Embodying Unemployment: Working-Class Men in 20th-Century Britain

In 20^th-century Britain, working-class men expected to work at solid working-class jobs, to bring home a good wage, to marry an industrious wife, to support a family, and to pursue leisure activities. They expected their bodies to be equipped to facilitate these goals. Yet unemployment and dependence on state welfare challenged working-class men’s perceptions of their bodies and the ways their bodies related to their wider lives and capabilities as workers and as men. Surveys and interviews with unemployed men, particularly from periods of economic crisis like the 1930s and the 1970s/80s, reveal both the health problems caused by the material consequences of being out of work and the physical expression of men’s psychic and emotional experiences of unemployment in a male breadwinner-based industrial capitalist society. As unemployment became endemic in certain regions where staple industries such as mining and steel production declined and collapsed, men in these areas tried to find new ways to conceptualize their bodies in order to give meaning to their lives on the dole.