Lone Mothers Between Paid Work and Care

The Policy Regime in Twenty Countries

Majella Kilkey

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138732230
• eBook ISBN: 9781351743501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

This title was first published in 2000. This is a study which compares and contrasts how lone mothers' relationships to paid work and care-giving are constructed across 20 countries, and with what outcomes for lone mothers' levels of economic well-being. In doing so, the book explores from an international perspective, the implications of the re-orientation of lone mothers' citizenship within the UK policy field from that of care-giver to paid worker. The volume engages with feminist comparative social policy literature concerned with specifying a construction of citizenship appropriate to capturing international variations in women's social rights. By incorporating social rights attached to paid work and care, as well as those which enable lone mothers to move between sequential periods of paid work and care-giving across the child-rearing cycle, the study makes a significant contribution to the literature.

1 Introduction

The concept of citizenship has become an important analytical tool in comparative social policy research following Esping-Andersen’s 1990 study, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. A Marshallian (1950) conceptualisation of citizenship forms the central plank of that study’s theoretical framework. Thus, for Esping-Andersen the provision of the social rights of citizenship represents the substance of the welfare state, and an examination of how welfare states vary in respect of both the social rights provided and the impact of those rights, should constitute the focus of comparative welfare state research. The centrality he attaches to the concept of citizenship has provided a bridge, which hitherto had been largely absent, between social policy research and macro comparative welfare state research. A key concern of the former is clearly the analysis of the welfare state, and historically citizenship has been an important conceptual tool in the pursuit of that task. Yet, as Esping-Andersen (op. cit.: 18) argues, the primary focus of the ‘first generation’ of comparative research was generally not the welfare state per se. Rather, the field was largely the preserve of economists and political scientists, for whom the welfare state tended to be just one of a number of independent variables in studies of, for example, economic competitiveness and the trajectory of capitalism.

Feminist social policy analysts, in particular, have used the bridge of citizenship provided by Esping-Andersen, to engage in comparative research - a relatively new field of enquiry for this perspective.¹ They have found it necessary, however, to pursue the reconstruction of that bridge. Drawing on a long history of feminist scholarship which had revealed Marshall’s concept of citizenship to be a gendered construct, initial feminist engagement highlighted the theoretical flaws inherent in the three dimensions developed by Esping-Andersen to examine variations in social rights across welfare states (see for example, O’Connor, 1993; Orloff, 1993; Sainsbury (ed.), 1994). His dimension of the public-private nexus in welfare provision was found to omit the family; a central context for the structuring of women’s lives, and a sphere which welfare states are deeply implicated in regulating. His concept of de-commodification - the degree to which social rights free individuals from reliance on the market - was found to be constructed in relation to male life-patterns, thus limiting its relevance to women. His final dimension - stratification - was found to be concerned solely with the manner in which social rights structure class relations, and so failed to capture the implications of the quality of social rights for gender relations.

The feminist critique of Esping-Andersen’s dimensions, concluded that theoretically his typology is limited in its ability to understand both how gender relations have influenced the substance of welfare states, and how the substance of welfare states affects gender relations. Feminist scholars subsequently moved on to more empirical comparative research endeavours. They tested Esping-Andersen’s ‘three-worlds’ against elements of the welfare state which might be considered important from the perspective of women and gender relations, for example: childcare provision (Leira, 1993; Gustafsson, 1994); the treatment of women’s unpaid work within the tax/benefit system (Shaver and Bradshaw, 1995); women’s bodily and reproductive rights (Shaver, 1992); and the role that the welfare state plays in the direct employment of women (Meyer, 1994). In general, the results of those applications confounded Esping-Andersen’s observed variations in welfare states. The focus of feminist scholarship has, thus, shifted to one of constructing comparative frameworks which are more sensitive to gender. It is currently engaged in identifying the appropriate dimensions for an analytical framework. Addressing the question of what constitutes women’s social rights of citizenship has become central to that task.

