ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the relationship between the welfare state and working mothers. It introduces the concept that motherhood has both earner and carer aspects. The "earner" refers to mothers' economic activities and material provision, the "carer" to primary socialization, nurturing, and rearing. The chapter emphasizes the need to transcend models of "work" and "family" that ignore or marginalize the interrelationship of production and social reproduction. It explains the Economic Community member states more as a contrast than as a direct comparison, to illustrate both similarity and difference in policy approaches to the "new" labour, that is, those mothers who combine wage work and parental responsibility for young children. The welfare state created in the post Second World War period in Scandinavia - the "Scandinavian model" - was shaped during a period of massive social democratic influence. The Scandinavian societies in the 1970s underwent remarkable social change.
