ABSTRACT
In interpretations which emphasise separateness and difference in gender roles, women's own social solidarity and moral purpose and their authority as mothers is highlighted, rather than focusing only on gender domination and inequality. This chapter explores the extent to which British welfare was maternalist by looking first at poverty and then at health. It focuses on women as providers, managers, consumers and in networks and asks whether women were able to implement Eleanor Rathbone's agenda for welfare feminism of 1925. Women can demand what they want for women, not because it is what men have got, but because it is what women need to fulfil the potentialities of their own natures. The chapter analyses the degree to which that agenda was distinct from that of equal rights feminists, in seeing women as mothers. It ends by assessing the extent to which the classic welfare state of the 1940s thus implemented an earlier maternalist welfare agenda rather than a universalist one.
