Abstract
Maurice Joyce came before the Umpire in 1925 to appeal the decision to deny his unemployment benefit on the grounds he was not genuinely seeking work. Joyce, “an old man,” was a union cooper. The Court of Referees had refused his benefit, because they thought he should have been looking for a different occupation, since he was no longer physically able to handle the tasks of a cooper. Joyce was appealing the decision that he was too weak or old to perform his usual duties. He stressed, “I am quite fit to carry on with my usual occupation as a cooper,” insisting that it was not his physical ability but the lack of available work that prevented him from obtaining employment. The Umpire, however, upheld denial of benefit, finding that Joyce’s “chance of obtaining work [as a cooper] is remote while there are a number of younger men unemployed. The work calls for a good deal of physical exertion and younger men are given the preference.” The Umpire disallowed Joyce’s benefit, deciding that Joyce was “capable of work and should try to get some work suitable for a man of his age.”1
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Notes
See, for example, Pat Thane, Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000);
Pat Thane, “Old People and Their Families in the English Past,” in Charity, Self-Interest and Welfare in the English Past, ed. Martin Daunton (New York: Routledge, 1996), 113–38;
M.A. Crowther, “Family Responsibility and State Responsibility in Britain before the Welfare State,” Historical Journal 25, no. 1 (1982): 131–45;
Margaret Pelling and Richard M. Smith, eds, Life, Death, and the Elderly: Historical Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 1991);
L.A. Botelho, Old Age and the English Poor Law, 1500–1700 (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2004);
and Susannah R. Ottaway, The Decline of Life: Old Age in Eighteenth-Century England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Richard Wall, “Relationships between the Generations in British Families, Past and Present,” in Families and Households: Divisions and Change, ed. Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 70, 76–84.
S.G. and E.O.A. Checkland, eds., The Poor Law Report of 1834 (New York: Penguin, 1974), 115. For discussion of the legal aspects of family liability, see Crowther, “Family Responsibility.”
Ann Orloff, The Politics of Pensions: A Comparative Analysis of Britain, Canada, and the United States, 1880–1940 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 131.
See, for example, Lynn Hollen Lees, The Solidarities of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 275–86.
For studies of intergenerational care, see, for example, David Thomson, “‘I Am Not My Father’s Keeper’: Families and the Elderly in Nineteenth-Century England,” Law and History Review 2, no. 2 (1984): 265–86; Wall, “Relationships between the Generations,” 63–85;
and Richard Wall, “Elderly Persons and Members of Their Households in England and Wales from Preindustrial Times to the Present,” in Ageing in the Past: Demography, Society, and Old Age, ed. D. Kertzner and P. Laslett (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995).
Paul H. Douglas and Aaron Director, The Problem of Unemployment (1931; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1976), 415.
For general discussions of gender and what counts as work, see, for example, Joanna Bourke, “Housewifery in Working-Class England, 1860–1914,” in Women’s Work: The English Experience, 1650–1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe (New York: Arnold, 1998), 332–58;
Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work 1700 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1998);
and Andrew August, Poor Women’s Lives: Gender, Work, and Poverty in Late Victorian London (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1999).
For discussion of gender, types of assistance in intergenerational relationships, and the invisibility of women’s help, see Gill Jones, “Short-Term Reciprocity in Parent-Child Economic Exchanges,” in Families and Households: Divisions and Change, ed. Catherine Marsh and Sara Arber (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 26–44;
Emily Abel, Who Cares for the Elderly? Public Policy and the Experiences of Adult Daughters (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992); and Thane, “Old People and Their Families,” 129. Thane specifically mentions how the records themselves make any form of non-residential support invisible.
Edward Higgs, “Women, Occupations and Work in the Nineteenth Century,” History Workshop Journal 23, no. 1 (1987): 59–80;
and Edward Higgs, “Household and Work in the Nineteenth-Century Censuses of England and Wales,” Journal of the Society of Archivists 11, no. 3 (1990): 73–7.
In 1871, the difference was about 600,000; by 1901, this had grown to more than a million. Chris Cook and Brendon Keith, British Historical Facts, 1830–1900 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), 232.
For a discussion of elderly women’s residence patterns over time, see Richard Wall, “The Residence Patterns of Elderly English Women in Comparative Perspective,” in Women and Ageing in British Society since 1500, ed. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane (New York: Pearson Education, 2001), 139–65.
Pat Thane, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop Journal 6 (Autumn 1978): 38. See also Lees, Solidarities, 264–8.
On contributions to the family economy, see Selina Todd, “‘You’d the Feeling You Wanted to Help’: Young Women, Employment and the Family in Inter-War England,” in Women and Work Culture: Britain, c. 1850–1950, ed. Krista Cowman and Louise A. Jackson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 123–40.
See, for example, Ramsay MacDonald, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 191 (1908), cols. 406–8; and Mr. Soares, Parliamentary Debates, 4th ser., vol. 191 (1908), col. 412.
William A. Casson, ed., The Old Age Pensions Act, 1908, together with the Text of the Regulations … 3rd ed. (London: Chas. Knight and Co., 1908), 1–30.
Bernard Harris, “Gender and Social Citizenship in Historical Perspective: The Development of Welfare Policy in England and Wales from the Poor Law to Beveridge,” in Gender and Well-Being: The Role of Institutions, ed. Elisabetta Addis, Paloma de Villota, Florence Degavre, and John Eriksen (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2011), 38.
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© 2015 Marjorie Levine-Clark
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Levine-Clark, M. (2015). “Younger men are given the preference”: Older Men’s Welfare and Intergenerational Responsibilities. In: Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137393227_8
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