“Why Cant 2 Brothers”? World War I and Britain’s Deceased Brother’s Widow Act of 1921

Marriage and Sexual Relations within the Prohibited Degrees

The 1921 Act was part of a long history of state control over marriage and sexual relations. Britain’s legal prohibitions against marriage to a deceased brother’s widow, and a range of other consanguineous and affinal relatives, had origins in the 1563 “Table of Kindred and Affinity” whose history was itself intimately bound up in the question of this particular form of “incestuous” union. When Henry VIII had tired of Katherine of Aragon, who had not produced a male heir, he sought to have his marriage annulled. He contended that this had never been a legal marriage in the first place as it was contrary to God’s law to marry the wife of one’s deceased brother. While this provoked much dispute among the learned at the time, ultimately this became one of the bases upon which he severed his union with Katherine and wed Anne Boleyn. When Mary I, Henry’s daughter by Katherine, ascended the throne she passed legislation that shored up the legality of marriage to a deceased brother’s widow in order to legitimate her own birth and thus her reign. After she died with no heir, the throne passing to her Protestant half-sister Elizabeth I, Matthew Parker (the Archbishop of Canterbury) introduced the “Table of Kindred and Affinity.” This listed the Church of England’s prohibited degrees of marriage, making marriage to a deceased brother’s wife voidable. Although many other marital unions were forbidden in the Table, the inclusion of the deceased brother’s wife affirmed Elizabeth’s legitimacy and thus her right to rule. ⁵

The “Table of Kindred and Affinity,” which was subsequently printed in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, formed the basis of the modern civil marriage laws. These 1835 statutes, commonly referred to as Lord Lyndhurst’s Act, were intended to do away with the ambiguities within the ecclesiastical court system that had allowed marriages within the prohibited degrees if legally contested to be voidable at any point within the lifetime of both spouses. This had meant that children of these marriages were not necessarily illegitimate at birth; however, they could be declared so if the marriage was later annulled. Lord Lyndhurst’s Act legalized all marriages within the prohibited degrees contracted before the passage of the act to protect the offspring of these unions, but it made all those contracted after the act illegal and thus automatically and absolutely null and void. ⁶ This did not mean that no one entered into these relationships. In fact, throughout the nineteenth century, marriages with in-laws remained “not only acceptable, but even desirable, to a large number of people” who were either unaware of the legal prohibitions or who flouted the law, often with few repercussions. ⁷

In the wake of the 1835 legislation, a movement to allow a widower to marry his deceased wife’s sister lobbied parliament almost annually to exempt these unions, but only these unions, from the prohibitions. From its founding in 1851, the Marriage Law Reform Association spearheaded this campaign, provoking the Marriage Law Defence Association to organize in opposition to any such reforms. ⁸ The intention of the many Deceased Wife’s Sister bills, their proponents posited, was to provide a solution to a pressing problem: that upon the death of his wife, a man would need practical help and emotional support in caring for his home and in raising his children. Who better to fulfill this role, many Victorians and Edwardians had argued, than his wife’s sister? Scholarship on the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act has argued that in securing a man’s access to what the Earl of Shaftesbury cast as the “faithful services” of his sister-in-law as “a second mother” to his children and as a “housekeeper for the man” himself, ⁹ promoters of these bills upheld traditional households and nuclear families organized around a man’s convenience. However, they have also demonstrated that these concerns about domestic arrangements cannot be severed from broader anxieties about sexual morality. For as Ginger Frost has demonstrated, women who were “doing all the duties of the wife—cooking, cleaning, and childcare—” often and easily “slipped into sexual duties as well.” ¹⁰ The debates over proposed legislation thus repeatedly raised the specter of incest, polygamy, cohabitation, and thus illegitimacy, the latter issue precisely what the 1835 statutes had been introduced to address. ¹¹

There was no parallel organized agitation for (or for that matter against) legalizing marriage with a deceased brother’s widow. This may have been because, as Frost has demonstrated, this type of affinal union was more common among the working class who had less time and resources to devote to activism and less social capital. ¹² In 1921, when a bill was finally brought before parliament, Viscount Haldane asserted that this explained why there appeared to be little public demand for this particular change in the law: while marriage with a deceased wife’s sister largely affected “middle-class people,” he argued, this legislation primarily benefited the working class. ¹³ But even in the absence of a pressure campaign, questions about a man’s right to marry his deceased brother’s widow emerged frequently in the seemingly endless debates over marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. In the early nineteenth century, how Biblical law applied to the United Kingdom’s marriage laws was heavily contested both inside and outside of parliament (especially given the considerable difference between English and Scottish law). ¹⁴ The Commission inquiring into the marriage laws in relation to a proposed Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill in 1848 could not ignore the parallel case of a deceased brother’s wife. Its report returned repeatedly to Leviticus 18, the section of the Old Testament that pertains to ritual, legal, and moral prescriptions and prohibitions around sexual relations and thus forms the basis of Judeo-Christian marriage laws. The legal scholar James Roffee describes this section of the Bible as a “muddle of provisions, hastily thrown together and with little coherence.” ¹⁵ There was little agreement about how best to interpret these confusing and often contradictory prohibitions against sexual relations (and thus marriage) between sisters- and brothers-in-law of all varieties precisely because they sat uneasily beside the requirement of a man to marry his deceased brother’s widow in certain situations. ¹⁶ These parallel forms of in-law marriage were thus intertwined from the early nineteenth century and comparisons between the two were consistently evoked in the parliamentary debates over the eventual passage of the 1906 Colonial Marriages (Deceased Wife’s Sister) Act ¹⁷ and the 1907 Deceased Wife’s Sister Act that followed fast on its heels, ¹⁸ neither of which included provisions for marriage to a deceased brother’s widow.

This loosening of one aspect of the incest laws was followed by a tightening of others, which came in the form of the 1908 Punishment of Incest Act. This made incest a criminal offense for the first time (though before 1857 it had been prosecutable through the ecclesiastical courts), but only when committed between a man and a narrow group of blood relations: his granddaughter, sister (or half-sister), daughter, or mother, and only when the kinship was known. The 1908 Act was passed in the wake of social purity agitation that focused on child protection and alongside other legislation that addressed heightened concerns about child abuse and neglect within nuclear families. ¹⁹ Because this was the immediate context for this revision to the incest laws, the 1908 Act did not nullify the clauses of the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act that had classified sexual relations between a man and relatives within the prohibited degrees as “incestuous adultery.” This is significant because “incestuous adultery” was one of very few grounds for a woman to divorce her husband. Nor did it cancel out the “incestuous adultery” clauses in the 1907 Act, which had been included to make explicit that, even if marriage with a deceased wife’s sister was now permitted, sexual relations with a living wife’s sister was nevertheless still considered “incestuous.” ²⁰ Although these shifts in the marriage and the incest laws clarified rights and offences under the law, their inconsistencies suggest that sexual relations between a man and his various sisters-in-law remained a vexing moral issue into the twentieth century.

