The Welfare state is a central location of normative gendered understandings which must be examined and challenged. Bringing critical female perspectives exposes the inequalities in current fiscal redistribution.

The welfare state represents a key interface between economic and political systems and forms of gender relations and power. Its development was premised on particular forms of economy (industrial capitalism), polity (andrarchies, that is, government by men), family (heterosexual nuclear models) and division of labour (male breadwinner) that resulted in women’s exclusion from full participation in the public sphere. Welfare states and associated notions of citizenship based on an ideal male worker reinforced women’s financial dependence on men by limiting their social rights and ability to make claims to public resources. Women’s lesser social rights often came together with weaker substantive political rights and represented a barrier to their full citizenship. By focusing on state-market relations and social provision relating to the sphere of production, mainstream analyses of welfare states were also cast in these masculine principles – although, framed in formally gender neutral terms –which relegated women and gender to obscurity. In this context, the emergence of research on gender and the welfare state constituted an important reorientation. First, feminists broadened notions of social provision to also include measures related to reproduction (Shaver 1994; Lewis 1992) and expanded the notion of social citizenship to incorporate care (Knijn and Kremer, 1997; Lister, 1997; Siim, 2000). They called attention to the family and its relationship with the state and the market in the production of public welfare (Daly and Lewis, 2000; Orloff 1993). They have been at the forefront in bringing in the influence of ideas, discourses and ideologies alongside political ideologies (Sainsbury, 1996; Duncan and Edwards, 1999; Lewis, 1992). They revealed the importance of gender in shaping the politics of welfare states (Sainsbury, 1999; Koven and Michel, 1993; O’Connor et al. 1999; Skocpol, 1992). So many and multifaceted have been feminist contributions to the study of welfare states that they have fundamentally reshaped the key analytical constructs used in its analysis. Feminist analysis of welfare states has now established itself as a vibrant area of research, and gender concepts and perspectives have become increasingly part of the everyday language with which researchers and policy-makers talk about social policy. Growing political concerns about women’s employment, work-family reconciliation, care deficits, ageing populations and children’s outcomes have also contributed to put gender high on the research agenda, and instances of collaboration between gender and non-gender scholars are increasingly observable (Orloff and Palier, 2009; Béland and Mahon, 2016). The distance between feminist and mainstream academic communities is now apparently smaller, and the value of gender perspectives is clearly recognized by mainstream researchers. Nonetheless, notions of care, dependency and reproduction still hold an ambiguous place in mainstream analyses (Orloff, 2009a). Issues about the place and respective value of care and paid work create divisions among feminist welfare state scholars. At the core of this literature is a strong normative concern about altering the unequal gendered division of labour, but there is also disagreement about the best way in which this is to be achieved. For many feminists paid work, and the economic independence it provides, is the precondition of women’s liberation (Orloff, 1993). Yet, others insist that gender equality requires that social rights should be attached to care (Knijn and Kremer, 1997). Much of the history of gender and welfare state analysis can be characterized as a pendulum oscillating between those different principles. As Ruth Lister (1997: 178) writes, ‘we are torn between wanting to validate and support, through some form of income maintenance provision, the caring work for which women still take the main responsibility in the private sphere and to liberate them from this responsibility so that they can achieve economic and political autonomy in the public sphere’. The article provides an overview of comparative research on gender relations and the welfare state through the lens of the tensions between care and paid work. First, we discuss how the intellectual enterprise of gendering welfare state analysis emerged and how it shifted feminist views of the welfare state. Secondly, we devote major attention to the comparative turn in feminist analysis of welfare states, the research agenda it established and the major reorientation it produced on mainstream studies. In sections three and four, we turn to the centrality of care in feminist theorizing on the welfare state and the normative perspectives that have tried to overcome the tensions between care and paid work as alternative routes to gender equality. In section five, we illustrate how this tension has shaped women political activity in the welfare state. We conclude by identifying the emerging challenges which need to be addressed by future research. 2. Bringing Women and Gender In To bring gender into the analysis feminist scholars initially focused on women and their relationships to the welfare state. A prevailing view maintained that women were the objects of policy. Women’s relationship to the welfare state was characterized as one of dependency, and in its most extreme form, the state was an instrument of women’s oppression (Wilson 1977). Other analytical perspectives, adopting ‘claims’ and ‘statuses’ as starting points, transformed women into actors – as claimants, beneficiaries, employees and citizens (Peattie and Rein 1983; Hernes 1987). Women’s relationship to the welfare state as mothers was also examined. In short, the strategy of focusing on women made women visible in the welfare state where they previously were invisible. Including women made it possible to compare women and men, which revealed a gender division of welfare and differentiation in social rights. Breaking down the poor by gender disclosed the feminization of poverty (Pearce 1978). This phenomenon reflected the duality of the welfare system that differentiated between women and men in terms of type of social entitlement, benefit levels, political legitimacy of social rights, and administrative intrusion in private lives (Nelson 1990). Finally, the strategy of bringing women into the analysis exposed the male bias in assumptions, concepts and theories. A case in point is T.H. Marshall’s social citizenship (1950), one of the most important concepts in the welfare state literature. The concept of social citizenship put social rights on a par with civil and political rights in attaining full citizenship, and Marshall underlined that social rights had the potential to strengthen the capacity to exercise political rights. Feminists criticized Marshall’s description of the evolution of civil, political and social rights on the grounds that it did not fit women’s historical experience (Hernes 1987: 27). Especially damaging to women’s social citizenship was that Marshall’s conceptualization upheld a division between the public and private spheres (Pateman 1988). Since being in the public sphere was for Marshall the precondition for social rights, women in the private sphere were denied equal rights, and their rights were derived from their husband’s rights and activities in the public sphere.