The retirement pensions awarded were considered quite low, generally not enough to cover daily expenses. The amounts of the pensions and the fact that, in the beginning, they did not keep up with the rising cost of living became the target of constant criticism that reached the ministries and the National Assembly, where several members warned of the "shadow of misery"83 that hovered over many former state servants. The issue was also mentioned in the national press, with some newspapers running real campaigns to call the Government's attention to the deplorable situation of civil service retirees.84 Public opinion demanded that retirement pensions should receive the same increases that were being given to active civil servants. This would be a way to ameliorate the rising cost of living that

79DSAN 199, March 22, 1969, 3677.

80Decree no. 16667, *Diário do Governo* 70/1929, March 27, 1st supplement.

81Decree-law no. 36610, *Diário do Governo* 273/1947, November 24, 1174.

82DSAN 5, December 11, 1957, 173.

83DSAN 41, April 23, 1970, 853.

84Matos, A. (February 14, 1968). O agradecimento de aposentados. *Diário Popular*, Lisboa.

affected everyone equally and prevented civil servants from maintaining their standard of living after retirement.85

These campaigns show a change in citizens' perceptions of *Previdência Social*. No longer considered a state concession, the retirement pension was now understood by society as a right of all of those who had dedicated their lives to public service and found themselves abandoned by the state in their old age. In fact, in 1969, assemblyman António José Brás Regueiro stated in the National Assembly that since the retirement pension was a food subsidy,86 it was close to the right to exist itself.87 Marcelism would thus end up agreeing to increase the amounts of retirement pensions. In fact, the image of the state as a "person of good" and its ability to attract and keep the best civil servants in its service was also in question. Civil servants had believed that the state they served would protect them in their old age. As such, public exposure of the situation of former civil servants was yet another factor driving them away from the civil service88 and, consequently, decreasing its level of effciency.

#### Conclusion

The lived experience of *Previdência Social* was many things to many people. For the New State, it was a legitimizing tool, an instrument that ensured the maintenance of the regime and its good image, the control of civil servants, and a sound public administration. For the civil servants, it meant better living conditions, at least compared with most of the population, though it also meant the acceptance of several regulations that aimed at controlling their daily lives and family dynamics. As for most of the citizens, the social support for the civil servants was further proof of their privileged condition.

From a broad perspective, *Previdência Social* is another layer of an experience of society based on the dependence of the citizen regarding the state. It is an experience in which inequalities are established, forced obedience is consecrated, and the emergence of social rights is slow. It also shows the utilitarian relationship between the individual and the state, in

85DSAN 136, December 9, 1959, 118.

86Caetano, M. (1980). *Manual de Direito Administrativo*, volume 1. Edições Almedina, 507.

87DSAN 199, March 22, 1969, 3678.

88Os aposentados (November 13, 1967). *Educação Nacional*, Porto.

which social benefts are granted according to the person's capacity to fulfll the objectives of the regime, and its downside is accepted because it grants the chance to achieve a better life.

As such, the development of social benefts during the New State presented relevant differences in relation to European trends. What was at stake, above all, was not the recognition of social rights or a convincing movement toward a Beveridgian model. On the contrary, the major goals were the legitimization of the regime, maintenance of social equilibrium, promotion of economic and social development, increase of the effciency of public administration, assurance of social control, and promotion of the regime's idea of family. Nevertheless, there was a widening and deepening of the social benefts provided to civil servants that allowed for objective improvements in their standard of living, especially when compared to other professional sectors, such as rural workers, housewives, or the selfemployed. The fnancial effort of the state as a fnancer of *Previdência Social* also increased greatly from the early 1960s onwards.

However, a bottom-up analysis shows that the impact of the expansion of social benefts to the civil service cannot be analyzed only through the enormous fnancial strain it represented to the state's treasury. In fact, in a context of rising living costs, this has always been considered insuffcient to achieve substantial improvements in the lives of civil servants. Finally, it becomes evident that, progressively, a change in the concept of *Previdência Social* was taking place, being visible throughout the 1960s. Gradually, social benefts began to be understood as social rights that could be claimed and to which the state should respond.

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# A Biographical Account of the Social Welfare State in Late Colonial Singapore, 1945–1965

*Chi Tim Ho*

### Introduction

Singapore does not have a welfare state in the sense of the state guaranteeing a minimum income or managing social insurance programs that cover contingencies at various life stages.1 Nevertheless, Singapore has a social welfare system that combines elements of the welfare state, such as social security programs that cover retirement, healthcare, housing and education needs (namely the Central Provident Fund and MediShield Life), and social services for both the individual and the family. Conventional presentations of Singapore's social welfare system, usually compiled by

1Adapted from defnition in Briggs, A. (1961). The welfare state in historical perspective. *European Journal of Sociology* 2(2), 221–258.

107

C. T. Ho (\*)

Core Learning, College of Interdisciplinary and Experiential Learning, Singapore University of Social Sciences, Singapore, Singapore e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023

P. Haapala et al. (eds.), *Experiencing Society and the Lived Welfare State*, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21663-3\_6

economists, sociologists, and social work academics, focus on the contemporary and the institutional.2 In other words, they evaluate current social services and related institutions, policies, and legislation, with brief historical overviews that rarely capture diverse and complex human experiences in requiring, rendering and receiving social welfare. What did it mean to be poor, destitute or in need of welfare assistance? To whom or what can such individuals and families turn? What motivated individuals, community organizations and the state to provide welfare assistance? These questions take on even more historical signifcance as there was no coordinated approach to social welfare in Singapore until after World War II.

These questions form the basis of this chapter's approach to the early development of Singapore's social welfare system. As the term "biographical account" suggests, I focus on the human experience, specifcally that of needing and rendering assistance, which in turn provides an intimate insight into the building of a social welfare system in late colonial Singapore. This is done primarily through the personal letters, oral histories, and biographies of the understated yet critical actors of Singapore's social welfare system. These include the colonial offcials who headed Singapore's Social Welfare Department (SWD); the local SWD offcers and volunteers who, by carrying out their everyday duties and responsibilities, gave tangibility and meaning to social welfare in post-war Singapore; and, not least, some of the individuals and families—the elderly, women, children, and the sick. Though partial or incomplete, such sources nevertheless provide a platform from which we can better appreciate the diverse range of human emotions and experiences in requiring and rendering assistance, especially in a historical situation where the provision of welfare assistance was not the norm or expected. The biographical approach layers the conventional legislative and institutional histories of the welfare state, allowing us to better comprehend fundamental historical change as experienced by individuals.

Their intimate accounts provide a deeper appreciation of the encounters between individuals and institutions in a late colonial/early

2Lim, L. (1989). Social Welfare. In K. S. Sandhu and P. Wheatley (eds.), *Management of success: The moulding of modern Singapore*. ISEAS, 171–197; Tan, N. (1991). Health and welfare. In E. Chew and E. Lee (eds.), *A history of Singapore*. Oxford University Press, 339–356; Wee, A. (2011). Where we are coming from: Social and welfare interventions when Singapore was a British colony. In A. Wee and K. K. Mehta (eds.), *Social work in the Singapore context*. Pearson Education, 21–72. See also Ho, C. T. and Wee, A. (2016). *Singapore chronicles: Social services*. Institute of Policy Studies and Straits Times Press.

nation-building situation. Such encounters do not necessarily follow conventional historical presentations of Singapore's past, which are usually based on political developments: British colonial rule from 1819 to 1942; the Japanese invasion and occupation from 1942 to 1945; decolonization and the struggle for independence from 1945 to 1963; independence from colonialism through a political merger with Malaya to form Malaysia in 1963; and, after separating politically from Malaysia in 1965, the continuous struggle to remain viable as an independent island nation-state. As such, the memories and perspectives presented in this chapter are valuable, as they allow for a different understanding of Singapore's history beyond events preordained as signifcant in a triumphalist narrative. These experiences may only be cursory to those political events, but they are no less signifcant. They give insights into the socio-economic conditions of late colonial Singapore. They capture the satisfaction of resolving a case and ensuring assistance was rendered, and they uncover the complications and frustrations in creating and operating that social welfare state—within a situation where deliberate state interventions into personal spaces were not the norm. These experiences complicate—in a good way—the organized and at times absolute renderings of social welfare by political rhetoric and in some scholarly discourse. The specifc case of Singapore not only adds layers to its colonial experience, but it also provides a basis from which comparisons can be made to similar colonial situations.3

#### Backdrop: The Colonial Situation

Until World War II, social services in colonial Singapore developed in a piecemeal manner, initiated mostly by the community, with rare interventions by the colonial state. This refected the *laissez-faire* or limited state approach adopted by British colonial authorities ever since they established a trading settlement in Singapore in 1819. The colonial society that subsequently evolved was a plural society, made up of diverse migrants with divergent loyalties and interests, with little to no common social will to see themselves as one community.4 As detailed elsewhere, the absence of a common social will resulted in the troubled and uneven development

3 See essays in Midgely, J. and Piachaud, D. (2011). *Colonialism and welfare: social policy and the British imperial legacy*. Edward Elgar.

4Furnivall, J. S. (1948). *Colonial policy and practice: A comparative study of Burma and Netherlands India*. Cambridge University Press, 304–306.

of social services and its related institutions and initiatives.5 There was no organized approach to provide relief during moments of need, or a common purpose to aid the vulnerable holistically. For instance, there were varying responses to the economic pressures caused by the 1930s Great Depression.6 Take, for instance, the experiences of three workers affected by the Depression: Augustin, a South Asian estate overseer working in British Malaya since the 1920s; Wong, a Chinese working in a motor engineering frm after arriving in Singapore in 1933; and Valentine, a Singapore-born Eurasian clerk. As part of a repatriation policy for Indians, Augustin was sent home to Kerala in 1932.7 Wong lost his job barely seven months after he arrived in Singapore, and was forced to become an itinerant hawker.8 In contrast, after losing his clerical position, Valentine relied on his family for accommodation and support during the Depression years.9

The colonial state was all but absent, but this situation allowed nonstate organizations to take the lead. The Salvation Army, for instance, took over existing relief funds when it frst arrived in Singapore in 1935. On the eve of World War II, it had established industrial homes, a hostel for discharged prisoners, and a children's home. Sometime after it opened, the female industrial home took in Tan Beng Neo, who ran away from home after a row with her father. She recalled that "after running away from home, I had no money. I had fve or six dollars only," and that the Army "gave me a bed."10 The Army also paid for her midwifery course and in return Beng Neo trained to become a Salvationist. In April 1939, she and six others became the frst local offcers of the Army.11 The training and experience Beng Neo and others gained from their time in the Army would stand them in good stead in creating and supporting the social welfare system to come.

Elsewhere in the British Empire, events were unfolding that would fundamentally change colonial policy from the previously hands-off approach

5Ho and Wee (2016), 18–25.

6Huff, W. G. (2001). Entitlements, destitution, and emigration in the 1930s Singapore Great Depression. *The Economic History Review* 54(2), 290–323.

7Coelho, M. N. (1958). Old man on public assistance: An intensive case study of two individuals. University of Malaya.

8Chia, C. F. (1954). The place of the hawker in the community: A research paper. University of Malaya.

9Coelho (1958).

10National Archives of Singapore (NAS), Oral History Centre (OHC), Tan Beng Neo.

11Unknown (April 3, 1939). New Salvation Army Offcers. *The Straits Times* (*ST*).

to a more interventionist policy in the area of social welfare. Industrial and social unrest in the British West Indies during the late 1930s led to the Colonial Development and Welfare Act in 1940, whereby metropolitan Britain committed itself fnancially to the social and economic development of its colonies.12 Although Singapore was surrendered to the Japanese in February 1942, colonial planning for a post-war future accelerated as the tide of the war turned. From 1943, the Colonial Offce helped prepare a series of policy directives to guide post-war rehabilitation in Singapore and other colonies. The social welfare policy directive called for the establishment of a Social Welfare Advisory Committee made up of government offcials and non-government representatives with the objective of stimulating and coordinating social welfare work.13 It directed that the "Government should appoint a Senior Social Welfare Offcer and any Welfare Staff should be under his direction," and that the "efforts of these Offcers and Committees should be directed towards improving the general well-being of the community in its widest sense." All agencies and organizations, offcial and unoffcial, were extolled to cooperate and to coordinate their programs in a "general plan for social welfare."14 There was no clear defnition of social welfare, but it was clear in the planners' minds that, as part of a broader social policy, it would help forge a more cohesive colonial society.

