Gender, Class and the Welfare State

The Case of Income Security in Australia

Bibliographic Data

ID4844244
AuthorsSheila Shaver (corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume32
Issue1
Pages90-110
Publication date1989-07-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-7789 • E-ISSN: 1466-4380
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1057/fr.1989.21
OpenAlexW1969652276
LanguageEN
Citations received12
References cited28

When feminism has raised questions about the state these have invariably also raised questions about class and the relation between gender and class. The trilogy of terms invokes a triangle of conceptual relationships. For most of its history discussion of the welfare state has privileged the relationship between state and class. It is only in the last decade that feminists have forced recognition that the welfare state is also deeply implicated in a politics of gender. The first feminist analyses of the welfare state called attention to areas of history and policy unmentioned in decades of class analysis. Thus Elizabeth Wilson (1977) pointed to the woman-to-woman character of the archetypal welfare transaction. Hilary Land (1976) showed how the Beveridge legacy reinforced a sexual division of labour taking women's dependency for granted. Linda Gordon (1976) documented state resistance to women's demands for autonomous control of their bodies and fertility. These and related themes have since been expanded in feminist accounts of a variety of welfare states (for example, Baldock and Cass,1983; Nelson,1984; Ungerson,1985). Feminist theory and politics have nevertheless remained undeservedly marginal to mainstream debate about the welfare state and its contemporary restructuring. No doubt this is partly attributable to plain intellectual sexism: not all writers want to face the fundamental questions raised by feminist social science (Harding and Hintikka, 1983). But perhaps feminist theory must also take some responsibility, both for inadequacies in the analyses offered to date and for abandoning public politics for the more exotic enticements of subjectivity, sexuality and semiotics (Segal, 1987). These important beginnings, now more than ten years old, have developed little beyond their first formulations, and while vital policy debates ensue, theoretical discussion of gender and the welfare state has lately all but ceased

Class (philosophy) · Feminism · Human sexuality · Political science · Politics · Social class · Sociology · State (computer science) · Welfare · Welfare state · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Employment and Welfare Studies · Gender Studies · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Labor Movements and Unions · Law · Social Policy and Reform Studies · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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