Equality Struggles

Women’s Movements, Neoliberal Markets and State Political Agendas in Scandinavia

Mia Liinason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317240983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent times where European welfare states are undergoing serious economic and social crises and being increasingly exposed to criticism, there has been a noticeable revival of feminist interest in the issues of equality.

Focusing on a signature aspect of Scandinavian welfare states, Equality Struggles explores how gender equality and women's rights are transforming the relationship between Scandinavian states and social actors. Indeed, drawing on in-depth analyses from fieldwork in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, this book examines the largest and most established women's organizations and develops a multi-layered understanding of the entanglements between women's movements, neoliberal markets and state political agendas in Scandinavia, as they give rise to feminist fractions and new feminist coalitions.

Contributing to novel understandings of "equality struggles" within women's organisations, this title will appeal to postgraduate students and scholars interested in fields such as Scandinavian Studies, Gender Studies, Political Science and International Relations and Social Theory.

1 Equality struggles in neoliberal welfare states

The crisis of women

In the 1930s, the Scandinavian countries experienced falling birth rates, widespread poverty, low-standard housing and high unemployment. Acknowledging this as dysfunctional, unworthy and unhygienic in a modern society, the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish governments embarked upon a project to modernize their societies by establishing inclusive welfare states, later famously depicted as the Scandinavian welfare model. However, due to the use of normalization as an inherent part of its implementation, this has also been described as a deeply ambiguous project (Fahlgren, Johansson and Mulinari 2011). Befolkningskommissionen [the Population Commission] was one of many initiatives taken to shape a more equal society. This particular initiative aimed at improving the living conditions of families with children and increasing the birth rate in Sweden. One important point of departure was the desire to support women in their caring duties, which would be realized by society taking significant responsibility for childcare (Lundqvist and Roman 2010). When the commission published its considerations, the three female members of the commission, the physician Rut Grubb, the politician Ruth Gustafson and the feminist writer and journalist Elin Wägner, added an amendment to the publication, titled ‘The Crisis of Women’. In their amendment, they pointed to the divided position of women in relation to the modernizing ambitions. This divided position of women illustrates, they wrote:

how incredibly difficult it has been for us [women] to abandon our attitude of adjustment [to current society] and instead require society to adjust to the demands of motherhood. [–] It would be unfair not to acknowledge with gratitude and happiness everything designed to give [the mother instinct] a better chance to materialize. But in order for women in Sweden […] to willingly and gladly become mothers they have to be given a position in society that gives them the power to protect their children.¹

In contrast to the many celebratory narratives presented about the Scandinavian welfare societies, this quote tells a less oft-repeated story about the divisions, ambiguities and dangers involved in the project. Over the following years, women in Scandinavia gained rights that protected their bodily integrity, self-determination and independence. However, this was not achieved without a struggle. Rather, the expansion of women’s rights in Scandinavia was the result of hard work by the women’s movement, supported over the years by a number of academics, politicians and journalists. It is precisely these successes of the women’s movement that are often the focus for narratives telling the story of the struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia. To be sure, these narratives do not give a unanimously positive image of governmental aspirations to shape more equal societies. Rather, these narratives emphasize the tough battles fought and raise concerns about the many inequalities that remain. Nevertheless, the struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia is less often analysed from the perspective of working-class, disabled, women of colour, ethnic minority and migrant women, whose social position is closely connected to the ways in which the attitudes of Scandinavian citizens have been shaped by a strategy of governance guided by concepts such as equality and rights.

In the quote above, Wägner, Grubb and Gustafson bring to light the constraints involved in these modernization ambitions. Importantly, they do so by focusing on women. The constraints they write about do not come from the state, ideology or men; they arise in the collective of women. This, they write, has to do with the tendency of women to adjust to the needs of society instead of requiring society to change with respect to the demands of motherhood. They conclude that women should therefore be given a position in society that allows them to protect their children. It is not difficult to read this as a critical response to the designation, current at the time, of certain women as ‘deviant’: the working mothers with ‘too many’ children; poor mothers; ethnic minority women. Women belonging to these groups ran the risk of being subjected to diverse disciplining measures. While a great deal of feminist scholarship has analysed the state superimposition of hierarchical divisions and norms on its citizens, less analytical attention has been directed at the role of everyday practices in the construction and reconstruction of such hierarchies and norms. And while a vast feminist scholarship has explored how the struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia has affected the position of women, less thought has been directed at examining how the position of women has affected the struggle for women’s rights. In this book I suggest that equality and rights have been implemented as a strategy of governance to remake Scandinavian societies: to modernize these societies during the emergence of the welfare state; and to optimize them within neoliberal forms of governance. And with regard to the position of women, I argue that this strategy of governance has had far-reaching consequences that are more ambiguous and risky than most analyses of the struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia have been able to show.

