ABSTRACT
The emergence of a modern welfare state in post—war Europe has connected with the changing status of citizenship. Peter Baldwin describes the Beveridgean welfare state as the social citizenship welfare state. Feminist research has produces many stories of the welfare state that differ from those of mainstream research. The first to discover subordinated women is the Anglo—American debate that was much inspired by socialist feminism. The modern welfare state is a complex structure whose key principles can be captures in the concepts of the social insurance state and social service state. The introduction of social insurance can be seen as an integral part of the process of modernization in which men attempted to break loose from the medieval view of society as something like family writ large: hierarchical, paternalist and communal. The most radical day—care reform in the world may well be dismantles in Finland in the future; at least it seems that social service rights will not be expands.