The concept of citizenship has also gained currency, however, outside the field of comparative social policy research. In particular, since the 1980s it has become an important political tool in the debates within the United Kingdom on the restructuring of the welfare state. The language of citizenship has been deployed by the New Right to justify the ‘rolling-back’, in ideological terms at least, of the welfare state. The theoretical validity of social rights vis-à-vis civil and political rights has been challenged, as have the moral and economic implications of a welfare state which is apparently skewed in favour of providing rights, as opposed to enforcing the obligations and responsibilities of citizenship (Plant, 1998). The New Labour Government similarly problematises the welfare state, and also employs the language of citizenship to identify both the causes and the solutions to the problems. Thus, for example, the welfare state is not only judged to have failed to address ‘social exclusion’, but it is also partly responsible for causing it (Levitas, 1998). From the perspective of New Labour, the unconditional provision of ‘welfare’ has undermined the moral and economic capacity of some to be included in society. A more appropriate balance between rights and responsibilities will restore moral self-worth and provide economic incentives (both of the ‘carrot’ and the ‘stick’ kind), all of which are required to bring about inclusion (Stephney et al., 1999). More generally, the Government’s 1998 Green Paper on ‘welfare reform’ (Cmnd. 3805) advocated putting ‘a new contract between the citizen and the Government, based on responsibilities and rights’ at the centre of the welfare state. Citizenship has also become a key term in the political lexicon of those seeking to defend the welfare state (though not necessarily its status quo). Thus, in the 1980s the anti-poverty lobby, emphasised the importance of social rights in substantiating formal civil and political rights (see for example, Lister, 1990). More recently, ‘new social movements’, such as the disability rights movement, have utilised the language of citizenship in highlighting the failure of the welfare state to meet the needs of particular groups, and in advocating more particular and inclusive forms of social provision (see for example, Barton, 1993).

Women’s Citizenship: Theoretical and Policy Dilemmas around Paid Work and Care

Women’s relationship to paid work and care is a key nexus at which the theoretical / research and political debates around the concept of citizenship converge. In its attempts to develop appropriate dimensions with which to capture international variations in the construction of women’s social rights, feminist comparative research has encountered a contemporary variant of what Pateman (1989) has termed ‘Wollstonecraft’s dilemma’. Thus, while agreeing on the requirement to construct dimensions which are sensitive to gender differences in respect of needs, a dualism has emerged when the question - difference with regard to what? - is contemplated. On the one side, ‘equality in difference via employment’ is being advocated: the provision of social rights which guarantee women equality in the labour market by recognising their difference in condition provoked by care-work, is considered to be the key to women’s social citizenship (for example, Cass, 1994). On the other side, ‘equality in difference via care’ is being emphasised: the provision of social rights which recognise the obligation and right to care as an equally valid base for citizenship as paid work, is considered to be central to women’s social citizenship (for example, Knijn, 1994). The dualism has tended to translate empirically into research that compares welfare states in respect of either their paid work strategies (for example, Lewis, 1992; Ostner and Lewis, 1995; Gornick et al., 1997; Meyers et al., 1999), or their care-giving strategies (for example, McLaughlin and Glendinning, 1994; Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Ungerson, 1997; Bussemaker, 1998).

Recently, moves to collapse the dichotomy between paid work or care, however, have been emerging. Thus, for example, with Hobson, Lewis (1997: 15-16) has re-visited a framework (the ‘male breadwinner’ typology) that she had previously developed from the paid work side of the dualism, in order to better capture ‘caring regimes’. Kilkey and Bradshaw (1999) have also recently applied Lister’s (1994a: 37) concept of defamilialisation - ‘the degree to which individual adults can uphold a socially acceptable standard of living, independently of family relationships, either through paid work or social security provision’ - in an effort to examine social rights around paid work and care.² These are positive developments, since neither the paid work, nor the care approach fully captures what is likely to be important in an examination of the manner in which welfare states influence the balance of gendered power within individual and societal relationships. Such developments are as yet, however, still in their infancy. Thus, for example, Lewis’ framework has yet to be applied empirically, and while Kilkey and Bradshaw apply the concept of defamilialisation to the fifteen countries of the European Union, they investigate a rather narrow set of institutional arrangements. The conceptual frameworks would also seem to require further development. Most critically, a dualism between paid work or care in respect of the social rights of individual women seems to persist, since no attention is paid to policies which might influence the ease at which women can move between sequential periods of paid work and care (especially long-term periods of care) over the life-course.

