Everyday Welfare in Modern British History

Caitríona Beaumont is Professor of Social History at London South Bank University, UK.Eve Colpus is Associate Professor of British and European History post-1850 at the University of Southampton, UK.Ruth Davidson is an Honorary Research Fellow in the Mile End Institute, School of History, Queen Mary University of London, UK.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Quaker women in humanitarian and social action: faith, learning, and the authority of experience.- 3. Communities of Care: Working-class women’s welfare activism, 1920-1970s.- 4. The “housewife as expert”: re-thinking the experiential expertise and welfare activism of housewives’ associations in England, 1960 -1980.- 5. Childminders and the limits of mothering as experiential expertise, England c. 1948-2000.- 6. “Daddy knows best”: professionalism, paternalism, and the state in mid-twentieth century British child diswelfare experiences.- 7. Fire, Fairs, and Dragonflies: The Writings of “Gifted Children” and Age-Bound Expertise.- 8. Claiming and curating experiential expertise at the children’s telephone helpline, ChildLine UK, 1986-2006.- 9. Justifying Experience, Changing Expertise: From protest to authenticity in anglophone “mad voices” in the mid-twentieth century.- 10. Qualified by virtue of experience? Professional youth work in Britian 1960-1989.- 11. “Let me tell you how I see it…”: White women, race, and welfare on two Birmingham council estates in the 1980s.- 12. Student Voices, Expertise, and Welfare within British Universities, 1930s to the 1970s.- 13. Connecting the disconnected: Telephones, activism, and “faring well” in Britain, 1950-2000.- 14. Placing Experiential Expertise: The 1981 New Cross massacre campaign.- 15. “Low risk doesn’t mean no risk”: The making of lesbian safer-sex and the creation of new (s)experts in the late 20th century.- 16. Afterword.