Jane Lewis & Gertrude Astrom. Feminist Studies. Volume 18, Issue 1. Spring 1992.
Many feminists regard Sweden as a progressive paradise, in terms of both its levels of social provision and its degree of gender equality. Although it is commonly appreciated that virtually all Swedish women are in the labor market and that public-sector daycare provisions are better than in most Western countries, the way in which this has been achieved is less well known. For example, many English-speaking feminists are surprised to learn that Sweden does not rely on equal opportunity legislation to promote equal pay or to counter sex discrimination.
In Sweden, women’s rights and entitlements are structured differently than in other modern welfare states. Most states operate a gendered model of welfare entitlements that defines and treats women as wives and/or mothers. Their labor market position then becomes a matter of individual “choice,” with greater or lesser opportunity for legal redress in cases of sex discrimination. In Sweden, the definition of women’s entitlements to welfare in family policies has changed dramatically since the early 1970s, away from the provision of benefits to them as mothers and toward benefits that they draw by virtue of their labor market status. Yet, paradoxically, the outcome of this shift has been the strengthening of policies that recognize women’s needs as mothers. The framework of equal treatment on the basis of labor market participation supported by a full employment policy seems to have made possible the greater recognition of women’s caring work in the family.
Many feminists have addressed the difficult issue of the basis for women’s claims on the state, the fundamental choice appearing to be that between equality and difference. In policy terms, this has translated into claims based on women’s status as paid workers or on their status as mothers. As Joan Scott has argued, this is an impossible choice. An option for equality means acceptance that difference is antithetical to it, and an option for difference means admitting that equality is unattainable. Furthermore, it is a choice that women reformers have historically sought to avoid, using both arguments strategically. Yet when Alice Kessler-Harris suggested (in her Sears’ case evidence) that women’s claims might be premised on either equality with men or difference, depending on the particular historical moment and group of women concerned, the court found such ambiguity unconvincing as a legal argument. Writers like Scott urge us to transcend the dichotomy of equality and difference, but it is hard in policy terms to know what this means. Although it is by no means clear that Swedish policy has succeeded in “transcending” the dichotomy, it has constructed a distinctive equal opportunity strategy by grafting the right to make a claim on the basis of difference onto a policy based on equal treatment.
The Swedish example also serves to address a second crucial question for feminists: What can be hoped for from the state? Many feminist policy analysts in Britain and the United States remain ambivalent at best as to their expectations of state action, given women’s weak institutional position and the historical tendency of most welfare states to make assumptions about the reality and desirability of female dependence on men when formulating welfare policies. Although recognizing that the outcomes of welfare policies have changed familial and other structures in society, such that male power has been challenged, state policies have also served to perpetuate patriarchal structures. At best, English-speaking feminist policy analysts view state patriarchy as patriarchy at a remove and thus preferable to dependence on individual men. In contrast, the Scandinavian literature on women and the state has grown increasingly optimistic about the possibility of a “woman-friendly state.” This is in part a product of the nature of policies delivered in Scandinavian countries and in part due to the rapid increase in women’s formal political representation. All Nordic parliaments (with the exception of Iceland) have a critical mass of women members.
This essay will argue that the Swedish model has resulted in significant gains for women but that its story is also something of a cautionary tale. The Swedish government played the major part in promoting the early 1970s’ legislation that resulted in women’s independent treatment as workers. This makes an assessment of its motives important; what the state gives may be taken away, although such reversals have not been a significant characteristic of the Swedish experience to date. Furthermore, serious problems remain within the Swedish model, centering on the unequal division of unpaid work and sexual segregation in paid employment. Despite a public commitment to achieving greater equality in the work of women and men, the Swedish system of promoting equal opportunities has only changed the position of women, leaving that of men relatively untouched. In addition, it is still not clear that women are in a position to make a genuine choice between paid and unpaid work.
The last part of the essay discusses the generalizability of the Swedish model. We argue that the policy details cannot be transferred to countries such as the United States or Britain, where expansion of the public sector and of collective provision is widely believed to restrict rather than extend freedom of choice and where the number of unemployed and peripherally employed make entitlements on the basis of adult worker status impossible. However, we suggest that current feminist thinking about the basis of women’s social citizenship can draw lessons from the Swedish experience in terms of the pursuit of strategies based on equality versus difference and of the relation of both to securing substantive equality.
Welfare State Regimes and the Basis of Social Entitlement
All Western countries have developed policies of social amelioration over the last century. The mainstream literature on the development of welfare states addresses the economic, institutional, political, and class variables that may explain this but often ignores gender and race. The older functionalist arguments which viewed the emergence of social policies as part of the logic of industrialism go some way toward suggesting why modern states took steps to rehabilitate the injured, facilitate labor mobility, and protect skilled (male) workers against sickness and unemployment. Many more recent left-wing writers on the emergence of welfare states have also stressed the degree to which the survival of capitalism requires a degree of social protection.
