Premium
The Breadwinner, his Wife and their Welfare: Identity, Expertise and Economic Security in Australian Post‐War Reconstruction
Author(s) -
Firth Ann
Publication year - 2004
Publication title -
australian journal of politics and history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.123
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1467-8497
pISSN - 0004-9522
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8497.2004.00349.x
Subject(s) - wife , politics , unemployment , identity (music) , great depression , spanish civil war , welfare , interwar period , political science , sociology , world war ii , economic growth , law , economics , art , aesthetics
The architects of Australian post‐war reconstruction had learned from the experience of the Depression that subordinating the social order to economic objectives could have disastrous results. In Australia as elsewhere, interwar political and civic institutions were not sufficiently robust to protect society from the instability of a system based on the economically rational choices of individual entrepreneurs. High unemployment, which had characterised the interwar years and reached catastrophic levels in the Depression, convinced the architects of post‐war reconstruction that new political institutions were necessary. The civil and political institutions they attempted to create were expressed in a particular anthropology constituted around their own identity as experts and the identities of the entrepreneur, the breadwinner and his wife.