THE POLITICS OF PREFERENCE MASCULINITY, MARITAL STATUS AND UNEMPLOYMENT RELIEF IN POST-FIRST WORLD WAR BRITAIN Marjorie Levine-Clark University of Colorado Denver ABSTRACT This article explores relationships between masculinity and welfare in post-First World War Britain through an analysis of unemployment relief. While their service to the nation entitled them to government benefits, veterans of the First World War fit into a context of already-existing unemployment relief schemes and already-established assumptions about who was deserving of state assistance, which privileged married men with children. The politics of preference surrounding unemployment relief reveal competing principles of deservedness connected to different models of masculinity, the breadwinner and the soldier, the married man and the single man. There was general agreement that ex-servicemen had a significant call on the state’s resources, but manhood above all meant the ability to provide for wives and children, which resulted in the marginalization of the claims of single men and the endangering of the principle of universal entitlement for ex-soldiers. Keywords: unemployment, welfare, masculinity, marital status, veterans, government documents In mid-February 1921 the West Midlands town of Brierley Hill (population 12,500) established a Relief Committee to deal with their approximately 2,000 unemployed, of whom about 400 were veterans of the First World War.The vice-chairman of the new committee stressed that ex-servicemen had a particular right to assistance, for they had been ‘unable to put anything by, and he considered the first claim upon any fund established in the town would belong to these men’. 1 The Relief Committee decided to use its resources to employ veterans in constructing a park. After the relief scheme had been operating for a few weeks and the numbers of unemployed registered in the town had grown to about 3,000, tensions erupted around the comments of Mr Harry Bullus, a member of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers (ASE). Bullus submitted a resolution from the ASE to the Brierley Hill and District Trades and Labour Council, objecting to ‘relief measures being on a charity basis’. 2 The resolution implicitly criticized the preferential hiring of ex-soldiers at the expense of trade union men and more overtly attacked the running of assistance schemes by a relief committee rather than the Trades Council itself. The County Advertiser reported on 5 March that at a meeting of the Relief Committee, when a Mr Warne ‘mentioned LEVINE-CLARK The Politics of Preference 233 Cultural and Social History, Volume 7, Issue 2, pp. 233–252 © The Social History Society 2010 DOI 10.2752/147800410X12634795054694 Address for correspondence: Marjorie Levine-Clark, Department of History, CB 182, PO Box 173364, University of Colorado Denver, Denver, CO 80217, USA. E-mail: marjorie.levine-clark@ucdenver.edu