After an absence of three and a half years, the British returned to Singapore in September 1945. During the British Military Administration (BMA), the Malayan Welfare Council was created, from which regional committees were established. The committee for Singapore, known as the Singapore Executive, became responsible for coordinating relief efforts such as the provision of food and medical supplies, and services for refugees and displaced persons, and for locating missing persons. The Singapore Executive also initiated a child nutrition program and direct fnancial assistance, and laid the foundations of a coherent youth policy via the establishment of youth clubs and a juvenile court. When the civilian government was established in April 1946, the new SWD took over most

12Ho and Wee (2016), 35.

13NAS, Government Records (GR), BMA(CH) 27/45, Social Welfare Policy Directive, undated.

14 Ibid.

of the Singapore Executive's services and programs.15 It is from this point that the building of Singapore's social welfare system began in earnest.

### A New Beginning: Tan Beng Neo and Institutional Care

The SWD was more than merely a new government department. It refected the colonial authorities' intent to shed pre-war *laissez-faire* approaches and to implement a "modern approach to the problems of delinquency, leisure, and want." The SWD was a "new kind of instrument," which was to be at the "disposal of the whole community." In the SWD's frst annual report, social welfare was seen "as part of the obligation of the community, as the State, to the community, as individual citizens." Social welfare was no longer going to be palliative or transient, or the domain of private charities, but an "essential public service."16 Such lofty objectives required skills and expertise previously undeveloped by the government, and hence it had to start from scratch. During the initial years, the SWD benefted from the expertise of Salvation Army offcers, some of whom went on to join the former.

Beng Neo was one such offcer. During the British Military Administration, she was an investigator for its emergency relief scheme. Beng Neo had to verify the applications by examining the applicant's "living conditions and so on and made […] my recommendations whether they needed any relief or not."17 She vividly remembered that it was extremely diffcult to locate the given addresses as house numbers were not organized in running order (or any order for that matter). The investigator's senses were assailed by a variety of sights and smells. Beng Neo remembered the stench of pig farms, the wretchedness of desperate poverty, and the heartbreaking sight of families mourning loss—she recalled a family of several women with more than a dozen children, and all its male members were lost during the war. Beng Neo also helped coordinate operations in the People's Restaurants, an integral part of the SWD's

17NAS OHC, Tan. Unless otherwise stated, information in this section is taken from NAS OHC, Tan.

15Ho and Wee (2016), 18–25.

16 Singapore Department of Social Welfare (SWDAR) (1947). *Beginnings: The frst report of the Singapore Dept. of Social Welfare, June–Dec. 1946*. Singapore, 247.

communal feeding program.18 She recalled that she "used to go round on my bicycle and go around and see how the food was…. Occasionally I tasted [the food] a bit to see if they're all right."

Beng Neo offcially joined the SWD in September 1947 as assistant matron at the Girls' Homecraft Centre (GHC). Originally called the Nantina Home, the GHC was a symbol of a new approach to the rehabilitation of women and young girls at risk (such as orphans and victims of abuse) by deliberately separating them from known prostitutes to avoid the perceived bad infuence of the latter. Beng Neo recalled in particular four girls who were sisters, the oldest being about "seven or eight" years old and the youngest three. Their father had disappeared. Their mother "went mental" and was unable to take care of them. The youngest apparently would wet herself and so Beng Neo "had to clean her up, changed her pants, cleaned her up and so on." Beng Neo's daily routine was divided between the home and the main offce: "Half the day I was there in the morning. I had the little ones. I had to teach them, looked after them, cleaned them up sometimes. And in the afternoon, […] I had to go to the main offce and did investigation work."19 Beng Neo's task was made more challenging by GHC's bare facilities:

There wasn't even a blackboard or chairs or anything. So [the girls] used to sit on the sort of platform. […] Nantina used to be a sort of Japanese hotel […] they had those types of platforms which were very useful. They didn't have to sit on the bare foor. The little ones would sit on my lap. I used to give them a bit of love and cuddle. […] And I just looked after them as if they belonged to me, as if I was their auntie or mother.

In December 1947, Beng Neo was asked to take over Mount Emily Boys' Home. The home housed just over 100 boys between the ages of six and ffteen.   The bugs were crawling up the walls. They had scabies, red eyes, and chicken pox. […] And there wasn't any food. Two jars of salt, that's all I found in that Home." While the SWD supplied some food rations, Beng Neo required more. She managed to persuade some "parents to

18Ho, C. T. (2013). Communal feeding in post-war Singapore. *BiblioAsia* 9 (3), 2–7. 19NAS OHC, Tan.

bring their rice ration. And every day I cooked a huge pot of rice and I got a lot of dehydrated soup mix and boiled these great, big pots."20

Beng Neo's problems were compounded by having no budget in her frst year, and so she had to make do with what was available. She bartered canvas for temporary shelters supplied by the Red Cross for sewing machines and clothing materials. She enlisted the Fire Brigade to clean and refurbish the old building, organized the children into work parties, and taught the older boys to sew and make clothing. The boys were also sorted into groups for cooking and maintenance around the home. She solicited help from the general public, such as staff from a nearby swimming pool to teach swimming, and a scout to start up a Boy Scout troop. Two girls from the Pasir Panjang Girl's Home (where rescued juvenile prostitutes resided) were enlisted as cooks. To raise funds, Beng Neo organized a sale of work during Christmas, getting the boys to use the spare Red Cross canvas to make shopping bags and handles. She planned a daily routine that provided elementary lessons, a duty roster of house chores, and suffcient time for play and leisure. Older boys were encouraged to fnd outside employment, returning to the Home after work. As there were few other full-time SWD staff in the beginning, Beng Neo lived at the Home and became the boys' surrogate mother. She took her position seriously, at one time confronting one of her former residents for cheating on his wife, long after he had left the Home and was a working adult.

In 1950, Beng Neo took over York Hill Home, a residential home for nearly 200 girls from infancy to school-going age. The residents were a mix of orphans, abuse victims, petty criminals, and those from troubled families. Beng Neo divided them into two groups, one school-going and the other designated as "Home girls." The latter were mostly "overage girls" who had gotten into various types of trouble, "sometimes involved with men. Some were even pregnant. […] Sometimes they would run away from home. Sometimes they were ill-treated. You should see some of them with marks all over their body, legs. […] They had been bashed about. […] And a few might even be theft cases." The "Home girls" learned sewing and embroidery work to make clothing "for the younger ones." They were also involved in the preparation of meals "for the rest of the Home and cooking for the nursery children." Essentially, they were learning to take care of infants and younger children. The girls would leave York Hill if they found work upon completion of school or if they

were to marry. Beng Neo sometimes had to "persuade" the Department to give a "dowry" for the orphaned girls, which she would use to buy the girl

A pair of shoes, a pair of slippers, a comb, a hairbrush, hair oil, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a pair of scissors, powder, lipstick, Eau de Cologne, talcum powder, a mug, a basin, two pieces of scented soap, two suits of pyjamas, three sets of underclothing, three to six dresses, six handkerchiefs and a little sort of suitcase to put all the things in. So that she goes out, at least she has a certain amount of decent things to start life with.21

Beng Neo was describing a situation where a girl had no one else to turn to except the Home and the SWD. The items described above are the bare essentials one reasonably expects a person to possess. In retrospect, it is diffcult to imagine the type of life these orphaned, abandoned, or troubled girls would have faced without the Home and Beng Neo.

The protection and support afforded by York Hill Home had its limits, however. For some who left, their lives did not immediately get better. Beng Neo remembered girls returning to the Home or asking for help after being abused by their husbands or adoptive parents.22 At the wedding of another girl, Beng Neo recalled confronting the groom's relatives as they were making snide comments about the absence of the girl's natural mother. The stigma of the home left Beng Neo feeling helpless. She noted that people did not "understand that the Home is for training" and received girls who had an assortment of problems.23 One particularly poignant story was of a ten- or eleven-year-old girl who came to York Hill because her father was dead and her mother was hospitalized with tuberculosis.

And I used to take her to the hospital to see the mother. I even left the address and all that but the hospital never informed us when the mother died. It was, I think, a couple of months or when I took the girl back to the hospital that we found that she was dead and already buried. And I had to console the girl.24

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid.

The presence of Beng Neo was a boon to a fedgling SWD badly in need of trained staff. She could work independently and manage challenging situations with initiative and imagination. In 1951, Beng Neo traveled to England for further education and training. Beng Neo thought that she could have gone earlier, but "staff was not easy to get in those days." At one stage, she was managing two homes simultaneously. She recalled: "Usually, most of the staff that helped […] really came from the Salvation Army. You see there was nothing, nobody was trained. Nobody was able to do the work. And to get somebody to take over my job was quite… you know, a task." She opined that "the jobs that [the SWD] started did not seem to progress until the Salvation Army offcers joined them."25 Beng Neo worked for the SWD until she retired in 1969. Her memories not only capture vividly the experience of pioneering an aspect of Singapore's modern-day social welfare system, they also provide a window into the experiences of young children and women who needed and received her help.

### Paving the Way: Daisy Vaithilingam and Medical Social Services

The SWD was only one part of Singapore's social welfare system. Almoners (or medical social workers) also played an important role in building Singapore's social welfare state, one of whom was especially successful in transforming her personal initiative into sustained social programs and policy. Contemporary policies and programs concerning child welfare, such as the fostering scheme, education for children with disabilities, and public awareness of persons with disabilities, can trace their origins to the endeavors of Daisy Vaithilingam. Inspired by an almoner's talk, Daisy started out as a student almoner in 1950. One memorable task was to solicit donations for walking aids:

One of the frst things I did was to write to people just using the telephone book […] to ask them to help out patients who needed orthopedic appliances. That means, like crutches or calipers. Some appliances to help them to learn to walk. Many of them were people who had been affected by polio. […] Every time I opened a letter there would be a check. People we didn't know. We just looked through the telephone book, [wrote] to companies

and said that we had a child, can you help with so much. That was the frst time I saw how generous the people in Singapore were, because we would always get checks to help the children.26

After formal training, Daisy offcially became an almoner in 1954. In the following year, she became the frst local head of Singapore's almoners' service. The service started in 1949. Almoners, named for the alms distributed to needy patients, were the predecessors of the modern-day medical social worker. However, in late colonial Singapore, almoners did more than that. In the context of little to no social support for hospital patients, the almoners of Singapore helped establish services, programs, and organizations—many of which still exist today—to address pressing social needs.27

One pressing issue was the number of unwanted children in the hospital wards, due to a variety of medical conditions. Daisy recalled that in "the children's unit we had lots of children who were mentally handicapped, severely handicapped to an extent that they couldn't walk."28 There were no institutions dedicated to this particular social need, so like Beng Neo, Daisy made effective use of what was available (and who was willing to help). She noticed several hospital attendants were "very good at looking after these small babies," and she began organizing them to take the babies home with an allowance. "A lot of them had got quite attached to the children, for they had remained in the ward for a long time. So they were quite happy to take them home."29 As the scheme expanded, the almoners collaborated with the SWD to ensure potential foster parents were properly assessed. The SWD formally took over the scheme in 1956, which still exists today.30 Daisy also focused on the caregiver, understanding that caring for children with disabilities required additional support. She succeeded in lobbying the SWD for a family allowance to help caregivers who had to give up their jobs to care for the children.

26NAS OHC, Daisy Vaithilingam. Unless otherwise stated, information in this section is taken from NAS OHC, Vaithilingam.

27Goh, S. N. (2021). Development of Social Work in Health Care in Singapore. In S. N. Goh and G. L Lee (eds.), *Medical social work in Singapore: Context and practice*. World Scientifc Publishing, 3–26.

28NAS OHC, Vaithilingam.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid. See also SWDAR 1958, 23.

Daisy also worked directly with the Education Department and schools to ensure that children with physical disabilities were still able to have an education. For those who could not travel, she arranged for teachers to teach on the hospital wards so that the children "would not be at a disadvantage" when they could be discharged. For those who could travel, Daisy and her colleagues arranged for transportation (provided by the SWD) and worked with the schools to ensure accessibility for the children. Daisy recalled a heart-warming example of a school principal ensuring that all classes of a particular level remained on the ground foor so as to allow a child with physical disabilities to continue attending school.

