Family Welfare and Social Work in Post-War England, c.1948-c.1970
This article examines the transformation in family welfare work precipitated by the post-war expansion of the welfare state. While existing scholarship has suggested that welfare work pathologised working-class families, and particularly working-class mothers, I argue that many family-welfare workers advanced a progressive understanding of poverty’s causes that sympathised with those living in hardship. These workers’ experiences of talking to clients in working-class homes led them to realise that poverty could never be eradicated simply by helping ‘the poor’ to help themselves. Some of these workers came to believe that poverty could be destroyed only by government intervention. Following recent revisionist historiography, I suggest that the 1950s were not a decade of moral conservatism or political consensus, but rather a time of heated debate over the pattern of class and gender relations. However, I offer two caveats to this new direction in scholarship. Firstly, this article suggests that the influence of the psy-sciences in shaping discussion over social relations was more qualified than existing historical studies suggest. Secondly, the impact of this debate on practice and policy was extremely limited until the late 1950s and the 1960s. This indicates that the connection between discourse and experience is far from straightforward, and that more studies of the connections between them would be valuable in helping us to understand the history of post-war Britain.
Quelle: http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/short/129/537/362?rss=1