Social Policy

A New Feminist Analysis

Gillian Pascall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415099288
• eBook ISBN: 9781134857951
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

No-one can hope to understand the workings of the welfare state without first appreciating women's part in it. In the past decade the significance of the gendering of welfare states has become widely accepted, extensively charted in research, and more systematically theorized. Building on her earlier work, in Social Policy: A New Feminist Analysis Gillian Pascall confronts the challenges and outlines the developments that have taken place during the eleven years since its first publication. This new edition also reflects extensive social changes in women's participation at work, educational achievement, security in marriage; and policy changes aimed at producing a mixed economy of welfare, increasing family responsibility in health, community care, housing, education and income security. It examines the changing pattern of welfare provision, with increasing reliance on women's unpaid work, the gendered nature of UK welfare structures, the continuing dependence of women on men's incomes and on welfare benefits, the public/private divide, women's non-citizenship as carers for young and old; and the changing political climate of the 1980's and 1990's. Social Policy: A New Feminist Analysis covers traditional policy areas, which makes it ideal reading for students of health, housing, social security and education as well as courses about women.

Chapter 1

Social Policy: A Feminist Critique

Introduction

The most striking claim in feminist analysis of social policy is that it is impossible to understand the welfare state without understanding how it deals with women. Elizabeth Wilson argued in a pathbreaking book in the mid–1970s that ‘only an analysis of the Welfare State that bases itself on a correct understanding of the position of women in modern society can reveal the full meaning of modern welfarism’ (Wilson 1977:59). In the 1990s, Virginia Sapiro makes the same case in relation to US welfare structures: ‘It is not possible to understand the underlying principles, structure and effects of our social welfare systems and policies without understanding their relation to gender roles and gender ideology’ (Sapiro 1990:37). And Nancy Fraser describes a US social security system that is ‘officially gender-neutral’ but ‘gets its structure from gender norms and assumptions’ (Fraser 1989:149–51).

Feminist research and publication have developed vigorously since the 1980s. Feminists have played a major role in putting family work on the social policy map (Ungerson 1987, 1990; Finch 1989; Finch and Mason 1993) and analysing the nature of the structures that provide care outside the state (Pahl 1989; Morris 1990). They have contributed important new thinking to paid and professional care work (Stacey 1988; Davies 1995; Doyal 1995; Foster 1995), and to the study of poverty (Glendinning and Millar 1992). They have rewritten the textbooks, with Social Policy: A Critical Introduction (Williams 1989) and Welfare and the State (Bryson 1992), and provided distinctively feminist accounts of welfare in Women, the State and Welfare (Gordon 1990) Gendering Welfare States (Sainsbury 1994). Jane Lewis has given us historical and comparative approaches with Women in Britain since 1945 (Lewis 1992a) and Women and Social Policies in Europe (Lewis 1993).

How far has feminist writing penetrated the mainstream of social policy? Feminism is now identified as a social movement that has changed the agenda of politics and social policy. In a review of 1980s social policy developments, Wilding argues the importance of these changes:

Feminist analysis raises a wide range of questions about policies, starting from a concern for the position of women. Those questions are important for commitment to equal opportunities. Those questions are also important for a broader evaluation of the ‘welfare state’. They supply Social Policy with a new armoury of critical questions and a new agenda.

(Wilding 1992:112)