The Deceased Husband’s Brother and the Question of Sex Equality

The absence of a vocal and organized movement meant that the mainstream media did not take up the deceased brother’s widow question with as much zeal as it had debates over marriage with a deceased wife’s sister. But the feminist press had been addressing the issue as a question of women’s rights from at least the 1880s. Its journals, which had a large, dedicated, and politically active audience, ²¹ consistently referred to this pressing matter as marriage with a “deceased husband’s brother” even once legislation had formally been introduced in 1921 under the title the Deceased Brother’s Widow Marriage Bill. ²² This was because for many late nineteenth and early twentieth century feminists, it was the woman’s right to choose an appropriate marriage partner that was the primary subject of concern. From the 1880s, male and female advocates for equality of the sexes demanded that should legislation finally be passed legalizing marriage with a deceased wife’s sister, it must at the same time legalize marriage with a deceased husband’s brother. To do otherwise, they argued, would render this amendment to the marriage statutes “anomalous and one-sided.” ²³ Walter McLaren, Liberal MP for Crewe and women’s rights activist, repeatedly pressed the point in parliament, arguing in the 1880s and 1990s that the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill created an inequality between husband and wife, granting him a “privilege” upon her death that she would not similarly be accorded upon his. ²⁴ As it stands, concluded feminist activist Elizabeth C. Wolstenholme Elmy in 1896, the latest incarnation of the bill provides only for “masculine convenience” and not for “human justice,” insisting that women’s rights were relevant both in a narrow domestic and in a broader social context. ²⁵

Even those who opposed these or any other alterations to the marriage statutes recognized the folly of allowing only one exemption to the incest laws. In 1901, “A Woman of the Middle Class” argued in a letter to the editor of The Times that the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill should be voted down on the grounds that it would require the inclusion of a clause allowing marriage to a deceased husband’s brother. “Women in the 20th century,” she insisted, “will claim that the law shall be equal for both.” ²⁶ Indeed “ladies” did continue to lobby for this clause to be added but to little avail. ²⁷

When the bill was debated for the last time in 1907, those on both sides underscored the “absurdity” and incoherence of a law that “allows a man every freedom to marry his deceased wife’s sister, while at the same time denying to women the privilege of marrying their deceased husband’s brother.” ²⁸ According to the Bishop of Hereford, who opposed the bill, it conferred a “kind of privilegium” in regard to this single type of marriage, an anomalous right not permitted to others in a similar situation. ²⁹ This “privilegium” was distasteful to many precisely because it was a privilege of sex. The lawyer George Cave, MP for Surrey, argued that it was “an extraordinary thing in these days,” that a man be allowed to marry a blood relation to his wife while a woman would not be allowed to marry a blood relation of her husband. ³⁰ Ultimately, these arguments that rested on equality of the sexes had little traction. That the Deceased Wife’s Sister bill was eventually passed in 1907 suggests that it had become possible in this moment for both parliamentarians and the public to conceive of a world where a man would always have a “second choice,” a spare wife, “waiting nearby in domestic reserve.” ³¹ That the Act contained no clause permitting marriage to a deceased husband’s brother indicates that it was not yet one in which a woman was allowed to exercise similar rights or in which a widow’s domestic arrangements were a matter of broader concern, a situation that did not change until the aftermath of World War I.

In the decade after passage of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act some feminists continued to lobby for further legislation alongside other issues of equal rights, ³² but it was not until women over thirty were granted the vote in 1918 that the political climate had shifted enough for these concerns to have purchase. In campaigning during the run up to the election held immediately after this extension of the franchise, the Labour Party promised to uphold “equal rights for both sexes.” ³³ The manifesto of the Coalition Liberals, led by David Lloyd George, who ultimately won the election, similarly hoped that the newly enfranchised “womanhood of the country” would support his party into the peace. He promised that it would be a primary “duty of the new Government to remove all existing inequalities of the law as between men and women.” ³⁴ In May of 1919, Horatio Bottomley, editor of the popular periodical John Bull and MP for Hackney South, thus asked Lloyd George whether, in view of his administration’s pledge to “secure equality of sex in all things,” he would allow a bill to be introduced to uphold “the right of a woman to marry her late husband’s brother.” ³⁵

Although Lloyd George declined to take up the matter, in December 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act was passed, guaranteeing that neither sex nor marriage would disqualify anyone from the exercise of any public function, from holding a civil or judicial office, or from assuming any civil profession or vocation. This suggested to proponents of women’s rights that more legislation might be forthcoming. In the name of “equality of the sexes” the question of marriage with a deceased husband’s brother was raised twice more in parliament in 1920, once by Nancy Astor, the first female MP to take her seat in parliament. Lloyd George nevertheless resisted introducing such legislation even on the grounds of the equal “treatment of the sexes” as he claimed to be preoccupied with more urgent matters. ³⁶ In fact, his administration both drove women out of the workforce and denied them any state support for their domestic activities. It reaffirmed the logic of, and thus government support for, a traditional family model based on male breadwinners supporting their dependent wives and children. ³⁷

Correspondents to the feminist press argued that, in consistently refusing to introduce this legislation the Prime Minister was reneging on his election pledge “to remove all existing inequalities of the law as between men and women.” ³⁸ By 1920, women’s periodicals had thus begun to argue that since women now had the vote, “their opinions on this matter have now a political value,” urging them to contact their MPs about amending the 1907 legislation. ³⁹ Some comments turned threatening. One contributor to The Woman’s Leader maintained that it was time that the Prime Minister was alerted to the “dangers” of not righting these unequal laws. ⁴⁰ By January 1921, The Woman’s Leader, whose stated purpose was to “advocate a real equality of liberties, status and opportunities between men and women” and was associated with the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, considered this to be a significant issue. As part of its mission was to educate politically-minded women about issues coming before legislators, it noted that several hundred letters had already been written to members of parliament advocating this particular reform. ⁴¹ The Woman’s Leader ran an article in its “Burning Questions” series under the title “Sex Equality in Relation to One Aspect of the Marriage Law.” It insisted that it was the “strong demand to-day for equal opportunities and justice as between women and men” that gives this question “special urgency.” Why should women, it claimed, be denied a right already granted to men? ⁴²

