Abstract

Prompted by a 1947 shop-floor jingle preaching fuel economy this essay explores neglected aspects of the politics of austerity in mid twentieth-century Britain. Though a burden to the housewife, austerity also carried discourses of citizenship into the private sphere of the home in ways that were potentially challenging to masculine identities. By examining how anxieties aroused by this challenge were played out in electoral, institutional and personal politics, this essay seeks to open the gender dynamics of 1940s corporatism to further historical investigation.

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