ABSTRACT
Those recent changes in Western European countries which can be characterised (perhaps caricatured) as a change from Fordist industrial to post-Fordist service societies have also been accompanied by changes in the overall division of labour and in processes of democratisation. These processes have therefore also created new spaces for change in gender relations. Traditional forms of gender inequality have been weakened or restructured, although, as this book has shown, there were considerable differences between European countries. This comparative difference in change in gender structures over the last few decades provides the main focus of this chapter. The central question is how such change, and how differences in these changes, can be explained. I distinguish here between three gender structures: (1) the gender division of labour, (2) power relations between women and men, and (3) sexual and emotional relations between women and men (Connell 1987). The three gender structures are mutually interrelated, but at the same time are also relatively autonomous. For instance, a specific form of the gender division of labour is not automatically connected with a specific kind of power relations between women and men. Similarly, it seems that the degree to which men are violent against women in any country is in part independent of the gender division of labour (Chapter 7, this volume). These social structures are also reproduced by the social practices of individuals and, under certain conditions, are thus subject to change, as we have experienced over the last few decades.
