A year earlier, Rappard had given his own twist to the idea of the welfare state as a strictly gendered household. In the midst of the mass unemployment and desperate poverty of the Great Depression, he argued, quite extraordinarily, that the individual in all the countries that experienced modern revolutions now resembled a 'pampered old bachelor who has a very faithful cook' and has come to depend on her. Singling out the United States of the New Deal, Rappard argued that the individual had 'jeopardised his possession of that freedom for which his ancestors fought and bled'.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 177