The welfare state has fostered a large volume of academic investigation but the core of its scholarship has been on the relationship between class forces and different systems of welfare. The possibility of a gender effect does not appear to have seriously troubled the minds of mainstream scholars in this domain. As a result, gender as a structuring principle of welfare systems remains under-explored. This paper undertakes a gender-focused analysis of a key aspect of welfare provision - income maintenance policies. The British welfare state is a useful site of analysis - at one stage an exemplary model of welfare provision, now a `laggard' among its European neighbours. To identify the gender dimension of British income maintenance policies, we go back as far as the 1830s for the new Poor Law. From then we trace female and male access to welfare income, in the process considering how women and men have been constructed by public income-support policies.
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