Children with intellectual disabilities held a special place in Daisy's heart. She was a founding member of a voluntary organization that became known as the Movement for the Intellectually Disabled of Singapore (MINDS), frst as Secretary and then later as President. One of the largest and oldest social service in Singapore today, the origins of MINDS can be traced to the collaborative efforts between the almoners, the Singapore Children Society, and the Rotary Club to establish a school or training center dedicated to preparing children with intellectual disabilities for employment and everyday living. Established in 1961, the school was called Towner Chin Pu—the latter two words a direct transliteration from Mandarin for "improvement." Towner Chin Pu, and the training centers that followed it, laid the foundations for special needs education in Singapore.

#### Seizing the Initiative: Constance Goh and Family Planning

The Singapore Family Planning Association (SFPA) was established in 1949, the result of volunteers confronting poverty on a daily basis for over two years. The SWD took over the Singapore Executive's child feeding scheme in 1947. However, lacking suffcient resources, the SWD restricted the program to children of families receiving fnancial aid, and even then, only to one child per family—usually the youngest. Moreover, the SWD had to rely on volunteers to run the feeding centers. The volunteers, mostly women, were confronted with the daily sight of large numbers of hungry and malnourished children and their inability to feed every one of them. A volunteer recalled, "the older brothers and sisters used to come along the centers and look longingly at what was being done for the younger children."31

Soon, the volunteers began to realize the root cause of this situation, and from there, the helplessness of the children's mothers. Another volunteer lamented:

And people were just breeding. […] [T]hey have so many children in one family, they can't afford to feed or clothe [or] send them to school. […] I used to meet these young girls. […]  And after a year and soon after, she's carrying again. And I used to tell her, 'How can you expect another child?' She said, 'What to do,' she would say.32

Another volunteer, Constance Goh, also recalled: "Children were running wild; if parents could not feed those they already had, how could they add more to the family?"33 Soon, Constance and her fellow volunteers had had enough: "It was seeing all [this] poverty […] that convinced us that something had to be done about family planning. […] Family planning was […] to allow women to space and limit the size of their families."34

Constance practically bullied the then SWD head, Percy McNeice, into becoming the frst President of the SFPA—giving the association the semblance of offcial support.35 She opened the frst SFPA clinic in November 1949, on the premises of her doctor-husband's clinic.36 During the SFPA's early days, the association's activities had to be discreet. Constance recalled:

The news spread by word of mouth. Few women could read. And we dared not say too much: we never had any publicity because if it was known we would be accused of trying to thrust something at other women, having nothing to do, or trying to get jobs. That was the attitude of the men, the public. So we worked quietly undercover. It caught on gradually. We wanted

31NAS OHC, Lady Yuen-Peng McNeice.

32NAS OHC, Gnanasundram Thevathasan.

33Huston, P. (1992). *Motherhood by choice: Pioneers in women's health and family planning*. Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 59.

34 Ibid., 60.

35McNeice was quoted as saying: "She bullied me into it" in Zhou, M. (1996). *The life of family planning pioneer, Constance Goh: A point of light.* Graham Brash, 142.

36Unknown (November 5, 1949). First FPA Clinic Is Opened. *ST.*

to create the climate for [the] government to accept us, for people to think that we were doing good things for others.37

Nevertheless, over time, Constance and the SFPA grew in confdence and began publicizing their work. Described as someone who was "absolutely outspoken [with] a sense of social rightness,"38 Constance did not hold back. She shared in an interview that "a woman who had had 22 pregnancies begged the doctors 'to do something to stop it all'. She had 20 children. Her husband was unemployed."39 She attacked polygamy, sharing one case where a 41-year-old woman, who had had seventeen children, found out her husband had taken a younger wife—even though he was incapable of supporting his existing family.40 She recalled one "particularly off-hand" husband who reassured his wife—already the mother of eight children—that additional children could be given away. There was precedence, as the couple had already given two away.41 Constance bitingly summed up the men's general attitude:

It was very diffcult to persuade men to use condoms. Most men thought only of their own pleasure. They thought their fun might be spoiled, their health injured. The worship of ancestors infuenced their attitudes as well. You must have sons to provide for you in the after-life and to carry on the family name, to serve you. The daughters get married and go away. It is the sons who remain and if you don't have sons, you must try again and again.42

Opposition also came from the Catholic Church. Constance recalled how a priest would condemn her to hell about "twice a month."43 Fellow volunteers were also "accused of corrupting the young and scheming to depopulate the earth."44 One volunteer recalled hospital nurses actively working against the SFPA, for instance giving misinformation about the

40Unknown (May 27, 1950). Polygamy is a Problem. *SFP*.

42Huston (1992), 61.

44Lee, J. (August 15, 2013). Rooted in service: Legacies of a family of old Raffesians. Retrieved on September 10, 2021 from https://raffesiantimes.wordpress. com/2013/08/15/rooted-in-service-legacies-of-a-family-of-old-raffesians/.

37Huston (1992), 61.

38 Ibid., 65.

39Unknown (May 3, 1950). 'Desperate' Mothers Seek Aid. *Singapore Free Press* (*SFP*).

41 Ibid.

43Huston (1992), 60; Zhou (1996), 133–134.

clinic's opening hours.45 The SWD head McNeice also commented that the "nurses who were Roman Catholic were advised by the priests to […] they mustn't assist in anyway and in fact if they were asked to assist in anyway, they must refuse on moral grounds."46 SFPA members worked hard and smart. While preparing for the offcial launch of the SFAP and anticipating opposition from religious bodies, Constance and her volunteers formed a committee to "look into the teachings of the Bible, the Koran, and the Hindu and Buddhist scriptures." Constance recalled that they found "nothing specifc against [the SFPA's] immediate objectives" and that opposition came mainly from the Catholic Church during the organization's early years.47 From 1951, the SFPA received a small grant from the government annually. Even so, the volunteers did not take it for granted. Lady McNeice recalled having "to lobby the Legislative Councilors […] to either support us when this matter was brought up in Council, or, at least, to abstain from voting against us."48 That the annual grants increased to a high of \$120,000 in 1958 (from the original grant of \$5000) was a testament to the volunteers' efforts.49 The SFPA was not only responsible for arresting and reducing Singapore's fertility rate from 1958,50 it was also a regional and international leader. In 1952, the association became a founding member of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, with Singapore acting as its headquarters for Southeast Asia. It acted as a guide and mentor to similar associations from around Southeast Asia, hosting visits and educational workshops for sister branches. The SFPA was ahead of its time. McNeice recalled that the SFPA operated more openly in Singapore compared to its counterpart in England, where even the addresses of its family planning centers were not publicized.51

Constance and her fellow volunteers in the SPFA were, moreover, part of a broader women's movement during the post-war years that ultimately led to the Women's Charter in 1961, by which polygamy outside of

45NAS OHC, Lady McNeice, and Mrs. B (March 24, 1951). F.P.A. Hours at the K.K. Clinic. *ST.*

46NAS OHC, Thomas Percy Ferguson McNeice.

47Huston (1992), 60.

48NAS OHC, Lady McNeice.

49 Saw, S. H. (2016). *Population policies and programmes in Singapore, 2nd edition*. ISEAS– Yusof Ishak Institute, 11.

50 Ibid., 115.

51NAS OHC, Percy McNeice.

religious situations was outlawed and the rights of women, vis-à-vis their husbands and children, were legally enshrined.52 Constance and her volunteers not only recognized a root cause of poverty, they took it upon themselves to do something about it. In doing so, their impact was farreaching, as they laid the foundations for an offcial state policy on population, enabling family planning to extend beyond the demise of the original SFPA.53

#### Social Bonds to Build a Nation

The work of Beng Neo, Daisy, Constance, and their colleagues provided much-needed tangibility and coherence to Singapore's social welfare system during its early years. Within the frst decade of a deliberate social welfare policy, individuals and families in need of assistance became increasingly aware, via a plethora of social services and programs, of a social welfare state that accepted responsibility for their well-being. For instance, when Augustin was referred by his almoner to the SWD in 1952, as he was unable to work due to a chronic illness, the SWD gave him 19 dollars every month under the Public Assistance (PA) scheme, the successor to the BMA emergency relief from 1951. This was in contrast to him being repatriated back to India earlier in 1932. By then, Augustin had made Singapore his home, for better or worse. Similarly, Valentine was unable to fnd work as age and illness caught up with him. His parish priest, familiar with his circumstances, advised him to go to the SWD for help. From 1955, he began receiving 15 dollars every month under the PA scheme. In both cases, we can see the social welfare system in operation, via the almoner and priest referring Augustin and Valentine to the SWD for help.

The reason we are aware of both individuals and their encounters is that the emerging social welfare system needed trained staff to operate the various services and programs. Information about Augustin and Valentine came from a research paper on elderly PA recipients completed by a student from the Social Studies Diploma program. Anticipating that more trained social welfare offcers were needed, this program was established in 1952 at the University of Malaya. It was a two-year program that exposed

52Leong, W. K. (2008). Fifty Years and More of the Women's Charter of Singapore. *Singapore Journal of Legal Studies*, 1.

53 Saw (2016), 23–40.

students to subjects such as law, history, sociology, and psychology, as well as attachments to the SWD and social service agencies to provide frsthand experience.54 It exists today as the Social Work Department at the National University of Singapore.

In executing their work, Beng Neo, Daisy, Constance, and their colleagues also forged strong bonds with the people to whom they gave assistance. Such bonds could manifest as deep feelings of gratitude. Beng Neo recalled a former York Hill resident insisting on giving her a treat at the restaurant where she worked.55 Daisy was gleefully recognized by a graduate from one of the training centers for children with intellectual disabilities she helped set up.56 An SWD offcer once returned to his motorbike to see a couple of chickens and several bunches of rambutans hanging from the handlebars—ostensibly tokens of appreciation from grateful applicants for assistance—and another received regular visits from his former hostel residents to seek advice about fnding work or simply to pass on news about doing well in school.57 Social bonds could also manifest as feelings of belonging or loyalty. This was discovered by another SWD offcer when she was posted to a youth club located in a "gangster area" part of Chinatown ("People's Park"). At frst wary of the gangsters who loitered nearby, the offcer realized after establishing a rapport with them that they were more than willing to assist her, even escorting her to the bus stop whenever she worked late.58 A PA recipient felt a sense of gratitude to the SWD for assistance given to him and his family during a testing period when his father died. In 1970, he joined the SWD, beginning a forty-year career in social work as he "wanted to give back to society what [he] gained from it."59 This personal statement exemplifes the raw potential of social welfare to build and buttress a cohesive community via positive relationships between individuals and their government.

This is perhaps where the creation of Singapore's social welfare system ideally meets the broader policy objective of colonial development and welfare, which was to create a cohesive community out of Singapore's prewar plural society. In 1955, an unpublished fve-year plan suggested that the SWD "should […] no longer be concerned with residual needs."

54Ho and Wee (2016), 57–60.

55NAS OHC, Tan.

56NAS OHC, Vaithilingam.

57NAS OHC, Chia Cheong Fook.

58NAS OHC, Janet Yee.

59NAS OHC, Subramaniam s/o Muniam.

Instead, it "should be concerned with social development and take a positive part in the construction of a society more in harmony with the political, physical and economic environment of today."60 The last colonial head of the SWD, Tom Cromwell, attempted to do this through community development, which was "a movement designed to promote better living for the whole community, with the active participation and, if possible, on the initiative of the Community."61 This manifested primarily via the building of community centers, which was described by Cromwell as

[A] building where there is a hall, big enough to play badminton in, with a proper stage for amateur concerts and plays, baby shows, lectures and so on, and rooms in which committees of clubs and societies can meet; provide frst aid posts, a telephone, kindergartens (more or less unoffcial) and some kind of training for children who can't get into school, facilities for boys and girls, youth clubs and so on. […] In short, it is our job to build up a feeling of neighbourliness among people who just happen to be neighbours.62

An internal SWD memo reiterated that the community center catered to all individuals, regardless of "sectional" needs and interests, providing a space for the "pursuit of common interests." The memo continued:

Neighbourhoodliness does not, of itself, necessarily constitute a social bond; but if, by grouping its leisure activities in a recreational and educational centre, a neighbourhood can develope [sic] into a socially conscious community, learning, by managing the affairs of the Centre, to participate intelligently in the affairs of local and central government, then education for democracy will have made a real advance.63

By the end of 1957, the SWD had built at least eight community centers.64 In 1960, the management of all community centers in Singapore was permanently transferred to the People's Association, a government agency that still exists today.65 The potential of community centers was clear to

60NASGR, SWD 328/55, Social Welfare Department Five Year Plan 1957–1962, undated. 61 SWDAR 1951, 33.

