Between two worlds of father politics: USA or Sweden? 9781784991609

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Introduction
Welfare, gender and fatherhood
The American model: state-enforced agency
The Swedish model: state-supported agency
The United Kingdom: full-time breadwinners and part-time fathers
Ireland: ‘vulnerable fathers’, invisible fatherhood
Fatherhood and the European Union
Crystallising the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan and patriarchal decline in China
Individualisation and two varieties of patriarchy and fatherhood
Bibliography
Index

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Between two worlds of father politics

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Between two worlds of father politics USA or Sweden?

Michael Rush

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Michael Rush 2015 The right of Michael Rush to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN

978 0 7190 9189 6 hardback

First published 2015 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing

Contents

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Introduction page 1 Welfare, gender and fatherhood 10 The American model: state-enforced agency 29 The Swedish model: state-supported agency 46 The United Kingdom: full-time breadwinners and part-time fathers 64 Ireland: ‘vulnerable fathers’, invisible fatherhood 74 Fatherhood and the European Union 88 Crystallising the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan and patriarchal decline in China 104 Individualisation and two varieties of patriarchy and fatherhood 120 Bibliography Index

141 158

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Introduction

The central hypothesis of the ‘two worlds’ model is that ways of thinking about fatherhood are central to social policy and gender relations, and that the USA and Sweden represent divergent archetypes. The comparative analytical framework of the ‘two worlds’ of fatherhood model illustrates and contrasts how ways of thinking about fatherhood in Sweden and the USA produced divergent social policy outputs and outcomes. The two regimes model presents the USA and Sweden as divergent and internationally influential ‘fatherhood regimes’. The two regimes model illustrates that the growth of comparative welfare and gender studies from the early 1990s largely ignored the treatment of fathers by social policy. The two regimes model also illustrates that the epochal decline of patriarchy, beginning with the reform of patriarchal marriage laws in the early twentieth century, was a prerequisite to welfare regime development, and the emergence of post-patriarchal welfare state infrastructures from the mid-1970s. The analysis of transnational academic debates, social commentary and public policy debates illustrates that Sweden and the USA represent divergent archetypes with competing influence on the international stage. The analysis shows that the American model upheld patriarchal-familism, marriage and male-breadwinning through a combination of laissez-faire and punitive approaches to fatherhood. On the other hand, the Swedish model dismantled patriarchy and revolutionised the gender relations of parenting. The Swedish model advanced the revolution in the social politics of fatherhood and parenting through the individualisation and non-transferability of parental benefits, including child support and parental leave. The analysis illustrates strong evidence of American influence on fatherhood debates and welfare ideologies in Great Britain and Ireland, whereas there was strong evidence of Swedish influences on social policy thinking in the European Union and Japan. In Sweden, where ‘father-friendly’ social policies were well developed, and in EU-level social policy debates, there was an emphasis on increasing father-involvement as a means of reducing gender inequality in families and labour markets, through the development of parental leave policies. Great Britain implemented a variant of the American model of child support, but with growing support among the epistemological community for a Nordic model of

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Between two worlds of father politics

parental leave. In the case of China, Confucian fatherhood was overturned by the Chinese Communist Revolution of 1949, but the regulation of reproduction within marriage by the Communist Party, and the privatisation of housing, exacerbated gender inequalities among young people and young married couples. The two regimes model illustrates that the growth of American ethological research offered new ways of thinking about father-involvement from the mid-1970s, but that an overarching ethological and psychological focus on individual agency and the father–child dyad failed to influence the macro-structural development of ‘father-friendly’ social policies in the USA. Instead, there was a punitive emphasis on the fiscal and moral shortcomings of non-resident fathers, who were stigmatised as ‘deadbeat dads’. On the other hand, ways of thinking about fatherhood in Sweden were influenced by epistemological feminism and conceptualisations of gender equality and gender roles from the mid-1960s. Therefore, the ‘two regimes’ model illustrates that father-involvement was an American concept, but it was the Swedish who put the concept of father-involvement into practice. Scandinavian perspectives Scandinavian debates concerning fatherhood were dominated from the 1960s and 1970s by epistemological concerns with the gender relations of paid work and parenting. Studies in the 1990s by Bjönberg and Kollind, amongst others, epitomised a Scandinavian focus on the changing nature of men’s family relations and the ‘ideal Swedish father’ (1996:9). During the 1990s social policies to improve fathers’ caring practices became emergent concerns of Scandinavian societies and to a lesser extent the wider European social model. By their nature, new comparative studies of what Hobson and Morgan termed ‘the social politics of fatherhood’ tended to be macro-level investigations based firmly on the ‘commonplace’ social scientific assumption that ‘fatherhood and motherhood are socially constructed’ (2002:3). In addition fathers’ take-up of parental leave in the Scandinavian welfare states eventually emerged as a core concern of international studies into caring father practices (Klinth, 2008). In general, the conceptual academic literature on fatherhood in the Scandinavian model and the wider European social model was generally dominated by what O’Brien termed ‘social science and public policy perspectives’ (2004:121). American perspectives On the other hand, father salience to child well-being was a core concern of American academic norms and epistemological debates from the early 1970s. American debates were dominated by psychological and ethological concerns about the significance of dyadic father–child relationships in ‘intact families’. The conceptual academic literature concerning the role of the father in child development was dominated by studies from the ethological tradition, such as Lamb et al.’s The Role of the Father in Child Development, which since 1976 has been published in five separate editions. The depiction of father deprivation, father absence

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Introduction

Table  1 Methodological and substantive principles of the two regimes of fatherhood Anglo-American model of fatherhood United States of America

Scandinavian model of fatherhood Sweden

Clinical and psychological perspectives Positivist perspective on agency Measurement of father-involvement Social commentary on deadbeat dads Social pathology blamed on ‘fatherless America’ Bottom-up fathers’ rights movements Normative concern with new father ideologies and the ‘marriage benefit’

Social policy perspectives Critical perspective on social structure Measurement of parental leave take-up Media campaigns promoting ‘velourpappa’ Low take-up of paternal leave by fathers blamed on employers Grassroots feminism/father think-tanks Normative concern with idealised egalitarian fathers and family diversity/ agency Marriage not privileged by social policy Normalisation of lone-parent families Emphasis on shared-parenting Weak malebreadwinner culture based on dual-earner dual-carer family model New politics of individualised and egalitarian fatherhood, state feminism, gender-equal parenting and family diversity

Family diversity crowded out/or discouraged by social policy Social pathology of lone-parent families Emphasis on child maintenance Strong malebreadwinner culture based on primary-earner in dual-earner marriage New politics of authoritarian-nurturing fatherhood, private patriarchy, complementary parenting and marriage Adapted from Rush (2011:43).

and the increase of lone-mother families as a core problem for American society was commonplace within American sociological literature. Influential proponents of the ‘fatherless’ USA and family decline thesis included Popenoe (1996) and Blankenhorn (1995). Akerlof, in a study of American men without children, linked the proliferation of ‘fatherless families’ and ‘family decline’ perspectives to the influence of underclass theories associated with Charles Murray (1984) and to conservative welfare ideologies (1998:307). Alternatively, leading academics in the USA such as Ann Shola Orloff, Linda Haas and Sheila B.  Kamerman were influential in shaping Nordic and European ways of thinking about gender equality, patriarchy, parental leave and the social politics of fatherhood. Table 1 maps out the separate methodological and substantive principles of the two worlds of fatherhood model. Table 1 also serves to illustrate that the two regimes model of fatherhood is primarily concerned with the way fathers are represented in academic norms and epistemologies and in the way fathers are treated by social policies. Case studies The case studies investigate the influence of the Swedish and American regimes on the social politics of fatherhood in China, Great Britain, Ireland, Japan and in

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Between two worlds of father politics

the European Union. The choice of countries was influenced, first, by the theoretical model of Sweden and the USA representing the ‘two worlds’ of father politics. Second, the choice was shaped by the idea that ‘worlds of welfare’ are conventionally divided into established welfare states, which are exclusively European and English-speaking welfare regimes, and emerging welfare states, which are divided into the three categories of Latin America, East Asia and Eastern Europe/Russia (Castles et  al., 2010). The choice of established welfare regimes focuses on EU debates and the English-speaking EU member states of Ireland and Great Britain. Great Britain and Ireland were previously identified as exemplar models of strong malebreadwinner regimes (Lewis, 1992). In addition, they are regarded as exemplar models of the Anglo-Saxon welfare states or English-speaking ‘family of nations’ (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Castles et al., 2010). The East Asian welfare states of Japan and China were chosen to represent emerging worlds of welfare (Peng and Wong, 2010) and as countries that exemplify the growth of national concerns with the changing nature of fatherhood in East Asian countries (Shwalb et al., 2010). In addition, they were chosen because the East Asian countries of Japan and China were at the ‘actual centre’ of the decline of patriarchy in the post-Second World War era (Therborn, 2004:74). Mainstream academics questioned whether China offered a new type of welfare regime (Ringen and Ngok, 2013)  and whether China offered an alternative to Sweden for lessons in successful government (Micklethwait and Wooldridge, 2014). Alternatively, Japan’s contemporary family policies were characterised in terms of crafting ‘Nordic shades’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:332). However, welfare regime theory and comparative welfare state analysis continued to be understood as a primarily euro-centric concern (Cousins, 2006b; Schelkle, 2012:12). The choice of EU-level social policy debates as a case study was influenced by the idea that fatherhood was a hotly debated policy dilemma of the European Union. For example the European Commission funded publications on fathers such as Men and Families: Men’s Changing Family Roles in Europe (Julemont, 2006) and the first meeting of the European Union Network for Family Policies held on 11 June 2009 was on The Promotion of Active Fatherhood: A New Objective of Family Policies. Most significantly, the European Parental Leave Directives promoted the individualisation of parental leave provisions through the establishment of non-transferable ‘father quotas’. The Nordic model, the Anglo-Saxon model, the European social model and the East Asian model of welfare represent four of the most significant models of welfare capitalism, while the American and the Nordic welfare states represent the most influential and divergent models of contemporary fatherhood. The case studies were chosen because a central aim of the book was to locate ways of thinking about fatherhood at the centre of comparative social policy and gender studies. Documentary sources were employed to analyse how the issues of non-resident fatherhood and parental leave for fathers were addressed by social policy and discussed in epistemological debates. The decline of patriarchy, or rule of the father, is discussed in relation to contemporary moral panics about a flight from fatherhood. The significance of faherhood to social policy is located within feminist

