MorganAndZippel_PaidToCare - K IMBERLY J MORGAN KATHRIN...

KIMBERLY J. MORGAN
KATHRIN ZIPPEL
Paid to Care: The Origins
and Effects of Care Leave
Policies in Western Europe
Abstract
A number of European countries have adopted paid child care
leaves and allowances in the name of parental choice and valuing
care. We examine the origins and consequences of these policies in
Austria, Finland, France, Germany, and Norway. Care leave poli-
cies have been politically attractive to center-right governments
seeking to fight unemployment, contain spending on child care, and
appeal to parents struggling to balance work and family. Yet given
the low benefits provided by these programs, choices for parents
remain deeply constrained by gender and class. These policies also
are likely to reinforce the traditional division of care work in the
home. Temporary homemaking is being institutionalized as the
norm for many women, who face potentially negative consequences
for their earnings and long-term employment trajectories.
While the United States has been busy in the past ten years
dismantling its only system of public income supports for mothers,
many countries in Western Europe have gone in the opposite direc-
tion. In recent years, governments have created two- or three-year
job leaves and/or child-rearing benefits that allow parents (almost
entirely mothers) of young children to care for their own children at
home and receive public funds to support them. These policies have
been adopted in the name of valuing care work in the home and
Social Politics Spring 2003
 2003 Oxford University Press DOI: 10.1093/sp/jxg004

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Morgan and Zippel
providing more choices for parents dealing with work–family con-
flicts. The development of these policies has thus been part of larger
debates in European societies over how best to reconcile work and
family life.
Care leaves and child-rearing benefits should be of interest to fem-
inist students of the welfare state who have been engaged in debates
over how public policy should treat caregivers and caregiving. There
is now a large literature on the meaning of care and its heavily gen-
dered dimensions, and on how to analyze the welfare state through
the lens of care (Knijn and Ungerson 1997; Jenson and Sineau 2001;
Meyer 2000). In both the public and private spheres, women perform
most of the care work, which is usually either not remunerated or
low-paid. Debates over how to improve this situation have tapped
more fundamental questions about the goals of feminist theorizing
and political action, given the difference-equality dilemma. For dif-
ference feminists, policies rooted in an assumption of male and fe-
male equality integrate women into the public sphere on male terms
and impose unrealistic assumptions onto the reality of most women’s
lives. Yet for equality feminists, difference-based policies perpetuate
essentialist norms and existing stereotypes (Fraser 1994; Mansbridge
1990). Thus, although many feminists have assailed domestic labor
as unpleasant, unfairly distributed between men and women, and a