ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on older women in the period 1918 to 1950. These women feared the workhouse with an immediacy that is only now beginning to dissipate. Yet it was also these generations that saw the reform of the poor law and its workhouses, and then their abolition. The chapter explores this disjuncture between the formal demise of the workhouse and its informal continuance in the fears of the old. It will suggest that the roots of this disjuncture were traced to specific features of the workhouse. Reform of the system, its recasting and replacement by public assistance institutions, private and local authority residential and care homes all failed to shift the frightening image of workhouse and the trepidation it created. To a large extent this fear was passed to old from past generations, particularly those of the second half of nineteenth century. The number of older people entering workhouse was falling owing to series of well documented welfare reforms.
