“The People Who Write to Us Are the People Who Don't Like Us”: Class, Gender, and Citizenship in the Survey of Sickness, 1943–1952

Abstract

Abstract The Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.

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