Publisher's Synopsis
This book is a fresh contribution to the feminist welfare state debate as far as caring is concerned. By using the case of municipal homemakers in Finland, the author analyzes the relation between women and the ôcaring state.ö The analysis addresses the welfare state formation, beneficial for women and built by women in alliance with leftist men, sympathetic to womenÆs issues. The Finnish experience differs from any other Western models of home help. In Finland, municipal homemakers are well trained, permanently promoted into their public employee positions and they earn fixed monthly salaries. The homemaking position is not a case of female reserve labour but a life-long occupation. The emergence and development of the occupation is analyzed from a critical perspective, differentiating between ideologies and actual practices in creation of this public caring reform. However, the gendered nature of caring work in the public sphere also in the Nordic countries comes out clearly: it is a womanÆs work with womenÆs wage and low status in spite of high unionization. The welfare state is contradictory to women.
