Presidential Address: Family Provision of Health and Welfare in the Mixed Economy of Care in the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

The paper begins by discussing the place of the family as a provider of welfare in the context of the changing nature of the 'mixed economy of welfare'. It goes on to explore the nature of social provision by the family at the turn of the century, stressing the way in which the behaviour of people within families was taken as the test of citizenship in an ethical state, and was therefore made the target of volumtary and state intervention. The paper concludes by contrasting this with ideas about family responsibility in the late twentieth century, and the concern to promote family provision as an alternative to state provision.