p. 17 “The hungry became figures of humanitarian concern only when novel forms of news reporting connected people emotionally with the suffering of the hungry and refuted the Malthusian model of causation. In this sense hunger became news during the 1840s but it was not until the last decades of the ninteenth century that it became firmly estanlished as a humanitarian cause celebre- one that would later give rise to organizations intent on the conquest of hunger, like Save the Children and Oxfam.”
p. 45 “Refuting the widespread belief that the famine was an act of providence (John) Mitchell argued that it was manmade in England, where the potato blight was the pretext for a knowingly perpetrated genocide. Using Britain’s own parliamentary reports, blue blooks, and census figure, he provided a litany of examples – ample harvests, exports of grain from Ireland, the profiteering use of relief supplies, the absence of British funds for relief, incompetent and murderous bureacrats, and opportunistic Anglo-Irish landlords determined to rid themselves of unproductive tenants – that demonstrated a concerted British policy of starvation and depopulation…. His associationof classical political economy with the English and famine was doubly damning; it undercut both the presumed universality of the laws of political economy and it promise to deliver the wealth of nations, at least to any nation other than England.”
p. 61 “The hunger strike arrived in Britain on 5 July 1909. On that day Marion Dunlop refused her prison food, to protest at the government’s refusal to recogise her offence (which was writing a clause of the Bill of Rights on the walls of the Houses of Parliament) as a political rather than a criminal act. Released after 91 hourson hunger strike, she was greeted by the WSPU as an exemplary figure whose protest had demonstrated her selfless commitment to the cause…the enthusiasm soon spread to Ireland. .. Hannah Sheehy Skeffington, one of the first to go on hunger strike, recalled that the “hunger strike was then a new weapon – we were the first to try it out in Ireland. Consequently, she wrote: “Sinn Fein and it allies regarded [the tactic] as a womanish thing. This was soon to change. During the 1920s, in the rush to assemble an exclusively male republican tradition for the huger strike, its prior history was quickly forgotten … gendered the hunger strike in particular wys to suit their idea of who was capable of the requisite self-sacrifice and discipline.”
p. 88 Edwardian years “Maud Pember Reeves … recognized the importance of nutritional science in analysing the adequacy of diets but lamented those who championed scientific diets and classes in household management were blind to the realities the labouring poor were facing. A poor woman, she insisted, was not inefficient or ignorant of nutritional principles; she had “but one pair of hands and but one overburdened brain.. give her six children, and between the bearing and the reading of them she has little extra vitality left for scientific cookin, even if she could afford the necessary time and appliances. And even if she did, she would still have to conend with the well-established taste of family members, especially the male breadwinner, who would probably “entirely refuce the scientific food”. The poor assessed their diet not by nutritional standards but by its taste. .. the insistence that food had a social and cultural meaning of its own, quite apart from its nutritional value, was to be lost for a generation, before being rediscovered by anthropologists.”
p. 145 “Most social nutritionists, however, believed that the market was not a sufficient mechanism for the reconstruction of postwar society nutritionally. Writing in the year that the Beveridge Report captured the social democratic agenda for postwar reconstruction, Orr insisted that after the war “the main function of the Government will be the promotion of the welfare of the people governed, and food policy will be based not on trade interests but on the nutritional needs of the people”. The Wartime Food Survey had shown what planning could achieve, .. The Ministry fo Food’s white paper on postwar food policy hailed this triumph of planning [improved diets during the war] as the key to the future. Acknowledging that poverty was the primary cause of hunger and malnutrition, it stated that the task of the emerging welfare state was to ensure that all members of society had a sufficient income to secure a healthy diet. … it outlined two specific objectives for the Ministry of Food: to extend the wartime system of foods for nursing mothers and children on welfare, so that all “boys and girls of this country shall be equipped to face life in the best physical and mental condiition that a full diet can secure”, and “to assist the adult citizens in choosing foods of the right nutritional value” through the regulation of advertising and food labelling” as well as”the widest measures of education and publicitiy.
p.245 When Mary Docherty asked Hannington whether she could join the NUWM’s second national hunger march in 1929, he bluntly replied: “No, nae women were allowed.” Yet later that year the NUWM created a women’s department under the direction of Maud Brown, and she secured women’s limited participation in the third national Hunger March. What really brought women into the fold was the means test on family life, and the disqualification fo 179,888 married women from unemployment relief under the Anomolies Act of June 1931. In 1932, some 50 women, ranging in age from 16 to 63, marched from Burnley to London and into the mythology of the movement. … Yet deep down the hunger march remained an inveterately masculine phenomenon. Women were not even allowed on the Jarrow march. |Ellen Wilkinson, who was the only woman alllowed on the march, believed they would “add complications” … undercut the image of a hunger march as a display of the strength and dignity of unemployed men,.. the right to welfare they articulated was based on the assumption that the needs of the unemployed man always came first.”
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