62 SOAS Library, Letter from Cromwell to his parents, July 10, 1955. Papers of Tom Pearson Cromwell, PP MS 33.

63NASGR, SWD 145/57, Community Centres in Singapore, July 1957.

64National University of Singapore Central Library (NUSCL), CO 1030/671–672, Social Welfare Monthly Reports, December 1957.

65 SWDAR 1959, 8 and SWDAR 1960, 26.

the pioneering generation of Singaporean political leaders. In clarifying the purpose of the community center, S. Rajaratnam, the then Minister for Culture, echoed the SWD memo: "When the Government introduced Community Centres its main aim was to use them as training grounds for democracy. Democracy does not mean only an elected leader running the country. […] Democracy means people also learning to do things for themselves; people willing to do service voluntarily for the community."66

The community center memo was a clear attempt to connect the SWD and social welfare to nation-building. At its most fundamental, nationbuilding refers to the efforts to foster a cohesive community within a defned territorial boundary by emphasizing commonalities, such as language, culture, a shared heritage, and a common vision of the future.67 The community center was perceived as integral to the "fostering of a spirit of neighbourliness and common citizenship in the present plural society."68 The reference to a "common citizenship in the present plural society" is intriguing, as it appears to be a reference to John Furnivall's earlier writings on the problems of the colonial plural society. Furnivall was a former offcial in the British colonial Indian Civil Service. He worked in Burma from 1902 until his retirement in 1931. He studied at Leiden University from 1933 to 1935, researching colonial policy and administration. In 1948, he published *Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India*, which expanded on his earlier studies on the problems of the plural society created by colonialism and their possible solutions.69 One suggestion Furnivall made was to have the government play a central role in facilitating the "re-integration of society through Nationalism."70 Hence, Cromwell's use of community development appears to build on Furnivall's idea of using nationalism to address the issues posed by Singapore's colonial society then. Cromwell clearly felt a strong government presence was necessary, as "there is no real

66Quoted in Seah C. M. (1973). *Community centres in Singapore: Their political involvement*. Singapore University Press, 59.

67Understanding of nation-building adapted from essays in Wang, G. (ed.) (2005). *Nation-building: Five Southeast Asian histories*. ISEAS.

68NASGR, SWD 328/55, SWD Five Year Plan, undated.

69These include Furnivall J. S. (1939). *Netherlands India: A study of plural economy*. Cambridge University Press, and Furnivall J. S. (1939). *The fashioning of Leviathan*. Zabu Meitswe Pitaka Press.

70Furnivall, J. S. (1941). *Progress and welfare in Southeast Asia: A comparison of colonial policy and practice*. Institute of Pacifc Relations, 68.

nationalism in Singapore. […] People do not feel [themselves] to be Singaporeans." He commented, rather presciently, that "it is just possible […] that racial antagonisms may be exacerbated after independence."71 He observed:

A natural lack of cooperation between the 'alien' Chinese and the local Government, *because they do not feel they belong to it*. They cannot speak any of the recognized languages, and like the Englishman abroad they see no reason to learn them. They are fearful, easily led by their own kind and they have a remarkable sense for joining a majority in semi-passive movements antagonistic to 'government.' It is due largely to ignorance of the way Government works and what it does.72

Cromwell's efforts at rudimentary nation-building were overtaken by events ironically enough initiated by decolonization. His infuence and power were reduced, and he was eventually replaced by a local offcer. Cromwell's ideas, however, particularly the use of community centers and the centrality of government in Singapore's nation-building efforts after independence, remained in practice long after he left.

#### Conclusion: The Value of Lived Experiences

The above is but a brief glimpse into the possibilities of a more intimate, biographical approach to histories of the welfare state and social welfare systems in general. The experiences of individuals, such as SWD offcers, almoners, volunteers, and the individuals they assisted, provide a platform from which we are made more aware of, frst, the everyday work of creating a social welfare system in a situation where there was little to no local precedent; and second, the basic experience of rendering and receiving aid. These contemporaneous perspectives and memories bestow an intimacy to conventional policy, legislative, and institutional histories by providing personal insights into the rationale behind those policies, legislation, and institutions. In doing so, they illuminate more clearly the historical interactions between the individual, the state, and society at large: in this case, they show how individual action helped foster a more cohesive

71 SOAS Library, Letter from Cromwell to his parents, November 11, 1956. Cromwell Papers, PP MS 33, Box 8, File 36. Two race riots occurred in Singapore in 1964.

72 SOAS Library, Letter from Cromwell to his parents, October 28, 1956. Cromwell Papers, PP MS 33, Box 8, File 36. My italicization.

society in late colonial Singapore, and how that society and the community in general were re-defned to include a more prominent role for the state.

This approach allows us to perceive the welfare state as more than just an abstract or monolithic institution providing social assistance. It encourages us to approach the welfare state as an institution or institutions that are grounded in everyday individual actions, which in turn produce experiences that give meaning to receiving and rendering aid. This also provides a basis to compare Singapore's experiences with other related contexts, be it in how social policy was used in other former colonies to refashion colonial society after World War II, in examining the intensifed role of the state and how that continued into the post-colonial period, or in the less prominent but no less signifcant impact of individual action.

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# Agency and Experience "from below"

# Voices of the Poor: Negotiations of Social Rights in Denmark, 1849–1891

*Leonora Lottrup Rasmussen*

#### Introduction

In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Denmark enacted three social reforms, which made it possible for people to receive unstigmatized public support. These reforms also supported preventive initiatives to eradicate poverty. As such, existing welfare state research has highlighted these reforms as lines of continuation between nineteenth-century poor relief and the twentieth-century welfare state. This research has emphasized political parties and collective class struggles as decisive factors in shaping the new social policy.1 In doing so, these studies inevitably prioritized

1For example, Esping-Andersen, G. (1990). *The three worlds of welfare capitalism*. Polity Press; Lützen, K. (2013). *Byen tæmmes: Kernefamilie, sociale reformer og velgørenhed i 1800-tallets København*. Hans Reitzel; Petersen, J. H., Petersen K., and Christiansen, N. F. (2011). *Dansk velfærdshistorie: Mellem skøn og ret, 1898–1933*. Syddansk Universitetsforlag; Kolstrup, S. (1996). *Velfærdsstatens rødder: Fra kommunesocialisme til folkepension*. Selskabet til Forskning i Arbejderbevægelsens Historie.

131

L. L. Rasmussen (\*)

University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023

P. Haapala et al. (eds.), *Experiencing Society and the Lived Welfare State*, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21663-3\_7

institutional considerations over those of their users, as well as organized social movements over non-organized citizen's interactions with the state. Thus, the agency and experiences of the people who depended on the public poor relief system were left out of the equation. This is due mainly to the fact that recipients of poor relief had no formal political organization or offcial spokespersons, and they were deprived of both key civil and political rights, such as the right to vote.2

Drawing on studies within the felds of citizenship and pauper agency, I wish to demonstrate the ways in which ordinary citizens, armed with pencil and paper, were entering new territory as they questioned the existing social order and pushed for change. My main argument is that the everyday interactions between the actual users of welfare and the people in power played a role in the evolution of social practice. These interactions contained important citizenship negotiations, which questioned the content and the extent of social rights. However, these negotiations can easily be overlooked because they are more subtle and less visible than, for example, public strikes or parliamentary debates. To access them, we must turn our focus toward the municipalities, who were responsible for managing the poor law. My analysis is based on the municipality of Aarhus, where different types of applications provide us with an insight into the lived experiences of the poor and their dealings with the local authorities.

#### From Poor Relief to Welfare State

The question of who and what were the driving forces behind the welfare state depends on the defnition of what constitutes a welfare state, as does the question of when to date the welfare state. Thus, it is natural to place the emergence of the Danish welfare state in the postwar period, if one operates with an all-encompassing defnition of a welfare state in which the state ensures the social security of its citizens and strives for full employment and economic growth.3 In the postwar period, characteristic welfare benefts—such as the national pension and state-subsidized childcare institutions—saw the light of day.4 Scholars who have focused their

4A universal national pension was enacted in 1956, which gave all citizens the right to receive a pension regardless of wealth and income.

2Rasmussen, L. L. (2019). *De Fattiges Ret: Forhandlinger af socialt medborgerskab som status og praksis i stat og kommune, 1849–1892*. Aarhus Universitet.

3Kolstrup, S. (1994). Forskning i velfærdsstatens rødder: Forskningsstrategier, resultater, huller. *Historisk Tidsskrift* 94(2), 315–336.

attention on this period often highlight the workers' movement and the Social Democrats as the main driving forces.5

Other scholars, who operate with a narrower understanding of what constitutes a welfare state, have turned their attention to specifc qualitative features, such as state-funded benefts or preventive initiatives. In their desire to trace the history of these features, they have found it meaningful to look further back in time, especially to the time around the turn of the century. In 1891, a new poor law and old-age compensation act were enacted. These laws made it possible to receive support during childbirth and old age, along with support for doctors' visits, funerals, and disabled children without the loss of rights. The following year, a law regarding state-subsidized sickness funds followed.6 Several scholars have highlighted that the tax-funded old-age compensation can be seen as an expression of universalism and solidarity, and thus a small step toward the welfare state that would emerge in the twentieth century.7 Some have emphasized how the sickness fund laid the foundation for the so-called fexicurity system, a labor market model that combines fexibility for employers and security for workers.8 Others have pointed out that the new poor law is the frst sign of the emergence of a caring and ameliorative social policy.9 Here, forces such as the agrarian movement, the Liberal Party (*Venstre*), and

5For example, Esping Andersen, G. (1983). Fra fattighjælp til velfærdsstat. *Tidsskrift for politisk økonomi*; Petersen, K. (1996). Om formuleringen af velfærdsstaten som et politisk projekt i 1950'erne: Et bidrag til den moderne velfærdsstats historie. *Arbejderhistorie*, 62–78; Kolstrup (1996).

6The public poor relief act of April 9, 1891; The old age compensation act of April 9, 1891; The sickness fund of April 12, 1892.

7Baldwin, P. (1990). *The politics of social solidarity: Class bases of the European welfare state 1875–1975*. Cambridge Univisity Press,76; Petersen, J. H. (2003). Gårdmandsvenstre: Velfærdsstatens far. In K. Petersen (Ed.), *13 Historier om den danske velfærdsstat*. Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 81–93; Petersen, J. H. (1995). *Den danske alderdomsforsørgelseslovgivnings udvikling*, *Bind 1: Oprindelsen*. Odense Universitetsforlag; Christiansen, N. F. (2015). Social- og familiepolitikkens rolle i den demokratiske inklusion. In A. Borchorst and D. Dahlerup (eds.), *Før og efter stemmeretten: Køn, demokrati og velfærd*,. Frydenlund, 39–61.

8Baldwin (1990); Petersen, J. H. (2003).

9Christiansen (2015); Kolstrup, S. (2010). Fattiglovgivningen fra 1803 til 1891. In J. H. Petersen, K. Petersen and N. F. Christiansen (eds.), *Dansk velfærdshistorie, Bind 1.* Syddansk Universitetsforlag, 159–199.

increasing industrialization have been stressed as key factors in this development.10

Considerably less attention has been paid to investigating the poor as driving forces. This of course has to do with the judicial and social stigmatization that the recipients of poor relief were placed under. Up until 1891, the legislation on public poor relief in Denmark was based on the Poor Law of 1803, which had been subjected to several alterations during the frst half of the century. Some of these alterations deprived the poor relief recipients of key civil rights, for example, the right to marry and the right to private ownership.11 The judicial degradation was further increased with the enactment of the frst democratic constitution in 1849. Even though this constitution secured social citizenship, making the right to receive public support a constitutional right, it also excluded recipients of poor relief from political citizenship, along with women and servants.12 At the same time, poor- and workhouses became increasingly popular in Danish municipalities from the 1860s. In fact, Denmark had the highest number of poor- and workhouses among the Nordic countries. These institutions supported people in need by subjecting them to surveillance, discipline, and control.13

So far, existing studies on poor relief in nineteenth-century Denmark have highlighted that the correlation between the constitutional allocation of rights and the municipal administration of the national poor law, with its use of poor- and workhouses, resulted in humiliation, infringement, and an overall stigmatization of recipients of public poor relief.14 In

10For example, Baldwin (1990); Mørch, S. (1982). *Den ny Danmarkshistorie 1880–1960*. Gyldendal; Hornemann Møller, I. (1891). *Klassekamp og sociallovgivning 1850–1970*. Socialistiske Økonomers Forlag; Petersen, J. H. (2003).

