ABSTRACT
Feminism and social policy have had rather an uneasy relationship since the late 1960s which in many ways parallels feminism's relation to the state. The social policy arena has been a crucial site in feminist struggles for change, particularly in the earlier years. Feminist demands for welfare provision were linked to more academic debates about the relation between distinctions of public and private, home and work, production and reproduction, and the precise meaning of the slogan 'the personal is political'. In social policy, it is the organising term for the subject's relation to scarce resources and their distribution. Social policy feminists have worked with concepts developed mostly by Marxists and Fabians who have paid little attention to gender. The Fabian social policy analysts have tried to sidestep the problems of treating needs as objectively existing or as absolute by introducing the notion of relative needs.
