ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how gender research on welfare states has been critiqued and developed by ethnic minority, lesbian and disabled feminist writers and activists. It considers research on feminist activism and the welfare state as an important theoretical and empirical backdrop to our own research. Feminist literature on welfare states in the 1990s provided a critique of academic models that have failed to capture their gendered nature. The restructuring of public services that epitomises neo-liberal policy has touched the Scandinavian states in the form of marketisation and new public management. One of the advantages of developing defined processes and structures to support feminist activity within the state is the ability to extend these beyond the nation state to build international networks. When conditions at home are bleak for feminism, transnational protocols and funding programmes can provide leverage for developing local and national machinery for implementing gender equality.
