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The Guild of Help was formed at Bradford in 1904 with the idea of introducing a new, more community-based, approach to deal with the increasingly important problem of poverty. It emerged to overcome the failures of charity and the threat of increased state intervention, seeking instead to get all the community to take responsibility for the poor. The movement spread rapidly and soon became a major constituent of voluntary urban relief in Britain. Yet, in the end, its community approach failed, largely because solving the problem of poverty was well beyond its means, and intent, but also because it was unable to draw the churches, the working classes and charities into working with the well-regulated system of help for the poor which it envisaged.

This article examines unemployment among married women within the context of evolving government policy rather than from a gender or feminist perspective. It establishes how, during the inter-war years, government policy towards women's unemployment developed in line with the ideas of female-dominated voluntary bodies and was only of fringe interest to the state. In particular, it stresses that a small number of middle-class women shaped official attitudes towards unemployed women through their activities in voluntary bodies, particularly the Central Committee on Women's Training and Employment, as well as their own rise in public service. This group operated within an environment that accepted women to be dispensable as a source of labour and where many female activists felt that women on unemployment benefit should train to be domestic servants, despite the fact that many of those women did not normally want domestic work because it was badly paid, of low status and uninsured. During the inter-war years governments relied heavily upon voluntary bodies to 'fill the gaps' in state welfare provision in their fringe areas of interest such as women's unemployment. In this instance, however, the voluntary bodies failed to assess or tackle the problem effectively.

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