But the timing and instruments of social protection differ widely between nation-states. Explanations of this variation have focused much more on actors and politics, with the arguments falling into two broad camps: either that social provision has been imposed “from above” or extracted by working people “from below.” Theda Skocpol has made a forceful attempt to “bring the state back in” and to argue for the importance of states and bureaucracies as autonomous actors. But the majority of the participants in the debate focus on the importance of social class. Frances Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, for example, have argued that elites made concessions to the poor to prevent or respond to social unrest but that the gains were substantially weakened when peace was restored. The social democratic “power resources” model emanating from Sweden has argued for the importance of working-class strength and the way in which wage earners were able to use the democratic state to displace class struggles from the workplace into the political arena. More recent work has emphasized the importance of alliances between the working and middle classes in the creation of “solidaristic” welfare states that offer universal, tax-based provision.
Women tend not to figure in these accounts of the development of welfare provision, in part because they focus on state-provided welfare to the exclusion of provision by the family and voluntary organizations. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel have suggested that in the weakly centralized late-nineteenth-century states of Britain and the United States women were able to exert considerable influence through their philanthropic work, and they compare this favorably to women’s lack of power in the late-twentieth-century corporatist Swedish state. This is difficult to prove, however, as the field of influence (measured by the amount of legislative change) secured by even famous women philanthropists remained small. Moreover, the vast majority of nineteenth-century British and American women remained poor, and, because philanthropic effort was patchy, such benefits as they acquired were unevenly distributed. Furthermore, although Swedish women, like women in other welfare states, were not a major force in postwar social policy making, they have acquired much more political power in recent decades. This may provide some support for Laura Balbo’s suggestion that strong welfare states provide women with political entitlements.
Welfare states developed varied structures which have had very different implications for women. The Scandinavian (social democratic) countries and, to some extent, Britain, emerged from World War II with a commitment to universally provided benefits and services, based on citizenship rights and full employment. The conservative/Catholic countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany) emerged with a commitment to making the state a compensator of first resort through social insurance programs designed to maintain status differentials between occupational groups, and between men as breadwinners and women as wives and mothers. The principle of “subsidiarity” also ensured that the state only intervened to provide services when family resources were used up. The United States, to some extent Canada and Australia, and, by the end of the 1980s, Britain, developed “liberal” welfare regimes, characterized by means-tested benefits and a residual role for the state.
Few scholars have attempted to introduce gender into the analysis of welfare regimes. The major commitment of both conservative and liberal welfare regimes in the twentieth century has been to the development of insurance schemes which work via the labor market. Core welfare programs have thus been above all the prerogative of the regularly employed, who have been predominantly male. In most welfare systems, women’s rights to welfare have therefore been indirect, a function of their presumed dependence on a male breadwinner. This has meant, first, that women’s substantial contributions to welfare, both paid and unpaid, have been ignored and with them the direct entitlements that should have been women’s due; and, second, that women’s needs have been defined in terms of motherhood as a social function rather than on the basis of individual need.
Although potential or actual motherhood provided the justification for making the grounds of women’s social entitlement different from those of men, in most states’ social security systems women have qualified for benefits as wives rather than as mothers. Women have thus been provided for via their husbands in accordance with assumptions regarding the family wage and the bourgeois family form. Women with children and without men have historically posed a particularly difficult problem. Over time, governments have oscillated between treating these women as mothers, or, given that they lack a male breadwinner to depend upon, as workers. The current swing in liberal welfare regimes toward treating them as workers (under “workfare” schemes in the United States) has more in common with nineteenth- than with mid-twentieth-century social policy. In liberal welfare regimes, where a dual insurance/assistance model operates, first-class (insurance) benefits tend to go to men and second-class (welfare) benefits to women.
The definition of social citizenship entitlements is thus linked firmly to the independent status of wage earner. Nowhere has government attached a significant value to the unpaid work of caring that women do for the young and old within the family. To this extent, gender regimes tend to cut across other ways of categorizing welfare systems. The Swedish welfare regime also grounds welfare provision in a citizen worker model, but it is arguably unique in respect to gender. Women gain social welfare entitlements on the same basis as men, that is, as workers; and, crucially, virtually all women and men have the right to work. The basis of the Swedish welfare structure is therefore “equality” rather than “difference,” but given that the recognition of difference has been grafted on to the model, the issue becomes the extent to which the model has succeeded in securing substantive equality between women and men.
Legislating the Basis of Women’s Social Entitlements in Sweden
Swedish Social Democratic governments are usually seen as a leading force promoting equality between women and men in recent decades. But the meaning of equality in Sweden is significantly different from the “equal to men” formulation which is implicitly (and explicitly in regard to legislation on matters such as workfare) favored by U.S. governments. Before the 1960s, Swedish social democracy was more profoundly influenced by arguments about improving the position of women based on difference than by those based on equality. This helps to explain the particular mix of policies adopted since the 1970s, which bears no relation to the kind of equal opportunity legislation familiar in Britain and the United States.
