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 paper examines the implications of welfare reform for the meaning of social citizenship in Australia. Australian welfare reform has been under way since the late s, and reflects the themes of activity and participation that are shaping social policy in many advanced industrial nations. The paper suggests that Australian welfare reform is following a liberal trajectory of change which places a continuing emphasis on market and family as the preferred institutions for social support with a newly salient appeal to moral ideas about the responsibility of citizens to be self-sustaining. The paper argues that welfare is being transformed from a limited social right to support provided on condition, and from treating the claimant as a sovereign individual to a subject of paternalistic supervision. Together, these changes are redefining the meaning of equality in Australian social citizenship.

This article is concerned with questions about the amount of support given by welfare states towards the maintenance of a wife engaged in housework and child care. It compares the value of the support supplied by the tax/benefit packages of 15 countries. The article defines support for wifely labour as the difference between the net disposable income of a single person and a couple with the same earnings. In analysing the data, three models are used: the “traditional” model where the wife is economically dependent on her husband; the “modern” model where the wife remains outside the labour market while she has young children; and the “dual breadwinner” model where the mother of young children is in full‐ or part‐time employment. Much of the analysis is concerned with patterns of social policy in which support for wives is associated with support for children. While the evidence shows that welfare states do provide support to wives, both with and without young children and engaged in paid as well as unpaid work, the levels of support vary greatly between welfare states. The variations are not associated with the generally discussed categorizations of welfare state types.

The postwar expansion of many welfare states has seen 'reproduction going public', the development of social policies making reproduction a public and political concern. Though the phrase 'going public' has been applied most commonly to care work, it also describes the politicisation of needs associated with biological reproduction. The present paper is concerned with one such service, abortion, and what it can tell us about the development of the welfare state. The paper focuses on a particular, 'liberal' type of the welfare state found in countries sharing the combined heritages of the British common law tradition and welfare residual ism maintaining the privacy of market and family. This paper explores the interplay of abortion rights, politics and services in the liberal welfare states of Australia, Britain, Canada and the United States. It considers the relationship between liberalism and gender and the distinction between 'body rights' and 'social rights'. The availability of abortion is examined in the light of decommodification and social stratification. Civil and social rights to abortion in each of the countries surveyed have been generated within distinctive political environments, each giving direct representation to gender, religion and professional interest. The form these rights have taken, however, also appears to have been shaped by the ideologies and institutional forms of the broader social policy content. It should be nOTed, nevertheless, that Ringen (1991) now rejects the notion that the Scandinavian welfare states represent a common type.

This article reviews the issues involved in policy choices with respect to universality and selectivity in income support to older people. It considers four questions: the practical meaning of universality and selectivity in the income support systems of various countries, the effectiveness of universal and selective arrangements in the alleviation of poverty among this group, the role of universal and selective arrangements in redistributing income among elderly people and the relative generosity of universal and selective arrangements. The article draws on data from the ‘second wave’ of the Luxembourg Income Study for six countries: Australia, (West) Germany, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States, concerning the incomes of elderly couples and single (non-married) women. It concludes that while selective income support arrangements achieve greater redistribution in favour of low income elderly people for the same expenditure than do universal ones, selective arrangements do not necessarily perform better in other respects, and, in particular, are associated with low levels of benefit income.