Despite this rhetoric of sex discrimination, the feminist press underscored that in fact what made this legislation especially urgent was that it remedied pressing problems with the declining birth rate, race deterioration, national efficiency, and the security of the nation. As fertility plunged even further during the war, and the medical examination of volunteers and conscripts separated the population into the fit and unfit, eugenicists warned that the best specimens of British manhood were being sent to sacrifice their bodies and thus potentially their future progeny while the dysgenic remained behind to populate the nation. ⁴³ A correspondent to The Woman’s Leader preyed on these anxieties, claiming that marriage to a deceased husband’s brother would be good for the state at a moment in which all were painfully aware of the recent loss of life. Deploying the rhetoric of pronatalism and eugenics that was widespread across postwar Europe and in North America, a woman who signed herself “One of the Victims” argued that in forbidding these marriages the nation was depriving itself of future healthy citizens. Two young people “well-fitted” for rearing the next generation were prevented from breeding more British children, as they would bear the stigma of illegitimacy. “Think of this stupid loss multiplied over and over again all across the country!” she intoned. ⁴⁴ Although war widows’ appropriate roles in the regeneration of the nation was debated in this period, ⁴⁵ this correspondent argued that if the health of the nation were to be secured, Britain could not afford not to sanction sexual relationships that could help to replace the generation of young fit men whose reproductive lives had been cut short.

The women’s press also highlighted the war’s impact on the nuclear family in its arguments in favor of marriage with a deceased husband’s brother. In 1907, the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act had been defended on the basis that since semi-orphaned children were “unattended and uncared for,” it was “necessary at once for someone to take the place of the dead mother.” ⁴⁶ In the wake of the war, women similarly claimed that many children were deprived of fathers who had been killed in the hostilities. It was for this reason, they claimed, that further legislation would be meeting an urgent need, a case that could not have been made in 1907 on the same grounds. ⁴⁷ The crux of The Woman’s Leader’s “Burning Questions” article rested on the contention that the problem of fatherless children had been “greatly accentuated” by the war. It was natural for a widow to wish to marry her brother-in-law, it argued, for she trusted that he more than anyone else could “discharge the responsibilities” of a father to his nieces and nephews. ⁴⁸ According to Lucy Noakes, in the immediate aftermath of the war many claimed that the return to “normality” was dependent upon restoring working-class women in particular to the domestic sphere where they could be “re-educated in suitable patterns of social and sexual behaviour.” ⁴⁹ But the “Burning Questions” article also implied that if mothers were replaceable so too were fathers. Rather than arguing that the state should endow motherhood by issuing family allowances, The Woman’s Leader reproduced the state’s own discourses of the traditional nuclear family. It nevertheless underscored not only women’s appropriate domestic roles but also their concomitant need for a male breadwinner who, they intimated, should be obliged to fulfill his duty as head of a household.

War widows themselves contributed to these arguments about women’s dependent status, arguing that re-marriage was key to their financial security. They wrote to the feminist press testifying that their husbands had made pacts with their brothers before departing for war, pledging to take care of each other’s families. ⁵⁰ Significantly, these women drew attention not merely to the affective bonds that had formed in the wake of their husbands’ deaths, but also to the economics of working-class marriages. A letter from “Sufferer” to The Woman’s Leader argued that current economic conditions made it difficult for war widows with children to survive on their widows’ pensions, intimating that the state was doing little to support the wives of those who had made the ultimate sacrifice for the nation. As historian Janis Lomas has emphasized, a second marriage was one of the “very few avenues” open for war widows that offered even “a chance of financial security” in the interwar period, supposing these women could even find a man willing to marry a widow with several young children. ⁵¹ According to “Sufferer,” it was thus not just that the children of the war dead needed the influence of a father figure. Inverting the logic of the 1907 amendment, that a man needed a domestic helper to cook his food and mend his clothes, “Sufferer” maintained that women and children needed “a breadwinner in the house so that there may be food to cook and clothes to be mended.” Working-class women could continue to do these domestic tasks, “Sufferer” insisted, only with the financial support of a man. Who better placed to undertake these responsibilities than her brother-in-law? ⁵² These women echoed arguments regarding a man’s need for a wife that had shaped debates over the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act, reversing the logic to make women’s, particularly working-class women’s, financial needs paramount. War widows thus deployed the state’s own vision of a return to prewar gender roles, underscoring women’s dependency on a male breadwinner and the obligation of male relatives to step into this role.

The Woman’s Leader not only reproduced discourses of the nuclear family; it also appealed to the Treasury’s bottom line. However much war widows’ struggled to stay afloat on their pensions, the financial cost to the state of this relatively new social benefit was not inconsiderate. The Woman’s Leader claimed that legalizing marriage to a deceased husband’s brother would thus save the government money. Reiterating that the war was the context for passing this legislation, it argued that 90 percent of these illegal marriages were with war widows. Passing this legislation would save £180,000 per annum, it calculated, as the government terminated a war widow’s pension upon remarriage, issuing instead a one-time gratuity. ⁵³ What The Woman’s Leader could not have known, however, was that the question of war widows’ illegal marriages to their deceased husbands’ brothers had become problematic for the government in ways that were not merely budgetary. While the arguments lodged by the women’s press may have contributed to support for further amendments to the marriage laws, the Deceased Brother’s Widow Act was not passed as a component of “a wave of equal treatment legislation which followed World War I.” ⁵⁴ Nor was it merely because war widows “were living with their husbands’ brothers and were in need of their support.” ⁵⁵ It was specifically the complex financial, moral, and administrative issues associated with war widows’ pensions that broke the impasse on stalled actions toward legalizing marriages with a deceased husband’s brother.

