From Cross Stitch to Condoms: Gendering British Humanitarianism in the Twentieth Century

This paper explores the British provision of overseas aid and humanitarianism through a gendered lens. The paper focuses on the role of the British state before and after decolonisation to argue that gender was a critical force in the development of humanitarian aid policy. Women and girls were framed by the British as ideal recipients of aid, both as model innocent victims (whether of disaster or underdevelopment) and as agents of change in their own communities, capable of fulfilling simultaneously a modernising and stabilising role.  In turn, women in the (post)metropole were ideal providers of aid; the minister in charge of aid and development has been a woman more frequently than any other ministerial position, and British narratives of aid provision drew heavily on gendered language of care-giving and motherhood. This paper will focus on the mid-1960s, but will draw on a longer history of British aid and development policy in the twentieth century, to re-centre gender in the history of state humanitarianism. In 1964, the British Ministry for Overseas Development was created with Barbara Castle as its first Minister. Castle’s identity as a female politician was used by the media, the government and her own department to narrate aid in a profoundly gendered manner; the depiction of recipients of aid was similarly framed through a gendered lens. This paper will explore the long historical roots of this gendering of aid and humanitarianism, and will examine the on-going consequences of this narrative in contemporary British development policy.