ABSTRACT
A gender dimension has been conspicuously absent from models and paradigms of comparative welfare-state research, from T. H. Marshall's concept of social citizenship to the recent welfare-state policy regimes of Walter Korpi and Gösta Esping-Andersen.1 The assumption in studies of welfare-state policy regimes is that class mobilization and class-political alliances appear as the most significant forces in the development of the institutional features of the Scandinavian welfare state—its universalism and the extension of social rights, even to women. Ironically, feminists who have cast the welfare state as patriarchal—reorganizing patriarchy from the family to the state, from dependent wife to the client or recipient of social-welfare services—have made similar assumptions about the marginal role of women's agency in the construction of the welfare state.2 One finds ideological and structural analyses of the gendered distribution of power in welfare states: the divorce of reproduction from production;3 the separation of the private sphere from the public;4 the shift from the housewife contract to the equality contract.5 Yet these conceptual frameworks do not tell us how these contracts were made and under what conditions, who acquiesced and who fought back.6
