Women and the politics of austerity: new forms of respectability

The relationship of women to conditions of material austerity is often characterised as having two main themes: women as recipients of charity and the question of which women are entitled to various forms of charitable and state assistance. This paper discusses the ways in which discourses about women and charity are highly moralised, assuming both that women are unlikely to ‘ask for more’ and that women have to be ‘good’ and ‘respectable’ in order to deserve public assistance. In the concluding section, the paper considers the ways in which women’s ‘respectability’ has become associated with participation in the labour market, and the various ways in which this constitutes a new form of the ‘deserving’ female poor.