Evacuation, hygiene, and social policy: the "Our Towns" Report of 1943

There has recently been much debate about social policy in Britain during the Second World War. This article takes up Jose Harris's suggestion that historians should look not at large-scale forces, but at ‘those minuscule roots of idiosyncratic private culture’. As a way into the complex amalgam that comprised ideas on social policy in the 1940s, we look in particular at the report on the evacuation of schoolchildren entitled Our towns: a close up, published by the Women's Group on Public Welfare in March 1943. Of course it is undeniable that one report is unrepresentative of all the many surveys that were produced on the evacuation experience. However, the initial wave of evacuation in September 1939 was the most significant, and the Our towns survey, along with a famous leader article in The Economist, has already received some selective attention from historians. Here we subject the survey to a more intensive examination, looking at the backgrounds of its authors, its content, and its reception by various professional groups. The article argues that it was the apparently contradictory nature of the report that explains its powerful appeal – it echoed interwar debates about behaviour and citizenship, but also reflected the ideas that would shape the welfare state in the post-war years.

Household, family and welfare: past, present and future

J. Robin, From childhood to middle age: cohort analysis in Colyton, 1851–1891. (Cambridge: Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure, Working Paper Series, no. 1, n.d.). Pages iv+83. £2.50.

H. Cunningham and P. P. Viazzo (eds.), Child labour in historical perspective, 1800–1985: case studies from Europe, Japan and Colombia. (Florence: United Nations Children's Fund, International Child Development Centre, 1996.) Pages 105. US$9.00.

L. Marks, Metropolitan maternity: maternal and infant welfare services in early-twentieth century London. (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1996.) Pages xxii+344.

A. Walker (ed.), The new generational contract: intergenerational relations, old age and welfare. (London: UCL Press, 1996). Pages xiii+241.

These four publications vary significantly in their geographical coverage and general subject matter, but it is still possible to identify a number of common themes. They are particularly important for what they reveal about the links between formal welfare provision, protective legislation, family care, and the standard of living. They also yield many individual insights into such matters as family reconstitution, migration, child labour, working conditions, municipal welfare services, the decline of infant and maternal mortality, and the possible existence of a demographic threat to the viability of modern welfare states.

The discovery of the child as an object 'sui generis' of cure and research by Melanie Klein as reflected in the notes of her first child analyses in Berlin, 1921-1926

In the early days of psychoanalysis the child served mainly as an object to demonstrate the correctness of findings inferred from adults' analyses. The author demonstrates that one of the hindrances to the development of child analysis was the negative transference. Based on the author's studies of Klein's handwritten notes of her first child analyses in Berlin, she outlines some factors which contributed to Klein also treating the child as an object sui generis of psychoanalytic cure and research: she proceeded methodologically, she accepted enactment as communication, and she learnt from her experiences. Klein's development in meeting the challenge of the negative transference is a fundamental part in this process, as is shown with reference to the analyses of three children: Grete, Rita and Erna.

"I never noticed she was dirty": fatherhood and the death of Charlotte Duffy in late-nineteenth-century Victoria

In Melbourne, 1880, fourteen-year-old Charlotte Duffy died of “hip disease” complicated by extreme neglect. Her parents were charged with criminal negligence. Matthew and Annie Duffy were both convicted, but Matthew Duffy's conviction was overturned on appeal, the court ruling that “in point of law” a father was not required to take any part in the day-to-day care of his children. This article uses the death of Charlotte Duffy as a focal point for an analysis of the gendered category of father in late-nineteenth-century Victoria, arguing that despite the clear delineation of male and female parenting in official discourse, the increasing strength of the ideal of conjugal masculinity was expanding the definition of fatherhood within the middle class. By the end of the nineteenth century, fatherhood implied a more intimate involvement with children than before: a new conception that worked to both extend and restrict the privileges of masculinity.