War Widows and the Pension Problem

If the coalition government of David Lloyd George had declined to take up the deceased husband’s brother question on the grounds of equalizing the “treatment of the sexes,” ⁵⁶ it proved more open to discussing the issue in relation to the specific problems of war widows. Even before the feminist press began to agitate for this legislation in earnest, the issue of these illegal marriages re-emerged in parliament in relation to the war widow. While it is unclear if this was a deliberate tactic, advocates of legislation shifted the terms of the debate to structure it as an issue of a man’s responsibility to marry this kind of sister-in-law in order to more fully take on the financial burdens of supporting her and her children in the wake of his brother’s patriotic sacrifice. The “sacrifices and casualties of the War,” John Lort-Williams, MP for Bermondsey Rotherhithe, maintained in 1919, had led in many cases to “privation and suffering caused by the death of the breadwinner.” Men whose brothers had been killed in the hostilities, he suggested, wished to marry their sisters-in-law precisely in order “to make provision for them and their families and to mitigate” their financial distress. Here then the issue was not framed as a question of women’s rights. Rather it appeared under the title “Marriage Law (Deceased Brother’s Wife)” thus highlighting a man’s right to honor his brother’s sacrifice. ⁵⁷ Nancy Astor was invested in women’s rights and sought to “equalise the treatment of the sexes.” But when she questioned the Home Secretary on this particular issue in March of 1920 Astor also led with the “urgent” need for legislation occasioned by the war, similarly choosing to frame it as a question of a man’s familial duties. There are a “great number of cases at the present time,” she argued, “in which a man is anxious to marry the widow of a brother killed in the war and to care for her children.” ⁵⁸ Although in these and other instances Lloyd George defended his unwillingness to pursue any additional “dangerous” interference in the marriage laws, which he feared would only lead to unpleasant and protracted “struggles” (given the history of the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act), ⁵⁹ it was the difficulties at the Ministry of Pensions in relation to war widows that in the end made the issue appear urgent enough for the government to proceed with legislation in 1921.

Pensions had been available for the widows of officers since the eighteenth century. ⁶⁰ However, it was not until 1901, in the midst of the South African War, that the government had introduced a pension scheme for the approximately 3,000 “on the strength” widows of rank and file military men, meaning those whose husbands had been given official permission to marry and who were thus financially supported by his regiment. ⁶¹ When war broke out again in 1914, Prime Minister H.H. Asquith committed to the state provision of widows’ pension for all military wives whether or not they were “on the strength.” This was part of a wider recruitment strategy to attract more men into the forces by promising that the state would assume the role of provider should a man die in service to the nation. It was also a corollary to the separation allowances issued to military wives, who the state configured not as citizens entitled to these rights but as dependents unable to support themselves without the male breadwinner who was enacting his citizenship status by sacrificing for the nation. ⁶² In the first years of the war, the administration of this pension scheme was largely left to the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Families Association, a charitable organization. ⁶³ But as casualties escalated, leading to the introduction of conscription in 1916, the government acknowledged that a state system of pension administration would henceforth be required. ⁶⁴

In December 1916, the newly formed Ministry of Pensions (MOP) took full responsibility for the pension scheme. Following the precedent set in 1901, the pensions for war widows that it administered under the Royal Warrant of 1916 were less than the separation allowances these women had received while their husbands were still alive as those had been understood to be both temporary and in service of the upkeep of a larger home awaiting a husband’s return. ⁶⁵ Widows’ pensions were set at just below subsistence in order to require women either to undertake some paid employment or to seek financial support from charities or family members. These pensions, which increased slightly after age fifty-five, were meant to keep the widows of servicemen out of the workhouse without allowing them to become wholly dependent on government support. ⁶⁶ If a woman’s husband had died “wholly due” to his war service, she was entitled to a pension as a reward for his service to the nation (except in cases of suicide, negligence, or misconduct). Should she remarry, however, the pension was terminated, and a one-time gratuity was issued in its stead. This was initially a sum equivalent to two years’ pension but in 1917 it was reduced to one year. In these cases, this concluded the relationship between the war widow and the MOP, which was no longer obliged to act as a “surrogate husband,” ⁶⁷ although an allowance for children continued as long as they remained dependents.

The MOP could also terminate a pension (permanently or temporarily) if the widow was deemed to be living an immoral life thus rendering her “unworthy” of government support. ⁶⁸ These decisions were made by the MOP’s Special Grants Committee (SGC), a 15 member board that had broad powers, which included supplementing, suspending, or terminating pensions, or administrating the pension in trust so that women had little control over how or where the money was spent. ⁶⁹ The SGC pursued these cases when irregularities appeared in the paperwork or when information was provided by “Lady Visitors,” who visited widows to offer advice and support and to undertake surveillance regarding her living arrangements and lifestyle. ⁷⁰

The idea that a widow had to be worthy of financial support had been central to voluntary and public assistance schemes dating back to the 1853–1856 Crimean War. ⁷¹ According to Elizabeth Riedi, while the state pensions for war widows introduced in 1901 were contingent on the good character of the widow, this precedent had been set by the pension scheme already in existence for officers’ wives. Britain’s military culture thus expected widows of any social class to honor their husbands’ sacrifice through “exemplary” moral behavior. However, the state often subjected working-class women to increased scrutiny. ⁷² As Angela Smith and Janis Lomas have demonstrated, the administration of the pension scheme during World War I saw the elaboration of a system of state surveillance that imposed middle-class moral norms over the lives of working-class women. ⁷³

The state not only reminded widows that they had to be “worthy” of the government’s favor. It created a two-tiered system based on a gradation of worthiness that was based on their marital status and was thus explicitly linked to sexual morality. When the war broke out, the government had agreed to provide separation allowances not only to wives of servicemen but also to “unmarried wives”: women who had been co-habiting with recruits prior to the outbreak of hostilities and remained wholly dependent upon them financially. This latter group only received state support, however, if their menfolk were also willing to allocate and commit a significant part of their pay to their maintenance. If their man died, an “unmarried wife” also received a pension. However, these were substantially different from those issued to legally-married war widows. These pensions were structured as an emergency wartime measure (all pensions for this population were terminated in 1922), rather than a lifetime commitment and were of lesser monetary value. Although a gratuity was also provided to the “unmarried wives” of deceased servicemen if they legally married a new mate, it was only half the amount granted to widows upon remarriage. ⁷⁴ The government’s pension scheme thus acknowledged the existence of, and provided for, unmarried women who had been living in stable domestic partnerships before the war. But it clearly privileged legal unions thus rendering some women inherently more “deserving” than others of government support.

