‘For Richer, For Poorer’

Abstract

Chapter 3 examines an unpublished policy document that Young submitted to the Labour Party Policy Committee in 1952 called ‘For Richer, For Poorer’, which marked a transition from Young’s public policy career towards sociology and social research. Young left his position in the Labour Party Research Department after the Conservative election victory in the 1951 general election, and undertook a Ph.D. in social administration at the London School of Economics supervised by the social policy thinker Richard Titmuss. Responding to the Labour Party’s failure to appeal to women voters in the 1951 election, ‘For Richer, For Poorer’ urged the Labour Party to pay more attention to family policy. Young integrated a historical vision of declining social cohesion caused by industrialization and suburbanization with contemporary concerns about the poverty of women and children that built on the work of earlier social poverty researchers and the feminist campaigns for a family allowance led by Eleanor Rathbone. This document reflected a turn in Young’s thought away from the focus on full employment and macro-economic planning which had characterized much of his policy work during the Attlee government, and towards thinking about social policy from the perspective of those he conceived of as non-workers, including the elderly, the unemployed, children, and women.