And in Walter Greenwood’s best-selling novel of the Depression, Love on the Dole, published in 1933, Sally Hardcastle’s fiancé, Larry Meath, breaks off their engagement when he loses his job in a foundry. ‘Why can’t we be married as we arranged?’ Sally demands. ‘There’s nowt t’stop us. You’d get your dole, and I’m working.’ But Larry refuses: ‘A humiliating picture of himself living under such conditions flashed through his mind: it smacked of Hanky Park [the working-class area of Salford where the novel is set and where Greenwood had been brought up] at its worst … “No …” he said, sharply, suddenly animated. “No, no, Sal. No, I can’t do it … It’s no use arguing, Sally. It’d be daft to do it. Yaa! Fifteen bob a week! D’y'think I’m going to sponge on you. What the devil d’y’ take me for?”’
As the social investigator and occasional politician Sidney Webb observed, the assumption was that ‘a woman always had some kind of family belonging to her, and can in times of hardship slip into a corner somewhere and share a crust of bread already being shared by too many of the family mouths, whereas the truth is that many women workers are without relatives, and a great many more have delicate or worn-out parents, or young brothers or sisters, or children to support’.
For unmarried women, this domestic vision translated into working in other people’s homes rather than their own. With female unemployment running at around 600,000 in 1919, various committees and schemes had been set up to investigate the problem. As these committees were composed — predictably — mainly of middle-class women who rather minded the difficulties they were having in finding maids and other staff, their recommendations were invariably that domestic training was the answer. Between 1922 and 1940 the Central Commission on Women Training and Employment trained an average of 4,000 to 5,000 women every year on Home Craft and Home Maker courses. To begin with such training was provided on non-residential courses, but the first residential centre opened at Leamington Spa in January 1930. According to the Ministry of Labour, ‘This experiment [was] designed to accustom trainees to live and sleep away from home and to observe the routine which resident domestic service entails.’ The experiment was judged a success, and by 1931 seven such centres had been opened, each providing eight-week training courses.
But on the whole women had no desire to do domestic work. A 1931 survey found that while more women in London were still employed in domestic service than in any other industry, their numbers had fallen by over a third since the turn of the century, and they now had a choice of other occupations ‘which appear more attractive to most London girls’. Indeed, ‘the London girl has always been particularly averse to entering residential domestic service’, and most young women, wherever they lived, would prefer to do almost anything rather than opt for life ‘below stairs’ or, in the case of the prevailing ‘cook general’ of the inter-war years, accommodated in a poky back bedroom in a middle-class villa. In an unnamed textile town in the North-West a Ministry of Labour survey revealed that of the 380 unemployed women on the employment exchange register who were single and under forty — natural recruits into domestic service, it might be thought — only four were prepared to consider such an option, while in Preston, out of 1,248 women interviewed, a bare eleven were prepared to train for domestic service. It was partly because wages were low — a live-in housemaid in London earned around £2.3s a week and a cook general perhaps a few shillings more (though with board and food included this was not as bad as it might appear); it was partly because domestic service was not covered by the unemployment insurance scheme until 1938, so a domestic servant would not be able to claim benefit if she lost her job; but it was also partly the life: the long hours, the loss of personal liberty — ‘No gentleman callers’ — entailed in being a servant rather than an employee.
However, an unemployed woman who refused domestic work, or declined to be trained for it, could have her benefit refused or reduced, since she could be said not to be ‘genuinely seeking work’. This had been one of the criteria for benefit since 1921, and until it was repealed by the Labour government in 1930 it had put the onus on the claimant to prove that he or she had been assiduously searching for a job, regardless of whether there was any work to be had. It was not until the end of 1932 that the Ministry of Labour finally acceded to pressure and agreed that refusal to accept a training place for domestic service should not automatically lead to loss of benefit: it would only be withdrawn if a young women had accepted training, then taken a post in service, but subsequently left it and refused all further offers of such work.
The abolition of the ‘genuinely seeking work’ clause caused an outcry that it was a sponger’s charter that would encourage opportunists, scroungers, malingerers and loafers. The particular fear was that married women who had no real intention of seeking work, but had accrued insurance entitlements prior to their marriage, would now come forward to claim benefits — and indeed employers wrote in maintaining that they knew of women who had worked for them who were now claiming benefit even though they had left work for reasons of pregnancy or domestic duties.
Sections of the press enjoyed a field day peddling stories of abuse. A Nottingham newspaper attested to the case of a girl of sixteen who had allegedly received £150 unemployment pay in the course of a year, having paid only twenty-four shillings’ worth of insurance stamps. Rebutting the charge in the House of Commons, the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield, Britain’s first woman Cabinet Minister, claimed that to achieve this remarkable feat the girl ‘must have maintained, with dependents’ allowances, not only herself but a husband or parent, and at least twenty-three children’.
There were also concerns that by ceasing to require that claimants must be actively seeking work (however ritualistic, and often harsh and excluding, that requirement had been), labour mobility would be impaired. It was argued that there would be no financial incentive for a man or woman to ‘get on his or her bike’ (or rather go on the tramp) in search of a job in areas away from the depressed regions, though this was hardly a realistic prospect for thousands of men who would either have to maintain a family back home, or move home and family for a job that turned out not to be permanent. Disquiet was not confined to the press: ‘Are we to legislate on the lines that these people should think that they need do nothing themselves; that they should wait at home, sit down, smoke their pipes and wait until an offer comes to them?’ ridiculed Labour’s Attorney General Sir William Jowitt. Even the Prime Minister became prey to alarmist thoughts. Ramsay MacDonald’s ‘colourful imagination … began to picture married women driving up in fur coats to draw benefit: and the retelling of such tales became a staple part of his conversation’.
In November 1930 the Minister of Labour reported that the Act had admitted an extra 200,000 persons to benefit, and nervously cited examples of employers arranging the working hours of part-time workers so that they too would be able to claim. However, the abolition had coincided with a severe recession in the pottery and textile industries, both employers of large numbers of women — indeed, 38 per cent of married women claiming benefit in June 1930 had previously worked in the Lancashire cotton industry, where unemployment had risen from 13.3 per cent in November 1929 to 45.4 per cent in July 1930. That month, with male and female unemployment in the cotton industry at more than twice the national average, 71.3 per cent of claims for transitional benefit came from married women. A year later the figure was still 68.5 per cent.
Pressure continued to grow to stem what were regarded as ‘abuses’ of unemployment relief — and to take urgent action to reduce the ever-rising borrowing by the Unemployment Fund, which had climbed from £50 million in March 1930 to £70 million in December, plus an additional £60 million from the Treasury to support the unemployed, with the cost of transitional payments alone reaching £30 million. Faced with the conundrum of obviously rising costs and equally obvious rising needs, the traditional prevaricating sticking plaster was applied: a Royal Commission was set up charged with recommending how the National Insurance Scheme could be made ‘solvent and self-supporting’ and what should be done about those outside the scheme who were ‘available and capable of work’.
Reluctant to grasp the political hot potato of actually cutting benefits, as the interim report of the Commission recommended, yet anxious to find a way of reducing costs and staunching ‘abuses’ (or, as they could more judiciously