Women's Organizing and Public Policy in Canada and Sweden

Margaret Kechnie, who teaches in the Women’s Studies Program at
Laurentian University, is the co-editor of Changing Lives: Women in
Northern Ontario.

The editors of this book have brought together a number of scholars from
Canada and Sweden for the purposes of comparing public policy in the two
countries and looking at the various ways in which women have organized
to both challenge and redefine those policies. The collaborators worked
in pairs (one from each country); they discovered that while Canada and
Sweden have many policies that are similar, the process through which
those policies are arrived at is often quite different.

Linda Briskin’s opening chapter, “Mapping Women’s Organizing in
Sweden and Canada: Some Thematic Considerations,” sets the tone for
the book. By “mapping,” Briskin means the ability to place women’s
organizing efforts within a social, political, and economic context.
Mapping allows us to recognize the connections between a number of
different organizing contexts, as well as the degree to which conditions
in one context affect conditions in another. Rianne Mahon uses a mapping
framework in “Both Wage Earner and Mother: Women’s Organizing and
Childcare Policy in Sweden and Canada.” The central conclusion of
Mahon’s paper is that while the Swedish welfare state has developed
child-care policies that have attempted to address gender and class
inequalities, the policies of the liberal welfare state in Canada have
served to reinforce such inequalities.

For feminists and other scholars interested in organizing for change,
Briskin and Eliasson’s work should not be overlooked.