Between 1918 and the passage of the 1921 Deceased Brother’s Widow Act, a series of cases came before the MOP that complicated this seemingly neat distinction between married women and “unmarried wives” and made the administration of the “worthiness” clause problematic. In these instances, which eventually amounted to about a hundred cases, widows had married their husbands’ brothers. ⁷⁵ When they applied to the MOP for the gratuity to be issued on remarriage, the Ministry was placed in an awkward situation. Since the remarriage was invalid because it was within the prohibited degrees, a remarriage gratuity could not be issued. But since the widow was in these cases technically “living in sin” in an “incestuous” relationship with her brother-in-law, the MOP was according to its own regulations obliged to revoke the pension on the grounds of “unworthiness.” ⁷⁶

This was further complicated by the fact that many of these cases were Irish war widows. Since the Irish were never conscripted during the war, all who had sacrificed their lives were volunteers, and were thus clearly loyal to Britain during a time of heightened tensions over the future of Ireland within the United Kingdom. ⁷⁷ The widows of these men could thus construct their husbands’ deaths as particularly patriotic. Since these Irish war widows were Catholics, their marriages and remarriages were overseen not by the Church of England, whose Book of Common Prayer explicitly laid out the prohibited degrees, but instead by the Catholic Church in Ireland. The Catholic Church did not frown on marriages between a woman and her deceased husband’s brother, gave papal dispensations to couples wishing to enter into these unions, and thus did not consider these couples “living in sin.” ⁷⁸ For the MOP to label these women “unworthy” thus meant not only challenging their morality; it would also mean contesting the authority of the Catholic Church over its own ritual practices. This was injudicious at a moment when Britain’s right to govern Ireland was heavily contested as nationalists and the government clashed, sometimes violently as in the 1916 Irish Rising, over independence. It would be “impolitic,” argued one official, to treat these cases harshly and label these women “unworthy,” because it is “a matter concerning religion also.” ⁷⁹ Another cautioned that the Ministry should not entertain any idea of “offending” such a large body of “co-religionists” who were entitled to these benefits. ⁸⁰ But to have one policy for Irish Catholics and another for English Protestants was equally unacceptable. We cannot, argued an MOP staffer, treat a Roman Catholic more favorably than a member of any other religious body especially given, he noted, that papal dispensations were “a mere matter of purchase.” The Protestant English widow would acquire one too, he argued, if she could. ⁸¹ It was these Irish cases that proved particularly vexing for the MOP as they were creating “substantial difficulty” at a moment in which the Irish Question was already politically volatile. ⁸²

Through the middle of 1918, the MOP had tended to regard these cases as troubling but nevertheless provided no gratuity, as the marriage was not legal, but also no pension as the widow was being supported by a “husband” of sorts. ⁸³ But with cases mounting, the MOP began to explore other internal solutions to the problem on the one hand and to advocate for any legislation that might be forthcoming to legalize this form of marriage on the other. ⁸⁴ This was because staff of the MOP tended to agree that cases where a woman had been legally married and was now in a marriage-like relationship with her brother-in-law, along with similar cases of bigamy, were “a little hard” as they had a serious impact on a woman’s financial security. ⁸⁵ Where the women claimed to be in ignorance of the law, and had in fact sometimes even been married by clergy (some of whom did not consider affinal unions immoral ⁸⁶ ), the MOP often proposed working around its own regulations and granting an equivalent gratuity through other means. ⁸⁷

As these cases became more numerous, the MOP consulted the Treasury. The Treasury’s position, as it was concerned exclusively with financial issues, was that the reason a pension was discontinued upon remarriage was that the widow now had a new means of support and thus the state should no longer be considered a “surrogate husband” liable for her maintenance. Whether the marriage was in fact legal, appeared to the Treasury to be of little significance given that the widow’s claim on her second “husband” was “moral and not legal.” Since these women (and presumably their “husbands”) regarded their unions as marriages and were applying for the remarriage gratuity, the Treasury argued in July of 1920 that it could see no reason why her pension should not be terminated. ⁸⁸ It was “uneconomical,” several officials argued, to continue to provide a pension if they could “clear off the claim by a gratuity” and thus get the “widow off our books.” ⁸⁹ It was thus “clearly to our advantage” to recognize the marriage, pay the lump sum gratuity, and terminate the pension, its officials argued. ⁹⁰ This would mean recognizing the “act of marriage” rather than the particular “form of marriage” and thus in relation to the Irish Catholic cases in particular, avoiding strictly “legal” definitions. ⁹¹

Although this proved logical and financially sound—given that by 1921, 239,000 British war widows were receiving a pension ⁹² —the MOP maintained that the question of clearing the widow off the books was in practice more complicated. In other cases where a widow did not have to support herself, for example when living with her parents, the pension was nevertheless continued. ⁹³ This was because these pensions were given “as a reward for service,” argued Sir W.B. Griffith, legal advisor to the MOP. Even if the widow was being maintained by someone else (or was herself wealthy), he maintained, the state would be obliged to continue to pay her in view of her deceased husband’s (rather than her own) service to the nation. ⁹⁴ While widows’ pensions might in practice be essential to many women’s financial security, they were not actually a form of welfare, Griffith suggested, and indeed were not means tested. The issue of financial need was thus, he implied, irrelevant to the issue of a widow’s entitlement to the pension. The Ministry’s staff also raised the issue of reapplication for pension, which had apparently already interfered with their ability to terminate responsibility for some of these cases. When deserted by their second “husbands,” some women had applied to the MOP for reinstatement of the pension, claiming that since the “remarriage” had never been valid they were still legally unmarried and thus entitled to the pension, turning the MOP’s logic to their advantage. But to reissue pensions to these women on the basis that their second marriage was never legal, was to place them in a more favorable situation than those deserted by a legal second husband, which the MOP found problematic. ⁹⁵

