‘Let me tell you how I see it…’: white women, race, and welfare on two Birmingham council estates in the 1980s

White, Jessica ORCID: 0000-0002-7572-5044 (2025) ‘Let me tell you how I see it…’: white women, race, and welfare on two Birmingham council estates in the 1980s. In: Everyday Welfare in Modern British History: Experiences, Expertise and Activism. Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience . Palgrave,London, pp. 243-263. ISBN 978-3-031-64987-5

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Summary

<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>Based on 48 interviews carried out between 1983 and 1984 with White working-class women in two housing estates in Birmingham, this chapter demonstrates how these women deployed their personal experiences of welfare as the grounds for their expertise, which was used to make claims about their rights to welfare provisions, legitimate their racist beliefs, and posit new ways of “doing welfare”. I argue that White women’s experiential expertise culminated in a cultural script within which the right to “fare well” was mediated through notions of race and racial difference. In voicing their shared experiences of living in competition with their neighbours of colour, these women constructed a “community of experience”, which was defined as being both “White” and British, and having exclusive, and deserving, access to the British welfare state.</jats:p>

Item Type:	Chapter
Uncontrolled Keywords:	4410 Sociology, 44 Human Society
Divisions:	Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Histories, Languages and Cultures
Depositing User:	Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited:	13 Nov 2023 16:05
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2025 15:44
DOI:	10.1007/978-3-031-64987-5_11
Related Websites:	Publisher
URI:	https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3176780