In this book, governance is understood as a form of rule exercised through actions and relations of power that aims to shape and mould the actions of others (Cruikshank 1999). In processes of governance, a complex set of actors takes part, of which the state is only one. Scientific knowledge is another, the economy a third. Governance also involves voluntary relations of rule, such as self-governance and governance of others. During the emergence of the welfare state and still within today’s neoliberal modes, the goals of governance (modernization; optimization) have been enabled by political programmes which make equality and rights key elements of their strategic plan. Yet the governance of the state is premised less on these concepts and more on constructing citizens who are empowered, responsible and participatory, who care both for themselves and for others (Cruikshank 1999). In the struggle for women’s rights in Scandinavia, women’s advocators have responded to this appeal from governments and grasped the opportunity to expand the rights of women by demonstrating that they have abilities that society needs. Throughout history, women’s advocators have referred to certain contextually specific female abilities inherent in the image of the caregiving woman of the early 1900s; the dutiful and diligent woman of the 1930s; the capable, self-realizing woman of the 1960s and the efficient, responsibilized woman in today’s struggle for women’s rights. Readers will recognize these dynamics from scholarship analysing the historical struggle for women’s rights (Scott 1999). However, what is less often highlighted is that these female strengths were constructed by a dual move: privileged women distinguished some women from the collectivity of women, depicted these women as a special problem for society, and emphasized that the special problem could be solved by abilities that privileged women claim to have. It therefore needs to be acknowledged that the remaking of society as envisioned by making equality and rights a strategy of governance has also been achieved by and through women.

The allure of this project, which promises equality across the whole of society through universal rights, lends itself readily to analyses that evaluate the failure or success of this strategy of governance. However, scholarship has more rarely explored the ways in which the strategy has sought to inspire and shape the wills, desires and actions of citizens to realize such a goal. It is this area that this book sets out to investigate through the lens of the struggle for women’s rights in contemporary universalistic women's organizations, that is, women’s organizations that claim to speak for all women in their struggle for women’s rights.² In 2013–2015 I conducted ethnographic fieldwork with three women’s organizations in Malmö, Stockholm, Oslo, Drammen and Copenhagen. In addition, analyses draw on policy documents from the Norwegian, Danish and Swedish governments and archival material, including debates that have had a key role in relation to women’s rights during the emergence of welfare states in Scandinavia. Engaging with this diverse material, I write a feminist discursive analysis, examining the struggle for women’s rights by looking at how women’s organizations in their everyday practices provoke and negotiate this strategy of governance.

Equality struggles in neoliberal times

Recently, the Scandinavian welfare states has been undergoing significant changes due to a shift to neoliberal policies, and in present-day Scandinavia the key notions of equality, universalism and solidarity are to a great extent articulated through neoliberalism. Deregulation, privatization and a liberalization of the economy motivated by the idea that the wellbeing of the citizens is best managed by the free market have transformed these states into neoliberal welfare states (Andersson 2010; Harvey 2005). These states continue to accept their role as provider of health care and education and still adopt active labour market policies to promote full employment, but these services and policies are increasingly subject to market-based logics. The introduction of New Public Management (NPM) in public institutions such as health care and educational institutions has been combined with a privatization of welfare services, for example in care units and schools. In addition, the desire to create social cohesion through New Public Governance, joint solutions and shared governance across vertical and horizontal structures put an emphasis on collaboration between municipalities, civil society and the local business community. It can be argued that the neoliberal reorientation has involved a greater focus on work (more duty than rights), individual responsibility and free choice, resulting in gendered and racialized effects (Fahlgren, Johansson and Mulinari 2011). In contrast to the view of neoliberalism as a class-based ideology aimed at dismantling the welfare state in liberal democracies (Hall 1988; Harvey 2005) or a global market-related disciplinary regime (Gill 1996), this book conceptualizes neoliberalism as a mobile set of practices, as a ‘logic of governing that migrates and is selectively taken up in diverse political contexts’ (Ong 2007: 3). This means that I am interested in analysing how the struggles for women’s rights articulate with neoliberalism in contemporary Scandinavian welfare states. Importantly, the struggles for women’s rights analysed here are not understood as only taking shape through macro-political practices, such as claims-making in relation to national or supranational institutions; they are also seen as shaped by activities at a micro-level in the ongoing and daily work of the organizations. In these various settings, feminism’s entanglements with neoliberal governance enable diverse, shifting and contradictory articulations, coalitions and actions.

