In many urban areas those households of labourers which were solely dependent on the husbands' earnings, lived, during conditions of full employment, 'in a state of actual poverty or so near to that state that they are liable to sink into it at any moment.' Everywhere the loss of the adult wage-earner's income pushed the widow with young children and her aged counterpart periously close to, or below, the primary poverty line. It is, however, less easy to isolate old age as a cause of poverty than certain aspects of widowhood – and this for two reasons. In the first place, as has already been demonstrated, widowhood itself rather than declining physical powers could plunge many women over the age of fifty-five into a state of primary poverty. But poverty in old age was also intimately associated with the problem of sickness.