The Transformation of Conservative Gender Regimes

This paper discusses the relevance of Walby’s varieties of public gender regimes for understanding the transformation of conservative welfare states, which according to her comparisons, are either historically lagging (a case of incomplete transformation of domestic gender regime) or hybrids, located somewhere along the continuum of liberal and social-democratic types. Neither understanding is sufficiently adequate for capturing change, since classification as a domestic gender regimes ignores the advancement of women in the public sphere, while the latter tends to assume that reproductive labour has either migrated to the market economy as paid labour or become socialized. The paper approaches a re-conceptualization by looking at the intersection of commodification/decommodification of the paid employment of women with the familialization/defamilialization of their unpaid domestic and care labour. The analysis yields a more nuanced understanding of the transformation of conservative gender regimes and suggests alternatives to the dominant role of the state or the market in the social organization of care.