One of the most characteristic traits of neoliberalism is its hybrid and changeable character, which arises from the capacity of neoliberalism to pick up and exploit other political projects. Despite the strong emphasis on issues of economy in neoliberal governance, however, neoliberalism is – at one end – a project occupied with social relations. Therefore, neoliberalism has to be understood as ‘social in the widest sense, and as political when they appear as movements and projects that demand not to be governed in the old way’ (Clarke 2008: 143). As a form of governance to strengthen the health, wellbeing and lives of citizens, neoliberalism interacts with the biopolitical logic of states to optimize the society as a system. In Scandinavia, Jenny Andersson (2010) argues, this optimization of society as a system has transformed the meaning of the values of equality, universalism and solidarity. If, before neoliberalism, the driving force in society was class conflict and conflict between the sexes, with economic redistribution used as a means to reduce inequalities among underprivileged groups, from the 1980s the chief driving forces became globalization and capital growth. Capitalism ‘suddenly became a force for human liberation’ (Andersson 2010: 135). As a result of this change, the meaning of equality shifted from an emphasis on redistributive justice to a focus on individual rights, accompanied by the introduction of concepts such as ‘cost effectiveness, customer orientation, privatization and marketization’ and a rhetoric about outsiderhood (Fahlgren, Johansson and Mulinari 2011: 5). With this, issues that used to be located in the public sphere and understood as political, such as unemployment, lack of housing or people on long-term sick leave, were suddenly constructed as individualized problems. I analyse how women’s organizations engage with this transformation of values and the reconstruction of the political within this neoliberal reconfiguration of Scandinavian welfare states. I use the Scandinavian case to study the ambiguous dynamics that follow from these changes, which are contextually specific but not restricted to the Scandinavian context. I explore how and to what result women’s organizations support or challenge these reconfigurations of power, within a context of governance where states aspire to appeal to the wills and actions of citizens to realize the goals of governance (Cruikshank 1999).

This book explores how gender equality and women’s rights transform the relationship between states and social actors by attending to how women’s organizations take advantage of the openings, or weaknesses, in the relations of rule. Guided by a wider ambition to understand the reproduction of relations of dominance between institutions, such as states, and social relations, such as gender, race, ethnicity, class and sexuality, this book develops an understanding of institutions not as things but as processes, derived from actions and practices. This is a view that shares many features with the understandings in the framework of new institutionalism (Lowndes 1996). As an analytic approach, new institutionalism expands the definition of politics to ‘include not just formal processes related to government and elections, but also informal actions embodied in social movement and interpersonal relations’ (Krook and Mackay 2011: 4). Here, links between formal and informal institutions are highlighted, as well as the bordering processes involved in demarcating the political from the non-political, such as the social or the private (Krook and Mackay 2011). This approach necessarily involves a distinction between governance and the state. In this book, I understand the state as the representative, electoral, administrative, legislative and juridical institutions and practices articulated within a democratic constitutional framework (Cruikshank 1999). Governance, in turn, depicts how relations of power are exercised in a complex interplay between social relations, institutions and agents. In modern societies, governance is not controlled by a superior state but carried out by a complex set of actors (Rose 1999). Following these views, I use the concept of governance to indicate the ways in which state governance, in coalition with scientific knowledge, aspires to produce social actors able to govern themselves, to act as agentic and empowered subjects, as well as the ways in which various social actors, including subjects and organizations, exercise forms of self-governance and governance of others within these relations of rule. With such modes of governance it remains important not to presuppose particular subjects or forms of subjectivity but to continually inquire into the constitution of subjects (Cruikshank 1999). In a context where equality and rights have been a key part of strategies to realize the goals of the state, I suggest that attention to this mode of governance productively can problematize the ways in which universal notions like equality and rights have been understood in feminist scholarship, and challenge the tendency to measure the success or failure of diverse projects to expand the rights of women against such understandings.

This book analyses the particularities of the encounter between struggles for women’s rights in women’s organizations, state policies and national histories, and visualizes the non-monolithic and highly complex nature of them all. Guided by my wider interest in understanding the reproduction of relations of dominance, this book analyses how women’s advocators take advantage – in their struggle – of the opportunities that arise, and I elaborate the many complex consequences of this. I present a contextually situated perspective on how struggles for women’s rights articulate with dominant discourses, national histories and relations of rule, resulting in ambiguous effects that are not easy to grasp within binary notions of oppressor/oppressed; men/women; state/civil society.

I engage with these issues through analyses of diverse material, where I pay attention to the micro-level of the everyday, as that is the location where the political is constructed and reconstructed (Räthzel et al. 2015; Cruikshank 1999; Gramsci 2007). Thus, in this book, the struggle for women’s rights is located at the core of the analysis and I explore this struggle through an ethnographic study of the actions, campaigns, projects and agendas of universalistic women’s organizations, situated as they are in particular discursive frames and policy contexts. At particular moments in history and today, discursive frames and policy contexts combine to shape materialist conditions, concepts and practices that enable certain subjects and struggles to emerge (Foucault 1981). In this book I ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Equality struggles in neoliberal welfare states
• 2. Tactics: Equality splits
• 3. Funding technologies
• 4. Markets, nations, norms: Women’s sexual rights
• 5. Claims-making: Negotiation and normalization
• 6. Feminist agendas: Contestation and coalition
• 7. Agency and resistance
• Index