ABSTRACT
During the past three decades, women’s lives have changed dramatically in many Western countries, not least in Sweden. Most noticeable, women’s labor force participation has increased rapidly. This increase has paralleled a transformation of the labor market into a postindustrial one, characterized by a shrinking number of those employed in manufacturing and an increased proportion of people working in the service sector (health care, schooling, child care, etc.). These jobs have, in large part, been taken by women. The organization of reproductive work has thus been shifted over to the labor market and become both a condition for women’s waged labor and the most important labor market for women in Sweden.