Introduction

5

debates about the concepts of private patriarchy and public patriarchy (Walby, 1990). The two worlds of fatherhood model illustrates that ways of thinking about fatherhood have become central to welfare and gender studies and to the social policy choices they inform, and that the concept of patriarchy has gained fresh relevance for welfare and gender studies. The overarching contention of the ‘two worlds’ of fatherhood model is three-fold. First, epistemological feminism, state-feminism and gender equality politics were the developmental drivers of universal, individualised and non-transferable father-friendly parental leave policies in Sweden. Second, the dominance of empirical positivism and psychology in the American model and among the academic fatherhood fraternity produced an overarching emphasis on agency (individual behaviour) over structure (welfare regime policies). Third, the Swedish and American models influenced the social politics of fatherhood in Great Britain, Ireland, the European Union, Japan and China, differently. The American influences were more evident in Ireland and China, and the Swedish influences were more evident in Japan and the European Union. Japanese social policy exhibited Swedish-type concerns with fatherhood and parental leave, but Japanese epistemological debates reflected an American ethological focus on the father–child dyad. Great Britain fell somewhere between the two models by exhibiting American influences in relation to the treatment of non-resident fathers by child support schemes and Swedish influences on epistemological debates about parental leave policies. In terms of a typology or model, the two worlds of fatherhood model posits the USA and Sweden as empirically divergent archetypes. The two worlds of fatherhood model highlights different substantive and methodological principles, with the American model based primarily on residual welfare ideologies and socio-behavioural perspectives on agency and the Swedish model based on universal welfare ideologies and social constructivism perspectives on the development of social citizenship roles, and entitlements, for fathers. The two regimes of fatherhood model locates the broad church of American psycho-sociological literature on fatherhood within a comparative welfare regime framework of analysis. The two regimes model also focuses on the comparative social policy treatment of fathers. By combining analysis of epistemological ways of thinking about fatherhood with analysis of social policies, the two regimes model locates fatherhood and patriarchy (defined as the rule of the father) as core concerns for welfare regime theory and gender studies. Chapter 1 offers a brief overview of welfare regime theorisation by highlighting the significance of Esping-Andersen’s Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (1990) and the feminist canon on welfare and gender (Lewis, 1992; Chamberlayne, 1993; Orloff, 1993; Sainsbury, 1999). The development of welfare regime theory since the early 1990s, and the feminist controversy surrounding it, was well covered, most notably by Bambra in ‘The worlds of welfare: illusory or gender blind’ (2004) and Orloff in ‘Gendering the comparative analysis of welfare state: an unfinished agenda’ (2009). Orloff reconciled what she labelled as the two intellectual ‘big bangs’ of gender analysis and welfare regime theory (2009). However, where the ‘two worlds’ of fatherhood model differs from previous welfare typologies, and

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Between two worlds of father politics

in particular from Esping-Andersen (1990) and Lewis (1992), is that instead of focusing on men as ‘decommodified workers’ or ‘breadwinners’, it focuses on their conceptual treatment as fathers in epistemological debates and on their social citizenship treatment as fathers by social policy. In this way the two worlds model places fatherhood and contemporary debates about the decline of patriarchal paternal power at the centre of welfare regime typology theorisations and gender analysis. Moreover, it offers a ‘two worlds’ model or an international continuum of fatherhood and gender politics, with the USA at one end and Sweden at the other end. To summarise, the two regimes model of fatherhood offers an explicit framework of comparison by focusing on (a) epistemological debates of fatherhood, (b) the treatment of fathers by parental leave policies and (c) the treatment of non-resident fathers by child support policies. This coherent approach is applied to each case study by investigating American and Swedish influences in all three domains. Overall, the analysis suggests that the role of the welfare state and ‘the role of poverty’ offer better explanations for within nation variations in child well-being and welfare outcomes, rather than the roles of family structure and father-involvement. Organisation of the book Chapter  1 explains that the ‘rule of the father’ was defeated during the course the twentieth century and was theorised as the ‘collapse of patriarchy’ (Castells, 1997), or as the decline of patriarchy (Therborn, 2004), or more recently as ‘the retreat of the male’ (Hobsbawn, 2005). The two regimes of fatherhood model links the decline of patriarchal legitimacy over the course of the twentieth century to welfare state expansion. Contemporary fears of a ‘flight from fatherhood’ or of endemic fatherlessness are illustrated to be particularly strong in the Anglo-Saxon type welfare states of Great Britain, Ireland and the USA, where residual welfare ideologies and male-breadwinning arrangements militate against the development of universal father-friendly social policies. On the other hand, Chapter 1 shows that the renaissance of the welfare modelling business was, in large part, driven by the growth of gender and feminist analysis in welfare state debates (Orloff, 1993, 2010; Bambra, 2004). The growth of gender perspectives provoked critical analysis of women’s interest group mobilisation in relation to welfare state development (Siim, 1993). Chapter 1 also shows that Nordic feminism promoted the idea that ‘increasingly men also have citizen-roles as fathers’ (Siim, 1993:44). By placing the social politics of fatherhood centre stage in welfare regime theory, Chapter 1 provides the normative and theoretical context for Chapters 2 and 3 on the two worlds of fatherhood in Sweden and the USA. Chapter 2 illustrates that the dual predominance of (a) pyschological perspectives on father salience to child development and (b) sociological perspectives on ‘fatherlessness’ in the USA represented distinct, prominent and paradigmatic features of the American literature. However, Chapter 2 also shows that despite the unique wealth of US ethological literature on the benefits of the father role to child development, the USA remained an outlier nation or laggard welfare regime in

Introduction

7

relation to the development of father-friendly parental leave policies (Kamerman and Moss, 2009). Chapter 2 charts the ‘invention’ of the cost-recovery model of child support by the US welfare regime in 1974, which became the template within the English-speaking welfare regimes (Hansen, 1999). In addition, Chapter  2 explains that conservative neo-patriarchal perspectives on fatherhood amplified and flourished under the American neo-conservative paradigm of combining welfare ‘reform’ with the promotion of marriage under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996). Chapter  2 shows that fathers’ rights groups such as the Promise Keepers promoted authoritarian fatherhood and the corporal punishment of children as a Christian principle. The chapter shows that the mid-1970s was a turning point for the American model of fatherhood. Chapter 2 illustrates that the decline of patriarchy in the USA was understood to involve an elegiac surrendering of authority by fathers, from a period in the Colonial era when fathers ruled the American homestead (Mintz, 1998; Aldous, 1998). The canon of Swedish and Nordic literature on the politicisation of fatherhood and the development of father-friendly social policies remained very much a work in progress. It was a canon of literature that was relatively homogeneous in terms of combining feminist and gender studies perspectives with social constructionist and pro-welfare state perspectives. Where the Swedish model departed in pioneering and influential ways was through the introduction of ‘father-friendly’ parental leave schemes which dated back to the mid-1970s and through the development of individualised and non-transferable ‘father quotas’ from the mid-1990s. Although similar developments occurred across the Nordic welfare regimes, Sweden was still understood to represent the exemplar welfare state for ‘father-friendly’ social policies. Chapter 3 pays particular attention to the historical context, and to the important roles of Nordic epistemology and government commissions in dismantling patriarchy and promoting gender equality over the course of the twentieth century (Haas et al., 2012:8). Chapter 3 also focuses on child support enforcement as an early twentieth-century enterprise in Sweden, which was roundly rejected from the mid-1970s as being overly stigmatising towards non-resident fathers, single mothers and their children. Instead, Chapter  3 shows that Sweden and Norway moved towards principles of joint-custody, shared parenting and individualisation of child support payments and housing allowances. Chapter 3 illustrates that the decline of patriarchy in Sweden was understood to date back to the Stockholm marriages of the mid-nineteenth century, and moreover, that marriage law reforms and the legislative dissolution of patriarchal fatherhood were understood to be prerequisites to the growth of Western welfare states (Wetterberg et al., 2001; Melby et al., 2006). Chapter  4 focuses on Great Britain, where, not surprisingly, there was a long-standing influence of American fatherhood debates that dated back to social commentary by the Institute of Economic Affairs on fatherless families and the social problem of rising crime (Dennis, 1992; Dennis and Erdos, 1992). These influences surfaced more recently in the highly publicised social commentaries of David Lammy MP on social unrest, knife crime and fatherlessness following the

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Between two worlds of father politics

Tottenham Riots (2013). In parallel, there was a shift in epistemological thinking towards a more emancipatory view of the welfare state and towards understandings of ‘Nordic nirvanas’ and ‘Nordic feminist uchronias’ (Lister, 2009:270), which placed a focus on father-friendly parental leave policies at the heart of British and English-speaking feminism. On the other hand, Great Britain is shown to have followed the American model of child support enforcement, albeit with a recent shift away from the failed US policy logics of child poverty reduction and cost-recovery of public expenditure on lone-mother households. Chapter 5 identifies an increase in the significance of fatherhood to Irish social policy debates, particularly those surrounding prosecution through the courts for non-payment of child maintenance payments, the constitutional recognition of fathers outside marriage and normative concerns with ‘vulnerable fathers’ in Irish family support debates (Ferguson and Hogan, 2007:12). The analysis reveals that the American model of fatherhood strongly influenced the politicisation of fatherhood in Ireland, and that Irish social policy debates tended to reflect normative academic traditions of avoiding Nordic, and in particular, Swedish welfare and gender ideologies in favour of selective debates concerned with a residua of ‘vulnerable fathers’. However, Chapter 5 shows that in recent years the Irish epistemological research community and public policy domain has taken a Nordic turn, towards the consideration of Nordic-type father-friendly parental leave policies. Chapter  6 highlights the importance of social dialogue to the social politics of fatherhood in the European Union and the importance of scholarly involvement on bodies such as the European Observatory on National Family Policies, the Confederation of Family Organisations of the European Union, the European Commission Childcare Network, the Network on Leave and Policy Research, the European Union Network of Experts on Family Policy and the European Parliament’s Quality of Childhood Group. Chapter 6 illustrates that the Swedish model was influential on the European Union Parental Leave Directives and on the move in 2009 towards individualisation and non-transferability of leave for fathers. Chapter 6 also illustrates that the EU is a site for contested debates concerning child support and broader issues of political economy, family policy, intersectionality and varieties of capitalism. Chapter  7 illustrates that social science attention to fatherhood remains under-developed in China and Japan, and when studies did emerge they tended to follow the epistemologies and methodologies of the American school of child development (Shwalb et al., 2010). However, the chapter emphasises key differences whereby Japan is understood to be an East Asian exemplar of a welfare regime that has taken a ‘Nordic turn’ while China is considered to have exacerbated gender inequalities among young people and young married couples through the One Child Family Planning Policy (1979) and the privatisation of housing. However, both China and Japan are illustrated to have dismantled Confucian patriarchy in favour of welfare regime development and the social policy regulation of fatherhood. The concluding chapter draws together insights from the case studies and judges to what extent the USA and Sweden represent exemplar fatherhood

Introduction

9

regimes and to what extent their differing approaches to child support and parental leave are mirrored in the case studies. The concluding chapter also considers to what extent the welfare state played a role in the decline of patriarchy, and to what extent the roll-back of the welfare state in the USA can be viewed as a process of re-patriarchalisation. Normative perspectives on the social politics of fatherhood underwent a revolutionary transformation during the course of the twentieth century, leading to the development in Sweden and the Nordic welfare states of father-friendly social policies and lengthy parental leave regimes. However, the more recent growth of American sociological perspectives on fatherlessness and family decline have combined to influence the development of patriarchal (or patricentric) social commentaries on the perils and pitfalls of lone motherhood and non-resident fatherhood. In addition, the growth of fathers’ rights movements, particularly in the Anglophone welfare regimes, has brought a specific anti-feminist tone to patricentric research perspectives. The final chapter discusses to what extent the rolling back of the welfare state in the USA may herald the growth of neo-patriarchy and a normative retreat from social policy norms and values based on principles of gender equality and the decline of patriarchy. Chapter  8 suggests that highly developed individualised parental leave regimes in the Nordic countries and the ex-communist states of Slovenia and Estonia, plus East German-influenced unified Germany, and the Southern European welfare state of Portugal, all illustrated that feminism and left-leaning political legacies still mattered to the politics of parental leave and the social politics of fatherhood, as did grassroots feminism, equality architectures and social partners in the form of trade unions and employers. Overall Chapter 8 concludes that the social politics of fatherhood gave fresh relevance to the concepts of decommodification and individualisation in relation to the decline of patriarchy and the ongoing revolution in the gender relations of care, parenting and paid work.

