This article argues that ideas about gender informed the 1834 New Poor Law's concept of "ablebodiedness," which in turn affected how women petitioned for assistance and received relief. Utilizing poor law reports, workhouse and parish records, and women's petitions for governmental assistance in the 1830s and 1840s, Levine-Clark demonstrates that the poor law placed women in a difficult position by forcing them to decide whether they were women or workers. The creators of the New Poor Law assumed that women were physically fragile dependents of male providers whose role was above all domestic; simultaneously, the New Poor Law saw any able-bodied petitioner as one who supported his or her existence through gainful employment. Focusing on the idea of ablebodiedness, this article illuminates the complex and sometimes conflicting ways gender operated in early Victorian English poor law theory and practice.

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"Dysfunctional domesticity" contributes to the growing reevaluation of the importance of the history of the family to understanding the history of insanity. Using patient case histories from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, this article examines representations of family life among poor in England in the 1830s and 1840s. Among the so-called moral causes of insanity, family relationships held a prominent place. Female patients more than male patients had their mental illnesses attributed to their domestic circumstances: the poverty of their home lives, grief over a death of friends and family, love and marital relationships gone wrong, and violence in their homes. The case histories reveal that poor women experienced many pressures in the domestic sphere, and insanity may have been one way to escape dysfunctional domesticity.