While Chapter 2 focused on how women are living with austerity, attention is now drawn to the kinds of scrimping, saving and making-do strategies which are employed and negotiated by women in everyday life. Arguments made by political elites and other voices within public discourse have argued that those suffering within the context of austerity do so because they lack important skills and decision-making abilities. According to Michael Gove, those who are unable to manage their finances are suffering because of their own bad decision-making. Likewise, Baroness Jenkin has previously noted that food poverty is the result of ‘poor people’ being unable to cook. Similar to rhetoric used by the state in previous times of crisis, in this framework, social markers are denied or seen as irrelevant, blinded by the language of individualism and self-responsibility.

This chapter complicates these statements, demonstrating how difference and processes of differentiation impact the ways in which women respond to and navigate the effects of austerity. Here, divergent accounts of varieties of austerity as lived come into view, from women changing their shopping habits in fairly minor ways, to the use of foodbanks and informal loans. Despite the importance of the intersections of class and ‘race’ shaping women's navigation strategies, notably here, it is the difference between being a mother (specifically being a single parent) or not, which particularly heightens women's ability to navigate a more or less precarious route through austere times. The mobility of non-parents — being able to travel and move into better paid work, or simply, the ease of being able to move anywhere at all — lies in stark contrast to mothers who become stuck — in jobs, in relationships, in places, in spaces and in time — which impacts upon their ability to move out of the way of the storm.

It is important to find other unexplored avenues that permit us to further unpack the complex ways in which austerity is produced, sustained and being challenged in the everyday. Feminism, as this chapter illustrates, is a productive site through which to examine austerity discourses and practices. Drawing on narratives from women such as Mia and Rebecca, the chapter exposes how feminism becomes an active force field that reinforces and questions certain aspects of the austerity project, and a way through which moral, classed and racialized differences are opposed and further reproduced. This might seem strange for the reader, when previous chapters have documented the ways in which women's inequality has been further entrenched by the material and symbolic violence born from the austerity programme. Feminism can seek to destroy existing social systems through collective, emancipatory and intersectional gender politics, but it can, as Mary Evans notes, also assist forms of ‘social inequality that support and sustain gender inequality’ (2017: 76).

It has been ten years since the Conservative–Lib Dem government first enacted their programme of austerity and welfare reform. Records from the House of Commons Library show that since then, there has been approximately £90.8 billion of cuts made to public spending (Cracknel and Keen, 2016). These cuts have been vigorously pursued and have translated into a wide range of punitive policies. Despite the softening of political rhetoric around austerity by Conservative leaders and members of the cabinet since 2017, such policies have had devastating consequences, which will slowly continue to unravel for years to come. Poverty, hunger, high levels of debt, unemployment, homelessness, rising levels of physical and mental ill health, rising levels of crime, infant and adult mortality and ‘austerity suicides’ are just some of the effects that have become commonplace in the last decade (see Garthwaite, 2016; McCulloch, 2017; Mills, 2017; O’Hara, 2017). A United Nations expert ruled in June 2016 that welfare reforms and austerity measures implemented by successive Conservative governments in the UK are in breach of international human rights (UN Economic and Social Council, 2016). The government, however, disputed those findings and refused to change course.

Austerity has been framed by political elites as an era of ‘years of hard slog’ (Hammond, 2017), in which everyone pulled together in the face of adversity (Cameron, 2012a; Osborne, 2012). Yet this façade of togetherness slips when it is reported that Britain is now one of the most unequal countries in the developed world (The Equality Trust, 2017). Since 2014, there has been an explosion of wealth at the top, whereby the richest 1,000 people own more wealth than 40 per cent of households. In the five years leading up to 2017, the combined wealth of Britain's 1,000 richest people had increased by £253 billion (The Equality Trust, 2019). In contrast, 14 million people in the UK — one fifth of the population — now live in poverty (Alston, 2018).

Running alongside this, through the political justification for austerity policies, there has been the endless targeting, vilification, humiliation and scapegoating of certain groups, mainly those on the lowest incomes or who have experienced poverty and other forms of deprivation.

While previous chapters have focused on how austerity is made present through the lived experiences of women, this chapter pays particular attention to how women's future imaginaries are felt in the present. It explores how austerity affects these imaginaries and asks which types of futures have women begun to imagine in the context of austerity? Women's future imaginings are multiple and, as this chapter shows, are affected particularly by class positioning. This is because, Rebecca Coleman (2014a, 2014b) notes, inequality and power are produced and reinforced through women's different kinds of imagined and real futures.

Economic, political, technological and social changes, which began in the 1970s and intensified in the following decades, delivered new and different expectations for the future. Many authors (Sennett, 1998; Bauman, 2005; Ehrenreich, 2005) have explored how such changes have resulted in a situation where people no longer work with the possibility of long-term planning, and without consideration for the directed construction of a future.

