Marjorie Levine-Clark

This article argues that ideas about gender informed the 1834 New
Poor Law's concept of "ablebodiedness," which in turn affected how
women petitioned for assistance and received relief. Utilizing poor law
reports, workhouse and parish records, and women's petitions for gov-
ernmental assistance in the 1830s and 1840s, Levine-Clark demonstrates
that the poor law placed women in a difficult position by forcing them
to decide whether they were women or workers. The creators of the New
Poor Law assumed that women were physically fragile dependents of
male providers whose role was above all domestic; simultaneously, the
New Poor Law saw any able-bodied petitioner as one who supported
his or her existence through gainful employment. Focusing on the idea
of ablebodiedness, this article illuminates the complex and sometimes
conflicting ways gender operated in early Victorian English poor law
theory and practice.

The first annual report on the operations of the New Poor Law of 1834
used the following example to articulate the problem of the "idle and
worthless pauper" that existed in parishes where the system was not be-
ing properly administered.

A woman, able-bodied, with two children, applied to the board
of guardians at Farringdon for relief. Lord Barringdon elicited,
on inquiry, that she earned 3s 6d a week, and one of the children,
aged 12 earned 3s also; the other child was seven years old. Un-
der these circumstances relief was refused. On hearing this deci-
sion she exclaimed, "'it is a hard case for we poor mothers to
have to work for our children." ¹

Women applying for poor relief were put in an awkward position.
While medical theories stressed women's physical weakness, the New Poor
Law assumed a body -- an ablebody -- ready for gainful employment. While
social reformers and politicians, as well as increasing numbers of the la-
boring poor, emphasized the ideals of female domesticity and male bread-
winning, which positioned women outside wage work, the New Poor Law
held that some women should participate in productive labor to maintain
their independence from parish relief. While the ideology of domesticity
imagined respectability to derive from a household that contained a male

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