ABSTRACT
In the 1950s and 1960s, the specter of unsupported families living off the public purse was a source of perpetual anxiety for offi cials at all levels of the British National Assistance Board (NAB, or Board). The NAB devoted considerable time and attention to the increasingly arduous task of encouraging and coercing lone women to turn to men, rather than the state, for economic support. The premise of this approach, of course, was that men were willing and able to sustain their families by wage-earning. What good were policies encouraging women’s dependence if men themselves had no qualms about seeking public assistance? To deter men from claiming national assistance, which had replaced poor relief in 1948, the NAB developed complicated machinery to reinforce a norm of masculinity centered on male breadwinning and autonomy. Well-publicized programs to correct and reform unemployed men on the national assistance rolls became part and parcel of the NAB’s program, as important as its payment of cash allowances. Despite the oft-repeated public renunciations of the punitive and stigmatizing features of the old Poor Law, the NAB’s strategies to shore up masculinity owed much to the disciplinary aspects of poor relief that had, in theory, been discarded once and for all after the Second World War. The rationales of the workhouse persisted in NAB policy, as did the use of communal sanctions to reprimand the morally defi cient. But in its project to reform and discipline unemployed men, the NAB could also draw on the assets of the modern bureaucracy, including specialization within its own ranks and medical and vocational expertise from other agencies. In the 1950s and 1960s, the practices of both the old and new worlds of welfare converged; the result was a mixture of disparate methods that ultimately functioned more effectively in dissuading men from seeking assistance than in reforming them.
