Samantha Williams Poverty, Gender & Life-Cycle Under the English Poor Law Samantha Williams Multicolor

Examination of welfare during the last years of the Poor Law, bringing out the impact of poverty on particular sections of society - the lone mother and the elderly. Social welfare, increasingly extensive during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was by the first third of the nineteenth under considerable, and growing, pressure, during a "crisis" period when levels of poverty soared.This book examines the poor and their families during these final decades of the old Poor Law.It takes as a case study the lived experience of poor families in two Bedfordshire communities, Campton and Shefford, and contrasts it with the perspectives of other participants in parish politics, from the magistracy to the vestry, and from overseers to village ratepayers.It explores the problem of rising unemployment, the provision of parish make-work schemes,charitable provision and the wider makeshift economy, together with the attitudes of the ratepayers.That gender and life-cycle were crucial features