11According to the Poor Law of 1803, the poor committee gained the right to sell the property of the deceased poor in order to receive compensation for paid relief. In 1808, the poor committee could register the properties of the poor. In 1824, the poor committee was also allowed to refuse citizens who had not yet paid back their relief the right to marry. In 1857, the law was changed so that women were exempted from restrictions on their marital rights, but the intervention remained in force for male citizens until social reform in 1933.

12Constitution of June 5, 1849: All men over 30 with an unblemished reputation received the right to vote, unless he was in private service, had received public poor relief, or was unable to manage his own estate.

13Kolstrup (2010), 213.

14For example, Christiansen (2015); Jørgensen, H. (1979). *Studier over det offentlige fattigvæsens historiske udvikling i Danmark i det 19. aarhundrede*. Selskabet for Udgivelse af Kilder til Dansk Historie; Lyngdrup Nørgård, I. (2017). *Beskyt de værdige fattige!: Opfattelser og behandling af fattige i velgørenhed, flantropi og fattigvæsen i København 1770–1874*. Syddansk Universitetsforlag.

addition, several studies have stressed that the political exclusion demoted recipients of poor relief to second-class citizens. Thus, the users of the early welfare state are portrayed as passive victims in an unloving system.15

However, in several recent citizenship studies, scholars have stressed that citizenship should be viewed not only as something that is allocated, but also something that is done, and thus something that can be done differently. Similarly, studies within the feld of pauper agency have stressed the importance of investigating local practice. Even though welfare policies were formally set at the national level, studies have shown how these policies were enacted at the local level, and the ways in which face-to-face negotiations determined their impact.16 All in all, these studies call for an investigation of the early welfare state that looks beyond the formal status of citizenship and national legislation. What is needed is an investigation that considers the everyday practice of citizenship and the actions and experiences of those citizens who turned to the local administrators in need of help, an investigation that provides a more nuanced understanding of how social benefts were introduced and established.

#### Citizenship and Pauper Agency

In his seminal essay *Citizenship and Social Class* (1949), T. H. Marshall defnes citizenship as a "status bestowed on those who are full members of a community."17 It is a status that includes civil, political, and social rights and obligations. However, since the 1990s, several citizenship studies have stressed that citizenship should not only be viewed solely as a *formal status*, as Marshall defnes it, but also as a *social practice*. For instance, Ruth Lister draws a distinction between two formulations: "to be a citizen" and "to act as a citizen." *To be a citizen* means enjoying the formal status of citizenship, while *to act as a citizen* involves fulflling the full potential of that status. For Lister, this distinction is key in deconstructing the conception of women as passive victims, while also acknowledging the discriminatory and oppressive male-dominated institutions that denied them full citizenship.18

15 Jørgensen (1979); Kolstrup (2010).

16Lees, L. H. (1998). *The solidarities of strangers: The English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948*. Cambridge University Press.

17Marshall, T. H. and Bottomore, T. (1996). *Citizenship and social class*. Pluto.

18Lister, R. (1997). *Engendering citizenship, work and care*. Aalborg University Press, 11–12.

Likewise, Canning and Rose emphasize citizenship as both a judicial status and a set of social practices. By combining the discursive and experiential dimensions of citizenship, Canning and Rose highlight how citizenship functions as a multidimensional discursive framework that provided citizens with the languages, rhetoric, and formal categories for claims-making. Like Lister, Canning and Rose are interested in the ways in which gender has shaped claims-making activities, pointing out that women, along with minorities on the margins of citizenship, often had a leading role in striking these claims.19

Similarly, Isin describes citizenship as a subject position in constant fux. According to Isin, citizenship can be defned as a "dynamic (political, legal, social and cultural but perhaps also sexual, aesthetic and ethical) institution of domination and empowerment that governs who citizens (insiders), subjects (strangers, outsiders) and abjects (aliens) are and how these actors are to govern themselves and each other in a given body politic."20 If one operates with this defnition, citizenship is not just performed and enacted by citizens, but also by non-citizens. In his effort to uncover the dynamic and porous nature of citizenship, Isin has introduced the concept of *acts of citizenship*, 21 which "requires a focus on those moments when, regardless of status or substance, subjects constitute themselves as citizens—or, better still, as those to whom the right to have rights is due."22

My study builds on these thoughts on citizenship, acknowledging that formal citizenship is not a prerequisite for a political voice. Even though recipients of poor relief did not enjoy the full status of citizenship, I treat them as political actors and investigate the agency that the poor, though stigmatized and degraded, did attain. This aim also corresponds with the research feld of pauper agency. Studies within this feld have highlighted the local and relational aspects of poor relief and emphasized the different ways that the poor handled and negotiated their poverty, especially during the period from the eighteenth to the

19Canning, K. and Rose, S. O. (2011). Gender, citizenship and subjectivity: Some historical and theoretical considerations. *Gender & History* 13(3), 427–443.

20 Isin, E.F. (2009). Citizenship in fux: the fgure of the activist citizen. *Subjectivity* 29(1). 367–388.

21 Isin and Nielsen (2008).

22 Isin and Nielsen (2008).

twentieth century.23 For example, Lynn Lees argues that poor relief should be viewed as an active, negotiating process between the poor and the administrator.24 In a similar vein, Marco van Leeuwen stresses the mutual strategic interaction between the recipient and the allocator of relief as defning the ways in which poor relief was distributed. Key to many studies within the feld of pauper agency are ego-documents, such as letters, complaints, and applications, which give us an insight into not only the actions of the poor, but also their experiences of being poor.

#### Applications in Aarhus

Along with other studies on pauper agency, this study is based on egodocuments, in the form of applications written by the poor to the municipality of Aarhus. Aarhus is located on the east coast of the Jutland peninsula and was at the beginning of the nineteenth century a small provincial town. After the expansion of the harbor from 1841 to 1861 and the opening of the railroad in 1862, the city experienced signifcant economic growth. The population increased from 11,000 inhabitants in 1860 to 52,000 in 1901, and Aarhus became the fastest growing provincial city in Denmark. People moved from the surrounding rural areas to the city center in hopes of fnding a job. However, toward the end of the century, the city was increasingly marked by social problems, such as unemployment and pressure on the housing market, and many had to turn to the public poor relief system for help.25

The public poor relief system was managed by the local poor committee. The committee was a part of the elected City Council and provided a mixture of indoor and outdoor relief, in the form of pecuniary and food assistance. The applications, which are at the heart of this study, were addressed either to the poor committee or directly to the City Council.

23For example, King, S. and Jones, P. (2016). *Testifying for the poor: Epistolary advocates and the negotiation of parochial relief in England, 1800–1834*. Oxford University Press; King, S. (2011). Negotiating the law of poor relief in England, 1800–1840. *History* 96 (324), 410–435; van Leeuwen, M. (2002). Histories of risk and welfare in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In A. Cunningham, R. Jütte and O.P. Grell (eds.), *Health care and poor relief in 18*th *and 19*th *Century Northern Europe: History of medicine in context*. Routledge, 32–66. Hansen, P.W. (2013). *Den skjulte fattigdom: Middelstandens fattige i København 1750–1850*. Københavns Universitet, 89.

25Rasmussen (2019).

24Lees (1998), 5–11, 33–37.

The applications vary considerably in form and content. Some are executed beautifully, and are well structured and well written. Others are made in straightforward and informal language, without punctuation and with random capital letters. It is reasonable to assume that at least some of the applications may not have been written by the applicant himself, but either by professional scribes or the people in his personal network, for example, an employer, landlord, or local pastor. As such, it is a type of source material that is entangled in questions of authenticity, authorship, writing skills, performativity, and factuality. While it is important to keep these considerations in mind, the applications still hold signifcant value in that they provide us with an insight into the strategies put forth by the poor. Even though some may not have been written by the person who signed the application and others consist of some amount of "make-up," they still show us how the poor used their network to further their position, as well as the intentional performances of the poor.

#### Regaining Lost Rights

While the constitution of 1849 excluded recipients from political citizenship, it also contained the possibility to have one's relief canceled and thus regain the lost rights.26 But up until 1891, the national poor legislation did not set any offcial rules or criteria regulating this paragraph. Instead, it was left to each municipality to decide who should be deemed worthy of having his debt canceled and on what grounds. In Aarhus, recipients of poor relief would send written applications for debt cancellation to the municipality. These types of applications appear frequently from the 1880s onwards. The applications were addressed directly to the City Council, who would usually forward them to the poor committee to give recommendations as to whether the applicant should have his debt canceled. The poor committee then undertook a general investigation of the accounts that were put forward in the applications. Often the poor committee would pay a visit to the applicant's home and conduct an examination, which also ensures some amount of credibility to the applications.

26The Danish Constitution of June 5, 1849, §35.

In July 1890, the City Council received an application for debt cancellation from a factory worker, Martinus Vissing.27 His application is as follows:

As originating from a poor and ill-fated home, I was hospitalized at Aarhus Hospital on 8 September 1880 and later 3 times with different intervals so that my total debt amounts to 175 DKr. and 60ø.

The frst time I became a burden on the public system, I was only 19 years old, and I had no idea at the time that I had a moral obligation to repay the sickness benefts or that I by not doing it would lose basic human rights.

This became clear to me at a later stage, but partly because of the sickness which every time has been rheumatic fever—I have a chronic heart disease that will follow me the rest of my life, which means that I am not always able to work, and partly because I have a poor and blind father, whom I occasionally support, it has so far been impossible for me to repay my debt.

In recent years, I have tried to put aside a small amount of money in order get the debt repaid but so far in vain—The sum is too big for me—it is insurmountable;

In order for me to once again regain my lost social rights, I hereby allow myself with great reverence to address the high council in petition for it to give me its assistance by willingly cancelling two thirds of my debt.

I allow myself to think that this is also in the best interest of the city. A third part of the total amount of 58 Dkr. 53 ø, I can, by continued good health, be able to repay within a shorter or longer period of time—the full amount, on the other hand, probably never.

Aarhus, July 15, 1890, Respectfully, Martinus Vissing Factory-worker.28

In this application, I believe two important factors are at play. First, Vissing argues that his poverty was not the result of a lack of character, but that, through no fault of his own, he was in fnancial hardship: He describes how as a young man he fell ill and later came to realize his moral obligation to pay back the received relief, but it was now too late. By sharing his personal experiences of sickness and poverty with the local authorities,

27Regarding the question of authorship, the handwriting suggests that Vissing's application is signed by the same person who wrote the application. Since the municipality treated the application as being submitted by Vissing, I will also treat it as such.

28Aarhus City Archive, journal number 271–1890.

Vissing tried to make these experiences a matter of public interest. By passing on these personal details to the City Council, the application refects the underlining notion that the municipality should care about his personal experiences and take them into consideration. Second, Vissing uses the language and laws of citizenship repeatedly throughout his application. This is especially evident in phrases such as "I had no idea at the time that I had a moral obligation to repay the sickness benefts or that I by not doing it would lose basic human rights" and "in order for me to once again regain my lost social rights." It is clear that Vissing sees himself as a political being "with basic human rights," and that he was able to articulate these rights.

Several other applicants also referenced the constitution and their citizenship rights. In 1888, weaver Christian Petersen wrote that he would like the City Council to cancel his debt of 24 Kr. because, as he noted, "the loss of civil rights is weighing on me."29 It should be pointed out that the term *civil rights* in these applications refers to the Marshallian concept of both civil and political rights. The same line of reasoning is refected in shoemaker J. Jensen's application from 1889, in which he stated that he would like the City Council to cancel his debt of 14 Dkr, "since I rather not lose my civil rights."30 Worker Carl Petersen used a similar phrasing in his applications from 1888. Because of an infection in his knee, Petersen had been hospitalized and was left with a debt of 30.40 Dkr. He applied for the cancellation of this debt by stressing that he was not yet able to work, and thus did not see himself as capable of paying back the money he owed, but that he would "rather not lose his civil rights."31 Worker Rasmus Nielsen referred more directly to his voting rights in his application from 1891. Here he explained that due to his wife's sickness, he now owed the municipality 10 Dkr, but that he wanted his debt canceled because, as he put it, "I would rather not henceforth lose my right to vote."32

Based on these applications to the City Council, all fve men got either all or parts of their debt canceled. The applications show us that recipients of poor relief were able to use the rhetoric of citizenship to position themselves as political beings. They knew which words to use and how to argue for their rights. By doing so, the applicants used the concept of political

29Aarhus City Archive, journal number 236–1888.

