ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a general historiographical review of British welfare development and a discussion of the contribution that a gendered analysis can make to it. It discusses the relationship of female agency to voluntarism and to the developing structures of state welfare. The chapter discusses the means by which this agency operated for women in welfare through networks of friendship and association. It suggests that an analysis of the main outlines of women's contribution to welfare as producers, providers and managers highlight a positive contribution, whose creativity and independence is intended to offset the more traditional depiction of women as dependent consumers of welfare. Serious gender inequalities still exist in the British welfare state, and have done so since its inception. Despite contemporary alarms about the welfare state, it is clear that a number of its central institutions and ideas remain relatively intact.