It was not just the logistics of administering these special cases that the MOP’s staff found vexing. They frequently expressed their unease with the discourse of “unworthiness” that they had been compelled by the Ministry’s own regulations to deploy. The SGC tended to exercise its authority to revoke pensions on grounds of “unworthiness” primarily in cases where the widow had committed theft, had neglected her children, had engaged in prostitution, or was cohabiting with a man to whom she was not legally married. (Women who had cohabited with fallen soldiers previous to their enlistment were still able to receive their pensions but women who entered into these types of relationships after the death of their husbands or domestic partners could not.) Officials acknowledged that “worthiness” was thus widely interpreted as more than merely a bureaucratic classification. They appreciated that there was a “stigma attached to the word” as it branded these women as immoral. ⁹⁶ But there was a vast difference between women “living in sin” who could marry but chose not to, they claimed, and those in a stable, monogamous relationship with a man they were legally forbidden from marrying. As Frost has demonstrated, this latter situation was not uncommon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for a range of economic, social, and emotional reasons. ⁹⁷ Although in some cases widows did appear to be milking the system, officials felt that for the most part those who had married their brothers-in-law were “hard” cases that should be pitied rather than punished. To follow the regulations precisely, they implied, meant permanently tainting the reputations of otherwise respectable war widows. To many this seemed not only unfeeling, but also wrong “in principle.” ⁹⁸ Especially in cases where there had been a papal dispensation, argued R.S. Meiklejohn of the Treasury, it would be “harsh” to put this widow on the “same footing” as one of “notoriously immoral life.” ⁹⁹ Since the widow in this situation was, according to Griffith, merely “cohabiting with a man whom she cannot marry,” the MOP suggested that “discretion can be exercised.” ¹⁰⁰

Widows whose pensions had been revoked and whose gratuities had not been issued because they had married their deceased husbands’ brothers both challenged the state’s actions and contested being categorized as “unworthy.” They claimed that they were “respectable” people who had “led a perfectly moral life.” Indeed they frequently employed their vicars as interlocutors in order to represent themselves as upright members of the community. ¹⁰¹ Mrs R. M. Curling, whose first husband had been killed in France in 1915, not only sought to carve out her own respectability, but to point out that her second husband (who happened to be her brother-in-law) was also a discharged soldier who had lost his leg in battle. ¹⁰² The implication here was that she had married not one but two good citizens who had both sacrificed themselves for the nation. But it was also that she was now doing the patriotic work of caring for a disabled ex-serviceman who might yet produce more healthy future citizens. In the midst of the war, eugenicists had launched a propaganda campaign encouraging war widows to reproduce more children for the nation by re-marrying disabled veterans, whose physical wounds did not, they argued, compromise their genetic fitness. ¹⁰³

Mrs Spittles similarly used both the language of respectability and of patriotism to cast herself as deserving of her “Marriage Money” when she wrote the MOP to complain that her pension had been terminated and yet the remarriage gratuity had not been issued. My first husband “was willing to fight for his King and Country,” she argued, deploying, as many widows did, the state’s own recruiting language and echoing Queen Mary’s January 1915 proclamation to bereaved women that “those who are near and dear to you have died like heroes for their King and country.” ¹⁰⁴ The government “aught to think I was very paticorit [patriotic],” she argued. “I am a respectabl[e] woman,” she claimed, and thus am not living with a man out of wedlock. Instead, she insisted, she was now married to her brother-in-law who was also a “respectable man.” If there was nothing wrong in a man marrying two sisters, “why cant 2 Brothers will you explain the difference,” she demanded. ¹⁰⁵ Although seeming to emphasize her own rights, her phrasing in fact reinforced two brothers’ rights to marry the same woman, underscoring the male prerogative and appealing to Victorian discourses of respectability that were clearly alive and well.

These pleas were affecting and bureaucrats from the MOP, the Treasury, and from other government agencies working to resolve these cases of marriage with a deceased husband’s brother were not in fact eager to deny these women their pensions or gratuities and did not generally question their sexual morality. The MOP and the Treasury attempted to work around their own regulations, proposing to terminate the pension and issue these widows a lump sum equal to the remarriage gratuity, but under a different scheme and from a different pool of monies. ¹⁰⁶ According to Andrea Hetherington, this was the MOP’s “classic fudge,” which they deployed to deal with situations they had not anticipated and which they addressed on a case by case basis rather than through shifts in policy. ¹⁰⁷ This workaround nevertheless required the pension to be terminated on the grounds that the widow was “unworthy of a grant of public funds.” ¹⁰⁸ These widows, the Ministry stressed, would be deemed “unworthy” only in a “technical sense.” It proposed that it would make it clear to the widows that this was not intended to reflect poorly on them and would devise wording that would “attach no stigma to the woman.” ¹⁰⁹ In terms of their financial situation, these widows would be treated neither more nor less favorably than those who had contracted a legal remarriage.

But the Minister of Pensions was not entirely comfortable even with this compromise. He feared that to label these women “unworthy” even if only in a technical sense was both “harsh and impolitic,” and perhaps also liable to public criticism given that recipients of these pensions were the wives of men the government had cast as fallen heroes. ¹¹⁰ Since this was the only course of action sanctioned by the Treasury, ¹¹¹ the MOP stalled and, as questions were being raised in parliament about the legality of this form of marriage, encouraged a legislative solution. ¹¹² By the summer of 1921, this strategy had paid off.

The Deceased Brother’s Widow Act

Scholars have noted that in diverse historical contexts widows have had their lives “controlled by many rules” that have served to reinforce a gendered social order. ¹¹³ In attempting to uphold its own Victorian-era regulations regarding war widows, by the third decade of the twentieth century the British state had found itself pulled in multiple directions by a variety of political, economic, social, and cultural concerns. This opened the door to a legislative solution. But in debating what became the Deceased Brother’s Widow Act a range of sometimes contradictory anxieties about gender and sexuality were also unleashed, underscoring Ginger Frost’s argument that the “gender landscape” of the immediate postwar period was both “confused and confusing.” ¹¹⁴

The bill that was finally introduced in the House of Commons in June 1921 to allow marriage between a woman and her deceased husband’s brother was framed as only a minor extension of existing legislation. Its title—the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Marriage Act (1907) Amendment Bill—was intended to reinforce that this was a slight amendment to the statutes whose justification did not need to be rehearsed. As such, only Viscount Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, attempted to ensure that members of parliament understood that the problem of war widows’ pensions was the context for this legislation. He explicitly pressed the issue of bereaved women who had married their deceased husbands’ brothers, seeing this as the most critical population to be served by this legislation. The Treasury had withdrawn their “pensionable rights,” he argued, because its officials had determined that they had been “living in sin.” There are “a great many cases” of this nature, he maintained, and insisted that this bill should be passed only if it would legalize marriages of this type that had already taken place. ¹¹⁵ Curzon was, however, the only member of the House of Commons to articulate the female prerogative and to foreground the economic context. Instead, the short debate over the bill that ensued in the Commons framed this as merely a bureaucratic fix to an unequal law that interfered as much with a man’s rights as with a woman’s.