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Welfare, gender and fatherhood

Introduction This chapter highlights a paradox within academic debates about national variations in the social politics of fatherhood. On the one hand, it portrays the mid-1970s as a turning point in the social politics of fatherhood; first, through the invention of exponentially punitive child support enforcement programmes by the USA in 1974 (Hansen, 1999), and second, through the introduction by Sweden of father-inclusive parental leave insurance schemes also in 1974 (Klinth, 2008). Yet, on the other hand, the chapter shows that the social politics of fatherhood were largely bypassed by comparative welfare state analysis, with the notable exceptions of Hobson, who proposed a typology of ‘policy regimes and fatherhood regimes’ (2002:13), and O’Brien, who proposed a typology of ‘father-care-sensitive parental leave regimes’ (2009). The present chapter highlights this paradox by showing that what Orloff (2009) identified as the ‘two intellectual big bangs’ in the ‘comparative study of gender and welfare states’, namely, ‘gender studies’ and ‘regime analysis’, occurred during a period when social policy responses to the changing nature of fatherhood were undergoing a modern-day revolution. The chapter also shows that in a parallel development, we began to witness the growth of academic research output dedicated to investigating the significance of the father–child dyad. The ‘big bang’ in ‘father-involvement studies’ occurred when Michael Lamb’s paper on ‘Fathers: forgotten contributors to child development’ (1975) set off an unprecedented explosion of research activity. Almost overnight, the paucity of research on the significance of fathers to child development was considered to be a cause for alarm as American academics woke up to the realisation that ‘most children have two parents – one of either sex’ (Robinson and Barrett, 1986:ix). Robinson and Barrett recalled that: Nationwide support groups emerged for fathers in various situations and professional journals began to devote special issues to the topic of fatherhood. In June 1982 top leaders in the field of men’s studies and fatherhood met at Groves Conference in Ocean City, Maryland, to share their research around the theme of ‘Men’s Changing Roles and

Welfare, gender and fatherhood

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Relationships’ … Out of these studies a new profile of fathers has emerged. Fathers are no longer seen as distant, uninvolved family providers. Instead men, as well as women are beginning to recognize their innate nurturing instincts and to participate more in the processes of childbirth and child rearing. (Robinson and Barrett, 1986:ix)

However, the influence of what the British scholar, Adrienne Burgess, labelled as the ‘academic fatherhood fraternity’ (1997:x) was overshadowed in the USA by a new wave of social panics about the ‘crisis of fatherlessness’ (Davidson, 1990; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996). These social panics lamented the decline of the ‘American family’ (Popenoe, 1993) and echoed the view of Mitscherlich who had argued in Society without the Father that there had been ‘a progressive loss of the father’s authority and diminution in the family and over the family’ (1969). Social panics about the rise of divorce, single-motherhood and fatherlessness in the USA were paralleled by elegiac accounts of a gradual surrender of paternal authority from the American Colonial era when patriarchal ‘Iron John’ type fathers ruled the rural family homestead to a post-Second World War era that signalled a descent into androgyny (Mintz, 1998; Aldous, 1998). The descent of American fatherhood into androgyny and role-confusion was understood in some quarters to be personified by the movie Mrs. Doubtfire, which starred Robin Williams as a separated father who managed to stay involved with his children by masquerading in drag as their newly employed nanny (Parke, 1996:115). Alternatively, and much less risible, the diminution of ‘the rule of the father’ was theorised by European scholars as a ‘decline of patriarchy’ (Therborn, 2004:8) and ‘the end of patriarchalisation’ (Castells, 1997:192) or more pithily as ‘the retreat of the male’ (Hobsbawn, 2005). These European theories tended to depict the erosion of patriarchy as an epochal twentieth-century process of ‘de-patriarchalization’ (Therborn, 2004:73). This chapter begins by offering a review of gender studies on the concept of patriarchy and on the significance of fatherhood to comparative welfare state analysis. This is followed by a review of literature on child support schemes and parental leave schemes, with a specific focus on Sweden and the Nordic countries, and on the Anglo-Saxon countries of Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the USA. For some time now comparative social policy studies and the debates surrounding them have been shaped by understandings of different regimes and typologies or Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990). Ways of classifying welfare states in terms of Nordic models, Continental models, Southern European models and Anglo-Saxon models have become firmly embedded in comparative social policy debates alongside the more recent East Asian model of emerging welfare states (Castles et al., 2010). Alternatively, and of equal significance, were attempts to ‘gender’ prevailing mainstream welfare regime typologies (Orloff, 1993; O’Connor, 1996) and to offer alternative gender-based typologies (Lewis, 1992; Chamberlayne, 1993; Sainsbury, 1999). Debates concerning the ‘Scandinavian welfare model’ were pithily termed by Abrahamson as ‘the welfare modelling business’, which dates back to the distinction between ‘residual’ and ‘institutional’ models (1999:33; Wilensky and Lebaux, 1965). However, this

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Between two worlds of father politics

chapter illustrates that, outside of the Scandinavian regimes, the ‘welfare modelling business’ paid scant attention to the social politics of fatherhood. Welfare regime theory and gender analysis The early 1990s gave rise to two distinct theories of power in comparative social policy debates (Orloff, 1993). On the one hand, mainstream research focused on variations in social citizenship entitlements, which gave rise to welfare regime theory and theories of power (Korpi, 1983; Esping-Andersen, 1990; Kemeny, 1995). Kemeny argued that the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism by Esping-Andersen (1990) had developed a neo-Gramscian perspective by combining a theory of class mobilisation and coalition formation, which was illustrated in the case of Sweden by an alliance between farmers and the working classes. Kemeny explained that: Gramsci (1971) argued that the working class cannot succeed in achieving its aims without enlisting the support of other interests and so must build broad-based coalitions, or blocs, which it leases and concerts through existing moral leadership or what Gramsci termed hegemony. (1995:93)

The central hypothesis of welfare regime theory (WRT) was that class mobilisation, cross-class alliances and political party politics mattered to national variations in welfare state effort (Orloff, 1993:305; Kemeny, 1995:93). On the other hand, feminist research was focused on international comparison of gender differences in social citizenship entitlements (Jensen, 1986; Skocpol and Ritter, 1991; Lewis, 1992). A central hypothesis of feminist research was that ‘women’s role in the promotion of social politics’ was as a significant driver of beneficial welfare state outcomes for women and children (Siim, 1993:28). However, at the heart of epistemological debates about welfare and feminism lay a clash about ‘different interpretations of power’ concerning the nature of patriarchy and the potential of the welfare state to reduce gender inequalities (Siim, 1993:28). On one side of the debate was a mainly English-speaking and neo-Marxist feminist school, associated with McIntosh (1978), Beechey (1979) and Barrett (1980), which believed that welfare states upheld a capitalist preference ‘for a particular family form (the wage earning husband and dependent wife and children) which ensures that women perform unpaid domestic labour and creates them as an industrial reserve army’ (Jensen, 1986:11). This type of thinking was reflected in Jane Lewis’ highly influential ‘malebreadwinner typology’ which upheld the view of ‘English-speaking feminists’ by concluding that the European welfare regimes of France, Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom were asymmetrically responsible for ‘perpetuating patriarchal structures’ (Lewis, 1992:170). Closely associated with this school of thought was the belief that fatherhood or the ‘inclusion of generation’ in contemporary definitions of patriarchy was a ‘contingent element and best omitted’ (Walby, 1990:20). In a similar fashion, Daly and Rake argued that a legacy of one-dimensional analysis in terms of dominance and subordination meant that the concept of ‘patriarchy provides no terms for examining the relations among women as a differentiated group’ (2003:20).

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Depictions of welfare state capitalism as patriarchal systems fostered a type of epistemologicalblindness to the social significance of fatherhood, first on the basis that gender relations were shaped by a shift from ‘private’ to ‘public’ patriarchy (Walby, 1990) and, second, on the basis of entrenched liberal scepticism within English-speaking feminism about ‘Scandinavian women’s optimism about the role of state’ (Lewis, 1992:171). On the other side of the patriarchy debate was a mainly Nordic school of thinking which believed that the ‘shift in women’s dependency from private dependence on individual husbands to public dependence on the state’ signalled a feminist coup de grâce over patriarchy through the development of ‘women-friendly’ Nordic welfare states (Hernes, 1987; Siim, 1993:28). While global epistemological feminism was busy gendering welfare regime theory (Lewis, 1992; Sainsbury, 1999), Nordic feminists were debating how to improve their already gendered and ‘women friendly’ welfare states (Leira, 1993). The introduction of gender-equality departments and national women’s agencies was understood to be a unique institutional outcome of Nordic ‘state feminism’ (Kjeldstad, 2001:67; Borchorst and Siim, 2008:220). Nordic accounts of the liberation of women from dependence on husbands engendered a general optimism about the emancipatory potential of the welfare state and reflected an alternative understanding that ‘patriarchy refers to a form of male dominance in which fathers control families and families are the units of social and economic power’, and not to ‘a universal unchanging deterministic social structure which denies agency to women’ (Orloff, 1993:304). This type of understanding helped to locate fathers as a central concern of Nordic social policy and gender studies and gave impetus to the feminist goal of developing men’s ‘citizen-roles as fathers’ (Siim, 1993:44). More recently, the varieties of capitalism literature (Hall and Soskice, 2001) sparked fresh feminist interest in ‘the nature of patriarchy as a family-based system of control over women and children rather than merely a form of gender equality’ (Folbre, 2009:208). The varieties of capitalism model associated liberal market economies (LMEs) with strong ‘stock market capitalization’ and market reliance whereas ‘coordinated market economies’ (CMEs) were associated with greater employment protection and an institutional reliance across the financial and industrial spheres reflecting greater non-market coordination. Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States were all identified as liberal market economies. On the other hand, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the Nordic countries were all identified as coordinated market economies. Hall and Soskice borrowed from welfare regime theory to argue that liberal market economies produce liberal welfare states: ‘whose emphasis on means testing and low levels of benefits reinforced the fluid labour markets that firms use to manage their relations with labour’ (Hall and Soskice, 2001:51). Running parallel to studies on the relationship between welfare regimes and patriarchy was mainstream welfare regime theory, which claimed that social policy comparison could be improved upon by identifying models and patterns in different ‘worlds’ or ‘regimes’ of welfare capitalism (Arts and Gelissen, 2010:570). The ‘big bang’ in welfare regime theory occurred when Esping-Andersen revived

