This article explores how the demand for an unconditional basic income (UBI) was discussed in the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) in the 1970s. A resolution for UBI was passed with a majority vote at the National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1977. However, this fact appears not to have been properly recorded in any academic literature. This is slightly surprising because it has been more than a decade since feminist academics started to argue either for or against UBI. The resolution was raised by working class women in the Claimants Unions Movement. This article records and analyses their feminist articulation of the UBI and the unfortunate fate of their resolution along with their intersections with other feminists. It is based mainly on oral historical interviews with ex-claimants women (128).

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As I have argued elsewhere, there is no room for the concept of need in the prevailing neoclassical school of economics—without reducing the need to a purely subjective construct. Not so, however, both in classical political economy and in the contemporary heterodox schools of economics. The main aim of this paper is, firstly, to show the existence of the concept of need as such in Carl Menger—widely acknowledged as one of the fathers of modern economics; and secondly, to trace the concept’s erasure in the orthodox school along with its rediscovery in the heterodox schools. With this exposition on the history of the idea, I hope to demonstrate how taking the concept seriously would urge us to engage ontological research and would mandate a significant change in economic analysis, regardless of whether this change is considered to reside within the orthodox tradition or be deemed a departure to heterodoxy.

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