Introduction

Public policy, particularly in most Western industrial nations and especially in the United States, presumes not to reach into the familial arrangements of dependency work (except in exceptional circumstances of neglect and abuse). This is consonant with the liberal distinction between the public and private domain, which is nowhere more pro­ nounced than in the United States. Democratic welfare states have moved to address a number of dependency concerns, either in their efforts to move to a more sexually egalitarian model-as in Sweden, where sex equality is an explicit aim of some welfare policies-or to promote pronatalist policies-as in the case of France and Germany.