A key text of the 1970s and 1980s, Ideology and Social Welfare (George and Wilding 1976), conceived significant ideologies along a left-right spectrum. This put market relations centre stage and sidelined work and relationships that took place outside the market in which women were primarily involved. The same authors’ 1990s book, Welfare and Ideology (George and Wilding 1994), sees feminism and greenism as distinct strands. It also acknowledges the contribution of feminist research and thinking to social policy: ‘the feminist perspective has enormously enriched the study of social policy and our understanding of those institutions which we call, with declining confidence, “the welfare state’” (George and Wilding 1994:157–8). This sets a standard for text books in the 1990s. Alcock (1996), Baldock, and Ellison and Pierson (both forth-coming) all incorporate feminist thinking on social policy as essential to contemporary debates. A recent key comparative text, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping-Andersen 1990), has attracted criticism for its development of gender-blind categories for classifying and explaining welfare states (Orloff 1993; Sainsbury 1994); but key publications in other key areas—A Theory of Human Need (Doyal and Gough 1991), Family, State and Social Policy (Fox Harding 1996), New Approaches to Welfare Theory (Drover and Kerans 1993)—incorporate gendered analysis and feminist thinking.

In its ‘second wave’, feminism has taken social policy as a major part of its political, practical and academic work, which includes refuges and rape crisis centres, issues of abortion and reproductive technology, and care for children and older people. A unifying theme of academic feminist critiques of social policy has been an analysis of the welfare state in relation to the family: as supporting relations of dependency within families; as putting women into caring roles; and as controlling the work of reproduction. This chapter will argue that this analysis presents an agenda that none of the major traditions of social policy and administration addressed at all adequately (though each failed for different reasons). In bringing these issues centre stage, feminist thinking and research have thus had a transforming impact on social policy studies: ‘feminism has made a major contribution to our understanding of the welfare state in the 1980s and 1990s’ (George and Wilding 1994:160).

The task of this chapter is to look (briefly) at the main traditions of social policy writing, to explain why these traditions neglected issues and analyses that are now commonplace in feminist social policy and to ask whether approaches to welfare dominant in the 1990s are more receptive to feminist understandings of the welfare state than approaches developed in the 1940s. Finally, I aim to give some indication of the shift of ground and perspective that current feminist thinking involves, giving a brief preview of themes that will be addressed throughout the book.

A Feminist Social Policy Archive

If the mainstream of social policy writing has failed to appreciate the special connection of social policy with the domestic world, and with women’s lives, this is not so of women themselves.

There is a considerable archive of women’s research and writing that connects social policy to the family and especially to women’s economic position in the family (Bock and Thane 1991; Pedersen 1993). Recent feminist work is used throughout this book; this section focuses on earlier writing. The aim is, first, to show that feminist writing on social policy has a long history, and, second, to show that ‘mainstream’ social policy writing has always had a feminist critique available. Most of the work to which I shall refer derives from women’s politics rather than from the academic establishment: the Women’s Cooperative Guild, the Fabian Women’s Group, the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (NUSEC), and individuals active in these organizations. Women’s suffrage was the prime subject of women’s political action at the beginning of this century, but women’s economic position—especially their economic position in the family— followed close behind.

Prior to World War I, discussion of the economic position of married women was widespread in women’s groups….The Fabian Women’s Group (FWG) was founded with the main object of discussing women’s economic independence….Anna Martin, who wrote in the Cooperative News and suffragette journals, contended that the authorities were expecting mothers to ‘make bricks without straw’ when they demanded that they improved the welfare of their infants without providing any additional income….One of the first major efforts to secure a measure of economic assistance for all married women was the Women’s Cooperative Guild’s campaign for maternity benefits.

(Lewis 1980:166–7)

Jane Lewis’s central argument is that women’s groups identified the economic position of married women as the key to women’s and children’s health, and maternal and infant mortality. This was in contrast to the narrow official focus on women’s ignorance and need for education. Political activity to enhance the economic position of married women was the prime aim of women’s groups and their individual members, but along with this went a considerable literary output. As well as pamphlet and journal writing, there was analytical work, such as Eleanor Rathbone’s The Disinherited Family (1924/1949), and detailed empirical descriptions of women’s lives and domestic economy.

