Neoliberals gendered welfare dependency as emasculating female domestic servitude

Evidence

A year earlier, Rappard had given his own twist to the idea of the welfare state as a strictly gendered household. In the midst of the mass unemployment and desperate poverty of the Great Depression, he argued, quite extraordinarily, that the individual in all the countries that experienced modern revolutions now resembled a ‘pampered old bachelor who has a very faithful cook’ and has come to depend on her. Singling out the United States of the New Deal, Rappard argued that the individual had ‘jeopardised his possession of that freedom for which his ancestors fought and bled’. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 177

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the reader’s prior note on Victorian gendering of silence vs noise — here the same gendered domesticity logic appears in political economy. — connects to: Family loyalty is central, not marginal, to American neoliberal welfare theory — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 213; Women’s independence from men, not state dependence, drove welfare backlash — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 227; Neoliberals framed welfare states as existential threats to individual rights and civilisation (+6 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did the racialized/gendered household metaphor in Rappard map onto racial hierarchy claims (‘freedom for which his ancestors fought’) — and how did this inform later austerity’s individual-responsibility discourse?

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal culture recasts welfare-state dependence as a moral failure to embrace risk #expands (0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 338
• Neoliberalism forces women into a double bind of either self-capitalization or invisibility #expands (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 205