Pre-World War II Swedish social democracy embraced the idea of difference in its thinking about the relations between women and men. This was largely due to the influence of Ellen Key, who accepted the view of nineteenth-century medical and social scientists that women were essentially different and who argued that women’s special knowledge as mothers should be the basis for their contribution to society. The central importance Key attached to motherhood led her to adopt a radical stance in regard to all women’s (married or unmarried) right to give birth. Difference played a large (Karen Often has argued a dominant) role in other European feminists’ thinking in the late nineteenth century. In Sweden, Key’s ideas also helped shape the social democratic movement’s views as to what was “good and rightful” in everyday life. The most powerful image in Swedish social democracy has been that of building “the people’s home.” This encompasses both the idea of society and state as a good family home, where no one is privileged, all cooperate, and no one tries to gain advantage at another’s expense; and, also, of ensuring that productive capacity is used to the advantage of people and their families. In 1927, the chairman of the Social Democrats and later long-time prime minister, Per Albin Hansson, sketched out women’s part in the social democratic project: “We have come so far that we have been able to begin preparing the big People’s Home. It is a matter of creating comfort and well-being there, making it good and warm, light and cheerful and free. To a woman there should be no more attractive mission.” Whether in the big People’s Home of state and society or the small People’s Home of individual household and family, women’s contributions (and rewards) were allocated on the basis of motherhood.
During the 1930s and 1940s, social democracy’s conceptualization of women’s place in society was challenged by the writing of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, themselves Social Democrats. In 1935, the Myrdals published their best-seller, Kris i Befolkningsfrågan (Crisis in the population question), the same year that in Great Britain Enid Charles predicted that by the year 2000 the population of England and Wales would be reduced to that of London. The common 1930s’ theme of “national suicide” was profoundly conservative and the Myrdals, like prophets of doom in other countries, advocated eugenic social engineering. However, the Myrdals’ insistence on “democratic” population planning differentiated them from the extremes of national socialism and made their work, published in the 1940s, influential in policy-making circles beyond Sweden.
In the Myrdals’ conception of “preventive social policy,” children bad to be wanted and reared to be productive adults, which meant that society had to invest in their welfare and that of their families. The Myrdals argued that governments must recognize that society’s greatest asset was its human resources and exercise appropriate control over that asset. But the state planning component in their thinking existed alongside the strong belief that state policies should aim to realize the potential of each individual, albeit that the justification for this belief remained the promotion of the social good. Thus, although women’s role as mothers had “national” significance, the Myrdals also insisted that women had the right to develop their talents to the fullest in other fields and particularly in paid employment. They argued that if the state wanted babies from middle-class mothers it must make it possible for them to keep their jobs. During the late 1940s, Alva Myrdal developed, with Viola Klein, her extremely influential idea of “women’s two roles,” whereby women ideally entered the labor market from school and remained until the birth of their first child, returning again when the children left school. Myrdal and Klein demanded state support for motherhood and flexibility from employers to accommodate this bimodal career pattern. Thus, Myrdal’s policy inheritance within Sweden had three components: first, she sought to reconcile the claims of equality and difference within a single strategy; second, her main justification for this strategy was the nation’s need for the talents women could bring to the labor market and for more babies, rather than women’s own needs; and, third, she was content to change women’s lives without pressing for concomitant changes in those of men.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, the labor force participation rate of women over fifteen remained constant at about 30 percent. As in most Western countries, married women in the childbearing years had lower participation rates, consistent with the “dual-roles” model. During this period, women were entitled to six months’ maternity leave, and, from 1954, flat-rate benefits as mothers, with employed women receiving an additional subsidy for ninety days. But beginning in the early 1960s, the desirability of the dual-roles model was questioned, first within the Liberal party and then by the social democratic movement. In 1968, a joint task force report on equal opportunity by the trade union confederation (LO) and the Social Democratic party concluded that “there are thus strong reasons for making the two-breadwinner family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance system.”
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the social democratic governments took conscious steps, first, to make the dual-breadwinner family a reality by increasing the incentives for married women to work all their adult lives; and, second, to change the basis of women’s entitlement to social benefits from that of mother to worker. The active use of both labor market and family policies to change women’s position in Swedish society was consistent with the broader pattern of development of the Swedish welfare state, which prioritized full employment and which also demanded that those qualifying for its most generous benefits manifest their readiness to work (in return the 1974 Security of Employment Act and Promotion of Employment Act provided strong job security for both women and men). The (very small) number of unemployed have historically received minimal welfare benefits. Although women’s pension entitlement was equal to that of men, other benefits, paid to them as mothers, were substantially lower than wage rates. The decisions made in the early 1970s, which treated women as workers for the purposes of social entitlements, raised women’s compensation for their work as mothers to the rates they could command as members of the labor force.
The most important change designed to promote women’s employment was the introduction of separate taxation, first on a voluntary basis in 1968, and then in law in 1971. Separate taxation, together with high marginal tax rates, makes it more favorable for family income for a woman to go out to work than for her husband to add extra overtime hours. In the United States or Britain (where separate taxation was introduced only in 1989), the labor market effects for women are not the same because of the less progressive tax system. In Sweden, both marginal and average tax rates have been higher for the one-earner than for the twoearner family. Thus, for a full-time industrial male worker who earned SEK 70,000 in 1981 (US $13,333) the marginal tax rate was 90 percent for the one-earner family as opposed to 68 percent for the two-earner family. From this point it therefore became more profitable for any extra income to be earned by the woman.
