The official figures which appear to show a widening of class differences in health in England and Wales during the post-war period have been controversial partly because they do not fit with common perceptions of what has happened to differences in the standard of living. As a result, a great deal of effort has gone into investigating suggested weaknesses in the decennial social class mortality data. Though initially plausible, the artifactual and selective explanations of the widening mortality differences which were put forward have not usually been borne out by closer investigations. The only fault in the broad picture presented by the official data which we do perhaps need to bear in mind is the tendency for a narrowing of mortality differentials among younger women to be masked by the widening among older women. This paper is an attempt to look at the other side of the coin—namely, to investigate trends in differences in the standard of living in relation to mortality differentials. It concludes that trends in mortality differences have not been related to trends in class differences in average earnings, but have been fairly clearly related to trends in relative poverty. Relative poverty and class differences in mortality declined before the war but have both increased, decade by decade, since the war. Younger women have perhaps been protected from the increase in relative poverty during much of the post-war period by their increased economic activity rates and the relative improvement in earnings of women in poorly paid manual occupations.

Since the early 1970s British and American feminists have developed a comprehensive critique of the dominant doctor/patient relationship within mainstream health care services. In Britain, activists in the women's health movement have struggled to put into practice a model of health care delivery based on feminist principles, within which the doctor/patient relationship is radically redesigned. This paper will explore the principles and practice of this feminist health care model. It will then attempt to evaluate alternative strategies for strengthening and expanding feminist health care within the NHS. The paper will draw on data gathered by the author in 1987 through a series of unstructured interviews with feminist health care providers who were working within a variety of NHS settings in the North West of England.

A recent edition of this Journal (Volume 16, Part 2, April 1987) was devoted to a number of articles on the definition and measurement of poverty. Surprisingly, perhaps, this did not include any specific discussion of gender differences in the causes, extent and experience of poverty. But such gender differences do exist, though they are often obscured by much research on poverty. Our initial response to the special edition on poverty was to write a reply discussing how the various contributors had ignored the issue of gender. But women cannot simply be ‘added in’ to existing analyses; instead a different analytic framework is required. This article therefore begins by looking at some of the widespread evidence of the economic disadvantage of women compared with men. We then go on to discuss why it is necessary to focus on the gender dimensions of poverty. We argue that this involves far more than simply disaggregating data to produce statistics about the situation of women. Rather, this focus leads us to explore the structural causes of women's poverty and the gendered processes in the labour market, welfare systems and domestic household which interact to create and maintain that disadvantage. In the final section we consider some of the important conceptual and methodological issues which must be tackled if we are to find ways to investigate and measure poverty which are not gender-blind.

The determination of the different needs of families of different compositions is necessary in order to ensure horizontal equity in tax/transfer policies. Despite the seeming simplicity of the problem, a consensus as to the appropriate means of determining relative need remains elusive. One approach which has been proposed has been to use social surveys to analyse the relationship between subjective evaluations of well-being and incomes. This paper examines such methods, and discusses the key assumptions upon which they rest. An explanation is advanced as to why these methods may lead to an understatement of the differences in relative needs of different family types.