Tables 1-10

The challenges of today

The overall objective of this book is to analyse the meanings of gender that underpin policies for the achievement of gender equality in the Scandinavian welfare states, ie Denmark, Norway and Sweden. The book focuses on similarities as well as differences between the countries and discusses the relevance of talking about a Nordic model. Different meanings of gender equality and the relationship between discourse and practice are analysed. The book is interdisciplinary and includes historical perspectives and comparative analyses. Its primary focus is on reforms and legislation related to the family, so crucial to the understanding of the welfare state. The book is policy oriented, but is also directed towards a broader discourse, and it focuses on the relationship between equality policy and family policy in the Scandinavian countries. The ambition of gender equality has been more explicitly expressed and applied in the Scandinavian countries than in other countries of Europe. But gender equality in the early 20th century to a great extent meant equality based on gender difference. The book raises the question whether the hallmark of the Scandinavian welfare model is a special combination of gender equality and gender differentiation. It stresses the importance of viewing the concept of equality in its historical context and investigates the changing meanings of equality based on sameness and/or gender difference.

The analysis takes its point of departure in a period when gender-equality policies were formulated for the first time. Gender equality – in the sense of formal equal rights – had already achieved increasing political support in the Nordic countries during the last decades of the 19th century, and around 1920 women had obtained formal equal rights with men in terms of education and government posts, voting and political positions. Between 1909 and 1929 the marriage legislation in all Nordic countries was also thoroughly reformed, modernising the institution of marriage, enhancing women's individual rights and ending the husband's legal power over his wife. The reformed legislation also gave married women the obligation to provide for the family, which was unique, as seen in a European perspective, and questions the application of a male-breadwinner model to this formative period of the Scandinavian welfare states.

This book has been developed within the framework of the research project ‘Gender Equality and Welfare Politics in Scandinavia’, which was part of the Welfare Research Programme (Velferdsforskningsprogrammet) run by the Nordic Council of Ministers for the period 2000–05. Initially, we would like to express our gratitude towards the Council for its generous funding of the project, funds primarily used as research grants, and sponsoring of recurrent working seminars, which made Scandinavian cooperation and comparison possible. We want to underline that the book to a great extent is a collective product, and to direct our sincere appreciation to all participants for interesting discussions and very good cooperation. We are also very pleased and grateful that two well-known welfare researchers kindly agreed to comment on the book: Keith Pringle, who also attended our final working seminar, and Ruth Lister, who read and commented afterwards. You have both been of great help! Annette Andersen has been of invaluable assistance in the last phase of the project, proofreading and adapting the entire manuscript to the house style of The Policy Press. Thank you very much indeed, Annette! Last but not least, it has been a pleasure working with The Policy Press. We really appreciate the fact that we always met with professional treatment, and in a most personal and friendly manner.

Introduction

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 turned upside down. The unmarried father was now portrayed as a victim of discrimination, as the gender most in need of equality. And whereas, in contrast to the mother, the father of the 1960s was primarily a socio-economic and not a socio-emotional or biological figure, the main characteristic of the ‘new father’ of the 1990s (see Annfelt, Chapter Six) was his biological sex.

This chapter analyses the changes in Danish family legislation on custody and visiting rights in respect of children after divorce or partnership break-up, focusing on political discourses on fatherhood and motherhood, gender and equality. The primary sources are parliamentary documents that disclose a clear shift of opinion both within the bourgeois parties and within the parties on the left in Parliament. In the 1960s and 1970s the greatest defenders of the rights of unmarried mothers were parties on the left, but by the 1980s the bourgeois parties came to provide the strongest defence of single mothers’ rights against fathers’ claims to children born out of wedlock. And whereas through the 1980s the preservation of the institution of marriage and the heterosexual family was the primary objective of the bourgeois parties, by the 1990s all political parties agreed that the first obligation of Parliament was to ensure a child's right to both parents, whether the parents were formally married or not.

From the late 1960s the hegemony of the heterosexual family started to dissolve, and the foundation of the Nordic marriage laws of the 1920s (see Carlsson Wetterberg and Melby, Chapter Two) began to quake.

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 legal responsibilities, but preservation of the principle of joint taxation of spouses. The question is, why?

Joint taxation of spouses and the status of the husband as head of the household was part of the first income and capital tax law in Denmark, enacted in 1903. Moreover, a revised tax law in 1922 assigned to the married man the status of family provider – in outright contradiction to the 1925 Marriage Act, which formally equalised spouses and stated the mutual obligation of wife and husband to provide for the family.