Communities of Care: Working-Class Women’s Welfare Activism, 1920–1970s

This chapter examines working-class women’s relationship to welfare and how their ongoing experiences of poverty and dependency have led them to challenge welfare regimes through activism underpinned by claims to experiential expertise. Drawing on the concept of “communities of experience” it will explore how the situated reality of care can build shared social knowledge across working-class women which creates a specific type of community of experience, a community of care. It will draw on three distinct case studies which each exemplify the consequences for working-class women of the inadequacy of social supports at different chronological moments. They will explore the lived experience of how the classed and gendered nature of caregiving undercut women’s citizenship. But will argue that this lived experience allowed women, often marginal to the political and policy processes, some measure of experiential expertise. It will trace how working-class women used this to challenge vested interests, whilst also assessing the limitations of this form of expertise. Overall, this chapter seeks to evidence empirically these complicated, messy, but also important, new ways of exploring histories of experience by recounting the history of working-class women and welfare in twentieth-century Britain.