The contrast with what was West Germany, which has a joint system of taxation with couple taxes set at lower rates than for single people, is striking. Whereas in Sweden women earned 39 percent of aftertax family income in the late 1980s, the figure for Germany was 12 percent. Siv Gustafsson and Roger Jacobsson have calculated that increasing a wife’s paid work hours from zero to full-time in Sweden increased the family’s disposable income by 43 percent before tax reform in 1967 and by 67 percent after tax reform in 1973. However, because mortgages have been tax deductible, for homeowners with large mortgages it has remained more profitable for the high wage earner (almost invariably the man) to increase gross income. And although many families at a particular point in career and family building could obtain optimum levels of family income by both the woman and the man working 75 percent of normal working hours, given the greater earnings increases within the male career it was nevertheless much more usual for the man to continue to work full-time and for the woman to work part-time.
The second major change promoting female employment was the increase in the number of places in public daycare, both in daycare centers and with registered childcare providers. Prior to the late 1960s, the most important element of public expenditure on family policy was that of the child allowance, but by the late 1970s this accounted for only 25 percent of such spending, largely because of the growth in daycare. In 1968, 5 percent of children under school age (seven years) had places in public daycare and 4.6 percent with childcare providers. At the 1975 Congress of the Social Democratic party, a five-year plan was presented which promised a substantial increase in daycare provision, and by 1979, 27 percent of below-school age children were accommodated by the public childcare system. By 1987 this had risen again to 47 percent (29 percent in daycare), with priority being given to the children of employed mothers. Nevertheless, at the end of the 1980s it was clear that the 1982 promise by the Social Democrats of a place for all preschool children over eighteen months by 1991 would not be fulfilled.
The responsibility for providing childcare rests with local government and both access and, to a lesser extent, cost to the parents vary substantially between local communities. In Stockholm, in 1989, 75 percent of children were accommodated at a cost of SEK 1,105 (US $187) a month for one child and SEK 1,420 (US $240) for two or more children for parents whose income exceeds SEK 14,000 (US $2,372) a month (the average wage for a male worker). Daycare is therefore relatively cheap. In other communities as few as 25 percent of children may have places and at 50 percent greater cost to parents. Such wide differentials cannot be wholly explained by regional differences in women’s labor participation rate (which ranges from 75 percent to just over 90 percent), although Stockholm, which has the most places, also has the greatest percentage of women in full-time employment. These differentials in availability and cost have benefited middle-class parents disproportionately. In 1984-85, 19 percent of children whose parents were members of the mainly manual workers trade union confederation had childcare places, compared with 32 percent of lower-middle-class, white-collar parents and 44 percent of the children of academics. The estimated cost for a daycare place is twice that of an early primary school place, but Siv Gustafsson and Frank Stafford have calculated that the payoff in terms of women’s labor market productivity allows the policy to pass the kind of cost-benefit tests that have increasingly been imposed on social policies during the 1980s.
In 1974, a scheme of parental insurance was introduced. Rather than women being given flat-rate maternity benefits, they were offered compensation for loss of market earnings. Men were also offered the same 90 percent replacement of earnings if they chose to care for children. Also in 1974, legislation was passed giving a parental leave of six months to be taken before the child reached age four together with a ten-day-per-year child sick leave entitlement, available until the child reached age ten. For those (few) claimants with no job, benefits were fixed at a relatively low flat rate. The parental leave was extended in 1975 to seven months, in 1978 to eight months, and in July 1980 to twelve months, with nine months at 90 percent replacement earnings and three months at the flat-rate level. In 1980 the number of child sick leave days was also increased to 60. No further significant extensions of either form of leave occurred until 1989, when parents became entitled to twelve months’ leave under the insurance scheme with a further three months at the flat-rate level, and 90 days’ child sick leave. The parental leave was projected to rise to eighteen months over 1990-91 and the number of child sick leave days to 120, but these plans were frozen during the political crisis of January 1990. Also, in 1979, parents with children under eight years gained the right to reduce their working day (at their own expense) from eight to six hours. However, repeated demands from women’s groups for a legislated six-hour day for all workers have not been met.
The vast majority of women claim virtually the whole amount of permitted parental leave at the 90 percent replacement of income rate, but only one-half of the three months available at the flat rate, which demonstrates the importance to the family economy of replacing income. However, only one man in five applies for leave in the child’s first year and for an average of only six weeks. Over a fifteen-year period, the percentage of parental leave claimed by men has remained constant at between 5.5. and 6.5 percent. Only men in higher paid, public-sector jobs are likely to opt for parental leave. Applications for child sick leave days are shared much more equally between women and men, although on average only 6.9 days a year are taken by any family, and as many as 50 percent of families claim no sick leave days at all. This provision has become an effective means of providing a caring subsidy to dual-earner families with children with special needs.
Sweden is way ahead of the rest of Europe in its parental leave legislation. Several other states provide limited paid, or more generous unpaid, leaves, but the politics of parental leave have been fiercely fought. By the late 1980s, the European Commission had prepared a draft directive on the subject. However, this has been opposed by the British government, which views it as a costly and undesirable piece of state interference.
