Class and Gender Relations in the Welfare State: The Contradictory Dictates of the Norm of Female Autonomy

Delphine Serre

doi:10.3390/socsci6020048

Abstract

One debate among feminist scholars of the welfare state is whether it supports women’s subordination or emancipation. Since the 1980s, the French state apparatus has been experiencing a conflict of values, between feminism and familialism. The research presented here probed how these distinct institutional-level conceptions of gender might be manifest at the interactional level. Analysis is based on ethnographic research in four social service offices in France. The article explores the childrearing and behavioral norms that female social workers promote for mothers in regular contact with social services. It first shows how central the norm of female autonomy is in these social workers’ thinking, which in turn reveals their gendered expectations of the women they see, beyond their role of mother. It then demonstrates that this conception of female autonomy is closely tied to a class position, as it is a model from the middle classes. The article lastly examines how this unequal situation in terms of social class, but not of gender domination, influences professional practices relative to the working classes. Combining gender and class dimensions in analyzing interactions with the welfare state bureaucracy helps to identify the contradictions in the job of social worker, caught between the goal of emancipation and the mandate of social control.

Highlights

One debate among feminist scholars of the welfare state is whether the state reproduces or reduces gender inequalities—or in other terms, whether it supports women’s subordination or fosters their emancipation (Orloff 1996; Morel 2007)
While its specific expressions depend on particular gender representations and class moralities, the norm of autonomy is very influential in social workers’ cognitive work, which includes identifying family situations harmful to children
It has an impact on the kind of relationship that exists between social workers and the social services’ clientele

Summary

Introduction

One debate among feminist scholars of the welfare state is whether the state reproduces or reduces gender inequalities—or in other terms, whether it supports women’s subordination or fosters their emancipation (Orloff 1996; Morel 2007). My research on social workers (who were almost exclusively women in the studied offices) shows that there is a strong tension between the goal of emancipating women and the primacy given to their maternal role, but this tension is not solely a consequence of their internalized regimes and standards: it results from the very nature of the relationship between female state employees and the predominantly female social service clientele, a situation putting women of different social backgrounds in contact with each other. The social workers studied here work in school and neighborhood-based services, and they are charged with solving a variety of problems, including budgeting, housing, health care access, childrearing, and conjugal violence They are charged with protecting child welfare, which puts them in the position of having to evaluate whether the childrearing habits of the families they work with are acceptable or need to be corrected. I will show that this conception of female autonomy is closely tied to a class position, and go on to examine how this connection influences professional practices with the working classes

Female Social Workers and a Clientele of Mothers

A Socially Situated Model for Women’s Emancipation

The Fraught Intersection of Gender Proximity and Class Distance

Conclusions

Findings

Methods