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.