In summarizing the content of the bill for members of parliament, Sir J. Baird (Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office) downplayed any suggestion that this was a major reform of the marriage laws. Nor did he cast this as a matter of women’s rights. Instead, he explained that its text merely altered the language of the pre-existing legislation to include marriage “between a man and his deceased brother’s widow.” ¹¹⁶ According to Baird, this bill was uncontroversial as its intention was to “put the man who marries his deceased brother’s wife on exactly the same footing as the Act of 1907 put the man who married his deceased wife’s sister.” ¹¹⁷ Although this was not raised in parliament, it also brought the United Kingdom’s marriage statutes in line with British dominions such as New Zealand and South Africa, which had already legalized these unions, thus forestalling complications around inheritance for colonial subjects returning to the metropole, a factor in the passage of the 1906 Colonial Marriages (Deceased Wife’s Sister) Act. ¹¹⁸ Pre-empting any possible objectionable interpretations of this proposed legislation, right before the bill was read for the third time, Baird re-iterated that the sole purpose of this legislation was “to put the case of the deceased brother’s widow exactly on all fours with the case of the deceased wife’s sister,” perhaps an inappropriate colloquialism in discussions of what was essentially a woman’s legal sexual relationship to a man. ¹¹⁹ The Home Office thus insisted that this was a small and logical amendment. The bill thus passed easily through the House of Commons with almost no debate and with little attention directed at Curzon’s justifications.

Baird’s statements and the new title the bill assumed when it transitioned to the Lords—the Deceased Brother’s Widow Bill—made clear that regardless of Curzon’s explanations this was not being framed in terms of women’s needs and rights. Rather it was about a man’s right to marry whichever of his sisters-in-law he pleased. As early as 1858 one man had facetiously argued that the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill currently being debated was too limited as it merely enlarged the number of “spinsters” a man might marry while at the same time limiting the number of “widows.” ¹²⁰ Had the 1921 bill been renamed the Deceased Husband’s Brother Bill, which would have been in line with the most common way the subject had been referred to since the 1840s, it would have given a woman the same statutory right as a man to marry this particular type of relative. Instead, what it put on “all fours” was a man’s relationship to his two types of sisters-in-law—his wife’s sister and his brother’s wife—which English, unlike other languages, did not distinguish from each other. Although as Curzon had argued, the act’s real beneficiaries would be working-class women, its title itself embodied long-standing gender and sexual norms constructed around a man’s rights to a woman’s sexual and reproductive body as well as her bodily labor.

When the Deceased Brother’s Widow Bill moved to the House of Lords, some of the Lords, particularly representatives of the church, remained skittish about any further broadening of what they continued to see as incest statutes. It is perhaps unsurprising that the most sustained critique of the bill emanated from the Archbishop of Canterbury. What is perhaps more telling is that his opposition was not merely to the immorality of the proposed alteration to the marriage laws. Instead, he was troubled by the possible “eugenic” and “physiological” issues that might arise from this particular sexual coupling. ¹²¹ Rather than being “well-fitted” to produce the next generation, as some eugenicists and pronatalists had argued, the Archbishop feared that these couples would be an experiment in the long-term results of telegony, a theory of “paternal impression.” Telegony, which was widely discussed in medical circles in the late nineteenth century, theorized that a female’s first male sexual partner could imprint his physical characteristics on any of her future progeny with a subsequent mate. This came largely from animal rather than human studies, but it continued to be debated into the early twentieth century. ¹²² This largely discredited scientific theory embodied male anxieties about sexual prowess and control over sexual reproduction. Telegony made every man who married a widow a cuckold, as the first husband usurped control over his wife’s reproductive body by denying the second husband the ability to shape the physical, and possibly the moral and the mental, qualities of all of his future offspring. These anxieties were magnified by the issue of two brothers sharing a wife: since they likely resembled each other physically, how was the second husband to know if it was his or his brother’s physiology that was imprinting on his biological children? The fact that the wife would be second-hand goods, he implied, is what made these marriages “entirely different” from those with a deceased wife’s sister as in the latter case the bride was presumed to be a virgin. Although eugenics was widely debated in this moment and attractive to those concerned about national efficiency, the Archbishop’s unconventional eugenic argument had little traction in the House of Lords as he could furnish no scientific evidence that this sexual coupling was in any ways detrimental to the human population at large. ¹²³ This aspect of the debate that exposed men’s anxieties about “sexual purity and male ownership,” which as Dave Barrie has noted had been present in these debates since the mid-Victorian period, ¹²⁴ exemplifies the ways in which the male prerogative remained foremost in the minds of many parliamentarians.

Indeed, although they had been informed of the pension problem, the men who debated this legislation in the House of Lords found it difficult to see this bill from the perspective of women, repeatedly and falsely asserting that there was in fact no demand for it. They maintained that the Deceased Wife’s Sister Act had been passed because there was a crying need for it: a man required domestic help with his children and thus naturally sought it from the woman he felt best placed to provide it, his dead wife’s sister. ¹²⁵ Several Lords claimed that these marriages were not parallel to those with a deceased wife’s sister, as no woman “wants to marry her deceased husband’s brother.” “Women do not want the right,” insisted the Archbishop of Canterbury. ¹²⁶ “No one can say,” echoed Lord Phillimore, “that the widow of a man wants her brother in the house to help her look after the children,” implying that this was woman’s work and emasculating to men rather than part of the model of a companionate marriage that was emerging in the interwar period. ¹²⁷ In understanding marriage only from the man’s point of view, these Lords thus failed to acknowledge the financially precarious situation of working-class women in general, and war widows in particular, which the feminist press had fully articulated and had been clear in the letters of widows themselves.