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the concept of ‘decommodification’ to measure welfare effort (1990; Polyani, 1944); that is, the extent to which welfare systems compensated for the labour market dependency of paid employees or, in welfare terms, ‘commodified’ workers (Rush, 2011:38). In addition to using decommodification, Esping-Andersen’s clustering of welfare states into three prominent types was based on national variations in levels of social stratification and the nature of the mixed economy of welfare provision in each welfare state, that is the mixture of provision between the state, the market, the voluntary sector and the family. Esping-Andersen’s typology identified three ‘models’ or ‘regimes’ of welfare capitalism; the Scandinavian model with high levels of decommodification, cross-class solidarity and a universal welfare system; the conservative/Central European model with a moderate degree of decommodification and a mixed economy of employment-related social insurance-based welfare provision; and the liberal or Anglo-Saxon model with low levels of decommodification and a preference for market-based solutions to social policy with a residual safety net for the poor, or a residual welfare system (Esping-Andersen, 1990; Arts and Gelissen, 2010:571). Contemporary re-assessments of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism suggested it was a ‘modern classic’, which ‘performed a virtuoso slalom between the theoretical and the empirical’ and introduced welfare regime theory as a model for ‘classifying welfare states’ in terms of ‘description and explanation’ (Arts and Gelissen, 2010:572). Feminist re-assessments suggested that ‘something about Esping-Andersen’s analysis brought greater engagement between feminist and mainstream scholars of the welfare state’ because it offered ‘compelling  – if not exactly Kuhnian paradigm-shifting – insights into the character of comparative variation’, and perhaps more importantly, because it demonstrated ‘the potentially emancipatory politics of welfare states’ (Orloff, 2010:253). Feminist re-assessments of the contribution of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990) also led to claims that rival gender-based typologies had served ‘to undermine the worlds of welfare thesis about the emancipatory potential of the welfare state and to denigrate its validity especially in relation to claims about women, welfare and the family’ (Bambra, 2004:212). Nevertheless, the main outcome of increased engagement between the two ‘big bangs’ of ‘gender studies’ and ‘welfare regime theory’ was the widely accepted theory that ‘social democracy together with organized women’s movements’ was ‘the key driver of employment-orientated family policy in Western democracies’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:331). This type of understanding was strengthened by a research study on European care policies which concluded that gender equality and national women’s agencies were ‘a necessary condition to advance social-care policies’ and that opportunities to improve social care internationally would be optimised when women outside and inside welfare state systems formed alliances with each other (Bleijenbergh and Roggeband, 2007:454). Typologies of fatherhood regimes The first, and perhaps as yet unrivalled, collection of essays on fatherhood from gender studies and comparative social policy perspectives was edited by Barbara

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Hobson under the title Making Men into Fathers: Men Masculinities and the Social Politics of Fatherhood (2002). The overall message of Making Men into Fathers was symbolised on the front cover, which carried a photograph of Hoa-Hoa Dahlgren, a Swedish weightlifter, wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Swedish flag and cradling a small baby (2002:13). This signified that fatherhood was both masculine and patriotic. Hobson et al. coined the term the ‘social politics of fatherhood’ and made a strong link between fathers’ rights and obligations and welfare state regimes to arrive at their typology of ‘policy regimes and fatherhood regimes’ (Hobson and Morgan, 2002:11). Sweden was classified as weak in terms of father obligations because, although the Swedish state had encouraged an increase in the employment rates of lone mothers, since the 1990s there had been no subsequent initiatives to increase the financial responsibilities of fathers. On the other hand Great Britain was classified as strong in terms of father obligations and the USA as medium because: The family (in Great Britain) plays a more central role in social policy, (and) market reliance is stronger in the US, where both women and men are supposed to support themselves through market work. (Hobson and Morgan, 2002:13)

Ultimately Hobson and Morgan did not identify a ‘neat fit’ between, as they put it, the ‘welfare regime typology and the fatherhood typology’. However, more recently Smith and Williams developed a father-friendly policy index using the European Community Household Panel and they found a very ‘neat fit’ between their father-friendly legislation typology and Esping-Andersen’s typology. Smith and Williams made this clear when they explained that: One unambiguous finding is that national legislation in Western Europe falls clearly into three categories of father friendliness that cluster regionally according to Esping-Andersen’s typology. (2007:188)

The central recommendation of the Smith and Williams’ study was that if governments want to increase fathers’ time with children they should adopt public policies wherein parental leave is a universal individual right with high wage compensation, and that governments should promote take-up of leave by fathers through publicly sponsored awareness programmes (2007:189). However, an ongoing absence of a focus on fatherhood was highlighted by O’Sullivan et al. when they suggested that the three ‘overlapping but nonintersecting’ conversations about ‘child well-being’, ‘work–family conflict’ and ‘gender equality’ tended to ‘focus on women, rarely questioning assumptions about the organization of men’s employment and care-giving activities’ (2009:236). Contemporary studies into the social construction of gender relations promoted the idea of men and women being able to balance paid work with care responsibilities (Orloff, 1993:319). These ideas led to a series of claims that new ‘dimensions of variation need to be examined’ in order to supplement the important concept of decommodification and the study of how welfare states organise systems for ‘the provision of care’ (Orloff, 2002:16). In addition, gender equality advocates called for the investigation of national variations in the capacity of women ‘to

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form and maintain autonomous households, that is, to survive and support their children without having to marry to gain access to breadwinner’s income’ (Orloff, 1993:319). One of the most important social policy provisions to affect the social construction of gender relations was the development of father-inclusive parental leave insurance schemes. This chapter illustrates that the individualisation of parental leave was a gender-egalitarian form of decommodification that liberated working mothers and fathers from labour market dependency in the early years of child-rearing. On the other hand, the chapter illustrates that one of the most important provisions for the maintenance of autonomous lone-mother households was advanced maintenance programmes (Torremocha, 2002), which offset reliance on child support enforcement schemes targeted at individual non-resident fathers. Non-resident fathers and child support regimes The Clearing House on International Developments in Child, Youth and Family Policies at Columbia University explained that child support is ‘cash support for a child by a non-custodial parent’ (www.childpolicyintl.org/childsupport.html), usually the father. The OECD attributed the growth of formal child support schemes among member states to the ‘growing number of divorces and the increased prevalence of sole-parent families in OECD countries’ and to the now highly controversial rationale that child support schemes ‘help prevent and reduce child poverty among sole-parent families’ (OECD, 2010:1). A  review for the OECD illustrated that there was a wealth of research, mainly from the USA (Kamerman et  al., 2003:35), to illustrate that payment of child support was positively associated with children’s well-being (Furstenberg et  al., 1987), better educational performance (Amato and Gilbreth, 1999; McLanahan and Carlson, 2006), lower rates of non-marital child-bearing (Huang et  al., 2000) and increased non-resident father-involvement with their children (Seltzer et al., 1998). Alternatively, a new source of international research on child support systems, beyond the confines of the US experience, was established by the International Network of Child Support Scholars (INCSS) in 2012 ‘as a means of connecting scholars worldwide and promoting the study of child support issues’ (incss.org). The INCSS archive of journal articles served to illustrate that critical scholarship on the issue of child support was flourishing, particularly in the English-speaking welfare regimes of Australia, the USA and the United Kingdom, and also in the Nordic welfare regimes. In the following section we examine the general lessons to be drawn from one-country studies and in particular from the USA, the United Kingdom, Australia, Ireland and Sweden and from comparative studies. The USA and Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes The rationale for the establishment of the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme in the USA was framed by Senator Russell Long, Chair of the Senate

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Finance Committee in 1974, when he ‘convinced Congress that establishing a federally funded support enforcement programme was part of the solution’ to reduce the welfare costs associated with the growing number of single-parent families (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:1). Subsequently, the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme was established under part D of the Social Security Act (1975). The twin aims of the Act were ‘to increase child support and reduce welfare costs’ (2000:1). The policy which emerged was labelled as an ‘absolute enforcement’ model of child support and as a ‘revolution in child support enforcement’ (Garfinkel et al., 1998). More critically, it was labelled as a ‘cost-recovery model’, which placed many non-custodial fathers, ‘who are often extremely poor themselves’, in debt to the state ‘for child support they may never be able to pay’ (Sussman, 2005:2). Alternatively, Professor Irwin Garfinkel wrote in an early and influential article on ‘The evolution of child support policy’ that ‘public enforcement of private child support obligations could not be dismissed as merely punitive’ (1988:15). This perspective was later reinforced by research studies which concluded that ‘failing to establish child support obligations for non-resident fathers simply because their incomes are initially low does not appear justified’ (Phillips and Garfinkel, 1993:227). More recently, Cammett argued in her research on ‘Deadbeats, deadbrokes, and prisoners’ that ‘mass incarceration had radically skewed the paradigm on which the child support system was based, removing millions of parents from the formal economy entirely, diminishing their income opportunities after release, and rendering them ineffective actors’ (2011:127). Cammett’s research illustrated that the American model of ‘cost recovery’ based on ‘absolute enforcement’ was alienating non-resident fathers from the formal economy and driving ‘them underground away from their families’ (2011:130). However, despite academic criticisms about the efficacy of the absolute-enforcement model, the American approach to child support remains unwavering as the archetypal ‘cost-recovery’ model in the Anglo-Saxon or English-speaking welfare regimes. On the other hand, Australia and the United Kingdom recently took steps to depart from their own variants of the cost-recovery model following decades of poor rates of compliance and a general failure to recoup the costs of welfare expenditure on lone-mother households (Cook and Natalier, 2013; Skinner, 2013:243). The flaw in both the British and Australian schemes was that the American model of cost recovery on which they were based had, after decades of dedicated policy-making, failed spectacularly to increase levels of payment compliance (Cancian et al., 2011:16). The recent reform of child support arrangements in Australia culminated in the framing of the 2006–2008 Welfare to Work (WTW) reforms (Summerfield et al., 2010:69). Put simply, the WTW reforms raised minimum payments from $5 a week to a modest $6.15 a week on the basis of non-resident fathers’ limited ability to pay. In addition, low-income non-resident fathers had their child support obligations waived because of the ‘shared costs’ associated with regular contact and caring post-separation (Cook and Natalier, 2013:39). Moreover, the 2005 Ministerial Task Force on Child Support rejected American-style recommendations to

