This chapter focuses on the development of research into child poverty itself and the policy response to it up to 1945. Gradually, the developments outlined in Chapters Two and Three came to mean that child welfare was more susceptible to systematic empirical research and was, at the same time, a greater potential source of concern. There was, increasingly, a policy imperative to respond to evidence of child poverty and hardship. This imperative continued to be balanced, however, by concerns over the economic implications of action as well as on-going reluctance to intervene either in the market or in what were deemed to be family responsibilities. The chapter explores the relationship of children to families, how support for children was seen as being an issue both inside and outside of the family context, and how child welfare was particularly tied up with and implicated in women’s welfare. The development of policy that responded explicitly to the recognition of the financial burden of childhood (and the primary responsibility of women for children) is considered up to the introduction of universal family allowances in 1945. This may have seemed to be the beginning of an era in which child welfare was paramount; however, the story continued to be complicated by ideological and political concerns that had precedents reaching far back.

The clergyman of each parish should, previously to the solemnization of a marriage, read a short address to the parties, stating the strong obligation on every man to support his own children; the impropriety, and even immorality of marrying without a fair prospect of being able to do this; the evils which had resulted to the poor themselves, from the attempt which had been made to assist, by public institutions, in a duty which ought to be exclusively appropriated to parents. (Malthus, 1992 [1803], p 261)