For political success, women’s groups needed evidence: evidence of the conditions of women’s lives, the way they managed household budgets, the health of women and children. Thus emerged a considerable flowering of investigative social report. Some of this was based on letters, some on direct investigation, some on questionnaires. From the Women’s Cooperative Guild came Maternity: Letters from Working Women (Llewelyn Davies 1915/ 1978) and Life as We Have Known It (Llewelyn Davies 1931/1977). From the Fabian Women’s Group came Round about a Pound a Week (Pember Reeves 1913/1979). And the Women’s Health Enquiry Committee (Spring Rice 1939/1981) issued Working Class Wives. These works are painstaking, detailed and highly readable accounts of women struggling against poverty. They tell of diet, household budgeting, frequent pregnancy, loss of health, miscarriages and loss of infant life. Despite varied political sources they share an emphasis on women’s poverty and the need for state economic support for maternity and child-rearing.

On the whole, these works did not criticize women’s identification with marriage and motherhood. They did identify and criticize women’s economic dependence. And they recognized that economic dependence went with the love and care that women invested in children. Financial support for children was a common prescription, as was support for maternity through health services and financial maintenance. Thus Maud Pember Reeves called for maintenance grants for children, national school feeding, and medical inspection (Pember Reeves 1913/1979:228–31), The Women’s Cooperative Guild wanted maternity and pregnancy sickness benefits, a women’s health service of better trained health visitors (called women health officers), midwives, and nurses, proper care for delivery, milk depots, and household helps (Llewelyn Davies 1915/1978:209–12). The Women’s Health Enquiry Committee included ‘A system of Family Allowances paid to the mother’, along with better maternal health services in an extensive plan (Spring Rice 1939/1981:207–8).

These works did not offer a radical critique of the family or of women’s work, but they revealed the conditions of women’s lives and the effects of their economic dependence. Thus Margery Spring Rice’s Working Class Wives (Spring Rice, 1939/1981) describes the ‘titanic job’ of housework, and the misery of some women’s lives cannot be missed in this painstaking and passionate investigation. While the author supports marriage, the results of bad marriages are clear to see:

throughout their lives they have been faced with the tradition that the crown of a woman’s life is to be a wife and mother….If for the woman herself the crown turns out to be one of thorns, that again must be Nature’s inexorable way.

(Spring Rice 1939/1981:95)

These writings emanated from divergent political groupings, and from women of different social classes, but they shared an economic analysis. Sally Alexander writes about the Fabian Women’s Group and speculates on their claim to speak for women in much worse circumstances than themselves:

There was no intellectual dogmatism in the Fabian Women’s Group. There were many divergent views, but the unifying theme was the fundamental acceptance of the economic basis of women’s subjection. They believed they could speak for the majority of women because their analysis of sex oppression was economic. In spite of middle class women’s wider opportunities for education and training, all women were disadvantaged on the labour market compared to men. While the grossest forms of exploitation were suffered by working class women, women in middle class occupations were also struggling under the burden of low wages, lack of skills, and very often had other people to support as well as themselves….And mothers in both classes were unable to support themselves or their children.

(Alexander 1979: xix)

If the power of the works discussed above lies in detailed description, Eleanor Rathbone’s work is characterized by trenchant analysis. Her most famous work, The Disinherited Family, was published in 1924; a new edition, with an epilogue by Sir William Beveridge and a new title, Family Allowances, was published in 1949. The work consisted of an economic analysis of the family and an argument for family allowances. While some aspects of Rathbone’s work are highly conservative to modern ears (her assumption that every man required a woman ‘to do his cooking, washing and housekeeping’ (Rathbone 1924/1949:15–16), her denial of allowances to unmarried parents (Rathbone 1924/ 1949:243), and her position on wages), there are many points that speak to current feminist thinking. Her arguments derive from a belief in equal pay for women. They involve a critique of the idea that women should be dependants (‘the very word suggests something parasitic, accessory, non-essential’: Rathbone 1924/ 1949: x); an exposure of the basis of power in relationships between men and women, which leads in a ‘minority of cases’ to violence and sexual exploitation as ‘part of the price they [women] are expected to pay for being kept by them [their husbands]’ (Rathbone 1924/1949:71); and a critique of legal and economic systems that set ‘no price on the labour of a wife and naturally have affected the wife’s sense of the value of her own time and strength’ (Rathbone 1924/1949:61).

