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.