Birgit Pfau-Effinger, University of Hamburg
Welfare state policies for mothers of young children have substantially changed in the developed welfare states. The gender division of labor in industrial societies was often based on the male breadwinner marriage, in which a non-employed mother provided the childcare and the fully employed father earned the family income. Meanwhile, many welfare states are supporting the employment of mothers after child birth, offering parental leave for employed women, as well as publicly (co-) financed extra-familial childcare. Different trends contributed to this development of policies, like the trend towards more gender egalitarian cultural ideas, political reactions to low fertility rates, or the strengthening of the concept of the social investment state in welfare state policies, which emphasizes the need of the advanced capitalist economies to extend women’s employment and to promote early education of children. With some delay, welfare states also started to offer particular support for parental leave by fathers, in order to promote a more egalitarian gender division of labor with regard to childcare based on the cultural ideal of the ‘caring father’.
It seems that change in the cultural ideals of motherhood and fatherhood is a rather uneven trend, that develops with different speed and dynamics between countries, and in part along different development paths. Also, the new cultural ideals are in part contested in the population and among social, economic and political actors within countries. Moreover, family policies and labor market policies differ across countries in the extent in which they support the realization of new cultural ideals about motherhood and fatherhood. They also in part treat different social groups of parents in different ways, regarding social class, family form (partnered/married/single parents), sex (heterosexual/same sex parents), or ethnicity. Consequently, women’ and men’s options to reconcile employment and childcare according to their cultural orientation differs in between societies and between social groups within societies.
Contributions are welcome which are related to the following questions:
- How did the ways in which welfare states conceptualize motherhood (of single/partnered mothers) and fatherhood, change, and which are drivers and social consequences of these changes?
- How far and in which ways are welfare state policies towards motherhood/fatherhood contested among social and political actors, and in which ways does this affect the development of welfare state policies?
- How far do welfare state policies differ regarding the options and agency of different types of parents on the basis of gender, social class, type of family, and ethnicity.
- How do mothers/fathers of young children experience their options and agency regarding their work-childcare behavior in changing and potentially incoherent societal contexts, and which factors are most relevant for their work-family behavior?