Yet, the examination of how welfare states structure women’s relationship to paid work and care, appears to be an urgent one. Within the United Kingdom, the social citizenship rights of women, and more particularly of lone mothers, are currently being reconstructed at the policy level, precisely around this axis of paid work versus care-giving. Lone mothers in the United Kingdom are predominantly full-time care-givers, as opposed to paid workers, and officially, they have long had the choice, albeit a constrained one in practice, to be so. With the aim of addressing their ‘social exclusion’, defined interchangeably by the New Labour Government as a lack of resources, opportunities, integration and appropriate moral values (Levitas, 1998), lone mothers, however, as with the young, long-term and disabled unemployed, are being enjoined to enter paid work.

The balance of policy, if not rhetoric, in respect of lone mothers to date, has been largely on the side of carrots. Thus, the mechanism of manipulating financial incentives in favour of paid work which was initiated under previous Conservative governments continues, in the form of a new ‘making work pay’ strategy. This incorporates the Working Families Tax Credit (WFTC) which replaced Family Credit in October 1999, a new system of assistance with childcare costs in the form of the Childcare Tax Credit within the WFTC, a minimum wage, introduced in April 1999, and the introduction of a 10p rate of income tax ‘when the economy allows’. There are also developments in respect of enabling lone mothers to reconcile paid work with their childrearing commitments: a National Childcare Strategy which aims to increase the supply of childcare places; the European Union Working Time Directive which aims to protect workers against excessive working hours; and the European Union Parental Leave Directive which introduces the right to thirteen weeks of unpaid leave during the first five years of a child’s life, the right to time off for urgent family reasons, and extends maternity leave provisions.³ Finally, a ‘one-stop shop’ for advising lone mothers about the opportunities for paid work, training / education and childcare has been established in the form of the Benefits Agency’s voluntary work-focused interview scheme.

There have also been, however, a number of rather indirect stick mechanisms adopted. Thus, for example, although not explicitly part of the ‘welfare-to-work’ strategy, the abolition of the Lone Parent Premium in Income Support in 1997 may further alter the balance of financial incentives in favour of paid work.⁴ Moreover, the implication of the emphasis on paid work within the ‘welfare reform’ programme is that raising the level of out-of-work benefits is neither an ideological nor an economic priority. There is also the possibility that the stick will become tougher in the future. Most critically, the Welfare Reform and Pensions Bill (House of Commons, 1998/99), which is currently being legislated for, proposes to make attendance at a work-focused interview a condition of out-of-work benefit receipt for lone mothers with school-aged children.

The re-orientation of lone mothers’ citizenship in the United Kingdom raises a number of concerns. For those lone mothers who want to enter paid work, one question centres on just how effective the package of support mechanisms will be in preventing in-work poverty. Moreover, in the context of research (Van Drenth et al., 1999) which points to the strong commitment among employed lone mothers to their care-giving responsibilities, a concern emerges around the degree to which they will be enabled to effectively balance paid work and care simultaneously. Research (for example, Bradshaw and Millar, 1991; Duncan and Edwards, 1997b,c; Ford, 1998) also suggests, however, that full-time care-giving, at least for some part of the childrearing-cycle, is the preferred activity of many lone mothers. A concern for those lone mothers is that their fate will be one of deepening social exclusion, and that ultimately, they will be denied the right to exercise such a choice. The United Kingdom is not unique in reconstructing lone mothers’ citizenship in the direction of paid work. The Netherlands, Norway and the United States, for example, have in recent years travelled further down that road (see Van Drenth et al., 1999 on the Netherlands; Bradshaw et al., 1999 on Norway; and Kahn, 1999 on the United States). Such developments point to the possibility that the foreclosure of choice in respect of paid work and care is inevitable. Without a broader international perspective on the paid work / care strategies adopted by welfare states, however, we simply do not know.