Contrary to the exhaustive repetitions from two of austerity's architects, George Osborne and David Cameron, this chapter exposes how women are certainly not ‘all in this together’. An intrinsically gendered issue, the burden of austerity has fallen heavily on women. Austerity has reconfigured the value of women's capital, the range of possibilities open and, ultimately, the degree to which economic necessity presses on their senses (Atkinson, 2013a: 14). Yet, as this chapter shows, the gendered effects of austerity are not experienced equally; they can be felt as minimal, significant or extreme. For some women, the realities of austerity are witnessed through small changes to their employment sectors. Others navigate short-term or part-time contracts, hoping for something better to come along. Many women try to succeed, but ultimately always fail to please their Jobcentre advisor despite searching for a certain number of non-existent or unsuitable jobs per week. This is done while juggling child care responsibilities on their own. For several women, being sanctioned no longer becomes a threat, but a repetitive reality. Multiple caps and cuts to welfare leave a number of women hungry, homeless and in debt. Austerity's effects are therefore messy, complex and multifaceted. Some women live in but not necessarily with austerity. Others cannot escape and are thus engulfed by it.

As this chapter will show, Pierre Bourdieu's metaphors of capital (1979, 1986, 1989, 1991) provide the greatest explicatory power with regard to the ways in which difference — particularly through the lens of class, but also mindful of ‘race’ (immigration and citizenship), age, parenthood and disability — affects the ways in which women are living in and with austerity. Despite austerity decreasing women's ‘space of possibilities’ in general, as this chapter highlights, the ways in which austerity materializes itself in women's lives is dependent on the volume, composition and trajectory of their differing economic, cultural and social capital and resources. Those with a lower volume and composition of capital will be ‘closer to necessity’ as opposed to those who are further away, who have higher volumes and different types of capital.

This chapter situates the present context of austerity within historical legacies that structure, reproduce and legitimize material and symbolic violence. In doing so, this chapter explores the complex social and political history of austerity in the UK and examines how the state has crafted and shaped gender and class relations within these different periodizations. Despite austerity being contested and complex, meaning different things in different periods (Bramall, 2013), unpacking and understanding this history is vital. This is since, as Raewyn Connell notes, ‘gender dynamics are a major force constructing the state, both in the historical creation of state structures and in contemporary politics’ (1990: 519). Without such an analysis, it would be difficult to comprehend the relationship between the state's production of, and women's navigation through, austerity, or understand how these legacies return and work on present day gendered experiences. The argument throughout this chapter is therefore as follows: while class and gender relations have clearly been reconfigured through different historical periods and crises in complicated and contradictory ways, certain central features remain. Working-class women are repeatedly used, seen as a solution, blamed or labelled as the problem by the state in the interests of capital. It is this historical contextualization of austerity, as a repeating gendered political project, which informs a more nuanced understanding of austerity in the present, beyond its generic typology.

The crisis of 1929, the Depression and the ‘hungry thirties’

As Mark Blyth discusses in Austerity (2013), despite being so central to the governance of states and markets, austerity's intellectual history is both short and shallow. Not readily apparent in the history of early economic thought, the conditions of austerity's appearance — parsimony, frugality, morality and a pathological fear of the consequences of government debt — lie deep within economic liberalism's fossil record from its very inception (Blyth, 2013: 115). Leaping back to the pre-history of austerity and the early 17th-century, liberal thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume and Adam Smith and their ideas concerning the role of the state, paved the way for such a project. In setting up markets as the antidote to the state, economic liberals believing in natural law, free trade, private property and the virtues of market equilibrium struggled to admit the necessity of states for the creation and preservation of markets.

This chapter explores how women who are significantly affected by austerity and welfare reform and who are devalued and made abject by the symbolic and institutional violence of the austerity programme — single mothers, women reliant on welfare, migrant women and women with disabilities or health conditions — talk about the austerity agenda. Women's narratives are not straightforward, they dialogue with this discourse in contrasting and contradictory ways, simultaneously reproducing, reinforcing, questioning and talking back to moralistic narratives of hard work, fairness and responsibility. They experience a range of violent impacts, increased racism, fear, humiliation, high levels of anxiety and concerns about the growing mistreatment from both the public and institutions of the state. Despite such experiences, their discussions are narrated through paradoxical dialogues of negotiation and distancing towards and away from such negative stereotypes. Rather than assuming such distinctions reflect the prevalence and internalization of anti-welfare messages and austerity discourse, such distinctions are ‘a central feature of their own bid for recognition and legitimacy’ (Dhaliwal and Forkert, 2015: 49). The ways in which these women try to value themselves thus becomes dependent on, and specific to, the immediate context, as well as to the resources and capital that they have available to be mobilized.

Divided into three sections, the first part of this chapter examines how women who are deemed to be ‘hard-working citizens’ by the government speak about these abject figures. Invoking outrage and condemnation, it is within these narratives that the power and influence of ‘poverty propaganda’ (Shildrick, 2018) becomes visible. The second section of this chapter then explores how women who are devalued and made abject through dominant anti-welfare discourse talk back to and dialogue with these representations.