Proponents of the legislation in the Lords thus attempted to sway their fellow peers not only through “logic” and the “commonsense” argument that if it is was “right for a man to marry two sisters,” how then could it be “wrong for a woman to marry two brothers?” Unlike members of the Commons, they also highlighted the war as the primary context for this bill. ¹²⁸ In introducing the Deceased Brother’s Widow Bill, Lord Newton, who had been heavily involved in government war work, explained that while there may not have been much demand for this legislation in 1907, circumstances had changed “in consequence of the war.” Many men had gone off to fight leaving their brothers in charge of their wives and children, returning to the narrative of female dependency on the male breadwinner. When these men were killed in combat, “in many instances an affection developed” between the widow and her brother-in-law, leading to marriages. Newton chose not to cast these marriages as purely a matter of economics, relying on the trope of romantic attachment. ¹²⁹ This was in part to dispel any notion that these marriages were by their very nature incompatible. At this moment there was a “perfect orgy of divorce going on,” he claimed, raising once again anxieties about the stability of the family, reproduction, and thus national efficiency, so much so that “octogenarian Judges have been dragged from their retirement to cope with the ever-increasing flood of these cases.” In not one of these instances, Newton maintained, has a man who had married his deceased wife’s sister been a party to these proceedings, suggesting the stability of in-law marriage had already been tested. ¹³⁰ While deploying the discourses of the companionate marriage, Newton nevertheless also highlighted the financial situation of the war widow who relied on either a breadwinner or the government for support in the wake of her husband’s death. There were “a number” of these cases under scrutiny by the MOP, he noted, which were awaiting decision “as the result of this Bill.” Newton thus underscored that the pension cases of war widows were the primary context for this legislation but at the same time emphasized the importance of upholding the nuclear family in the wake of its apparent cultural demise. ¹³¹

Viscount Haldane, who increasingly sided with the Labour Party, championed passage of this legislation by arguing that it was working-class widows’ economic vulnerability that had made passage of this bill necessary and urgent. He began his argument by highlighting the male position, arguing that every working man required a wife. But his argument evolved primarily into one about a working-class woman’s financial needs. When a woman’s husband went off to fight, Haldane explained, she had often been obliged to take in a lodger in order to “assist in keeping up the home.” This was particularly prevalent in mining regions, Haldane noted, where it was unusual for married women to work outside the home. ¹³² In many cases the lodger had been the miner’s brother. When the miner was killed, his widow could not have continued living with her brother-in-law out of wedlock. It was thus “the natural thing that they should be married.” This is what had rendered the question “acute,” Haldane insisted, as it had led to “complications” in regard to how authorities should deal with a widow’s pension in the case of an illegal marriage. The question of legalizing these marriages had now become a “practical one,” he explained, for “a certain number of people” who were now harboring, he suggested, “an acute sense of grievance.” ¹³³ Haldane thus highlighted women’s economic needs, for as Susan Grayzel has argued, the postwar period offered “little opportunity and a good deal of economic hardship” for working-class women in particular. ¹³⁴

With only one sitting female MP and no women in the House of Lords, debates in parliament (both for and against the legislation) thus primarily rehearsed a range of arguments that focused on male prerogatives and anxieties and that reinforced prewar gender norms. Although a small number of supporters recognized that this legislation’s beneficiaries were primarily working-class women, the Deceased Brother’s Widow Act was not a response to an active women’s rights campaign however much feminists had lobbied on its behalf. In framing it as equalizing a man’s right to marry both types of sister-in-law, the act was passed in 1921 by a government that largely emphasized men’s rights and responsibilities, women’s dependency, and thus traditional gender roles.

Conclusion

Although as Rebecca Probert has argued, by the early twentieth century British legislators were much more willing to adapt laws relating to the family “to the world as it was, rather than to the world as legislators wanted it to be,” ¹³⁵ the Deceased Brother’s Widow Act should not be read as progressive legislation passed to keep up with shifting gender roles and more liberal attitudes toward sexual morality and the nature of family life. Instead, it is best understood as a product of the state’s attempt to reestablish the gender order in the immediate postwar context. Historians have demonstrated that the war unleashed a range of anxieties about women’s sexuality, their increasing financial and social independence, and their desire for pleasure and access to public spaces, all of which challenged traditional gender and domestic roles. ¹³⁶ As Lucy Bland has argued, men returned home from war to find that British women were “not as they had left them.” ¹³⁷ For many Britons re-establishing order in the aftermath of the war was predicated on the shoring up of sexual difference and the reinforcement of traditional marriage relations. ¹³⁸ The 1921 Act was part of this process.

By solving the MOP’s administrative problem through expanding the scope of who could form a legal union, rather than choosing to recognize marriage-like relationships, the British government shored up the institution of marriage itself. Indeed, by preserving the clauses in the 1907 Act that prohibited these unions in cases of divorce and “incestuous adultery,” the 1921 legislation underscored conservative family values. In upholding these traditional understandings of the nuclear family, the state sought to get as many widows off the payroll as possible by transferring the financial burden of, and moral responsibility for, their maintenance from the government’s coffers to male breadwinners. ¹³⁹ At the same time, removing this small population of war widows from the category of “unworthy” allowed the state to continue to police other women who challenged perceived norms of respectable behavior on the one hand and to distinguish the entitlements of married women from the “temporary and pragmatic” forms of welfare provided to inherently less “worthy” “unmarried wives” on the other. In fact, the state terminated pensions and gratuities for this latter population of war widows in 1922. ¹⁴⁰ These policies were thus a direct challenge to feminist calls for state welfare programs directed at supporting women’s domestic duties directly; instead they perpetuated the nuclear familiar based on the breadwinner model. ¹⁴¹ This further supports Susan Pedersen’s contention that during the war and in its aftermath state welfare programs reinforced the “sexual and economic rights of men through the operation of moral tests of wives’ eligibility for benefits.” ¹⁴² But female proponents of the 1921 Act were also partly responsible for this outcome. In arguing for their own rights, and those of women more generally, they frequently deployed arguments that perpetuated traditional understandings of gender and morality and relied on anxieties about the relationship between the family and the nation.

If the Deceased Brother’s Widow Act rehearsed some of the debates over the domestic order that had been raised by the decades-long battle over the deceased wife’s sister question, it was a product of a very different historical moment. The 1921 legislation was a direct and expedient response to problems generated by the war that disproportionally affected working-class women. It reflects an attempt to forestall, rather than embrace, shifts in attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and the family that began to emerge in the interwar period and would come to reshape late twentieth-century British society. Although it recognized the financial precariousness of many working-class women’s lives, this legislation promoted discourses of gendered dependency and reinforced traditional nuclear family units precisely in order to reduce the state’s responsibility for the maintenance of economically vulnerable women and shift this burden onto male breadwinners. At the same time, it absorbed more women into the increasingly outdated categories of “worthy” and thus “deserving” while continuing to police others as sexually immoral and thus ineligible for state support.