Not surprisingly, the labor market participation rate of women in Sweden has increased dramatically since the 1960s. This has been true of most Western countries and has to do with the demand for female labor by service industries, women’s increased desire for employment, and families’ increasing need for two incomes. However, the Swedish increase has been more dramatic both because participation rates were lower during the 1950s and early 1960s than in countries such as the United States or Britain and because of the very high participation rates achieved by women with young children. By 1986, 89.8 percent of women aged twenty-five to fifty-four (only 5 percent less than men of comparable age) were in the labor market and 85.6 percent of women with children under seven worked compared with 55 percent in the United States and 28 percent in Britain. By 1984, only 7 percent of Swedish women between twenty-five and fifty-four were classified as “housewives.” However, many women work parttime, 43 percent in 1989, compared with 37 percent in Britain and 24 percent in the United States, although most Swedish women are working three-quarters’ time. In 1986, only 10.9 percent of women twenty-five to fifty-four worked under nineteen hours a week. Swedish policies have been effective in getting women both to work outside the home and to have children. Compared with West Germany, for example, more than twice as many Swedish mothers of preschool children work, although in 1984, the West German fertility rate was 1.27 and the Swedish rate was 1.61.
Interpreting the Policy Changes: Implications for Women
The official view of the change in social policies affecting women that began in 1968 was: “The aim of a long-term programme for women must be that every individual, irrespective of sex, shall have the same practical opportunities, not only for education and employment but also in principle the same responsibility for his or her own maintenance as well as a shared responsibility for the upbringing of children and the upkeep of the home.” Swedish ministers thus spoke the language of equal opportunity, yet their policy approach differed profoundly from that in both the United States and Britain, where governments also expressed a commitment to achieving equal opportunity during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In part, the Swedish approach was due to a different conception of equality. British and U.S. legislation sought to secure women’s equality with men in the public world of employment. Under equal opportunity legislation, if a woman received less pay than an equivalently employed man, or if she suffered discrimination in hiring, promotion, or layoffs, she could seek legal redress. The legislation was premised on the idea of securing formal equality between women and men at work. In contrast, Sweden had a considerably stronger and better institutionalized tradition (dating back to the policies framed by the Myrdals) for also recognizing women’s needs as mothers. This, together with the active labor market policy at the core of the Swedish welfare system, enabled women to synchronize family and labor market work. Sweden did not pass equal opportunity legislation on U.S. and British lines until 1980 (as a result of an initiative by the parties the Swedish term “bourgeois”) but the legislation lacks adequate enforcement provisions and has been little used. Rather, the Swedish equal opportunities strategy has involved, first, defining all adults as workers and providing incentives to ensure that women enter the labor market and, second, providing compensation to women and men for lost earnings with generous recognition of the needs of parents. To this extent the Swedish system moved beyond the severely formal equality on men’s terms offered in Britain and the United States to encompass women’s needs as mothers.
However, the aim of the strategy as stated in 1968 was to do more than accommodate women’s “two roles.” It also was intended to provide a substantive equality: women and men were now able to share the work of the public and the private sphere equally. However, this has not yet occurred. The opportunity strategy was couched in gender-neutral language, yet the outcome of the reforms has been to exaggerate gender divisions. Because the legal changes (in tax, daycare provision, and parental insurance) focused entirely on the supply side, there was no reduction in the degree of sexual segregation in the workplace; indeed, Sweden has one of the most sexually segregated labor markets in the Western world. The vast majority of women work in the public sector, and many are paid for the kind of work they would formerly have done at home. Between 1965 and 1984 the number of publicsector jobs expanded from 700,000 to 1.4 million, and 75 percent of these were taken by women. This is not to say, as one leading liberal Swedish economist has argued, that all caring work has (in his view, unfortunately) entered the public sector. The figures still show women devoting 60 percent of their time to nonmarket work. According to data from the National Board for Consumer Policies, the full-time Swedish working mother works an average of seventy-three hours, of which thirty-four are unpaid; the Swedish father works sixty-five hours of which eighteen are unpaid.
Because unpaid work is still performed disproportionately by women in Sweden, women tend to become part-time workers with the birth of a first child. However, a large proportion of parttimers work full-time in jobs with good benefits but exercise their right to reduce their hours from eight to six. Together with the occupational segregation that restricts women’s access to high-status, high-paying jobs, this means that in 1989 women’s earnings for full-time work averaged only 77 percent of men’s. The solidaristic wage policy of the Swedish trade union movement has proved successful in securing 90 percent of the male wage for women in manufacturing jobs, but very few women are so employed. Solidaristic wage bargaining made formal legislation on equal pay in large measure unnecessary but has in and of itself failed to secure equal earnings. Thus, Swedish women are able to combine paid and unpaid work more easily than women in Britain or the United States, but they remain poorer than men both in regard to money and time.
Arguably, the Swedish strategy was not gender-neutral at all. Rather, it may be seen as an updated version of Myrdal’s vision of women combining motherhood and paid employment. It has, however, profoundly changed the balance between these, in part as a result of the Swedish interpretation of feminist demands for equality but also as a result of the government’s desire to see a change in the way women used their time. During the 1960s, Sweden experienced severe labor market shortages and when the government decided in 1966 not to encourage large-scale immigration (as Britain, for example, did), it became imperative to increase married women’s labor market participation. The first steps in the Swedish equal opportunity strategy—separate taxation and increased daycare provision—were supply-side measures, designed to pull women into the labor market. But women took the kind of low-paid, low-status service sector jobs that were held in many other countries by married women and people of color. The second major step in the strategy—parental insurance—was directed at both women and men, but although women were “forced” to be workers by dint of both the effects of the tax changes and by the changed basis of women’s entitlement to benefits, men were not “forced” to be carers. Even the promise of 90 percent replacement of income failed to change men’s behavior significantly.
