WOMENS WORK IS NEVER DONE
WOMENS WORK IS NEVER DONE
COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN CAREGIVING, EMPLOYMENT, AND SOCIAL POLICY REFORM
Edited by
Sylvia Bashevkin
Published in 2002 by
Routledge
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Published in Great Britain by
Routledge
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Copyright 2002 by Taylor & Francis Books, Inc.
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
Design and typography: Jack Dormer
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Womens work is never done : comparative studies in care-giving, employment, and social policy reform / edited by Sylvia Bashevkin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-415-93480-X (hardback) ISBN 0-415-93481-8 (pbk.)
1. WomenGovernment policyCross-cultural studies. 2. CaregiversCross-cultural studies. 3. Sexual division of laborCross-cultural studies.
4. Welfare stateCross-cultural studies. I. Tide: Comparative studies in care-giving,
employment, and social policy reform. II. Bashevkin, Sylvia B.
HQ1236.W656 2002
305.42dc21
2002023010
Contents
Sylvia Bashevkin
Selma Sevenhuijsen
Dionne Bensonsmith
Jane Jenson
Maureen Baker
Sylvia Bashevkin
Gwendolyn Mink
Leah F. Vosko
Unlike many other books, this collection began as a twinkle in an editors eye at a scholarly conference. Karen Wolny, at the time with Palgrave/ St. Martins and now publishing director at Routledge, attended a women and the welfare state panel at the International Political Science Association meetings in Quebec City in the summer of 2000. Maureen Baker, Gwendolyn Mink, Leah F. Vosko, and I presented papers, and Sandra Burt, of the Department of Political Science at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, served as the discussant. Karens belief that our four manuscripts should be brought together in a larger, book-length collection led me to seek out Selma Sevenhuijsen, who presented her paper at another IPSA session, as well as Dionne Bensonsmith and Jane Jenson, who participated in panels at the American Political Science Association meetings in Washington, D.C., later that same summer.
All seven of us revised our papers in the fall of 2000, after which I submitted them together with an introductory chapter. My ability to work on this project was assisted by a six-month sabbatical leave in fall term 2000, secured for me by Robert Vipond as chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. The refereeing process produced many valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript, as did a one-day book workshop in May 2001 with four University of Toronto political science Ph.D. students, Gina Cosentino, Genevieve Johnson, Jacqueline Krikorian, and Heather Murray. Nanda Purandare provided invaluable research assistance at the copyediting stage.
I am thankful to all of the chapter authors, editors, and commentators who have played such a pivotal role in creating and improving the various parts of this book. Funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada made it possible for me to attend the IPSA and APSA conferences and to convene the book workshop in Toronto. Above all, my family provided the encouragement necessary to keep the project interesting, relevant, and on track.
Sylvia Bashevkin
Toronto
September 2001
Sylvia Bashevkin
Do contemporary Anglo-American and West European welfare states show more signs of resilience or decline? Do patterns of policy talk and policy change in these systems reflect more cross-national similarities than differences, more points of convergence than divergence? How have recent shifts in North American and European social policies affected different groups of women citizens? In what ways do unpaid caregiving and paid (including caregiving) employment intersect in the lives of female citizens?
These questions and others like them follow from two distinct streams of scholarly literature that address welfare state development in advanced industrial countries. Influential accounts of welfare regime formation, notably by Gsta Esping-Andersen, and of contemporary regime restructuring, including by Paul Pierson, raise fundamental questions about convergence, resilience, and the role of states and markets in constructing, as well as refashioning, social policy schemes.1 Like other mainstream studies in this field, these accounts tend to overlook womens crucial status, both as the main adult recipients of postwar income support benefits and as the primary providers of paid and unpaid care in modern welfare systems.
A second body of literature, which presents feminist perspectives on welfare states, has emerged since the 1970s to interrogate and expand the traditional base of knowledge in this field. Beginning with classic studies such as Barbara Nelsons analysis of the early two-channel welfare state in the United States, robust for employed men (via unemployment insurance) but residual for widowed women (under mothers pensions), feminist scholarship has employed a gender lens to shed light on significant dimensions of social policy evolution that were missed by conventional analysts.2 One popular focus of feminist research attention has been Esping-Andersens typology of welfare regimes and, in particular, his account of the role of state programs in decommodification, meaning the purposive release of citizens from reliance on labor market income. By addressing the varied uses of social benefits to cushion against the loss of earned income, Esping-Andersen theorized welfare state regimes in terms of two key unitsstates and markets. His conceptual approach thus turned on the extent to which states protected citizens, using decommodifying social programs, from labor market failures.
Feminist students of welfare state programs have closely scrutinized Esping-Andersens typology, which contrasts liberal, residual, and predominantly Anglo-American welfare regimes with more generous, market-usurping (or decommodifying), and primarily continental European corporatist and social democratic ones. If any core conclusions can be said to emerge from this growing critical literature, they are at least three in number. First, traditional scholarly preoccupations with the relative significance of states and markets have obscured the differential relations of women and men to these core units of analysis, including within countries. Governments have operated in varied, and profoundly gendered, ways vis--vis their citizens, as have unfettered, regulated, and state-controlled markets. Organized interests that work to identify and challenge these patterns of differentiationnotably, womens movementsare frequently overlooked in welfare state studies that emphasize the role of trade union organizations, which were themselves traditionally male-dominated in most countries.
