Fathers, Welfare and Gender

This paper examines macro-level social policy influences on national variations in men’s roles as fathers across different ‘worlds of welfare’. It begins by identifying a paradox. On the one hand, the paper illustrates that the mid-1970s represented a historical turning point in social policy responses to the changing nature of fatherhood. On the other hand, national variations in the social politics of fatherhood have been largely overlooked by comparative welfare state analysis, with the notable exception of Hobson et al (2002), who proposed a typology of ‘policy regimes and fatherhood regimes’. The paper addresses this paradox by locating fatherhood as a central concern of what Orloff (2010) identified as the “two intellectual big bangs” of social policy comparison: namely ‘gender studies’ and ‘welfare regime analysis”. It does so through historical analysis of the social policy treatment of fathers and non-resident fathers in selected Nordic, Anglo-Saxon and East-Asian regimes and at the meta-level of European Union parental leave and gender equality directives. The analysis serves to illustrate the idea of a continuum of ‘two worlds’ of father regimes, typified at one end by the gender-egalitarian ‘father friendly’ regime in Sweden and at the other end by the targeted regime in the USA, which impacts most forcefully on a residuum of non-maintenance paying fathers. The paper concludes by discussing whether and how welfare states served to erode the patriarchal power of fathers during what Therborn (2004) identified as the long process of ‘de-patriarchalisation’, and by considering to what extent we are witnessing a feminist backlash in new discourses of re-patriarchalisation.

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