Beveridge writes in the epilogue to the 1949 edition that when he read the book ‘as soon as it appeared in 1924’, he ‘suffered instant and total conversion’ (Rathbone 1924/1949:270). But Rathbone might not have recognized the case he made for family allowances in 1949—which concerned only the relationship between earnings and benefits (Rathbone 1924/1949:274). The reforms of the post-war era, then, were a very partial victory for feminists. Family allowances were paid to mothers, but went along with a reassertion of women’s dependence and domestic work. The allowances were introduced to maintain men’s work incentives, and they have never been enough to spell economic freedom for mothers and children.

Not all women were grateful for the benefits brought to them as housewives and dependants in the Beveridge scheme (Price 1979). In 1943 Abbott and Bompas of the Women’s Freedom League describe Beveridge’s ‘error’ as ‘denying to the married woman, rich or poor, housewife or paid worker, an independent personal status. From this error springs a crop of injustices, complications and difficulties’ (quoted in Price 1979:9–10). In criticizing the lower rate of benefits proposed for married women, they wrote:

This retrograde proposal creates (and is intended to create) the married woman as a class of pin money worker, whose work is of so little value to either the community or herself, that she need feel no responsibility for herself as a member of society towards a scheme which purports to bring national security for all citizens.

(quoted in Price 1979:9–10)

Thus these authors identified the way in which the state was perpetuating dependency in the home and its connection with low pay in the labour market, an argument that resurfaced thirty years later.

Thus analyses and evidence of women’s economic position in the family have long been available. Women as politicians and investigators have often taken social policy as a special subject. There has long been sufficient empirical study of women’s lives to give rise to unease about a system of welfare and thinking about welfare that took the harmony and security of family life for granted. Feminist analysis and accounts of women’s lives could both have informed debates in social policy and administration.

Feminist Critiques and the Academic Disciplines

Feminist analysis is most obviously about putting women in where they have been left out, about keeping women centre stage. But to do this suggests questions about the structures that left women out; about the way academic disciplines work; about language, concepts, methods, approaches, and subject areas. Such a quest leads to a profound rethinking. What we have at the end of such an investigation of social policy is a new understanding, not only of the way the welfare state deals with women, but also of social policy itself.

The lack of a specifically feminist analysis within the main traditions is partly a matter of political history. The main period of establishment and growth for social administration departments was the post-war era. This started a particularly barren period for feminism, when sociology began to reflect a cosy view of family life and social policy concerned itself with pressing women back into its confines. Traditions of social administration that were born in this climate of the 1940s did not have a vigorous feminist movement to draw on (but there was some critical writing that they missed), and feminism as a political movement did not re-emerge until the late 1960s.

The farmer wants a wife’, we sing, never The farmer wants a husband’. The language has no way of reversing the first statement or of equalizing the partners to indicate women’s agricultural work. Busily, the statisticians follow. Head of household: farmer; other members of household: wife and two children; ‘economic activity’ of women: nil. Ideas of women’s dependency are thus built into language use, and are operationalized by those who draw the world for us.

New terminology is not necessarily an improvement. A major area of empirical study of women’s lives in social policy hides under the title ‘one-parent families’ or, more recently ‘lone parents’. The term suggests that lone motherhood and lone fatherhood can be lumped together. The studies cannot help showing that gender counts. But these labels disguise the fact that most lone parents are women and that an overwhelming factor in their situation is lack of a male wage. They also affect the publication of statistics and the design of research. Much work about women in social pol...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Social policy: a feminist critique
• 2. Family, work and state
• 3. Caring
• 4. Education
• 5. Housing
• 6. Health
• 7. Poverty and social security
• 8. Conclusion
• References
• Index