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Poor Law (poor + law)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Humanities and Social Sciences75%

Selected Abstracts

Liberal Conservativism, Once and Again: Locke's "Essay on the Poor Law" and Contemporary US Welfare Reform

CONSTELLATIONS: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF CRITICAL AND DEMOCRATIC THEORY, Issue 3 2002
Nancy J. Hirschmann
First page of article [source]

Poverty among the elderly in late Victorian England1

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2009
GEORGE R. BOYER
Despite rapid increases in manual workers' wages, poverty rates among the elderly remained high in late Victorian England, although they varied significantly across Poor Law Unions. This paper begins by examining the ability of workers to provide for their old age. A data set is constructed, consisting of all English Poor Law Unions in 1891,2, and regression equations are estimated in order to explain variations across unions in pauperism rates. This is followed by the testing of several conjectures made by contemporaries, and repeated by historians, regarding the deterrent effect of workhouse relief, the effects of wages and of the industrial character of Poor Law Unions on pauperism rates, and regional differences in workers' reliance on the poor law. The paper then examines the implications of these results for the debate over national old age pensions in the decades before the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act. [source]

Identifying the poor in the 1870s and 1880s1

ECONOMIC HISTORY REVIEW, Issue 2 2008
ALAN GILLIE
Poverty lines devised throughout England and Wales in the 1870s and 1880s defined ,the poor', a new class not recognized by the poor law. This article provides an account of the poverty lines adopted, mainly by school boards, in about 40 different places; the context in which they were developed; and what has been retrieved of the reasons determining the adoption of specific poverty lines. In particular, it examines the principal controversies surrounding them, and the challenge they posed to the poor law; and, incidentally, compares them to the poverty lines proposed, many years later, by Booth and Rowntree. [source]

"Not the Normal Mode of Maintenance": Bureaucratic Resistance to the Claims of Lone Women in the Postwar British Welfare State

LAW & SOCIAL INQUIRY, Issue 2 2004
Virginia A. Noble
Because of the expansion of the postwar welfare state and its rhetoric of inclusion, the British National Assistance Board (NAB), which provided means-tested relief, faced a dramatic increase in the number of lone women with children claiming assistance in the 1950s and 1960s. In trying to restrict the state's role in social provision, the NAB relied on and tried to extend familial obligations for women's support that had been institutionalized in family law and in the poor law. The largely unsuccessful efforts of the NAB to prevent such women from turning to the welfare state included various forms of persuasion, coercion, and intimidation. Scholars of social policy in the postwar period have called attention to later efforts to discourage applications by lone women between the late 1960s and the 1990s. But the defensive posture against such women was adopted much earlier, in a relatively unexamined portion of the NAB's history. In its early, formative years, the NAB devised new strategies based on the rationales of female dependence that had long been entrenched in family law and the poor law. These methods and rationales became fixed in the postwar bureaucratic repertoire and were later available to bolster gendered attacks on the welfare state itself, particularly those made so aggressively under Thatcherism. [source]