed. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 71–118.
See also Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997),
and Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992).
See, for example, Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
and Karel Williams, From Pauperism to Poverty (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981).
Keith McClelland, “Masculinity and the ‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850–80,” in Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800, ed. Michael Roper and John Tosh (New York: Routledge, 1991), 82.
Sonya O. Rose, “Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The Language of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers’ Strike of 1878 in Britain,” Gender and History 5, no. 3 (1993): 389.
Angus McLaren, The Trials of Masculinity: Policing Sexual Boundaries, 1870– 1930 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 55, 252n69.
See also John Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays on Gender, Family, and Empire (New York: Pearson Longman, 2005), 36; Brady, Masculinity, 26; and Rose, Limited Livelihoods, 128.
For further discussion of the breadwinner ideal in its relationship to welfare in Britain, see Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, “The Origins and Expansion of the Male Breadwinner Family: The Case of Nineteenth Century Britain,” International Review of Social History 42, Supplement S5 (1997): 25–64;
Wally Seccombe, “Patriarchy Stabilized: The Construction of the Male Breadwinner Norm in Nineteenth Century Britain,” Social History 11 (1986): 53–76;
Anna Clark, “The New Poor Law and the Breadwinner Wage: Contrasting Assumptions,” Journal of Social History 34, no. 2 (Winter 2000): 261–81;
Marjorie Levine-Clark, “Engendering Relief: Women, Ablebodiedness, and the New Poor Law in Early Victorian England,” Journal of Women’s History 11, no. 4 (2000): 107–30;
and Susan Pedersen, Family, Dependence, and the Origins of the Welfare State in Britain and France, 1914–1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
The negative assumptions attached to transients in terms of sexual and gender nonconformity are discussed in both Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2011)
and Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
John Horne, “Masculinity in Politics and War in the Age of Nation-States and World Wars, 1850–1950,” in Masculinities in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann, and John Tosh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 34.
See, for example, Lees, Solidarities; and Pat Thane, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop Journal 6 (Autumn 1978): 29–51.
On women’s work in the Black Country, see Carol Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (New York: Routledge, 2001);
On women’s work in the Black Country, see Carol Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (New York: Routledge, 2001); and Sheila Blackburn, “Working-Class Attitudes to Social Reform: Black Country Chainmakers and Anti-Sweating Legislation, 1880–1930,” International Review of Social History 33, no. 1 (1988): 42–69.
Joanne Bailey, “Masculinity and Fatherhood in England, c. 1760–1830,” in What Is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. John Arnold and Sean Brady (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 168.
See, for example, Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).
Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996);
and Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (New York: Routledge, 1991). Martin Francis complicates this analysis in “The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity,” Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 637–52.
For more on these connections, see Marjorie Levine-Clark, “The Politics of Preference: Masculinity, Marital Status and Unemployment Relief in Post-First World War Britain,” Cultural and Social History 7, no. 2 (2010): 233–52.
Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).
On men’s emotional responses to unemployment, see Sally Alexander, “Men’s Fears and Women’s Work: Responses to Unemployment in London between the Wars,” Gender and History 12, no. 2 (2002): 401–25.
Matt Perry, Bread and Work: The Experience of Unemployment 1918–39 (London: Pluto Press, 2000), 68.
This approach to women’s work has a long history. Historians have demonstrated that, especially in tight labor markets, working men attempted to demonize women’s employment as undercutting men’s wages and masculine responsibilities. For a good overview, see Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman, “Women’s Work, Gender Conflict, and Labour Markets in Europe, 1500–1900,” Economic History Review 44, no. 4 (1991): 608–28.
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© 2015 Marjorie Levine-Clark
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Levine-Clark, M. (2015). “They were not single men”: Responsibility for Family and Hierarchies of Deservedness. In: Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137393227_3
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