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punish non-resident fathers with outstanding child support debts by cancelling their drivers’ licences on the basis that it would impair their earning ability and be self-defeating as a way of encouraging payment and father-involvement (Cook and Natalier, 2013:39). The United Kingdom’s departure from the cost-recovery model occurred under the terms of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 when it was announced that lone mothers on means-tested welfare benefits would be allowed to keep any child maintenance received (Skinner and Main, 2013:48). In a major ideological departure from the rationale of child-poverty reduction, the 2011 Green Paper, Strengthening Families, Promoting Parental Responsibility: The Future of Child Maintenance (DWP, 2011), dropped the policy aim of reducing child poverty because, according to Iain Duncan Smith, the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, child maintenance payments had shown no ‘statistically significant impact on child poverty’ (Skinner and Main, 2013:39). A major lesson from the UK research was that making regular child support payments could ‘increase poverty’ for non-resident fathers (Skinner, 2013:49). This understanding was previously the prevailing consensus in Ireland where a ‘hands off ’ approach to the financial responsibilities of non-resident fathers was taken by the state on the basis that: At least for low income non-resident fathers, measures to improve their employment and earnings, in conjunction with measures to improve family relationships, may have more beneficial impact on the payment of maintenance than stricter enforcement. (McKeown, 2001a:28)

This type of ‘hands off ’ approach changed following recommendations from the Final Report on the Commission on the Family (1998) and the Review of the One-Parent Family Payment (OFP) that ‘there should be a stronger link between social welfare policy and the legal maintenance system’ (Commission on the Family, 1998:115; DSCFA, 2000:111). The American model of ‘cost recovery’ loomed large in Irish political and social commentary debates and was epitomised at the time by the following quote which appeared on the front page of the Irish Sunday Times: The huge bill for supporting lone parents is now a political issue in America. In many states, ‘deadbeat’ dads who refuse to pay up become non-persons. They are not allowed to apply for any public work or contracts, and all state permits such as driving licenses are automatically refused. (Bushe, 2004)

However, the major lessons from the recent child support policy U-turns in Australia and the UK were that academics and policy makers had arrived at a shared understanding that regular contact by non-resident fathers involved ‘shared care post-separation’ (Summerfield et  al., 2010:76; Cook and Natalier, 2013:39; Skinner, 2013:254). However, a major problem illustrated by the Australian case was that when regular shared care arrangements were based around the full-time working needs of non-resident fathers, the arrangements often amounted to no more than a ‘fly-in/fly-out’ type of paternal care schedule that undermined

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lone mothers’ autonomy both as parents and as paid workers (Summerfield et al., 2010:76). Overall, it seems the financial obligations of non-resident fathers were reduced in Australia and the United Kingdom, but instead of shifting the balance of responsibility for poverty reduction among children in lone-mother households onto the broad structural shoulders of the welfare state it ‘shifted most obviously towards mothers’ (Fehlberg and MacLean, 2009:21). But on the other hand, what became increasingly obvious to policy makers and to epistemological research communities in Australia and the United Kingdom was the message that ‘many separated fathers are financially disadvantaged’ (2009:18). Sweden By contrast with the USA and other Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes, non-resident fathers in Sweden were cast as a politically active group whose lobbying alongside lone-mother families has kept child support low down the political agenda in favour of active labour market policies for low-income fathers and for lone mothers who were also supported by beneficial advanced income maintenance strategies. Sultan et al. explained that Income Maintenance laws were passed in Sweden in 1938 to provide for children of divorced or never married mothers: ‘in which the state guaranteed payment for child support and sought to collect money from the father’ (2012:989). Sultan et al. also explained that: In Sweden, during the 1990s biological fathers have gained more rights with the widening powers of the state to enforce mutual custody and the hegemonic ideology that children need equal access to both parents even after divorce. (2012:989)

Child maintenance support reforms in Sweden during the 1990s were internationally recognised for aligning child support orders more closely to the means of the non-custodial father/parent (Sultan et al., 2012:990). Comparative studies The Clearing House at Columbia University differentiated between countries that have public or welfare state guarantees of a specific level of payment, variously known as ‘Advanced Maintenance Programmes’ or ‘Child Support Assurance’, and countries that don’t have such schemes. Torremocha labelled advanced maintenance payments as a ‘public substitute’ and identified the Scandinavian countries, and in particular Sweden and Finland, as being at the forefront of generosity and accessibility to public substitutes for maintenance support when there was non-payment by the non-resident father (2002:199). However, the review of research on child support schemes for the OECD by Kamerman et al. cautioned that there was an absence of research to document the impact on children of policies to provide ‘advance maintenance (guaranteed child-support) payments’ (2003:38). However, it was possible to draw on a small number of excellent comparative studies to illustrate the beneficial impact of advanced maintenance programmes in reducing child poverty and extending the coverage of child support payments to a greater

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number of lone-mother households (Corden, 1999b; Bradshaw, 2006; Skinner, et al., 2007; Richardson and Bradshaw, 2009; Skinner and Davidson, 2009; Casey and Maldonado, 2012; Hakovirta, 2010; Richardson, 2012). Anne Corden’s early pioneering study of ‘child maintenance regimes’ compared Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden as countries with advanced maintenance programmes and contrasted them with Australia, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the USA as countries without such schemes (1999a). Corden’s findings showed that the Nordic countries worked well in delivering universal support to all children by setting comparatively low levels of child support in a quick and transparent manner and by applying a model of provision for lone mothers that was based on a combination of ‘labour market support and state support’ in a child maintenance regime context where ‘levels of child maintenance are not controversial’ (1999a:4). More recent international research made use of Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) data to compare the impact of child maintenance schemes in Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Norway, Sweden, the UK and the USA to arrive at the conclusion that ‘countries guaranteeing child maintenance payments by the state are more effective in reducing child poverty’ (Hakovirta, 2010:249). A more pertinent finding was that reductions in child poverty from child support payments were minimal in all countries and that child support schemes which relied on payments by non-resident fathers were ‘not very effective at reducing overall child poverty’ (Hakovirta, 2010:255). Similar findings regarding coverage and poverty reduction came from a large study of cross-national data which compared single-parenthood in the USA with sixteen other ‘high-income’ countries including Ireland, Sweden and the United Kingdom, plus the EU member states of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and the non-EU states of Norway and Switzerland (Casey and Maldonado, 2012). This study illustrated that relative poverty levels after social transfers for lone mothers were highest in countries without advanced maintenance programmes, including the USA (51 per cent), Ireland (44 per cent) and the United Kingdom (33 per cent), making the Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes the most well represented among the countries where lone-mother poverty levels reach the highest levels. On the other hand, lone-mother poverty levels after social transfers were lowest in the Nordic welfare regimes of Denmark (8 per cent), Sweden (10 per cent) and Finland (12 per cent). The overriding message of the Casey and Maldonado study was that ‘U.S. single-parent families will remain the worst off unless the U.S. expands its family-supporting policies’ (2012:29). Dominic Richardson’s excellent paper on good practices in ‘anti-poverty and family focused policies’ across OECD member states distinguished between ‘advanced public child support payments’ and ‘publically assisted private payment systems’ in order to review the anti-poverty impact of child support policies (2012). The findings were based on associations between coverage, amounts received and reductions in lone-parent poverty rates. The study showed Denmark and Sweden achieved the highest coverage and the highest decrease in lone-parent

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poverty rates, while on the other hand, the USA, Canada and Ireland were represented at the opposite end with the lowest coverage and the lowest reduction in poverty (2012:14). In a similar paper on family orientated family policies in developed countries, Richardson and Bradshaw recommended that countries prioritising coverage of child support payments should consider advance maintenance payment programmes as a critical aspect of an efficient anti-child-poverty strategy (2009:16). The general message from the national literatures and international research was that joint-custody and recognition of the ‘shared costs post-separation’ allied to individualisation of child support payments within advanced maintenance systems provided the optimum trajectory for the social politics of fatherhood. These types of arrangements supported the prevailing ideology that children need equal access to both parents, especially after divorce or separation and in circumstances where mothers and fathers choose to parent independently from each other across separate households. Parental leave schemes An international study represented parental leave schemes as a ‘necessary part of the tool-kit for running a modern state’ (Moss and Kamerman, 2009:1). Moss and Kamerman defined parental leave as a ‘social care’ provision which could ‘be seen as part of the redesign of the welfare state’ (2009:2), where re-designing welfare states means ‘taking the birth of child as a starting point’ in systems of social care provision and where the parental ‘leave system is the first relevant aspect of the care system’ (Plantenga and Siegal, 2004:109; Kamerman and Moss, 2009b:260). Comparative scholarship on the provision of parental leave was greatly advanced by the establishment in 2004 of the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (LP and R) which publishes annual reviews to exchange information about leave policies and cross-national analysis of leave policies. For example, the International Review of Leave Policies and Related Research 2013 presented ‘country reports’ by researchers from thirty-four countries, including the Nordic welfare regimes of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, the Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes of the United Kingdom, the United States and Ireland, plus the East Asian regime of Japan (Moss, 2013:ii–iii). O’Brien classified four different models of parental leave provision for a four-fold typology on father-sensitive parental leave schemes (2009:191). In the first group there were nine countries with extended leave and high income replacement for fathers, comprising:  the Nordic welfare regimes of Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden; the Central European welfare regime of Germany; the Southern European regimes of Portugal and Spain; plus Quebec and Slovenia. In the second group there were seven countries with short leave and high income replacement for fathers comprising:  the Central European welfare regimes of Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece and the Netherlands plus the Anglo-Saxon regime of Canada and Hungary. In the third group there were eight countries with short or minimal father-care leave with no income replacement or low income