Further evidence that the measure, despite its gender-neutral language, was designed primarily with women in mind comes, first, from the minimal, flat-rate benefit for those not in employment; second, from the fact that men were not (until 1986) eligible for parental leave unless their partners were in paid work; and, third, from the way in which government policymakers voiced their anxiety about the policy’s potentially detrimental effect on women’s labor market behavior. By 1980, the extension of parental leave had reached the point beyond which it would pull women out of, rather than push them into, the labor market. The scheme therefore remained untouched during the 1980s. Recent promises to extend it further may well be linked to the government’s failure to achieve a sufficient expansion of daycare places and therefore to its need once more to shift the balance between women’s paid and unpaid work.
Mary Ruggie has argued strongly that Swedish women achieved their high levels of labor market participation by virtue of their high union membership and the institutional power of the labor movement within social democracy. In this analysis, trade union pressure, together with active state labor market policies to achieve greater class equality, have benefited women. It is true that once women entered the Swedish labor market they could call on trade union protection on the same terms as men, so that they escaped the conditions prevailing in the peripheral, nonunionized labor market that are familiar to so many women workers in the United States and Britain. In particular, Swedish women’s part-time work is entirely different from part-time work in other countries. But as Arnlaug Leira has pointed out, workingclass interests were as strongly institutionalized in Norwegian social democracy and women were not drawn as dramatically into the labor market, nor has the same commitment to the provision of public daycare been made in Norway. The change in the position of Swedish women followed from a conscious political decision to treat women as workers. Arguably, women had little choice but to engage in paid labor. In a more recent article Ruggie found herself unable to explain the persistence of occupational segregation within her explanatory model and concluded that perhaps social corporatism had reached its limits in Sweden.
If the main aim of the Swedish policies was to allow women to take a greater share in the work of the public sphere, the nature of the work was not a matter of concern. In 1972, Olof Palme, the Social Democrat prime minister, contemplated the mass entry of women into primarily public sector service jobs with equanimity. Although this was achieved via the collectivization of childcare and the establishment of parental leaves, men’s lives in both the public sphere of work and the private sphere of the family remained virtually untouched. Indeed, it is arguable that the parental insurance scheme, which despite its gender-neutral language was aimed at women, served to reinforce job segregation. Elisabeth Näsman has shown that many of the (relatively few) women working in male-dominated jobs actively search for work in female-dominated occupations, where their postpartum behavior—in terms of claiming parental leave and opting to reduce their working hours to six per day—will not be at variance with other workers. It is significant that the demand for a six-hour day for all women and men raised by the Social Democratic Women’s League in the early 1970s as part of an equal opportunity package and again during the Social Democratic party conference of 1987, was not met. This measure alone could force a substantial change in the way men allocate their time and arguably is a necessary prerequisite for changing the sexual segregation of paid work. However, the aim of Swedish policies has been, like the British and American, to permit the reorganization of women’s lives rather than to promote substantive equality between women and men. As in other countries, Swedish women are thus doing much more work in the public sphere, and the vast majority of men are not doing more work in the private sphere. The extent to which men change the balance between unpaid and paid work in their lives is determined by private negotiation within the household and the outcome depends on the women’s bargaining power. Thus, as Näsman has shown, it is in families where the woman has higher education (a proxy for high-status, high-paid work) that the man is most likely to take parental leave.
Nevertheless, the Swedish equal opportunity strategy allows women to make a claim on the basis of difference, as well as a large measure of equal treatment as workers. This distinguishes the Swedish strategy from Eastern European models of female citizenship, which were also based on equal paid worker status with men. Since the early 1970s, Swedish women have first had to become workers to qualify for parental leave at a favorable benefit level, but, paradoxically, having taken a job, they could then exert a claim as mothers and stay home for what has proved to be a steadily lengthening period. An increasing number of women are opting to have a second child within two-and-a-half years of the first, thus maximizing their time off. Thus, Swedish social policies have succeeded in changing women’s behavior, but women have, to some extent, also managed to manipulate the policies to their advantage. If parental leave is extended to eighteen months, then an employed woman having two children consecutively will have the right to three years’ leave paid at market wage rates.
Women themselves had very little influence on the Swedish strategy for equal opportunity in early 1970s. Although feminist pressure played a role in determining the timing and in providing a justification for the dramatic nature of the changes, the policies owed as much to the need for female labor as to a commitment to improving the position of women. During their late 1960s’ and early 1970s’ campaign for equality, the Social Democratic Women’s League stressed the importance of making women’s lives easier, but Swedish women still work considerably more hours than do men. The legislation built on the powerful dual inheritance of Swedish state policies toward women, which incorporate both the right to claim equality with men in the public sphere and the right to claim as mothers on the basis of difference. Both have historically been justified in terms of the national interest as much, or more than, women’s needs—the state needed women as workers and it needed babies.
