This dissertation examines how new gender norms and family relations challenged the structures and categories of European welfare provision in the late twentieth century. It recovers a crucial yet forgotten era of welfare reform between 1957 and 1992, in which policymakers and publics grappled with how to adapt welfare institutions designed for paid industrial workers to suit the needs of unpaid family caregivers. These reforms were sparked by mass demographic and social changes in the age of affluence: working motherhood, the increase of migrant workers and their families, rising divorce rates, aging populations, and new definitions of equality. This process of reform was actually realized, however, amid the economic turmoil and political realignment of the 1970s and 1980s, as demographic changes and social movements pushed on the budgets of reformist governments and constrained the viability of their economic reforms.
In this dissertation, I show how the attempt to develop social protections for family care entailed more than the creation of new or better benefits. Rather, addressing the demands of family care required that politicians, bureaucrats, sociologists, feminists, trade unions, poverty activists, and officials in the European Community rethink the very notions of “risk,” “aid,” and “insurance” on which European welfare states had been based. Drawing on archival records in five languages from seven countries, I reconstruct how centrist governments in the 1970s developed a series of innovative measures – social-security credits for caregivers, workplace protections for part-time workers, cash benefits for families with disabilities, leave allowances for caregivers, new entitlements and restrictions for family migrants, European Directives on gender equality– that reshuffled the relationship between welfare, employment, and care.
But I also show how revisionist governments in the 1980s adapted those same policies to confront new economic conditions marked by high unemployment, low productivity, and low-wage, flexible work. The result was a new politics of welfare, developed first for caregivers in the 1970s and then expanded to the long-term unemployed and the socially “excluded” in the 1980s. Precisely because care troubled the categories of the post-war welfare state, care policies of the 1970s helped found the active employment policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Working at the intersection of the intimate and the international, this dissertation recovers how the post-industrial welfare state emerged from contestations over the gendered foundations of the industrial welfare state that preceded it.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/m1mc-z919 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Dubler, Roslyn |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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