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replacement levels comprising the Anglo-Saxon regimes of Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom, the Central European regimes of Austria, the Southern European regimes of Italy plus the East European regime of the Czech Republic, Estonia and Poland and in the fourth group was the USA as an outlier welfare regime with no ‘father-friendly’ leave provision (2009:194). O’Brien presented these categories in a descending order of league tables with the first group of eight countries being considered as the ‘premier league’ (2009:195). The premier league of welfare states with well-paid father-friendly leave programmes included Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden alongside the recently promoted welfare states of Germany, Portugal, Spain and Slovenia (O’Brien, 2009:195). However, in the lower third and fourth divisions were the Anglo-Saxon welfare states of Australia, Ireland, the United Kingdom and the outlier USA, making them well represented among the ‘welfare state laggards’ of father-friendly parental leave programmes. The question as to why the USA has one of the least generous parental leave regimes in the world, and why ‘universal paid leave is not to be expected in the United States’ anytime soon, raised the idea that we may be witnessing an entrenched case of ‘American exceptionalism’ (Levmore, 2003:204). Moreover, any change was viewed as unlikely because fathers are deterred from taking parental leave because of ‘substantial workplace hostility’ (Malin, 1998:55, 1994). At the other end of the scale was Iceland, which was considered to be at the top of the premier league because in the year 2000 it introduced a total of nine months’ leave organised into three distinct parts with the first three months reserved for mothers, the second three months reserved for fathers and the third three months to be transferred between couples as they chose (O’Brien, 2009:195). The literature on parental leave highlighted the health benefits associated with increasing mothers’ capacity to offer children longer and sustained periods of breastfeeding (O’Brien, 2009:206). One of the key findings of comparative research was that the Nordic countries have instilled a wider sense of public responsibility for the care of infants into international public policy debates, as in the case of Japan where it was found that ‘Nordic shades’ now influence the development of Japanese family policies (Toivonen, 2007:30). The USA On the other hand, Henneck’s study of parental leave and child benefits/family allowances in the USA, Japan, Germany, Italy and France explained that from a comparative perspective, the USA ‘appears to have a low level of political commitment to the well-being of families, lacking even the guarantee of unpaid leave to all workers’ (2003:4). Henneck argued that this was not because American families did not need support from social policy, especially with 60 per cent of young mothers in employment and just over 50 per cent of married couples in dual-earner households, and 55 per cent of families paying for non-parental care. Henneck explained that the USA:

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Has no public system of child care and only about 10 per cent of families recieve childcare subsidy (other than the child care tax credit). Also there is no universal cash benefit for families with children, only indirect tax credits … The most active domain of US family policy with the widest range of benefits is that which serves the poorest of the poor. (2003:5)

The absence of social policy to support families and fathers in the USA was understood to be a contributory factor to a ‘flight from fatherhood’ among well-educated American men. Olah et al. made this observation in a comparative context with specific reference to the fact that modern American ‘men with high education avoid household fatherhood more strongly than in Sweden’ (2002:56). Sweden and the Nordic countries Sweden was the first country to introduce parental leave insurance in 1974 and the impetus for change was widely accredited to the 1972 Swedish Commission on Family and Marriage, which recommended that not only should the parental leave be gender-neutral but also that it should be shared equally (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:105). The twin aims of the 1974 parental leave legislation were to improve career opportunities for women and to increase men’s caring responsibilities. The 1972 Commission on Family and Marriage was also widely understood to have brought about a ‘radical shift in the social construction of fatherhood’ through the encouragement of joint-custody as a response to family change and the decline of marriage (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:100). The paid ‘daddy month’ was first introduced to Sweden in 1995, and to Norway two years earlier in 1993 (Eydal, 2006:13). Klinth argued that Swedish parental leave campaigns developed over two stages. In the first stage between 1976 and 2001 fathers were considered as ‘secondary parents’ whereas from 2002 onwards fathers were encouraged to adopt a ‘half-each’ or gender-equality approach to parenting (2008). The Nordic revolution in ‘father-friendly’ social policies was critically promoted by gender studies and feminist activism at both the grassroots women’s group level and at the parliamentary policy-making level (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:110). In addition, Chronholm emphasised the role of academic elites whose conceptualisations of ‘konsroll’ (gender role) and ‘jamstalldher’ (gender equality) introduced ‘a theoretical basis for political decisions’ (2009:228). The role of epistemological theorisation and debate was held up by Chronholm as a central influence on the development of demographic and family policy by the Swedish welfare regime over the course of the twentieth century. Nordic policy-making was characterised more recently by a trend towards emphasising the rights of children when forming policies that affect them, meaning that ‘the child’s perspective has become more noticeable in the Swedish parental leave debate’ (Gíslason and Eydal, 2011:117). The achievements in Sweden were widely understood to have come from ‘strong government campaigns and decisive leadership amongst ministers themselves, in addition to the existence of legislation’ (Dermott, 2006:630).

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The decline of patriarchy The rescue of fatherhood from the periphery of welfare and gender studies was given added impetus by the publication of Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900–2000 by Goran Therborn (2004). Therborn made a fresh case for the ‘core meaning of patriarchy’ to be understood as ‘paternal power’, or ‘the rule of the father’ over his daughter’s sexuality and son’s social advancement (2004:8). Therborn’s analysis spanned five continents covering the period 1900–2000 and depicted the decline of patriarchy as an epic dismantling process carried out in three ‘acts’ over the course of the twentieth century. Act One coincided with the end of the First World War and was labelled ‘reform and revolution’ wherein the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws and the 1917 Russian Revolution delivered decisive ideological blows to patriarchal familism. Act Two was labelled as ‘the Constitutional moment’ wherein the 1948 United Nations Convention on Human Rights enshrined the principle of equality between the sexes and delivered a decisive blow to arranged marriages and bars on inter-racial marriage in the USA. In Act Three, the mass entry of girls and young women into free welfare state education systems from the late 1960s gave rise to ‘global feminism’ which delivered the coup de grâce to patriarchal fatherhood and husbandry in the West (2004:73). However, as well as describing the decline of patriarchy, Therborn provided clarity in the definition of patriarchy by putting fathers at the centre of conceptual epistemological thinking: But Patriarchy in this book will not be cut loose from the family and made synonymous with the subordination, discrimination or social disadvantages of women in general. Gender discrimination and gender inequality should be seen as a broader concept than patriarchy, with the latter’s family tradition and historical connotations. A significant erosion and even disappearance of the latter does necessarily entail the end of the former, and has not actually done so. (2004:8)

Therborn illustrated that the Swedish/Scandinavian model involved a gradual transition from regulatory power resting with the husband/father to power resting with the welfare regime. The Swedish model was given a kick-start by the Lutheran Church’s withdrawal from family regulation as an earthly matter with the passing of the 1915 Scandinavian marriage law. Within the Swedish model the decline of patriarchy or the rule of the husband and father was not regarded as a by-product of economic, demographic, industrial and cultural change as it was in American analysis (Mintz, 1998; Aldous, 1998). Instead, it was understood as a victory for individual freedom over the twin forces of old Europe, i.e. patriarchal and religious power. Therborn illustrated that American de-patriarchalisation was ‘difficult to follow and summarize’ and that the USA remained ‘a country of contradictions’ (2004:101). Moreover, Therborn argued that the USA was ‘the first and so far the only country to see a successful anti-feminist backlash in the area of the European family system’ with fifteen states failing to support male–female equal rights and with three states failing to ratify and thereby failing to pass the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution first introduced by Congress in 1923 (2004:102). However, Therborn warned that the male-dominated family had

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been reinforced by strong religious revivals, ‘often with intense patriarchal preoccupations’ which was strongest in Islam but was also evident in US Christian fundamentalism, also arguing that despite ‘a strong Islamic religious revival … and … surges of Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalism … the prospects for patriarchy are certainly far from bright’ (2004:305–310). However, the eminent British historian, Eric Hobsbawn, questioned whether the rise of US Christian fundamentalism was as ‘Pyrrhic’ a victory as Therborn suggested and identified the Islamic (Iranian) Revolution of 1979 and the election of George W. Bush in 2001 as key moments of re-patriarchalisation (2005:8). Also significant was the landslide election victory of President Ronald Reagan in 1984 and his appeals to the Christian right to ‘bolster our Federal-state child support system’ for children on ‘welfare and non-welfare alike’ (Crowley, 2003:600). Instead of being a key date of American re-patriarchalisation, this introduced an American paradox whereby the American welfare regime appealed to the Christian right by exerting punitive power over patriarchy, albeit outside marriage. Another key date identified by the two regimes model was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996), which enshrined marriage as the ‘foundation of a successful society’ in the USA (Britto, 2000:68) and ‘made it harder for a single woman to raise a child alone’ (McLanahan, 2006:11). The decline of patriarchy was therefore not unilinear and American and Sweden represented diverging paths. Conclusion and discussion This chapter has illustrated that the mid-1970s were a turning point for the social politics of fatherhood on two fronts. First, the Swedish welfare regime invented parental leave in 1974 (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:105), and in the same year, the American welfare regime re-invented child support enforcement schemes (Hansen, 1999:1123). In addition, 1975 marked a ‘turning point’ in ethological and child development perspectives on fatherhood involvement (Lamb, 1975; Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke, 1997:9). The chapter suggested that one of the reasons that fathers were overlooked by comparative welfare and gender studies was because epistemological ways of thinking about the concept of patriarchy were focused primarily on public patriarchy or dual systems theory, for which ‘gender inequality was understood to be the outcome of of the interaction between two co-exisiting autonomous systems of patrarchy and capitalism’ (Walby, 1986; Milkman, 1988:516). In addition, English-speaking feminism did not share Scandinavian women’s optimism about the role of the state (Lewis, 1992:171). The concepts of public patriarchy and dual systems theory contributed to a type of gender blindness towards the significance of fatherhood within English-speaking welfare and gender debates. Gender blindness to the significance of fatherhood was also shaped by the prevalence of strong male-breadwinning arrangements within the British, Irish and American welfare regimes (Lewis, 1992; Sommestad, 1998). Strong male-breadwinning regimes focused critical epistemologcal thinking on

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the disadvantageous position of mothers, as part-time workers and unpaid carers, rather than on creating a work–life balance for fathers, which outside of the Nordic welfare regimes was ‘still but a dream in most countries’ (Sarkadi et al., 2008:154). This chapter illustrated that a major difference in the Swedish model was that gender blindness towards the significance of fatherhood was much less evident in Scandinavian welfare debates because epistemological thinking viewed Scandinavian welfare regimes as ‘women friendly’ regimes of ‘state feminism’ (Hernes, 1987; Siim, 1993:28; Kjeldstad, 2001:67). Twenty years of father-friendly parental leave experience provided Scandinavian feminism with practical reasons to focus on men’s ‘citizen-roles as fathers’ (Siim, 1993:44). The Nordic revolution in parenting was spearheaded in the 1960s by epistemological conceptualisations of gender equality and gender roles (Chronholm, 2009:228). The Nordic revolution was also shaped by regular government commissions, grassroots feminism and ‘strong government campaigns and decisive leadership’ (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:100; Dermott, 2006:630; Haas et al., 2012:8). The Nordic revolution was also facilitated by cooperation between Northern European welfare regimes on bodies such as the Nordic Council of Ministers, in response to social citizenship demands and grassroots feminism. Individualisation became a core principle of parental leave schemes in the 1990s, as a response to low take-up of parental leave by fathers from the mid-1970s. The introduction of non-transferable or ‘use it or lose it’ father quotas or daddy months revolutionised the social politics of parenting and the practice of fatherhood in the Nordic counties. More recently, the Nordic model of paid and individualised paid parental leave was adopted by former communist countries including Slovenia and Estonia, and by Germany and Portugal (Moss, 2011:127). On the other hand, this chapter illustrated that the American model arose from the politicisation of non-resident fatherhood in response to the rising costs of social protection for lone-mother households (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:1). The American model fostered an animus towards non-resident fathers otherwise labelled as ‘deadbeat dads’ (Cammett, 2011:130). Britain and Australia followed a similar path to the USA, but after decades of low compliance rates and popular disapproval, both countries abandoned the American policy logics of ‘cost recovery’ and ‘child poverty reduction’ (Summerfield et  al., 2010:76; Skinner, 2013:254). The Swedish welfare regime first introduced the legislative status of ‘negligent provider’ for non-resident fathers in 1927 and abolished surveillance of unwed fathers, over forty years later in 1973, because of feminist and social work opposition to the labelling and stigma attached to such surveillance (Begman and Hobson, 2002:16). The American welfare regime re-invented stigmatising child support schemes the following year in 1974 (Hansen, 1999:1123). On the other hand, countries such Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway and Sweden achieved much higher levels of coverage through the availability of Swedish-style advanced maintenance schemes or state guarantees. The Nordic welfare regimes increasingly promoted joint-custody and the principles of