Given the prominence of the paid work versus care dilemma at the practical / policy level and the concerns that this provokes, the focus of research, though, cannot be solely one of examining how welfare states structure women’s relationship to paid work and care-giving. Rather, the outcomes of different paid work / care strategies must also be part of the research agenda. An examination of the relationship between policy inputs and outcomes, however, has been largely absent from feminist comparative welfare state research.⁵ In part, this may reflect the legacy of Esping-Andersen’s 1990 study which lacked a rigorous analysis of the relationship between the three welfare state regimes and international variations in outcome measures, such as poverty. It may also have arisen, however, from a long-standing division within comparative social policy research between studies of policies and micro-data policy outcome studies. While the former have tended to do no more than speculate on the possible outcomes of various institutional arrangements, the latter have lacked the detailed policy information to adequately account for variations in the patterning of outcomes.

The Book: Purpose, Scope and Structure

The purpose of this book is two-fold. In the first place, it is concerned with expanding our understanding of how welfare states construct women’s social rights of citizenship. Secondly, it is concerned with extending the focus of feminist comparative social policy research to include attention to policy outcomes, and more particularly to the relationship between policy inputs and outcomes. To accomplish our purpose, the book compares the structure and outcomes of the policy environment for lone mothers around paid work and care across twenty countries. The countries are the 15 EU Member States (Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Austria, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and the United Kingdom), and Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Norway and the United States.

The book is organised into nine further chapters. In the first two of those, we situate the study within its theoretical and research contexts. Thus, in Chapter Two we review what has been termed the ‘mainstream’ body of comparative welfare state research. The main focus is Esping-Andersen’s 1990 study, however, in order to establish a context in which to discuss the significance of that work, we also review a selection of the comparative research which preceded it. In Chapter Three, we move on to examine the feminist body of comparative welfare state research which has been provoked by Esping-Andersen’s study. We outline the feminist critique developed in relation to Esping-Andersen’s framework for analysing and explaining welfare state variations, and present the conceptual and empirical attempts which have been made to develop a more gender sensitive approach to comparative welfare state research. We examine the dilemma around how to conceptualise women’s social citizenship which has dominated such attempts, and point to the limitations in the paid work / care-giving schism that has arisen. We progress by assessing the small body of largely emergent research which advocates the collapse of the dichotomy, and finally in assessing its conceptual and empirical limitations, we argue the case for further work on how welfare states structure women’s relationship to paid work and care.

In Chapter Four we explicate more fully the scope of our research, and outline its methods. The scope is partly determined by the adoption of lone mothers as an analytical category, and we begin the chapter by explaining both what we mean by the category ‘lone mother’, and also the rationale underlying our decision to use this group as a case-study. The focus on lone mothers restricts the study to an examination of the policy environment around paid work and care for those with caring responsibilities for dependent children, and the chapter progresses by specifying the particular elements of the policy environment selected for analysis. A three-fold policy framework is constructed consisting of policies which might be expected to support: (i) care-giving; (ii) paid work; and (iii) transitions between paid-work and care-giving times. We move on to outline the research design which is composed of three elements: the use of national informants, a pro forma questionnaire and the ‘model families income matrix’. We conclude the chapter by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the research methods.

Our examination of the policy environment around paid work and care and its outcomes across the twenty countries is conducted across Chapters Five to Nine, and employs two approaches. The first is a group-by-group approach. The twenty countries are classified according to two outcome measures - activity status (whether lone mothers are primarily paid worke...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Mainstream Comparative Welfare State Research: A Review
• 3 Feminist Perspectives on Comparative Welfare State Research
• 4 Lone Mothers as an Analytical Category in an Examination of How Welfare States Structure Women’s Relationship to Paid Work and Care: Rationale and Methods
• 5 Poor Mothers: Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the United Kingdom
• 6 Non-Poor Mothers: The Netherlands
• 7 Poor Workers: Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Portugal, Spain and the United States
• 8 Non-Poor Workers: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Norway and Sweden
• 9 Patterns of Convergence and Divergence in the Configuration of Social Rights Attached to Paid Work, Care and Transitions Across Twenty Countries
• 10 Conclusions
• Appendices
• Bibliography