JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. American Sociological Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to American Sociological Review. State social provision affects women's material situations, shapes gender relationships, structures political conflict and participation, and contributes to the formation and mobilization of identities and interests. Mainstream comparative research has neglected gender, while most feminist research on the welfare state has not been systematically comparative. I develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the gender content of social provision that draws on feminist and mainstream work. Three dimensions of qualitative variation suggested by power resources analysts are reconstructed to incorporate gender: (1) the state-market relations dimension is extended to consider the ways countries organize the provision of welfare through families as well as through states and markets; it is then termed the state-market-family relations dimension; (2) the stratification dimension is expanded to consider the effects of social provision by the state on gender relations, especially the treatment of paid and unpaid labor; (3) the social citizenship rights/decommodification dimension is criticizedfor implicit assumptions about the sexual division of caring and domestic labor and for ignoring the differential effects on men and women of benefits that decommodify labor Two additional dimensions are proposed to capture the effects of state social provision on gender relations: access to paid work and capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household. N o one who has listened to debates about the welfare state in the United States or in other advanced capitalist and democratic countriesabout "welfare mothers" or childcare supportcould doubt the importance of gender relations to social provision by the state. Many recent analyses have recognized that states regulate gender relations in the labor market, polity, family, and elsewhere (Wilson

Gender relations—embodied in the sexual division of labor, compulsory heterosexuality, gendered forms of citizenship and political participation, ideologies of masculinity and femininity, and the like—profoundly shape the character of welfare states. Likewise, the institutions of social provision—the set of social assistance and social insurance programs and universal citizenship entitlements to which we refer as “the welfare state” —affect gender relations. Until recently, two broad approaches to gender relations and welfare states predominated: one which saw states contributing to the social reproduction of gender hierarchies, and a second which saw states having an ameliorative impact on gender inequality. More recently, two new strands of research have emerged emphasizing the variation in the effects of social policies on gender.

Can feminists count on welfare states-or at least some aspects of these complex systems-as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. Feminist scholars have moved to bring the contingent practice of politics back into grounded fields of action and social change and away from the reification and abstractions that had come to dominate models of politics focused on "big" structures and systems, including those focused on "welfare states." Conceptual innovations and reconceptualizations of foundational terms have been especially prominent in the comparative scholarship on welfare states, starting with gender, and including care, autonomy, citizenship, (in)dependence, political agency, and equality. In contrast to other subfields of political science and sociology, gendered insights have to some extent been incorporated into mainstream comparative scholarship on welfare states. The arguments between feminists and mainstream scholars over the course of the last two decades have been productive, powering the development of key themes and concepts pioneered by gender scholars, including "defamilialization," the significance of unpaid care work in families and the difficulties of work-family "reconciliation," gendered welfare state institutions, the relation between fertility and women's employment, and the partisan correlates of different family and gender policy models. Yet the mainstream still resists the deeper implications of feminist work, and has difficulties assimilating concepts of care, gendered power, dependency, and interdependency. Thus, the agenda of gendering comparative welfare state studies remains unfinished. To develop an understanding of what might be needed to finish that agenda, I assess the gendered contributions to the analysis of modern systems of social provision, starting with the concept of gender itself, then moving to studies of the gendered division of labor (including care) and of gendered political power.Can feminists count on welfare states-or at least some aspects of these complex systems-as resources in the struggle for gender equality? Gender analysts of "welfare states" investigate this question and the broader set of issues around the mutually constitutive relationship between systems of social provision and regulation and gender. 1 The comparative study of gender and welfare states has, since about 1990, been favored by the occurrence of two intellectual "big bangs"-gender studies and . A number of colleagues read this essay, sometimes more than once, and offered excellent advice and suggestions; I thank . Remaining errors are my responsibility.1 Modern systems of social provision and regulation are usually called "welfare states" by both analysts and political actors, even when the merit of the term-implying a commitment to citizens' and residents' welfare-is at the very least qu...

No abstract

The 1990s have seen dramatic restructuring of state social provision in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This has occurred largely because of the rise of market liberalism, which challenges the role of the state. This important book examines the impact of changes in social policy regimes on gender roles and relations. Structured thematically and systematically comparative, it analyses three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. Largely driven by issues of equality, it considers the role of the state as a site for gender and sexual politics at a time when primacy is given to the market, developing an argument about social citizenship in the process. Eminent scholars in the field, Julia O'Connor, Ann Orloff and Sheila Shaver make a landmark contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in this era of economic restructuring and deregulation.