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shared parenting and children’s rights of access to care and financial support from both parents (Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:271). The strong malebreadwinner regime of the USA was strengthened further by the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, which privileged the status of marriage (Britto, 2000), and made it harder for single mothers to raise children (McLanahan, 2006). By following similar paths, the English-speaking variants of the American model, including Great Britain and Ireland, continued to faciliate illiberalism through gender inequalities in labour markets by maintaining an unfair advantage for men over women. The American model and the Swedish models of fatherhood represented different responses to the decline of patriarchy, the decline of male-breadwinning and the decline of marriage as a life-long institution. The American response was to try and bolster marriage and to discourage lone motherhood and non-resident fatherhood by introducing punitive child support enforcement schemes to deter fathers from getting divorced or separated and by introducing ‘time-limited’ welfare reforms such as the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) under the PRWORA of 1996. On the other hand, the Swedish response to the decline of life-long marriage was to individualise welfare arrangements for parents inside and outside marriage. Individualisation of parental welfare arrangements shaped the new social politics of fatherhood and promoted gender equality in families and labour markets. Patriarchy remained in decline across much of the Western world and ‘dual system theory’ was undermined by a return to familial concepts of patriarchy (Therborn, 2004; Folbre, 2009:208). On an empirical level ‘dual systems theory’ representations of separate and autonomous systems of patriarchy and capitalism were undermined by the way Western capitalist welfare regimes such as the Nordic countries dismantled patriarchal fatherhood, or usurped patriarchal power, as in the case of China’s One Child Family Planning Policy, or as in the case of the USA, which imprisoned fathers for failure to comply with child support orders. The decline of patriarchal fatherhood in the Western welfare regimes illustrated that male-breadwinning patriarchy was not autonomous from welfare capitalism. Instead, this chapter suggested that welfare capitalism dismantled patriarchy in response to the reform of marriage and in response to women’s demands for autonomy and gender equality in labour markets and families. By contrast with Hobson and Morgan’s model of the social politics of fatherhood (2002), which did not find a ‘neat fit’ with Esping-Andersen’s (1990) typology, this chapter illustrated a neat fit by proposing a two worlds model of father politics with Sweden at one end and the USA at the other. Overall, this lent support to the findings of the Smith and Williams study, which also found a neat fit between fatherhood policies and the three worlds of welfare capitalism (2007:188). But the two regimes model of fatherhood departed from the ‘three worlds’ framework by illustrating a ‘two worlds’ continuum of fatherhood with Sweden at one end, on the left of the political spectrum and the USA at the other end, on the right of the political spectrum. Moreover, the two regimes model

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highlights the importance of father-friendly parental leave policies as a form of decommodification and as a form of individualisation. Overall, the two regimes model suggests that decommodification, individualisation and care are three core concepts for ways of thinking about fatherhood and social protection in twenty-first century welfare regimes.

2

The American model: state-enforced agency

Introduction This chapter makes a case for a distinct ‘American world’ of fatherhood and highlights four paradigmatic features of the model. First, the chapter shows that, after 1974, non-resident fathers in the USA were subjected to an exponentially punitive child maintenance enforcement system, which was labelled a cost-recovery model (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:611). The cost-recovery model created a dualism within American epistemology of child support exponents, on the one hand (Garfinkel, 1988; Huang and Han, 2011), and on the other hand, critical opponents of the ‘American invention of child support’ (Hansen, 1999:1123; Britto, 2000; Waller and Plotnick, 2001; Cammett, 2011; Crowley et al., 2012). The second paradigmatic feature of the American model was the unique, and influential significance, of social-psychology and ethological literature, which was shaped by the seminal publications of Michael E. Lamb et al. in The Role of the Father in Child Development (1976). American ethological perspectives were influential in shaping global perspectives on the significance of fatherhood to child development (Russell, 2001). However, the chapter demonstrates that after four decades of research into ‘patricentric research themes’, fathers emerged ‘in a poor light relative to mother’ (Lamb and Lewis, 2004:292). Early reviews of father-involvement literature concluded that there were few, if any, ‘unique effects of fathering’ (Crockett et al., 1993:372). A third paradigmatic feature was the extent to which moral panics about the ‘decline of fatherhood and marriage’ and the ‘human carnage of fatherlessness’ became influential within epistemological and social commentary about fatherhood, lone motherhood and welfare reform in the USA (Davidson, 1990; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996; McLanahan, 2006). The fourth paradigmatic feature was the emergence of mass men’s movements emphasising fathers’ responsibility, marriage and the plight of ‘fragile families’ (Gottman, 1998; Gavanas, 2002; Crowley, 2008). Fathers’ rights movements emerged in other Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes including Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom, but it was the sheer scale of numbers involved the USA,

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epitomised by groups such as the Promise Keepers, and by the formation of umbrella groups such as the National Fatherhood Initiative and the American Fathers Coalition, which made for a paradigmatic case. Finally, a key feature, or rather non-feature, of the American model was the way the USA lagged behind other advanced welfare states in the provision of parental leave for fathers (Ray et al., 2008; National Partnership for Women and Families, 2012b:3). From a comparative perspective it was claimed that parents in the USA were faced with an entrenched case of ‘American exceptionalism’ (Levmore, 2003:204). Non-resident fathers and the child support enforcement regime When President Bill Clinton promised to ‘end welfare as we know it’ with the introduction of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996, he stressed that child support payments from non-resident fathers were a central plank of American welfare reforms. Specifically, President Clinton said that ‘if every parent paid the child support they should … we could move 800,000 women and children off welfare immediately’ (Hansen, 1999:1123). Clinton also said that the failure of ‘deadbeat dads’ to pay child support was ‘a serious crime’ which was just as bad as robbing banks or 7-eleven stores, and he sent out the following warning to non-resident fathers: If you owe child support, you better pay it. If you deliberately refuse to pay it, you can find your face posted in the Post Office. We’ll track you down with computers … We’ll track you down with law enforcement. We’ll find you through the internet. (Hansen, 1999:1124)

The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme was established under part D of the Social Security Act (1975). The two aims of the Act were ‘to increase child support and reduce welfare costs’ (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:1). The Senate Committee of the 94th Congress noted that: The Committee believes that all children have the right to receive support from their fathers. The Committee bill is designed to help children attain this right, including the right to have their fathers identified so that support can be obtained. The immediate result will be a lower welfare cost to the tax payer but, more importantly, as, an effective support collection system is established fathers will be deterred from deserting their families to welfare and children will be spared the effects of family break-up. (Cammett, 2011:136)

The view of the Senate Committee was that an effective child support system would also function as an incentive for fathers to think twice about getting separated or divorced. By the 1970s politicians, policymakers and the epistemic research community were singing from similar hymn sheets when it came to support for the CSE programme as a mechanism for tackling ‘welfare dependency’ among lone mothers. Moreover, as Garfinkel and Nepomnyaschy explained in the quote

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below, politicians and academics shared similar views on the relationship between poverty and welfare: Dissatisfaction with both public assistance and child support enforcement was fuelled by the growth of single parenthood, the welfare explosion of the decade following the 1964 War on Poverty, and the continuing high rates of poverty of single mother families. Politicians and academics alike sought new methods for achieving the long-standing policy objectives of preventing both poverty and dependence on welfare. In 1974, Congress enacted two programs championed by Senator Russell Long that have played a key role in assisting families outside welfare – the Earned Income Tax Credit and the new federal/state child support enforcement program. (2009:233)

However, some members of the epistemic research community were more supportive of child support enforcement than others. For example Professor Irwin Garfinkel, a prominent member of the American academic fatherhood fraternity, was described as ‘one of the principal architects’ of the Child Support Assurance System demonstration programme in Wisconsin (Garfinkel, 1988:11). In his article ‘The evolution of child support policy’, Professor Garfinkel described his ‘road to Damascus’ or conversion to support for welfare ‘reforms’ and for stringent child enforcement policies: I took no notice when the 1975 Child Support Act was passed. But not long after, I received a request, in my assumed capacity as the Director of the Institute for Research on Poverty, from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation in the Department of Health Education and Welfare. ‘Could I please try to find someone at IRP to study child support?’ I was not favourably disposed to the idea of increasing public enforcement of the private child support obligations of the poor. What little thought I had given to the issue was coloured by my background in social work. Most social workers viewed the public enforcement of private child support obligations as simply punitive. (1988:15)

Garfinkel put his change of heart down to direct involvement in research which concluded that ‘public enforcement of private child support obligations could not be dismissed as merely punitive’ (1988:15). However, what might be described as the Garfinkel dilemma was expressed as follows: As we collect more child support from the relatively poor fathers of the children on welfare, that money will not be used to reduce the poverty of single mothers and their children. We may wind up playing Robin Hood in reverse and use it to reduce the taxes of the middle and upper classes. That would be a disgrace. (1988:16)

The power of states to intervene in the lives of non-resident fathers and lone-mother families grew exponentially from 1974 through the re-enactment, on a near annual basis, of new laws by Congress to ‘limit the ability of non-custodial parents to escape their obligations’ (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:5). The failure of the CSE to ‘pass on’ collected payments to mothers on welfare led Lerman and Sorensen to conclude that one of the principal reasons that child support had such ‘limited redistributional effects’ on child-poverty reduction was because ‘the government

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Between two worlds of father politics

keeps essentially all of the child support paid on behalf of children who are on public welfare’ (2001:19). Previously two distinct bodies of family law had evolved in the United States: ‘one for families receiving public assistance and another for families in the rest of society’, which were separated by a ‘relatively solid wall’ (Britto, 2000:67). Indeed, the phrase a ‘wall of separation’ was coined by Jacobus tenBroek to illustrate how Californian state law treated families on welfare separately from other families: The conditions of welfare, which included midnight raids and home searches were often punitive, moralistic and politically motivated, with the explicit goal of limiting access to welfare benefits and thus keeping costs down. (Britto, 2000:68)

However, after 1965 this harsh welfare surveillance system was ‘largely dismantled’ at the behest of a ‘welfare rights movement’ that was supported by ‘civil rights lawyers’ and by the introduction of the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) programme (Britto, 2000:68). The exponential growth of child support legislation resulted in a ‘trickle-up’ of government intervention in family life or what Britto labelled as ‘the welfarization of family law’, which was underpinned by conservative and neo-liberal assumptions about family responsibilities: But with wave of welfare reform that began in the late 1980s, the family law of welfare has begun to penetrate and shape general family law in its image. The ‘welfarized’ family law that results embodies the dominant orthodoxy of welfare reform-that public spending gives government greater license to intrude into intimate areas of family life. (2000:67)

Britto explained that following the introduction of the CSE programme in 1974 ‘the patterns of duality in family law that were largely abandoned after 1965’ were ‘resumed, with fervor’ (2000:71) and were embedded even further when the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (1996) legislated that: 1) Marriage is the foundation of a successful society. 2) Marriage is an essential institution of a successful society which promotes the interests of children. 3) Promotion of responsible fatherhood and motherhood is integral to successful child-rearing and the well-being of children. (Britto, 2000:68)

When Congress introduced the Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) under the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) the ‘prevention of out-of-wedlock pregnancy and reduction in out-of-wedlock birth’ became one of the main aims of American family policy and welfare reforms (Cammett, 2011:139). The introduction of the TANF under the PRWORA (1996) was the culmination of what Williams labelled as a ‘30 year assault on welfare’, which was motivated by political hostility to ‘the racial composition of the AFDC population’ which was increasingly made up of ‘African Americans and other people of color on the welfare rolls’ (1997:2).