30Aarhus City Archive, journal number 73–1889.

31Aarhus City Archive, journal number 204–1888.

32Aarhus City Archive, journal number 27–1891.

citizenship as a steppingstone to request the cancellation of paid relief. A similar dynamic was also at play in other types of applications.

#### Allotments and Active Citizens

As mentioned above, the city of Aarhus offered both indoor and outdoor relief. A part of the city's outdoor relief consisted of allotment gardens small pieces of land that offered aid to the urban poor by providing them with the opportunity to supplement their otherwise sparse income with fruit and vegetables. In 1836, the city owned approximately 36 allotments. By 1884, the number had increased to 140, and by 1891 there were 228 allotments. The allotments were administered by the poor committee and were apportioned free of charge.33 As the growing number of allotments suggests, these plots of land were very popular. Their popularity stemmed from the fact that the allotments—unlike other types of public poor relief—did not result in any loss of rights, even though the allotments were aimed at helping family fathers, who usually had to give up their political rights in order to receive public support. That the allotments allowed male citizens to exercise both social and political rights is an interesting feature from a citizenship perspective.

The main reason why recipients of poor relief were excluded from political citizenship in 1849 was that the ability to support oneself was seen as a precondition for suffrage. This meant that political citizenship was not only male-gendered but also built around a particular form of masculine ideal. This allocation of rights placed ultimate authority and responsibility on the male head of the household and made passive social citizenship incompatible with active political rights.34 Since the allocation of allotments did not cause any loss of rights, the act of applying for an allotment can be treated as an "act of citizenship," because this act called into question the formally defned distinction between social and political rights.

The applications for allotments are interesting because the applicants used the notion of the male political citizen in order to get the opportunity to be both a recipient of poor relief and a political citizen at the same

33Aarhus City Council Minutes, 1884; 1891.

34Koefoed, N. J. (2014). Performing male political citizenship: Local philanthropy as an arena for practicing and negotiating citizenship in late nineteenth-century Denmark. In N. J. Koefoed, K. Cowman & Å. K. Sjögren (eds.), *Gender in Urban Europe*. Routledge, 162–177.

time. This meant presenting yourself as independent and responsible, which is why many also stressed their role as providers. For example, worker Vilhelm Petersen wrote in his application from 1883: "I, in my position as provider for a wife and 6 children, could beneft from the help such a plot of land would be able to give me."35 In the attached testimony (which all applicants were required to present), Petersen's former employer also emphasized his ability to provide: "Vilhelm Petersen (…) is a nice and decent, sober and diligent man, who arguably will make sure to get something out of it, if the requested allotment is allocated him, and since he has a large family to support, he needs such an additional income."36

Key words such as "sober," "hard-working," "diligent," "trustworthy," "industrious," "respectable," "conscientious," "polite," "independent," "rational," "sensible," and "careful" are repeatedly used to characterize the applicants, either by themselves or by the person giving the testimony.37 These words were all characteristics associated with the role of being a provider and connected to the ideal of the male, political citizen. In the national parliament, the exact same words were being used to describe the deserving poor, who—as many politicians argued—should not be deprived of their political rights. Words such as "lazy" and "drunken" are, on the other hand, used in descriptions of the underserving poor, who were not deemed worthy of political participation.38 By emphasizing their willingness to work and their position as the male head of the household, the applicants deliberately presented themselves as men striving for their family's economic survival and respectability. Through the display of character traits such as being independent and industrious, which was inevitably linked to the conception of political citizenship, the applicants used the ideal of the good citizen as a steppingstone for exercising both their social and political citizenship. This again underlines how citizenship functioned as a discursive framework to make claims about rights.39

In addition, the applications show us that many people applied several times in order to procure an allotment. One of these applicants was worker Søren Møller. The frst testimony from Møller is dated May 26, 1879.

35The Danish National Archives, Sager vedr. Frihaverne 1867–1886.

37For example, the Danish National Archives, Sager vedr. Frihaverne, Jens Jockumsen 1879, Christian Bach 1881, J. B. Møller 1881, Christian Rasmussen 1881.

38Minutes from the Danish Parliament, Appendix A, 1874–1875, column 1586–1711.

39Canning and Rose (2001), 431.

However, in this testimony it appears that Møller had previously been in contact with the municipality:

Dear Mayor Schmidten,

Three years ago, I addressed head master Kraiberg with the respect of acquiring an allotment if such became available, since it would be a great help for me and my family and after his request, I submitted briefy thereafter an application with Mr. Editor Mørk's recommendation and signature, and a year ago I submitted once again information on where I lived, but now I have obtained nothing and I have been made known from what I deem a reliable source that last year quite a few plots were available.40

Applications such as this demonstrate how industrious, active, and proactive the poor were in their dealings with the local authorities. Møller's arguments, which appear to be well formulated and well founded, display a kind of self-confdence. In addition, his applications show us that he knew how to use his network: Niels Kraiberg, whom Møller mentions he had been in contact with, was a City Council member and part of the poor committee, while Johannes Mørk, from whom Møller had obtained a recommendation, was the editor of the local newspaper and member of the City Council. Thus, Møller showed he was in contact with some of the city's most prominent men. He also showed courage in addressing the mayor in person, while also stating that he knew that the City Council had had the opportunity to give him an allotment but had so far not done so. However, Møller was not allocated an allotment in 1879, and three years later applied again:

Since I have 3 times before applied to be considered for the distribution of allotments and my requests have not yet been successful, and it has now come to my knowledge that there will be a few plots available this spring, I ask to be considered at this distribution.41

Even though Møller met the formal criteria for the allocation of an allotment, he did not receive one in 1882. Still without an allotment, Møller applied again the following year:

40Aarhus City Archive, Sager vedr. Frihaverne 1867–1886, Søren Møller 1879.

41The Danish National Archives, Sager vedr. Frihaverne 1867–1886, Søren Sørensen Møller, 1882.

Since there are some plots of allotments for the use and cultivation of poor people who have not received poor relief available, I would like to ask the Honorable Poor Committee to obtain such a plot as I have a large Family and it would be a big help to me. I have 4 children, the oldest is 11 years old and the next 6 years old and one at 4 years old and one at 2 years old—I am 43 years old and my wife is 40 years old so I believe that there are many who are younger than me who have had a plot for many years.42

Attached to the application were three recommendations in which Møller was described as a "hard-working man who seeks to support his family in the best possible way" and as a "sober, and extremely decent, hard-working and reliable man." Although Møller, who categorized himself as a "poor worker," belonged to the lowest rung of society, he did not submit to the decision put forward by the municipality, but had the courage to challenge it. By doing so, Møller performed an "act of citizenship," which involved an attempt to exercise his social rights not at the expense of but by virtue of his political rights. This also emphasizes that the functioning of poor relief was dependent on cooperation between the elites and the poor, and even though poor relief can be seen as a control strategy, it also presented the poor with a survival strategy.43

#### A Laboratory of Modernity

By putting into words how poverty and sickness was felt and experienced, and how public support could help them be good and independent citizens, these applicants contested the constitutional distinction between social and civil rights on the one hand and political rights on the other. As "acts of citizenship," these contestations shaped the local modality of citizenship, making it more caring and humane than what the national legislation would have us believe.

As mentioned above, the allotment gardens were very popular among the citizens of Aarhus. In 1888, the head of the public poor relief system wrote to the City Council: "it does not go unnoticed, that the population greatly appreciates these gardens, and that every year a number of people apply, of which only a few obtain what is applied for."44 The City Council

42The Danish National Archives, Sager vedr. Frihaverne 1867–1886, Søren Sørensen Møller, 1883.

43Leeuwen (2002), 39.

44Extracts from the City Council minutes in Aarhus, 1888.

continuously discussed the possibility of creating new areas with allotment gardens.45 In connection with one of these discussions in 1896, the poor committee carried out a study on the functions of the allotment gardens. Here too, the popularity of the gardens was pointed out: "There is a great demand for these gardens, and even qualifed applicants must, as a rule, apply for several years before obtaining a garden."46 At the same time, the poor committee emphasized that they had opportunity to see:

…with what interest the allotments are usually cared for, and that many families spend their spare time there. The thing is, that after all it is not just the pecuniary income that has meaning for the family, but also the feeling that it has a place that is its own. The committee must therefore state that these allotment gardens are a good institution.47

The quote shows that the municipality recognized that the allotment gardens had a value that extended beyond the tangible material value. The allotment gardens also facilitated a connectedness to the city and its soil. At the same time, working on the allotments and cultivating the land of the city was seen as a fulflment of an obligation toward Aarhus. In an article published in the local newspaper in 1839, the allotments are linked to the image of the city: "for allotment gardens, the city has laid out plots of land whose users are obliged to improve the appearance of these plots by planting."48 What the article indicates is that, in addition to fulflling a social purpose, the allotments also served an aesthetic purpose, thereby forming a reciprocal relationship between the city and the citizen. The allotment tenants not only benefted from the city in terms of food crops, but also "gave something back" to the city by cultivating its land and, thereby, improving the city's image. In the signing of the allotment contracts, the recipient of poor relief—tangibly and fguratively—entered an agreement binding the city and citizen, and, in line with national citizenship, this contract consisted of both rights and obligations.

By focusing on the allotment gardens as a type of public poor relief, it becomes clear that the municipality did not only subject the recipients of poor relief to surveillance, discipline, and control. The municipality also

45 See, for example, Aarhus City Archive, jour.nr.: 263–1873; 151–1879; 272–1883; 114–1885; 8–1889.

46Aarhus City Archive, jour.nr.:103–1896.

47 Ibid.

48Aarhus Stiftstidende 1839.

adjusted the public poor system in light of the demands put forth by the poor. By continuously laying out new areas with allotment gardens, the municipality appears responsive and concerned. What also becomes clear is that while the dichotomies of dependency versus independency and passive versus active were central to the notion of male political citizenship at the national level, these dichotomies were negotiated and shaped at the local level. As opposed to the national legislation, the boundaries between social and political rights remained fuid and contested in Aarhus through the second half of the nineteenth century. Since the integration of social and political rights was only partially recognized at the national level with the social reforms of the 1890s, the practice in Aarhus indicates that the local level preceded the national legislation in important aspects. In some cases, it also directly infuenced it.

The parliamentary debates from the 1870s onwards show that the local practice of citizenship played a role in the drafting of the new Poor Law in 1891. It is important to note that the Right-Wing Party (*Højre*) was in power in Denmark in the second half of the nineteenth century, and that the parliament was strongly infuenced by a constitutional struggle that was fnally resolved in 1901, when the Liberal Party came to power. However, during the political negotiations regarding a new Poor Law, both right- and left-wing politicians stressed the importance of the municipal practice regarding the cancellation of paid poor relief. For instance, a member of the Liberal Party emphasized in 1889 that he had noticed that many municipalities—like Aarhus—had begun to cancel the debt of poor relief recipients if the applicant showed independence and trustworthiness. According to him, the problem was that some municipalities did not make use of this paragraph at all, so it was urgent to establish fxed national rules.49 The same line of reasoning was expressed by the Right-Wing Party. However, they wanted fxed rules to prevent the municipalities from going too far in their dealings with the poor.50 In the end, the Parliament agreed that all citizens had the right to have their debt canceled fve years after the debt was incurred, thereby regaining their political citizenship.51

The political negotiation leading up to the enactment of the right to have one's debt canceled confrms that the local practice played a key role in the way in which this right was motivated, articulated, and criticized. In

49Minutes from the Danish Parliament, 1889–1890, column 806–875.

50Minutes from the Danish Parliament, 1890–1891, column 2597.

51Public poor relief act of April 9, 1891, §35.

addition, the local practice also made the issue a more pressing matter at the national level. Across the political spectrum, politicians agreed that they needed fxed guidelines because the municipalities had started practicing their right to cancel the debts of former poor relief recipients. At the same time, the reason why the municipalities had begun cancelling paid relief was that the poor themselves had expressed their wish to regain their civil and political rights. These contestations echoed from the local to the national level, which indicates that the municipalities also functioned as laboratories of modern citizenship and as a point of reference, shaping the content of national citizenship.

