Encountering Benefits for Families: Layers of Lived Social Citizenship in Finland in the 1930s and 1940s

Abstract

Benefits for families with children—the maternity benefit for pregnant women (1938), the family benefit for large low-income families (1943), and the child benefit for all children (1948)—were among the first reforms which broadened social legislation beyond the stigmatized poor relief in Finland. The practices of applying for and receiving the benefits open a view to the emerging institution of social benefits as lived social citizenship. In the chapter, Harjula approaches the encounters between families and local authorities as scenes of experience, which, as situational frames, set limits for the possible experience. The chapter shows how the early social benefits were characterized by many institutional and ideological continuities from poor relief, framing parallel and contradictory lived social citizenship. The chapter concludes by presenting how these competing citizenships as historical layers of experience had a presence in the later practices of the Finnish welfare state.