The aim of this article is to give an overview of gender equality policy in Sweden

Sweden has been considered both `worker friendly' and `women friendly'. Both workers and women have called upon the welfare state to support their demands and they have also had some of their requests granted. Feminists' oldest and most important demand has been economic independence from men and the capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household including children.1 The article investigates whether women were closer to these goals in Sweden in the 1990s than in the 1970s, and whether this was achieved by commodification (paid work) and/or decommodification (transfers from the welfare state). The result is that women as a whole have become more economically independent of men in families, thanks to paid work, and that lone mothers' capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household has been upheld by transfers from the welfare state. However, the capacity of lone mothers to support themselves and their children through paid work has decreased. Overall, by the 1990s, women in Sweden were more economically independent from men than they had been in the 1970s. Similarly women's capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household had become greater, however, this is through higher transfers, not higher earnings from the labour market.

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The Swedish welfare state is usually considered "woman friendly." It treats mothers, including single mothers, as workers and offers them high quality public child care. Feminist typologies often use paid work as the lens through which to look at welfare states. Jane Jenson, however, proposes that we think seriously about care in typologies of welfare states. The aim of this article is to take the child care arrangements of working mothers seriously and the empirical concern is historical. While most people believe that the expansion of public child care in Sweden enabled mothers to become workers, it could also be argued- looking through the lens of care- that new public policies enabled women workers to become caregivers.Child Care, Foster Children, Foster Mothers, Welfare States, Women's Work,

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