My current book project, Friends and Neighbors, explores the history of caring and uncaring in modern Britain. This talk will focus on the vexed history of the cohabitation rule, designed to keep single women and widows from claiming welfare benefits if they were living with a man “as husband and wife.” During the postwar decades, around 27,000 cases of cohabitation were investigated in Britain annually; 20,000 women appealed every year. These cases could be financially and emotionally catastrophic. Sex snoopers conducted dawn raids on women’s homes, feeling the pillows on both sides of the beds to see if they were still warm. Many women lost their benefits; some were forced to repay hundreds or even thousands of pounds. As welfare benefits were dismantled in the 1970s, prosecutions for cohabitation continued. But the meaning of these cases shifted. Now, they were about the neoliberal crisis of feeling, policing the boundaries of care in a regime that was profoundly ambivalent about them. I trace lawsuits about caregiving in which disabled Britons claimed they were cohabiting to obtain care that the state had failed to provide. The players in these cases posed key questions: how do people feel about each other in the time of welfare? And what counts as a love story within the welfare state?
Jordanna Bailkin is the Jere L. Bacharach Endowed Professor in International Studies and Professor of History at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her research interests include decolonization, legal history, urban identity, gender history, and the history of material culture and emotions. She is the author of The Culture of Property (Chicago, 2004), The Afterlife of Empire (Berkeley, 2012), and Unsettled (Oxford, 2018), as well as articles on archives and decolonization, tattooing in British Burma, interracial murder in South Asia, and radio in decolonizing Africa. The Afterlife of Empire won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the American Historical Association, the Stansky Book Prize from the North American Conference on British Studies, and the Biennial Book Prize from the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Co-sponsored by the Department if History, the Global Arts + Humanities Discovery Theme, and the Mershon Center for international Security Studies
Questions? Email Theodora Dragostinova and Chris Otter
