Two Reports, One Empire: Race and Gender in British Post-War Social Welfare Discourse

  • Denise Noble
Chapter
First Online:
Part of the Thinking Gender in Transnational Times book series (THINKGEN)

Abstract

This chapter is the first of two historical sociology chapters that use genealogy to historicize the meanings of freedom, Black British identity and Black womanhood presented in the previous chapters. As an ontology of the present, the aim of these two chapters is to identify the conjunctures informing the changing temporalities of what we have identified as liberal-colonial governmentality, as it has targeted and sought to shape African Caribbean women as both subjects of freedom and subjects of British liberal-colonial rule—that is, racial governmentality. These two chapters also reveal the double articulation of the colonial relation in which British ideas of freedom, race, gender and citizenship have been elaborated and reformed within a colonial circulation of power, interests and influence, in which the interests of the metropole and the colonies have been mutually dependant. The insights gained from this long view will then be used in the remaining chapters to assist in reframing our understanding of the present defined by neoliberal conceptions of freedom, and the postcolonial legacies of empire in contemporary multicultural Britain. This chapter addresses the post-war period of mass immigration of Caribbean people to Britain, focusing on the immigrant woman rather than the immigrant man, who for a long time was the central figure of the immigrant in British migration discourse. The chapter explores the role of post-war social policy across the British Empire and within Britain, Reading the Moyne Report in the mid-twentieth-century articulations of patriarchal racial rule and British liberal nation-building, in which the status of women, gender relations and the family were central to modernizing welfare reforms and the management of ‘race’ at home and abroad.

Keywords

Immigrant Woman Gender Relation Welfare Reform British Colonial Colonial State 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2016

Authors and Affiliations

  • Denise Noble
    • 1
  1. 1.SociologyBirmingham City UniversityBirminghamUK

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