ABSTRACT

Women’s relationship to welfare in the twentieth century has been complicated. Certainly there is no way that they can be fitted comfortably into prominent interpretations of welfare regimes and citizenship entitlements. For example, in response to T.H.Marshall’s post-war notion of a progression from (eighteenth-century) civil rights to (nineteenthcentury) political rights and (twentieth-century) social rights,1 it has to be pointed out that women gained social entitlements in the form of protective labour legislation long before they gained political enfranchisement. And in response to more recent attempts to capture the characteristics of, and the entitlements offered by, modern welfare regimes in terms of the relationship between paid work and welfare, it has to be pointed out that such a formulation misses the unpaid contribution that women have historically made to welfare.2 The discovery by late-twentieth-century economists that women tend to spend their time in more complicated ways than men-in terms of their mix of paid, unpaid and voluntary work, and (lack) of leisure time-also has implications for their welfare.3