Gender, social policy and the idea of the welfare state

The topic of gender and social policy makes sense only in relation to the historical project of the welfare state. It is time to re-evaluate this project not least because of how neoliberal policy settings have all but dis-established the welfare state. Even though the neoliberal political class has not successfully persuaded the public to abandon its historically acquired expectations of a welfare state, neoliberal governments at least in the USA, Australia, New Zealand and the UK have adopted a tri-pronged attack on the institutions of the welfare state: cut back and reduce the scope of welfare state services; stigmatize so-called welfare dependency, remove a rights-based conception of welfare benefits, and substitute publicly subsidized private decisions concerning the management of the vicissitudes of life for a collective system of social security; and take the core service institutions such as schooling, hospital and primary health care out of a public bureaucratic ethos and turn them over to market principles of business efficiency and consumer choice