Who Cares?: Women's Work, Childcare, and Welfare State Redesign

Elaine G. Porter is an associate professor of sociology at Laurentian
University.

Given the importance of “context, context, context” for traversing
the social policy terrain, this book is a prime location. Individual
chapters summarize the policy debates within Belgium, France, Italy,
Sweden, and the European Union within the framework provided by the
editors. Jenson and Sineau have set out the task as no less than
determining how closely women’s employment has become a citizenship
right using accessibility to “safe, reliable, and publicly financed
childcare” as the crucible.

The book’s contributors seek to show how the arguments of the
egalitarian groups within these countries have fared as the business
agenda of fiscal restraint gained ascendancy in the 1980s. A variety of
national and transnational policy reports serve as the basis for the
analyses of social policy decision-making and policy effects. These
discussions fully recognize the ways in which family policies and
programs have been and continue to be indirect and represent political
compromises. Although the European Union ultimately adopted a weak and
belated parental leave policy in 1996, its future role is predicted to
be that of facilitator and financier of innovative social programs. The
long, convoluted political route taken by the maternal-leave legislation
begins with its birth as an article in the 1989 Social Charter stemming
from the recommendations of the European Childcare Network.

There is much to care about in a book on policy that also considers the
extent to which family behavior and policy are interdependent. Among its
merits is the editors’ chapter comparing child-care programs, which
demonstrates the folly of unidimensional comparisons. The editors’
first two and last two chapters might best be read before the individual
country and EU case studies, since they provide a sense of the general
directions of trade-offs over time. The message: European welfare states
remain but cannot be taken for granted.