#### Conclusion

In this study, I have placed the agency and experiences of the poor as the focal point of my analysis. This group has usually been characterized as oppressed, stigmatized, and degraded. Above all, this group has been viewed as holding no responsibility in the enactment of the social reforms that were passed in the early 1890s. Building on newer citizenship studies, this study acknowledges that citizenship should not be treated as an either/or position, but as a dynamic and malleable relation. As Ruth Lister underlines, people "can be, at the same time, both the subordinate objects of hierarchical power and subjects who are agents in their own life, capable of exercising power in the 'generative' sense of self-actualization."52 By acknowledging that the actors of citizenship are not necessarily those who held the formal status of citizenship, this study was conducted with the aim of tracing the agency of the users of welfare.

To investigate this type of agency, I turned my focus to the municipality and the local practices of claims-making. Through the analysis of applications for the cancellation of paid relief, as well as applications for allotments, the study has shown that the poor were able to assign meaning to the prescriptions of citizenship, thereby becoming subjects through their encounters with citizenship laws and practices. It shows us that the constitution did not only function as a force of exclusion, by depriving recipients of poor relief of their political rights. It also functioned as a force of inclusion by providing the poor with a language, a rhetoric, and formal categories for claims-making. Through the applications, we can see the poor as

52Lister (1997), 11.

actors who were capable of appropriating a different subject position and, in doing so, redefning the boundaries of citizenship.

In sum, investigating how citizens expressed their experiences as well as the extent to which those experiences gained institutional recognition gives insight into the interactions and everyday negotiations between citizens and the public administration that helped shape a feld of public responsibility. These fndings indicate that the increased public responsibility and the changes in social citizenship enacted in the 1890s were not only the result of a top-down movement, but also of a bottom-up movement, in which the local administration preceded the national legislation in certain aspects. By focusing on acts and practice, rather than formal status, this study recognizes new forms of agency that have received little attention in earlier research on the development of the Danish welfare state. The chapter has provided an insight into the ways in which formally defned hierarchies were enacted and challenged on a daily basis, which in turn affected the content and the extent of national citizenship.

**Open Access** This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if changes were made.

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# Framing the Client's Agency: Generational Layers of Lived Social Work in Finland, 1940–2000

### *Minna Harjula*

#### Introduction

This chapter takes a long-term approach to agency-from-below by focusing on the encounter between the social worker and the individual who seeks aid in the local social offce in Finland. My starting point is that personal encounters with social workers are signifcant for the experience of society, as the local public institutions and authorities represent society and the (emerging) welfare state in everyday life.1 Within these

1Kumlin, S. and Rothstein B. (2005). Making and breaking social capital: The impact of welfare state institutions. *Comparative Political Studies* 38(4), 347; Lipsky, M. (1980). *Street-level bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the individual in public services*. Russell Sage Foundation.

149

M. Harjula (\*)

Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
© The Author(s) 2023

P. Haapala et al. (eds.), *Experiencing Society and the Lived Welfare State*, Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21663-3\_8

encounters, the special relationship between the individual and society becomes concrete as lived citizenship, and the agency of the individual is constructed and shaped.2

In research, welfare state development has usually been conceptualized as a breakaway from the tradition of poor relief. In practice, Finnish poor relief offces were renamed public welfare offces (1937) and social offces (1951) when they were reassigned to implement new legislation on social security. The means-tested poor relief—since 1956 called public assistance—remained as a part of the social workers' daily work at the social offce in addition to the expanding social benefts and social services. Thus, social offces became the venues of old and new expectations in the emerging welfare state.3

As research material storing expressions of clients' experiences is fragmented, my focus is on social workers' everyday experiences of their work with clients. By analyzing how the social workers saw the rights, responsibilities, and motivations of the individuals seeking aid and what kind of expectations they had for their clients, it is possible to explore the encounter as the context for the client's agency. I will approach the encounters as a *scene of experience*, which as a socio-spatial setting frames the situated interaction. In addition to the social workers' conceptualizations of their clients' agency, the frames embedded in the material environment and in the practices of social work, as well as the social preconditions of the social workers and clients, will be explored as a part of the scene of experience.4

As a scene of experience, the encounter between the social worker and client opens up a view to temporal change. Changing terminology in the social workers' journal points to a major institutional reinterpretation of the relationship between the individual and the worker. Figure 8.1 indicates how the earlier concepts of ward (*hoidokki*) and dependent

2Kallio, K., Wood, B., and Häkli, J. (2020). Lived citizenship: Conceptualising an emerging feld. *Citizenship Studies* 24(6): 713–729; Isin, E. and Nielsen, G. (2008). *Acts of citizenship.* Zed Books; Lister, R. et al. (2007). *Gendering citizenship in Western Europe: New challenges for citizenship research in a cross-national context.* Policy Press.

3 Satka, M. (1995). *Making social citizenship: Conceptual practices from the Finnish poor law to professional social work*. University of Jyväskylä; Harjula, M. (2020). Eletty sosiaalityö kahden sukupolven murroskokemuksena 1940–2000. In J. Moilanen, J. Annola, and M. Satka (eds.), *Sosiaalityön käänteet*. SoPhi; AsK (Statutes of Finland) 145/1922; AsK 51/1936; AsK 34/1950; AsK 116/1956.

4For a detailed introduction to *scene of experience*, see Kokko and Harjula, Chap. 2. On clients' agency as the relational and contextual capacity to act, see Lister, R. (2020)*. Poverty.* Polity, 123–176.

**Fig. 8.1** Changing terminology for the persons seeking aid in the professional journal for social workers, 1919–2009, frequency per page (National Library of Finland, Digital Collections)

(*huollettava*) that referred to the individuals who needed aid were replaced by a new concept of client (*asiakas*) in the 1960s–1970s.5 By focusing on the scene of experience I will explore how this major change framed the everyday agency of the clients.6 In the scene, the societal temporal *layers of experience* that the people and the sociomaterial environment carry in the encounter are present in the framing of the individual–society relationship. Thus, the situational encounter not only crystallizes the existing shared societal layers of experience, but at the same time, it is the moment

5 Journals *Huoltaja, Sosiaaliturva, Sosiaalitieto.* Ward: *hoidokki* and *hoidokas*; Recipient: *avunsaaja,-tarvitsija, avustettava* and *anoja*. National Library of Finland, Digital Collections. Retrieved January 18, 2022, from https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.f/search

6 In my text, I will use the term *client* as a general concept referring to the individuals seeking social assistance.

where new societal layers of experience take shape because of the tension between experiences and new expectations.7

I will combine an oral history approach, based on 36 interviews with 60–80-year-old retired social workers and their colleagues8 with offcial material, such as legislation, textbooks, and journals, to obtain a structural framework for my analysis. The use of photos as expressions of past experiences will complement my reading.9

The interviews of 22 women and 14 men open a viewpoint on Finnish welfare state development from the 1940s to the 2000s (see Fig. 8.2).10 The interview collections bring out lived social work in an urban environment, as most interviewees worked in the second largest Finnish city, Tampere.11 In collection 1, social workers who started their career in the 1930s–1950s and retired in the 1970s–1980s were interviewed in 1987–1989, when the construction of the Finnish welfare state was seen to have reached its peak.12 This collection refects the everyday of the new profession within the rapidly expanding post-war social legislation. Collection 2 from 2018–2021 contains voices of social workers who entered the profession with an academic degree during the establishment of the welfare state in the 1960s–1970s and retired during the so-called welfare state crisis in the early 2000s. The interview material carries the multiple temporalities of experiences, as the time range covers the time remembered, the time of remembering, and the time of researching. All the different pasts and futures are fltered through these different time levels and are present in the

7On *layer of experience*, see Kokko and Harjula, Chap. 2.

8 SHA1–23. Interviews of retired social workers 1987–1989; SHB1–13. Interviews of retired social workers 2018–2021. HEX, Tampere University.

9On *sediments of experience*, see Kokko and Harjula, Chap. 2.

10The interviewees who worked for part of their career in the social offce are included in Figure 8.2.

11On the rural social work: Satka, M. (1994). Sosiaalinen työ peräänkatsojamiehestä hoivayrittäjäksi. In J. Jaakkola et al., *Armeliaisuus, yhteisöapu, sosiaaliturva: Suomalaisen sosiaalisen turvan historia.* Sosiaaliturvan keskusliitto, 281–283, 291–294, 297, 303; Satka (1995), 122–124.

12Kettunen, P. (2001). The Nordic welfare state in Finland. *Scandinavian Journal of History* 26(3), 225–247; Haatanen, P. (1993). Suomalaisen hyvinvointivaltion kehitys. In O. Riihinen (ed.), *Sosiaalipolitiikka 2017*. WSOY, 31–67.

**Fig. 8.2** Two collections of interviews: Timeline of social workers' working careers and time of interview

narration and analysis, guiding the selection of meaningful experiences and silences.13

My basic fnding, based on the close reading of the transcribed recordings, is that the 1960s–1970s was interpreted as the turning point of the *old* and *new* in social work in both collections, but two contradictory and opposed meanings were given to the temporal turning point: For the social workers in the frst collection, the turning point was a negative loss, while for those in the second collection the change was a break from an old burden toward a better future. This points to generational differences and makes the generation, as a sociological concept that is related to societal change, my analytic category in tracing the temporal layers of

13Taavetti, R. (2018)*. Queer politics of memory: Undisciplined sexualities as glimpses and fragments in Finnish and Estonian pasts*. University of Helsinki; Koselleck, R. (1985). *Futures past: On the semantics of historical time*. MIT Press; Koselleck, R. (2018). *Sediments of time: On possible histories*. Stanford University Press. Kettunen, P. and Petersen, K. (2011). Introduction: Rethinking welfare state models. In P. Kettunen and K. Petersen (eds.), *Beyond welfare state models: Transnational historical perspectives on social policy*. Edward Elgar, 1–15.

experience.14 My starting point is that the two generations of social workers—who even worked as colleagues in the same social offce—each had their own shared professional preconditions and key experiences as flters that created "conditions of different chances for experiences" in the encounters with their clients.15

By analyzing the changing scene of experience, I will argue that—as shared societal experiences and horizons of expectation which were integral for the lived and narrated social work—the two generational layers of experiences carried different interpretations of the individual–society relationship and resulted in divergent expectations toward the clients and their agency. By indicating the meaning of the local-level individual–social worker relationship in defning the agency of the citizen, this chapter nuances and challenges the macro interpretations of welfare state development that are based on the chronology of legislation only.

### "The Poor Must Be Humble": Layer of Poor Law in Lived Social Work

[T]here were very old-fashioned social workers, and the poor relief reared the social workers to think a little differently than those of the present day. (…) In such a developing feld of work (…) attitudes change, the worker comes from far behind, and does not accept all the advances in his/ her mind.16

A social worker who started her 33-year career in the social offce of Tampere as the frst with a professional education in 1947 saw the poor law (1922–1956) as the most signifcant feature that distinguished the "old" and "new" generation. Similarly, the chief accountant, who joined the offce in 1957, recognized the long-term effect of the annulled law:

14On the concept of generation: Virtanen, M. (2001). Fennomanian perilliset: Poliittiset traditiot ja sukupolvien dynamiikka. SKS, 15–35; Purhonen, S. (2007). Sukupolvien ongelma: Tutkielmia sukupolven käsitteestä, sukupolvitietoisuudesta ja suurista ikäluokista. Yliopistopaino. On generations in the welfare state: Bude, H. (2003). Generation: Elemente einer Erfahrungsgeschichte des Wohlfartsstaates. In S. Lessenich et al. (eds.). *Wohlfahrtsstaatliche Grundbegriffe: Historische und aktuelle Diskurse.* Campus, 287–300; Worth, E. (2021). The welfare state generation: Women, agency and class in Britain since 1945. Bloomsbury.

15Koselleck (2018), 210–213, citation p. 211.

