In the 1920s, the American academic John Merriman Gaus was charged with the task of analyzing British citizenship. He concluded that in Britain, unlike in the Soviet Union, there was no system of civic training, and that definitions of what it meant to be a British citizen were inconsistent and confused. The conceptual problems of defining British citizenship that Gaus struggled with have proven no less difficult for subsequent historians. Without recourse to a written constitution or formal system of civic education, the historian is presented with a messy and largely opaque historical record. At a very basic level, the task is to understand citizenship in terms of attempts to forge a link between the individual and the authorities, either at a local or national level. Given these conceptual and methodological issues, Marjorie Levine-Clark's Unemployment, Welfare, and Masculine Citizenship is a welcome addition to the literature.
Levine-Clark frames her exploration of citizenship with contemporary debates about the poor, unemployment, and masculinity between 1870 and 1930. She rightly argues that the notion of work was significant in defining the desirable citizen in both public and private life, and that ideologies of work interlocked with other key cultural norms of a burgeoning liberal democracy. As Levine-Clark notes, most Poor Law historians who have been drawn to this chronology tend to focus on working-class self-help societies, while research on the state's redefinition of the relationship between the male citizen and poverty has largely been neglected.
Levine-Clark has two core aims: first, to explore what happened to working-class men who were unable or unwilling to play the exemplary male breadwinner role; second, to ask how the authorities' attempts to address noncompliant men resulted in shaping new assumptions of what it was to be a male citizen. The book examines these questions through a regional case study that entwines national debates with the local context of the Black Country in the heart of the English midlands. The national and local perspectives work together well, as notions of citizenship were not nationally uniform but shaped by forces at various scales. The Black Country was, by the late nineteenth century, a declining industrial area that had been dominated by the coal industry (hence its name) and suffered significant unemployment in Britain's Great Depression of the 1870s. It was an ideal place to see major shifts in workers' relationships to the economy, the local community, and the state.
Taking a thematic approach, Levine-Clark explores issues such as the concept of “honest poverty,” the exemplary family man citizen, the introduction of state benefits in the early twentieth century, the impact of the First World War, and the “loss” of citizenship for strikers who withdrew their labor. In adopting these themes and chronology, Levine-Clark is able to explore the major shifts in thinking about poverty and masculinity. For example, she convincingly argues that during the Great Depression of the 1870s there was a significant change in attitude from the traditional approaches that saw poverty as essentially a moral problem to a recognition that structural unemployment had created a population of the “honest poor.” Policy makers and unemployed men argued for more state intervention that would provide relief for the unemployed without stigma. This new thinking was enshrined in welfare legislation in the early twentieth century that placed married men at the top of a hierarchy as all-round citizens who had both working and domestic responsibilities. Indeed, Levine-Clark argues that this distinction between the hard-working family man looking for work and the single young man shirking all masculine and working responsibilities defined the core assumptions of citizenship during this period.
The single male shirker was certainly an issue in the First World War, though in this context the accusations related primarily to their apparent refusal to enlist. Through exploring the First World War, Levine-Clark shows how fluid the concept of citizenship was since the work imperative was replaced in favor of sacrifice and duty. What is perhaps less convincing is the claim that the change of emphasis from work to military duty was partly due to full employment during the war. Indeed, the chapters on the war could have benefited from greater attention to economic and social context. For the first few months of the war, most manufacturing regions suffered significant unemployment; a bumpy conversion from domestic to military hardware led to thousands of men and women being laid off. Moreover, the notions of sacrifice and duty at a national and imperial level had been schooled in children and readers of the popular press from the late nineteenth century, and their inclusion in the values of what defined a good citizen had become irresistible. Indeed, the increasing importance of the imperialism in training the next citizens of the Empire was an Edwardian obsession.
However, these quibbles should not detract from Levine-Clark's fascinating book. She demonstrates that though exploring an amorphous, gendered concept such as citizenship is both tricky and frustrating, the results can be rewarding. Indeed, Levine-Clark provides a convincing account of how the state forged changing concepts of citizenship to define the exemplary working man against the challenges of unemployment and poverty of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
