Debating the Bachelor Tax: Masculinity and the Politics of Taxation in Britain, 1894–1920

'Bachelor tax' was a popular shorthand for controversial changes in government policy regarding income tax and marital status. From 1918, men were given tax allowances for a wife, and from 1920, all married and unmarried people had their incomes taxed on different terms for the first time. By examining the letters pages of national and local newspapers, alongside the reports and minutes of the Royal Commission on the Income Tax, this article argues that bachelors became contentious figures in this period, decried for their failure to marry and have children and pilloried as incomplete citizens. Through the prism of a debate about tax policy, married and unmarried masculinities were pitted against each other. The article considers the effects of this atmosphere on bachelors, and their strategies for defending themselves in the face of punitive hostility. It asserts that the bachelor tax debate throws into relief the deep relationship between gender and the fiscal state in these years. Tax policy was not a dispassionate political topic, being frequently discussed through discourses of gender and brought into dialogue with men's self-understandings.