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The 1990s have seen dramatic restructuring of state social provision in the US, the UK, Canada and Australia. This has occurred largely because of the rise of market liberalism, which challenges the role of the state. This important book examines the impact of changes in social policy regimes on gender roles and relations. Structured thematically and systematically comparative, it analyses three key policy areas: labor markets, income maintenance and reproductive rights. Largely driven by issues of equality, it considers the role of the state as a site for gender and sexual politics at a time when primacy is given to the market, developing an argument about social citizenship in the process. Eminent scholars in the field, Julia O'Connor, Ann Orloff and Sheila Shaver make a landmark contribution to debates about social policy and gender relations in this era of economic restructuring and deregulation.
This book defends progressive political interventions to erode the gendered division of labor as legitimate exercises of coercive political power. The gendered division of labor is widely regarded as the linchpin of gender injustice. The process of gender equalization in domestic and paid labor allocations has stalled, and a growing number of scholars argue that, absent political intervention, further eroding of the gendered division of labor will not be forthcoming anytime soon. Certain political interventions could jumpstart the stalled gender revolution, but beyond their prospects for effectiveness, such interventions stand in need of another kind of justification. In a diverse, liberal state, reasonable citizens will disagree about what makes for a good life and a good society. Because a fundamental commitment of liberalism is to limit political intrusion into the lives of citizens and allow considerable space for those citizens to act on their own conceptions of the good, questions of legitimacy arise. Legitimacy concerns the constraints we must abide by as we seek collective political solutions to our shared social problems, given that we will disagree, reasonably, both about what constitutes a problem and about what costs we should be willing to incur to fix it. The interventions in question would effectively subsidize gender egalitarian lifestyles at a cost to those who prefer to maintain a traditional gendered division of labor. In a pluralistic, liberal society where many citizens reasonably resist the feminist agenda, can we legitimately use scarce public resources to finance coercive interventions to subsidize gender egalitarianism? This book argues that they can, and moreover, that they can even by the lights of political liberalism, a particularly demanding theory of liberal legitimacy.
Gender equality has been one of the defining projects of European welfarestates. It has proven an elusive goal, not just because of political opposition but also due to a lack of clarity in how to best frame equality and take account of family-related considerations. This wide-ranging book assembles the most pertinent literature and evidence to provide a critical understanding of how contemporary state policies engage with gender inequalities.
This Open Access book explains a new type of political order that emerged in Hungary in 2010: a form of authoritarian capitalism with an anti-liberal political and social agenda. Eva Fodor analyzes an important part of this agenda that directly targets gender relations through a set of policies, political practice and discourse—what she calls “carefare.” The book reveals how this is the anti-liberal response to the crisis-of-care problem and establishes how a state carefare regime disciplines women into doing an increasing amount of paid and unpaid work without fair remuneration. Fodor analyzes elements of this regime in depth and contrasts it to other social policy ideal-types, demonstrating how carefare is not only a set of policies targeting women, but an integral element of anti-liberal rule that can be seen emerging globally.
In the last two decades public policies have reflected a drive for accelerated global economic integration ("globalization"), associated with greater economic liberalization. The outcomes have been largely disappointing, even in the estimate of their designers. Rural livelihoods have become more insecure, and the expected growth has rarely materialized. Insecurity is also etched into the growth of informal economies across the world. Yet the economic policy agenda that has been so adverse to many people around the world has also provided new opportunities to some social groups, including some low-income women. In response to widespread discontent with the liberalization agenda, more attention is now being given to social policies and governance issues, viewed as necessary if globalization is to be "tamed" and "embedded". The contributors to this volume address key issues and questions such as whether states have the capacity to remedy the social distress unleashed by liberalization in the absence of any major revision of their macroeconomic policies and whether the proposed social policy reforms can redress gender-based inequalities in access to resources and power.
Extensive welfare, law and policy reforms characterised the making and unmaking of Keynesian states in the twentieth century. This collection highlights the gendered nature of these regulatory shifts and, specifically, the roles played by women as reformers, welfare workers and welfare recipients, in the development of welfare states historically. The contributors are leading feminist socio-legal scholars from a range of disciplines in Canada, the United States and Israel. Collectively, their analyses of women, law and poverty speak to long-standing and ongoing feminist concerns: the importance of historically informed research, the relevance of women's agency and resistance to the experience of inequality and injustice, the specificity of the experience of poor women and poor mothers, the implications of changes to social policy, and the possibilities for social change. Such analyses are particularly timely as the devastation of neo-liberalism becomes increasingly obvious. The current world crisis of capitalism is a defining moment for liberal states – a global catastrophe that concomitantly creates a window of opportunity for critical scholars and activists to reframe debates about social welfare, work, and equality, and to reinsert the discourse of social justice into the public consciousness and political agendae of liberal democracies.
Using a feminist political economy approach, contributors document the impact of current socio-economic policies on states, markets, households, and communities. Relying on impressive empirical research, they argue that women bear the costs of and responsibility for care-giving and show that the theoretical framework provided by feminist analyses of social reproduction not only corrects the gender-blindness of most economic theories but suggests an alternative that places care-giving at its centre. In this illuminating study, they challenge feminist scholars to re-engage with materialism and political economy to engage with feminism.
Contributors include Sedef Arat-Koç (Ryerson), Kate Bezanson (Brock), Susan Braedley, (PhD candidate, York), Barbara Cameron (York), Marcia Cohen (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, BC), Marjorie Griffin Cohen (Simon Fraser), Bonnie Fox (Toronto), Meg Luxton (York), Leah F. Vosko (York), and Alice de Wolff (Toronto-based researcher and activist).
Recent years have seen a shift in the international development agenda in the direction of a greater emphasis on rights and democracy. While this has brought many positive changes in women's rights and political representation, in much of the world these advances were not matched by increases in social justice. Rising income inequalities, coupled with widespread poverty in many countries, have been accompanied by record levels of crime and violence. Meanwhile the global shift in the consensus over the role of the state in welfare provision has in many contexts entailed the down-sizing of public services and the re-allocation of service delivery to commercial interests, charitable groups, NGOs and households. Gender Justice, Development, and Rights reflects on this ambivalent record, and on the significance accorded in international development policy to rights and democracy in the post-Cold War era. Key items on the contemporary policy agenda-neo-liberal economic and social policies; democracy; and multiculturalism-are addressed here by leading scholars and regional specialists through theoretical reflections and detailed case studies. Together they constitute a collection which casts contemporary liberalism in a distinctive light by applying a gender perspective to the analysis of political and policy processes. Case studies from Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Middle East, East-Central Europe, South and South-east Asia contribute a cross-cultural dimension to the analysis of contemporary liberalism-the dominant value system in the modern world-and how it exists, and is resisted, in developing and post-transition societies.