In the Nation's Image:
The Gendered Limits of Social
Citizenship in the Depression Era

Alice Kessler-Harris

When a workman suffers he suffers all the more comfortably . . . when he knows that behind him in his sorrow there is the nation to which he belongs. . . . England . . . has done nothing that is more worthy of her than that in the great hour of her need and in the midst of her innumerable anxieties, her first thought has been to sustain the manhood on which her fame so well reposes.1

The story of my childhood would have been quite different without the British welfare state. I grew up in postwar Britain in a refugee family that the Beveridge plan served well. I was housed in public housing; clothed with the help of a mother's allowance; and watched over by national health insurance, which detected nearsightedness before I could read, looked after my teeth, and provided vaccines on schedule. I had my first lessons in Latin, German, and French in the new grammar schools where, fed by school dinners and clothed in a uniform meant to obscure poverty and disguise class, I was prepared to prevail over both.	1
The welfare state served the Britain of my memory nobly. Blissfully ignorant of the price it exacted of labor elsewhere, as well as of its injunctions to keep married women at home, I cannot have been alone in absorbing its munificence with my childhood lessons.2 I accepted the public largess as no more than my due. It appeared as an offering of thanks to a nation that had sacrificed everything to the war against Adolf Hitler and sustained pride in a country rapidly denuding itself of the spoils of colonialism. The nation I have constructed—my "nation of memory"—is neither racist nor imperialist, but a place where commitment to public cooperation provided an essential source of national identity; where the ubiquitous queue that marked shortages of goods and services signaled a willingness to share the deprivation equitably. It was also a place of refuge for families like mine that had escaped death at the hands of the Nazis.	2
When I think back on it as a historian, I readily admit my own ignorance of the several forms of privilege from which I benefited at a time when color and distance threatened British hegemony. Yet, in testimony to the power of the images released by the postwar welfare state, I can still summon a national self-esteem that did not rest on exploitation, exclusion, and conquest. It seems to me even now that the value of that welfare state lay far beyond the feeding of children. Surely it constituted, if only for a generation, not merely a bulwark against Cold War communism but a measure of the supple, even amenable, flexibility of a nation redesigning itself to participate in a newly energetic world capitalism. Even as it shed the elements of empire that had contributed to its proud vision of itself, Britain retained the racialized world view that had served it so effectively. The Britain of my memory perpetuated a wartime unity by transforming itself from the mother of empire into a modern state that could mother its children into the postwar order.	. . .