Concept of poverty / edited by Peter Townsend

In the mid-1950s a number of studies appearing in Britain showed that despite post-war social reform, high taxation and low levels of unemployment there was poverty among old people, fatherless families, the unemployed and the sick. Up to that stage few people in any advanced industrial society believed that, following the 1939 war, substantial poverty remained. Indeed, even Professor Kenneth Galbraith referred to 'pockets' of poverty in his provoking analysis of The Affluent Society. By 1960 public assumptions were transformed. Michael Harrington's The Other America was published in 1959 and official studies in the United States showed that, according to new definitions which became widely accepted, more than a fifth of the population were living in conditions of poverty. In 1964 the American war on poverty was launched and throughout the early 1960s in many parts of Europe problems of squalor, deprivation and want were gradually acknowledged.¹ In Britain two Government studies of pensioners and families with children³ found substantial numbers living below subsistence standards which society had approved.