Daddy knows best : Professionalism, paternalism and the state in mid-twentieth century British child diswelfare experiences

Lambert, Michael (2024) Daddy knows best : Professionalism, paternalism and the state in mid-twentieth century British child diswelfare experiences. In: Everyday Welfare in Modern British History : Experience, Expertise and Activism. Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, pp. 119-149. ISBN 9783031649868

Abstract

This chapter argues that disclosures made during successive inquiries into historical child and family abuse challenges existing understanding of state power in mid-twentieth century Britain. By foregrounding lived experience and surfacing omission and commission by officials, inquiries have exposed the limits of technocratic expertise and professional authority narratives. Yet such narratives remain foundational to social policy teleology and historical social work identity associated with the inexorable rise of the social democratic welfare state; they become increasingly seductive under the shadow of their neoliberal decline. Such actions constitute a diswelfare; what Richard Titmuss terms social losses against aggregate welfare gains. This diswelfare is compounded by the voices of those affected, children, being disregarded by the perpetrator: the state. The child welfare state had little consideration for what Robert Pinker considers to be their subjective state of welfare. Barbara Wootton succinctly captured the gendered infantilising logic of this paternal power within prevailing social service logics: “Be quiet dear, daddy knows best”. Ultimately, the chapter shows that lived experiences of welfare state failure requires historians to foreground the coercive power of the state, rather than the redistribution of welfare, in our understanding of the mid-twentieth century British child welfare state.