Since the late 1980s, feminist scholarship has reconceptualised the equality–difference dilemma, which has plagued feminist activists and policy makers for many decades. They have been confronted with the claim that they should choose either difference or equality as the route to achieving gender equality, because the two should be regarded as logically incompatible. The dilemma has been closely interconnected with the gendered division of breadwinning and unpaid care work and the public–private split, which has been attached to it.

The rethinking of the dilemma has generated a broad consensus that it is neither universal nor static, and that...

In the beginning of the 20th century, marriage legislation was reformed in all the Nordic countries. Male privileges were abolished and equality was declared. Some changes in the old marriage laws had been accomplished already at the end of the 19th century, especially in Denmark and Norway, where the wives had attained their majority. Married women in all the countries had also been given the right to dispose of their own private property and income, but husbands maintained complete disposal of the common estate, as well as custody of the children. All this was changed during the reform process that...

Edel Saunte specialised in family law and functioned as barrister in the Danish High Courts. She was chair of the Danish Women’s Society 1936–41, and she was a member of the Social Democratic Party. When she wrote her 1951 article in the social democratic women’s magazine,Frie Kvinder, cited above, two official commission reports, appearing in 1948 and 1950, had unanimously recommended the preservation of the gendered tax system. But in spite of Saunte’s pointing out the irrationalities and injustices of the system, she did not argue for its total abolition. She advocated individualisation of taxes in regard to...

Should the state regulate family affairs? If so, how and under what circumstances? These questions have dominated family policy debates over many decades and in most states. In Sweden, many ideas on how ‘the family’ should be organised have been presented by intellectuals, politicians and experts over time, and reforms of family regulations have emerged since the early 1930s.

This chapter studies the development of Swedish family politics between the 1930s and the early 1970s. My point of departure is that the emergence of Swedish family politics is mainly based on interplay between (i) research on family and gender relations,...

From the late 1960s, Swedish family and gender equality politics has strongly emphasised individualised marriage ties, autonomy and economic independence. The explicit political objective has been to construct institutional means for creating a society ‘where every adult individual takes responsibility for herself or himself, without being dependent on other family members’ (SOU 1972:41, p 58). Family law has been reformed accordingly, and social rights and entitlements have increasingly become tied to the individual. This institutionalised individualism (cf Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, p 23) has promoted processes of individualisation and defamilialisation (cf Orloff, 1993; Lister, 2003). The aim of the presentation...

The Norwegian Law on Children and Parents (hereafter the Children’s Law) was passed in 1981. It replaced a body of laws from 1956 and introduced new ways of thinking about the family. Among other things, the law changed the parents’ rights to their children, revoking the mother’s automatic right to the custody of young children after divorce. About 2000 the parents’ rights to their children were again discussed in the political decision-making bodies. Again the discussion sprang from a concern about parents’ rights. Did the Children’s Law still incorrectly prioritise mothers’ rights over fathers’?

This chapter focuses on the discursive...

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s Danish family policies on parenthood underwent radical change. The change can be described in terms of equality – as equalising children born out of wedlock with children born in marriage or as equalising unmarried fathers with married fathers and with unmarried mothers. This is not the whole story, however. Beneath this process of equalisation a profoundly new perception of fatherhood and of the position of fathers vis-à-vis mothers evolved: in the 1960s political debates on parenthood constructed unmarried mothers as weak and unmarried fathers as powerful, but in the 1990s this construction was...

Feminist scholarship has asked important questions about multiculturalism and gender equality and about the relation between women’s rights and respect for cultural diversity. The objective of this chapter is to discuss the challenges from migration and multiculturalism in the context of the Nordic welfare states by looking at the tensions between gender equality and respect for diversity. The focus is on the gendered conflicts and tensions between gender and ethnicity in the Danish approach to citizenship.

The problem of multiculturalism and gender equality has only recently been addressed in the Nordic countries (Mørck, 2002; Siim, 2003; Andreassen, 2005). one inspiration...

This chapter offers a re-reading of the Swedish welfare state based on everyday experiences of women from the Latin American diaspora (Sawyer, 2000; Alinia, 2004) living in Sweden. Central to the chapter is to explore the specific experience of a group of migrant women at the crossroads between their transnational communities and the public policies of the Swedish welfare state.

Hegemonic trends in Swedish gender studies primarily focus on the conditions of women conceptualised as belonging to the nation. An under-theorisation of gendered racism(s) is common in these studies (Mulinari, 2001). The expansion and academic institutionalisation of queer and post-colonial...

For young Scandinavian women, certain central elements in the Scandinavian welfare states have been part of their upbringing – for example, equal opportunity policy and the role of public provision in day-care institutions – and they therefore expect equal citizenship rights for men and women. Gender and equality have been hotly debated topics throughout the lifetime of young Scandinavian women.

Although the young generation did not live through the female political mobilisation that followed the second wave of feminism from the 1960s through the 1980s, feminism has had an effect on young women’s gender-identity formation. Most of their mothers belong...

A common thread in this volume is the recurring challenge to and questioning of the official Scandinavian gender-equality discourses, as expressed at state level. Other threads I discuss in this chapter are a generational perspective between two generations of feminists and whether feminism has maintained some type of ‘intergenerational currency’ (Budgeon, 2001).

One such challenge is a debate initiated in the late 1990s by young, predominantly white middle-class feminists who are, generally speaking, the ‘daughters’ of the feminists in the women’s movement of the 1970s across the three countries. The ‘daughters’ have been brought up and socialised to believe that...