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Gendering Welfare States
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Gendering Welfare States

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Volume: 35

December 1994 | 240 pages | SAGE Publications Ltd
This comprehensive volume is the first to synthesize the insights of feminist and mainstream research both in theory and empirical analysis. Because of its emphasis on gender, Gendering Welfare States challenges commonly accepted concepts and approaches and suggests a number of reconceptualizations and new analytical frameworks to include women and men--or to bring women--into the analysis where they have been previously omitted. Next, mainstream frameworks of analysis are applied to new areas in gender. All the chapters contain cross-national comparisons that elucidate how the division of labor among the sexes and gender ideologies shape social provision and, in turn, how social policies affect the life situations of women and men across welfare states. Neither mainstream theory on welfare states and social policy nor feminist analysis has examined the implications of different welfare states for women and men, until now. Clearly written and wide-ranging, Gendering Welfare States fills a void in contemporary theory on welfare states by integrating contemporary research in comparative politics, women's studies, social policy, and economics and will be of interest to students and scholars in these areas.

Diane Sainsbury
Introduction
Jet Bussemaker and Kees van Kersbergen
Gender and Welfare States
Some Theoretical Reflections

 
Anette Borchorst
Welfare State Regimes, Women's Interests and the EC
Siv Gustafsson
Childcare and Types of Welfare States
Traute Meyer
The German and British Welfare States as Employers
Patriarchal or Emancipatory?

 
Alan Siaroff
Work, Welfare and Gender Equality
A New Typology

 
Mary Daly
Comparing Welfare States
Towards a Gender Friendly Approach

 
Lois Bryson, Michael Bittman and Sue Donath
Men's Welfare State, Women's Welfare State
Tendencies to Convergence in Practice and Theory?

 
Kirsten Scheiwe
German Pension Insurance, Gendered Times and Stratification
Diane Sainsbury
Women's and Men's Social Rights
Gendering Dimensions of Welfare States

 
Barbara Hobson
Solo Mothers, Social Policy Regimes and the Logics of Gender
Toni Makkai
Social Policy and Gender in Eastern Europe

`The stated aim of Gendering Welfare States is to integrate mainstream and feminist approaches to the comparative analysis of the welfare state in Western Europe.... The book contains a series of essays some of which deal with the subject overall and with particular aspects of welfare state provision. The collection is usefully drawn together in an introductory essay by Diane Sainsbury, which points out that such an integration on the one hand forces mainstream analysts to pay more attention to unpaid work and the family and, on the other, gives feminist analysis a broader remit and a sharper focus on the state.... produce[s] useful insights.... One point to emerge from these studies and from the book as a whole is the importance of the concept of "gendered time" as a way of illuminating the different trajectories of men and women within the framework of state, market and family....this is a useful book which both argues for and demonstrates the importance of setting gender in its rightful place as one (but only one) of the tools needed to analyse modern welfare states and the changes taking place within them' - Democratization

`The papers are thoughtful in regard to the theoretical and conceptual issues, and contain much interesting comparative material.... This book has a rare coherence for a collection of articles because the authors deal with the same questions, but from different perspectives and with different empirical cases, thus pushing the discussion in new directions' - Economic and Industrial Democracy

`Recent years have seen analyses of the welfare state as a generic type superseded by analyses of welfare states in the plural, as Sainsbury notes in her introduction to this useful volume of interdisciplinary papers on the gender dimension of welfare state diversity.... this is a coherent collection which works well in looking at its subject matter from a variety of angles without being repetitive, and which engages seriously and constructively with the problems of comparative methodology in the pursuit of the gender-friendly welfare state' - Work, Employment and Society

'As the title suggests, the objective of this fine collection of high quality essays is to incorporate gender into comparative welfare state analysis... By bringing gender systematically in, the essays enrich current knowledge of variations among welfare states and offer new or enlarged concepts which challenge widely held tenets. Above all, the book forces us to carefully consider contexts and to avoid quick conclusions.... The volume informs comprehensively about "the state of the art" of comparative welfare research that is sensitive of gender. It also provides some objections with regard to scarcely debated concepts of equality, choices, and trade-offs embedded in welfare regimes. It also raises more general questions about the welfare state, its scope and direction' - Journal of European Social Policy

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