16 SHA20, 9, 11.

[T]he older offcers were inculcated with the old baggage of the poor law, and their work was still marked by it (…) at least in their stance toward their clients. And people still clearly felt the poor law was harsher and stricter all around.17

The frst social workers were hired by the largest cities to implement the poor law in the 1920s. As the sphere of poor relief was widened to child protection and the control of alcoholics and vagrants in 1937, a new terminology based on the concept *huolto*, referring to care, support, maintenance, and supply, was introduced. The practice of the institution of *huoltotoimi* (public welfare, literally: welfare affairs) was called *huoltotyö* (welfare work).18 New national social benefts broadened the feld further from the late 1930s onward, and the foreign terms *social work* and *social affairs* were gradually adopted in the 1950s.19

From 1951, the around 330 towns and rural municipalities with over 4000 inhabitants were obliged to have a paid employee for social affairs, while in the approximately 220 small rural municipalities, laymen who were elected to a position of trust by the social board took care of social worker tasks. Special academic education for social workers was available from 1942, but only 45 percent of the workers had a special education or university degree in the early 1960s. A qualifed applicant only needed "suffcient education or experience" to enter the feld.20

Although the young profession with its comparatively low salary lacked high esteem, the position of a municipal offcial, representing the public authority, was traditionally "above the people" in the local social hierarchy.21 In the late 1950s, 70 percent of Finnish social workers were women, but especially the higher posts in the offces were dominated by men.22 The background of social workers was heterogenous. In Tampere, working-class men were recruited from municipal party politics and labor

17 SHA15, 3.

18 Satka (1994), 267, 292–294. Satka (1995), 62–63.

19Tarasti A. and Sipponen, K. (1957). *Sosiaalihuollon lainsäädäntö.* Suomen lakimiesliitto. Search *sosiaalityö*, *sosiaalitoimi*. National Library of Finland, Digital Collections. Retrieved December 10, 2021, from https://digi.kansalliskirjasto.f/search.

20 Satka (1994), 306–308, 313–314; *STV Statistical Yearbook of Finland* (1951). Valtioneuvosto, 7, 11; Tarvainen, L., Sosiaalihuollon työvoimakysymys. *Huoltaja* 5/1965, 133–134.

21 Jalas, R., Työvoimakysymys huoltoalalla. *Huoltaja* 1–2/1944, 9; Eskola, A., Kunnan viranhaltija yleisön kannalta. *Maalaiskunta* 15/1953, 516.

22 Satka (1994), 315.

unions on the basis of their local knowledge, while women usually became qualifed after working in the social offce as secretaries in the 1940s–1950s. In addition, the separate child welfare offce—which was operational only in fewer than ten of the largest cities—hired women whose educational and vocational background was in childcare and nursing. Thus, the working-class family men in their new role with a tie, briefcase, and desk, and the religious, unmarried women with a vocational attitude toward child protection represented two different worlds. The shared childhood experiences of scarcity and the extreme experiences of war in their adult life, however, similarly shortened their social distance to the clients.23

The early term for social worker, *tarkkaaja*, literally referred to a person who observes and keeps an eye on somebody. The new profession was the "watchful eye" and "information gatherer" of the social board.24 The other early title, *kodeissakävijä* (home visitor), indicated feld work at clients' homes as the main task.25 Each social worker had their own district in the city. After reception hours in the offce, the afternoons were usually flled with obligatory home visits (Photos 8.1, 8.4, and 8.5).26

As the venue for the frst encounter between the individual and the social worker, the social offce carried the stigmatized experiences of poor relief. Still in the late 1950s, the fear of being seen entering the social offce was one of the reasons that made seeking aid diffcult.27 As there were no booked appointments, long queues were an everyday experience during the offce hours in Tampere, which was a rapidly growing industrial city with over 100,000 inhabitants:28

[T]he poor souls sat there on the bench queuing perhaps since the morning, without eating or drinking (…) It was hard for the clients, and when they got in to see the social worker, they were already tired and tried to tell their matters as quickly as possible to get back home, the children probably waited for them.29

23Harjula (2020), 52–55.

24Tarasti, A., Eräitä sosiaalihuollon hallinnon uudistamisen. *Huoltaja* 24/1950, 591.

25 Satka (1994), 293; Kaupunkien huoltotoimihenkilöiden yhdistys. *Huoltaja* 9/1935, 197.

26Harjula, M. (1990). *Sosiaalityön arki Tampereella 1945–1970*. Tampereen yliopisto, 27–40.

27Piirainen, V. (1963). *Ensikertainen huoltoavun hakeminen: Tutkielma huoltoavunhakijain käyttäytymisestä.* Sosiaalihuollon keskusliitto, 83–86.

28 STV (1951), 10. Cf. Piirainen (1963), 86–87. 29 SHA20, 5.

**Photo 8.1** The entrance of Tampere social offce. Despite the modern vocabulary based on the concept *social* since the 1950s, the sign *Huoltotoimisto* (public welfare offce) dated back to the 1930s and carried the legacy of poor relief (Huoltaja 18/1962, 581. Photographer unknown)

A private conversation was an ideal that was not always met in the offces. Even a booklet, *Choose social welfare for your mission in life* (1949) for those who considered pursuing the career, indicated how the conversation with a client took place at a shared offce of two workers. The body language, clothing, and the layout of the furniture construct and maintain the humble status of the client in Photos 8.2 and 8.3.

The receipt of poor relief restricted the client's rights as a citizen. The ideals of poor relief dated back to the nineteenth century, emphasizing the moral responsibilities of the citizen to the nation. Autonomous citizenship

**Photo 8.2** A shared offce was presented as the norm in a booklet for social workers-to-be in Finland in 1949 (Valitse sosiaalihuolto elämäntehtäväksesi (1949). Sosiaaliministeriö, 3. Photographer unknown)

was earned only by one's moral self-control and hard-working behavior.30 Therefore, poor relief was not a beneft but a loan that the receiver or relatives were obliged to pay back. All recipients of poor relief were supervised by the offcials, and long-term recipients were under the guardianship of the local board. The board even acquired ownership of the recipient's belongings. Furthermore, long-term receipt of poor relief was grounds for exclusion from universal suffrage in national and local elections until the 1940s.31 All these features led the receipt of poor relief to generally be seen as a degrading experience that made the person a second-class citizen.32

The practices of poor relief narrowed the client's autonomy further. Poor relief was granted either as indoor care mainly in poor houses called municipal homes from the 1920s33—or as outdoor care. Instead of

30 Satka (1995), 22–24, 68–101.

31AsK 145/1922; AsK 7/1928, § 6.

32Piirainen (1963), 16–17.

33 Satka (1994), 273.

**Photo 8.3** A social offce described as exceptionally peaceful, light, and spacious in the Finnish social workers' journal in 1954 (Huoltaja 20/1954, 525. Photographer unknown)

**Photos 8.4 and 8.5** Social workers with their briefcases making a home visit in Finland in the 1950s (Huoltaja 12–13/1953, 352 and Huoltaja 7/1957, cover. Photographers unknown)

cash, outdoor care was usually products, such as frewood and clothes, or payment commitments to certain shops or medical aid. In Tampere, 40 percent of the outdoor relief recipients were regularly assisted, mainly old and sick people who received their aid monthly in the mid-1940s. Because of new social benefts and social insurance, their share reduced to only 5 percent by 1960, and most clients received temporary aid. In addition to old age and sickness, also unemployment, a large family, or the "husband not supporting the family" were among the accepted reasons for shortterm aid.34

The task of the social worker was to investigate the needs and the deservingness of every applicant case by case. Pre- and post-war social work was based on a dichotomic view of clients. *Decent* people deserved to be aided, whereas *indecent* individuals with self-inficted troubles were placed under a step-by-step tightening control to make them adopt the moral code of a good citizen.35 The social worker had to fnd out to what group each client belonged: "who is in dire straits, who is faking, who is a decent human being, who is an immoral waster."36

The truthfulness of the client's story had to be questioned and confrmed by the social worker. The recurrent home visit formed the core of the investigation. According to the social workers, the home as an environment could give the client confdence and space to talk:

[W]hen a mother comes to ask for poor relief (…), the home visit elucidated the situation so much (…) you could see the environment the family lived in (…) I felt that the client was much more confdent to talk about the troubles at home than in the offce (…) it is more formal and when there is a queue behind the door, the clients get nervous (…). On a home visit, the atmosphere was different, and shortages (…) were brought out, such as (…) cut-off electricity.37

34Harjula (1990), 15–19, 52–58, 98–103.

35 Satka (1995), 22, 37–40, 59–63, 80–96.

36 Suhonen, H-M., Huoltotyön "sielutiedettä." *Huoltaj*a 8/1939, 198.

37 SHA20, 5–6.

While especially the regularly assisted lonely old women welcomed the home visitor, for a man under surveillance because of alcoholism, a home visit was a sign of distrust. Even for a mother, the home with the presence of the husband and children could be an awkward place to discuss family matters.38 In any case, the early generation of social workers emphasized the difference between an intrusive home visit that included the checking of rubbish bins and outbuildings and a tactful handling of the situation that indicated professional consideration:

You can do the checking in many ways so that it is not insulting. To go to the home and root around every corner, that is not needed.39

[I] never opened cupboard doors, but you could still see them, they always needed something from the cupboard (…) and when you sat facing it, you saw it.40

[I]n extremely rare cases, when someone asked for frewood very often, we suspected whether (…) he would sell it, sometimes we went to the woodshed to see (…) but I would not have forced any door open.41

Although some social workers avoided dropping in on a home visit in case the client had guests,42 the borders of privacy were generally vague. Neighbors and employers were regularly asked about the client's life. Notifcations from the local community often started the process of child protection or the control of alcoholics and vagrants.43 For the workers, the tight control was not seen as patronizing but as an unquestioned part of looking after the client.44 The concepts of "ward" and "dependent" in the offcial discourse crystallized the power relation that framed the clients as humble minors and social workers as the experts who knew what was best for them.45

38 SHA20, 15; SHA16, 8; SHA14, 5.

39 SHA15, 9.

40 SHA14, 17.

41 SHA20, 5.

42 SHA20, 15.

43Toivola, O., Näkemyksiä sosiaalitarkkaajista. *Huoltaja* 20/1957, 599; SHA13, 2; SHA13, 3, 7; SHA16, 10.

44 SHA6, 6; SHA4, 8; SHA19, 9.

45 Satka (1994), 300; Satka (1995), 132; SHA22, 4, 7.

The meager policy of giving aid seemed acceptable to the social workers during the post-war reconstruction. As the shortage of goods affected every household, the unquestioned basis was that "you must be within bounds when you ask the municipality for public welfare."46 The regular poor relief recipients were absolutely poor: "so poor that they could not afford to have any friends."47 The basic and humble needs of the client were easily met, which made the encounters satisfactory for the worker:

[E]ven though a poor home, it was a clean home with proper order… Yes, you were happy to give aid to such a family (…) It was such a fne job to give assistance to a grandma or grandpa, get rent, frewood, clothes, doctor, et cetera. Both were happy and you felt that you are doing good work.48

In a long-term relationship with a client who was found to be decent and honest, the worker could bend the rules. The worker could utilize the common austerity practice of "giving only half" and double the applied sum when presenting the case for the director. The social worker could even forget the principle of keeping professional distance. Stories of giving one's old skis to a single mother or cooking a macaroni casserole for the family refected a familiar relationship.49 Despite the rule regarding addressing the clients formally, the working-class male social workers were allowed to be on frst-name terms with their male clients and to use the informal language of their early social background.50 Even a female social worker accepted a cup of coffee at a home visit when the client expressed it as a sign of her dignity: "don't I as a poor person have at least the right to offer a guest coffee (…) to show hospitality?"51

To stay in the frame of the deserving client, the possibility of expressing one's dissatisfaction was vague. Complaining about the meager assistance and using sarcastic names—the social worker was called a "cop" or "saucepan-lifter" and the social board "the senate of the poor"—were

 SHA15, 9. SHA20, 15. SHA16, 3. SHA16, 10; SHA22, 4; SHB5, 2; Eräsaari, L. (1990), *Nilkin naamio: Sosiaaliraportti*. Tutkijaliitto, 19, 27–36, 107. SHB8, 8, 12. SHA20, 16; SHA23, 5.

common strategies in coping with the situation. However, the workers described openly hostile reactions from their clients as relatively rare:52

[T]he clients try (…) to control themselves and behave smartly, try to fawn over the worker to get the thing right (…) Usually, the attitudes were positive because maybe the client felt themselves at mercy (…) even though the worker under no circumstances would have wanted to act like that, but I'm afraid that many poor felt it humiliating to come [to the offce] at least those days (…). is it so that the poor must be humble?53

As the scene of experience, the encounter with the social worker linked together the client's home, their neighborhood, and the crowded social offce as a multi-locational setting, which made individual problems visible in the community and maintained the stigmatized and humble status of the client.

#### The Idea of Social Rights Shakes the Client Relationship of the First Generation