The Swedish system, since 1974 and increasingly during the 1980s, has provided women with a unique opportunity to participate in paid employment and also to make claims on the state for their needs as mothers within the relatively privileged and stable framework of entitlements accorded paid workers. Given that the parental insurance scheme has been continuously extended since 1974, it may be hypothesized that having gained equal status as workers, women themselves pursued claims that would enable them to stay at home. Certainly in terms of voting behavior women have shown greater attachment to the Social Democratic party than have men. In 1987, the bourgeois opposition parties proposed a “caring subsidy” in the form of a childcare benefit to parents rather than extending daycare provision, arguing that the state-provided daycare system left 40 percent of children over a year old without any provision, while aiming also to reduce the costs of publicly provided daycare. The major counterplank in the Social Democratic program was a further extension of parental leave, which won the backing of voters.
But it would be wrong to overestimate the amount of choice that Swedish women can exercise. In the first place, the logic of the system demands that any woman contemplating motherhood get a job before she has a baby. To some extent this imposes a middle-class pattern of delayed motherhood on all women. Only 6 percent of Swedish women do not conform to this pattern and pay the price by qualifying only for low flat-rate benefits rather than getting replacement income. Given the compensation principle, single mothers must work and 87 percent do so in Sweden (compared with 52 percent in Germany, 66 percent in the United States, and 39 percent in Britain). Single mothers also tend to work more hours than married women; the burden of paid and unpaid work is therefore high. In her study of the strains on Swedish parents, Phyllis Moen found that single mothers experienced the most psychological stress. In addition, women do not have a genuine choice as to whether to care for children or not. The 1988 promise of the Social Democrats to increase parental leave was in part a result of the failure to honor the commitment to provide public childcare for all preschoolers. Because of unequal access to public childcare and its variable cost, together with the lack of significant change in the amount of unpaid work performed by men, women have had little choice but to take the full amount of parental leave. For the few women in private-sector employment, the exercise of this right may mean sacrificing career advancement. Indeed it is possible that any further extension of parental leave to eighteen months would exacerbate divisions between women, with working-class women taking the full amount of leave and middle-class women seeking to make alternative cooperative or private arrangements that would allow them to pursue uninterrupted careers.
To the extent that the Swedish equal opportunity strategy was implemented by the state for reasons of the national interest the gains are fragile and subject to reversal. The strategy rests on women becoming workers, which is in turn premised on an active labor market policy that has secured a very low (1.7 percent) unemployment rate. However, the consensual politics achieved by social corporatism (that is by trade unions, employers’ organizations, and Social Democrats) has shown increasing strain during the late 1980s and early 1990s. Solidaristic wage bargaining began to break apart in 1985. This, together with concern about the size of the public sector, resulted in a public sector pay squeeze which disproportionately affected low-paid women workers. Early in 1990, these women workers threatened strike action. While there has been no sign of a welfare backlash, as there has been in Denmark, and little sign of moves toward privatization, as in Great Britain, there has been considerable decentralization of welfare provision to local communities in both fiscal and administrative terms. In part, this explains the variation in the availability and cost of public daycare. The extension of parental leave may be a means of solving current problems as to the care of children and the balance of women’s work: there is a shortage of daycare places and, increasingly, a shortage of women prepared to take the lowpaid, low-status work in daycare centers. Longer parental leaves would take women out of the labor market (albeit on terms favorable to them) and provide childcare more cheaply.
During 1991, pressure on the Swedish model increased. High taxation was a precondition for the maintenance and expansion of employment, which is both necessary to guarantee welfare rights and the product of welfare provision. In an environment with inflation and high marginal taxation, real wage gains can only be attained with high wage settlements. The solidarity of the Swedish regime is therefore showing increasing strain, which may be exacerbated further by the September 1991 defeat of the Social Democratic government, although no political party has as yet shown any sign of backing off from the commitment to full employment. In addition, Sweden has applied for membership in the European Community, where unemployment is on average four times higher and where the proportion of long-term unemployed is 54 percent as opposed to 10 percent in Sweden and Norway. Membership in the “United States of Europe” (as they will become in 1993) is likely to increase Swedish unemployment and exert downward pressure on taxation, wages, and social benefits.
The substantial growth in the number of women in positions of formal political power in Sweden, although not as marked as in Norway, may serve to moderate these pressures. Siv Gustafsson and Frank Stafford found that the key factor determining the availability of public childcare was the proportion of women among elected local community officials. Only the continued growth of political power among women will justify the optimism of some Scandinavian feminists about the possibilities of a woman-friendly state, and it is therefore worrisome that as a result of the 1991 election the percentage of female members of Parliament was reduced from 38 to 28, although the number of female ministers has remained the same at eight. Nevertheless, it is significant that all the important bodies comprising the Swedish corporate state, including LO, in which women have historically been poorly represented in terms of decision making, have committed themselves to making “every other place for women.”
