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The Netherlands and Britain have treated lone mother families in similar ways in the post-war period. Until very recently they have been alone among countries of the EU in allowing lone mothers to draw benefits without making themselves available for work so long as they have dependent children. At the beginning of the 1990s, both countries attempted (unsuccessfully) to enforce the obligation of ‘absent fathers’ to maintain. In 1996, the Dutch government took decisive steps towards treating lone mothers as workers rather than mothers. In Britain, the last Conservative government began to move in the same direction, something that has been confirmed by the new Labour government. This article reviews the structure and characteristics of lone motherhood in the two countries and the nature of the recent policy changes. It then reports the findings of an exploratory qualitative study of divorced mothers in both countries. The evidence from the interviews reveals the strength of the primary commitment that women in both countries make to care. It also shows the difficulties divorced women face in combining paid and unpaid work, which, we suggest make the pendulum swing from treating lone mothers as mothers, to treating them as workers unrealistic.

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Historiographies on the phenomenon of "autism" display Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger as the great pioneers. The recent controversy on who was first in "discovering" autism urges research into the question of how scientific discoveries relate to processes of academic reflection and social intervention. The Netherlands provide an interesting case in pioneering work in autism, since Dutch experts described autism in children already in the late 1930s, preceding the first publications on autism in children by Kanner and Asperger. This paper examines the Dutch origins of autism by focusing on IdaFrye's contribution to the teamwork at the Paedological Institute in Nijmegen, which resulted in descriptions of children with autism.The theoretical aim of this paper is to underline the importance of the productive interplay between social interventions and scientific efforts concerning the complex inner world of special children. INTRODUCTIONHistoriographies of the phenomenon of "autism" point to two men as the pioneers of the medical practices that paved the way to the "discovery" of autism in the late 1930s. 1 In her Autism: A Very Short Introduction, Uta Frith (2008, p. 20) refers to "the story" that is told time and again. The most prominent pioneer is the Austro-Hungarian psychiatrist Leo Kanner (1894Kanner ( -1981, whose publication on children with "autistic disturbances of affective contact" was published in the U.S. journal Nervous Child in 1943. The other pioneer, whose medical work resulted in a publication describing autism in children in 1944, was the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger . His observations of "autistischen Psychopathen" in their childhood were published in the journal Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten in 1944. What has puzzled various scholars, however, is whether and how there was any relationship between the two pioneers (Lyons & Fitzgerald, 2007;Sanders, 2009). This seems to be important because, as Sam Fellowes (2015, p. 2274) recently put it: "The issue at stake is simple: who first described autism?" Both the claim that Asperger himself used the term "autistic" in his work with special children already in 1934 (Feinstein, 2010, p. 7), and that he inspiredKanner directly in a lecture given Vienna in 1938 entitled "Das psychisch abnormale Kind" (Lyons & Fitzgerald, 2007), favor the conclusion that Asperger and not Kanner was the first to note and thus to discover autism as a new entity, (2015, p. 2247), Kanner could have been influenced by a different article altogether, namely one written by a woman, the New York based child psychiatrist Louise Despert, who published an article on "Schizophrenia in children" in 1938. She discussed children diagnosed with this mental disorder, some of them from birth onwards. Their characteristics showed a close resemblance to specific aspects that Kanner observed in his children with problems. According to Fellowes (2015Fellowes ( , pp. 2275Fellowes ( -2276 The aim of this paper is to add a new example of pioneering work in autism in...

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