Lessons from the Swedish Strategy
During the 1980s social policies in both the United States and Great Britain moved more firmly toward an equal treatment model within the context of government determination to “roll back the state” and to stamp out the so-called culture of dependency. Workfare schemes, which set terms of work or training to be met in return for benefit, employed the rhetoric of gender equality. Mothers were expected to put their children in daycare and were then treated in the same way as male applicants for benefit. A similar rhetoric of “formal” equality underpinned 1980s’ divorce law reform in both the United States and Britain, where the attack on “alimony drones” and the idea that women and men should start again on “equal terms” with a “clean slate” gained acceptance, despite increasing evidence that the gendered division of work and gendered access to resources reproduced prior, substantive inequalities. Sylvia Hewlett’s bitterness about women’s double jeopardy as less well paid, lower-status workers, and as mothers with little state aid or protection, led her to look favorably on the family policies of the European countries, including Sweden. However, it is dangerous to lump these policies together, as Hewlett tends to do. European welfare regimes vary, with some primarily motivated by pronatalism rather than by any notion of gender equality. Although she is in some respects explicitly antifeminist, Hewlett is not alone in rejecting claims based on equality in favor of claims based on difference. Some influential feminist political theorists argue for a concept of a universal participatory citizenship grounded in the recognition of sexual difference such that women can actively participate as fully autonomous members of the body politic.
However, historically it has proved very difficult to validate the caring work that women do in modern industrial societies. Whenever a state benefit has been offered to women for their work as mothers, or, more commonly in the 1980s, for their work in caring for elderly and infirm dependents, the rates have been extremely low. A 1982 British study reported that on average women “opting” to care forfeited about £4,000 a year (US $6,800) in income to do so, despite the existence of a carets benefit. In Sweden the flatrate benefit paid under the parental insurance scheme to those who were not active in the labor market is also low and the caring subsidy proposed by the opposition parties in 1988 amounted to only SEK 15,000 (taxable) per child annually (US $2,360), a sum well below subsistence notwithstanding the strong pitch as to the value of such work.
In fact, within modern welfare states, better benefits have always been accorded to those with attachment to the labor force. Thus the Swedish system, rooted in equal treatment, but with provision for the recognition of difference, secures first-class rather than second-class social benefits for women. Arguably, our aim should be to change the system entirely such that unpaid work commands equivalent benefits to paid work. Carole Pateman has argued for a redefinition of work, paid and unpaid, that would lay the foundation for a new form of female citizenship. This is an important vision, but, regrettably, it has little purchase given the way in which welfare regimes have been gendered. Indeed, in liberal welfare regimes the boundaries between primary and secondary labor markets and between paid and unpaid work have been more tightly drawn during the last decade, with the result that welfare systems have also become increasingly residual. Women have suffered disproportionately.
For women to participate as fully autonomous citizens, there must be substantive choice in the matter of paid and unpaid work. As Hilary Land and Hilary Rose have argued, for the choice to engage in unpaid caring work to be genuine, women must be able to choose not to care. The Swedish model guarantees that choosing to care will attract reasonable monetary reward only so long as the carer has first undertaken to become a citizen worker. But among existing models, the Swedish, for all its unresolved problems, may still be the most attractive. Although we have drawn attention to the contradiction between the gender-neutral language of the Swedish equal opportunity legislation and the outcome of that legislation, at the rhetorical level the gender-neutral approach has not been without effect. Attitude surveys show that all Swedish men between the ages of twenty-one and sixty at least feel that they should participate in unpaid work.
However, the Swedish model is unlikely to prove exportable. In countries such as the United States and Britain, not only are unemployment levels high but a large proportion of labor and especially female labor is also in “precarious”—short part-time and casual—employment. Gösta Esping-Andersen has calculated that although the ratio of “good” to “bad” jobs in the Swedish service sector is four to one, in the United States it is two to one. Granting social entitlements on the basis of employment status will only improve welfare if the differentials in work status are not too great. Even in Sweden women tend to be employed in low-status, lowpaid work, but only about 10 percent are so precariously employed as to be excluded from entitlements to parental insurance. In countries where labor market restructuring has gone much further, the only feasible model is probably a basic guaranteed income for adults and for children, accompanied by a more active labor market policy (to include training, retraining, and job creation). In the context of European Community membership, this may increasingly be also Swedish women’s best hope.
The Swedish system for securing equal opportunity is nevertheless useful in assessing the rich literature emerging on the proper basis for women’s citizenship. Much of this work rejects both equality and difference as the basis for women’s participation and instead makes the case for “participation from below” and the representation of differences. Iris Marion Young, for example, has argued that the idea of universal citizenship has in practice excluded groups judged incapable of adopting the general point of view and that the existence of privileged groups has meant that the equal treatment inherent in the idea of universality has perpetuated inequality. She has therefore advocated that full participation by all requires mechanisms for group representation. However, by beginning with the construction of ways to represent differences Young begs the question of how the problem of differential power and hierarchy between interest groups is to be overcome. In the Swedish example treated here, limited though it is to the issue of women’s social citizenship, the central state had to secure equal treatment via labor market status before women could exercise a claim grounded in difference without suffering grave material disadvantages. Not only are differences difficult to recognize and to value equally within the hierarchical and segregated gender system of late-twentieth-century states, but, unfashionable though it might be to say so, it is unlikely that any authority other than a central state can exert sufficient power to change that system. One problem with the equality/difference debate is that it tends to make women’s choices between the two strategies the focus of attention rather than the gender inequalities that underpin the choice.
As Merle Thornton has suggested, only “equal freedom” or “equal consideration of interests” will empower the genders, but thus far no workable means has been found to achieve equality for women qua women. We are left with the pragmatic option of using claims based on equality and difference strategically, in the time-honored manner of feminist movements, aided it is hoped, by our growing knowledge as to where the pitfalls lie.