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From an equally critical perspective, Jocelyn Elise Crowley, author of Defiant Dads:  Fathers’ Rights Activists in America (2008) and ‘The politics of child support in America’ (2003), labelled the exponential growth of the child support enforcement as a process of ‘gentrification’ because, by 1997, non-welfare cases (9.9 million) outnumbered welfare-roll cases (9.1 million) by 800,000 (2003:585). Crowley characterised the expansion from ‘targeted programs’ as the ‘trickle-up’ effect (2003:587). Crowley explained that during the 1980s a new type of grassroots movements led by middle-class mothers had emerged: By the early 1980s a new type of political activism was emerging. Across the country, grassroots groups were founded by and made up of middle class women who advocated for changes in child support laws. (2003:595)

According to Crowley, the mobilisation of the Women’s Vote Project to register an additional 1.5 million new female votes for the 1984 presidential election prompted President Reagan to discover that ‘he could sell enhanced child support services for middle-class women to the Right’ (2003:599). The religious right made up of groups such as the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum interpreted child support enforcement as a central plank of ‘family values’ which was a shorthand phrase to describe their general belief in ‘traditional roles for men and women in modern society’ (2003:599). Reagan’s efforts to woo the abandoned or separated middle-class mothers’ vote were articulated in his speech on signing the 1984 Child Support Enforcement Amendments into law: It’s an unfortunate fact of our times that one in four American children live in single-parent homes, and millions of these children endure needless deprivation and hardship due to lack of support by their absent parent. The failure of some parents to support their children is a blemish on America. As a decent and caring people, it behoves us to come to grips with the devil-may-care attitude of some of our citizens that has left too many children in dire straits … Last year I  promised that we bolster our Federal-state child support system by mandating effective and proven collection practices. I believe that we should emphasize services to all children, welfare and non-welfare alike, and improve incentives for State government to get the job done. The Child Support Enforcement Amendments bill contains all these features. (Ronald Reagan cited in Crowley, 2003:600)

Crowley’s core thesis was that 1984 represented the year that the American child support enforcement system expanded from being targeted at AFDC families to being universally targeted at all non-resident fathers as the Reagan administration became ‘more responsive to domestic policy issues that directly affected middle-class women’ (2003:601). In her article on ‘Deadbeats, deadbrokes, and prisoners’, Cammett explained that since the Aid to Dependent Children (ADC) programme was established the number of American men in prison had risen from 125,000 in 1935 to 2.3 million in the contemporary era. On the basis of this data Cammett argued that: mass incarceration has radically skewed the paradigm on which the child support system is based, removing millions of parents from the formal economy entirely,

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diminishing their income opportunities after release, and rendering them ineffective actors [and in this way] enforcement measures serve to alienate parents from the formal economy after re-entry and drive them underground away from their families. (2011:127)

Cammett’s research also observed that prisoners amass further child support debts while in prison and demonstrated this with the example of the state of Massachusetts where ex-prisoners owed an average of $16,000 child support debt on release, of which $5,000 was amassed during their sentence (2011:129). Moreover, the infamous ‘Bradley Amendment’ (1986) ensured that once a child support debt was accrued it could not ‘be modified or discharged’ by the courts (2011:130). Cammett’s study presented an image of fathers coming under fire on their immediate release from prison, which was asymmetrical to the promotion of father-involvement with children and families: These automatic penalties are counter-productive, as they make it more difficult for formerly incarcerated parents to pay on-going support as they attempt to successfully reintegrate into society and resume contact with their children. Rather, automatic enforcement creates perverse incentives and alienates parents from the formal economy and drives them underground – and away from their families. Such a paradigm cannot be in the best interest of their children and runs counter to the goals of the child support program. (2011:130)

Cammett’s conclusion was that: child support law and policy that is driven by an animus against deadbeat dads without any sincere inquiry about whether these policies create well-being for children can, and does, have unintended consequences. (2011:130)

In their study of the child support enforcement system, Waller and Plotnick sought to explain, through interviews with mothers and fathers caught up in the system, why the system was ineffective for low-income families (2001). Waller and Plotnick’s research illustrated that one-quarter of fathers interviewed, for a street-level qualitative study, reported that they had been arrested on child support charges and reported being sent to prison on numerous occasions for child support charges: ‘every eight months or so’ (2001:105). The following quote from Waller and Plotnick’s research, from a respondent named Vincent, illustrated the scale and consequences of imprisonment: The jails are full of these guys for child support, and it’s the craziest thing. And it’s counterproductive because you have these guys – they’re practically living on nothing. You lock them up for child support. These guys who already on living on the edge, living in a terrible neighbourhood, working in a horrible job. And then they get put in jail because they fall behind on their child support. (2001:105)

Studies by Gavanas (2004) and Orloff and Monson (2004:86) emphasised the consequences of disproportionate low income and unemployment among non-white fathers compared to white fathers. Orloff and Monson emphasised that fathers who failed to pay child support were kept under judicial supervision through

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regularly scheduled follow-up court hearings to submit proof of their efforts to find work and make payments. Failure to appear resulted in a ‘shirking order’ or a bench warrant for arrest which was often enforced ‘when a father was arrested on another charge’ (2004:86). From a less critical perspective McLanahan observed that ‘the high level of incarceration among unmarried fathers (in the USA)’ was ‘particularly striking’ and that ‘changes in penal policy which occurred after the 1980’s’ had ‘played an important role’ in the lives of fathers (2006:11). The following quote by McLanahan offered a candid analysis of the logic of the PRWORA (1996) and of the eugenic undercurrents of American ‘welfare reforms’: And the plight of poor unmarried fathers was virtually ignored except insofar as they were the target of child-support enforcement. However conditions began to change in the early 1990’s, beginning with the rapid expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which represented a substantial earning subsidy for many two-parent families, and followed up by welfare reform legislation in 1996 which made it harder for a single woman to raise a child alone … Thus in order to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty, we will need to find a way to persuade young women from disadvantaged backgrounds that delaying fertility while they search for a suitable partner will have a payoff that is large enough to offset the loss of time spent as a mother or the possibility of foregoing motherhood altogether. (McLanahan, 2006:11)

The above quote presented a normative epistemological link between ‘welfare reforms’ and eugenic concerns with controlling non-marital births. Moreover, the quote demonstrated something of a Janus-faced approach whereby American welfare reforms created adverse conditions for lone mothers to raise children and then lone mothers were blamed for creating cycles ‘of intergenerational poverty’. This overarching normative and epistemological emphasis on individual responsibility or agency, even in the face of conservative and racially motivated structural constraints, served to support more critical claims that: Underpinning the complex structure of federal and state child support enforcement programs in the United States is essentially a simple assumption:  that the financial support of children is, first and foremost, the responsibility of their parents. (Cancian et al., 2011:142)

However, a major finding from a study of the MDRC Parents Fair Share Demonstration Program, conducted between 1994 and 1996, was that many American parents struggle to meet their financial obligations and that: Low income non-custodial fathers are a disadvantaged group. Many live on the edge of poverty and face severe barriers to finding jobs, while those who can find work typically hold low-wage or temporary jobs. Despite their low, irregular incomes, many of these fathers are quite involved in their children’s lives and, when they can, provide financial and other kinds of support. (Miller and Knox, 2001: v–vi; Solomon-Fears, 2014:6)

Critics argued that despite the introduction of a vast array of punitive ‘big brother’ enforcement tools: ‘the program still collects only 20% of child support

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Between two worlds of father politics

obligations’ (Solomon-Fears, 2014:12). This type of analysis illustrated that the American cost-recovery approach was not working for American children or their parents. Child development perspectives on fatherhood At about the same time that Congress introduced the Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program in 1974, American ethological and psychological research communities began to preside over a shift in ways of thinking about the significance of father-involvement to child development (Lamb, 1975). This new way of thinking about father-involvement represented a paradigmatic shift away from an attachment-theory focus on the mother–child dyad towards a ‘patricentric’ focus on the father–child dyad. Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke characterised this in terms of a shift away from a ‘deficit model of fatherhood’ where fathers were assumed to be less likely to be involved with their children than mothers (1997:ix). The ‘deficit’ model of fatherhood was associated with Freudian psychoanalysis, Parsonian functionalism (Parsons and Bales, 1955) and ‘attachment theory’ (Bowlby, 1969). The deficit model was challenged over the last four decades by the new ethological model of ‘father involvement’ associated most notably with Lamb et  al. (1985). The American model of fatherhood thereby included a paradigmatic shift from an ethological focus on the mother–child dyad to a sustained focus on the father– child dyad, as opposed to an explicitly Swedish gender-equality focus on the benefits of shared parenting. Lamb’s article, entitled ‘Fathers: forgotten contributors to child development’ (1975), inaugurated a sustained ethological challenge to the deficit mode of fatherhood. Publication the following year of the seminal anthology The Role of the Father in Child Development brought together a number of research studies on fatherhood in one volume for the first time and since then it has been published in five separate editions involving numerous authors (Lamb et  al., 1976, 1981, 1997, 2004, 2010). According to Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke the forgotten father thesis marked a ‘turning point’ in the development of clinical perspectives and psychological research into fatherhood involvement and child development (1997:9). Lamb identified three major themes of the social aspect of fatherhood (2000:25). First were contemporary concerns with the decline of the American family, fatherlessness and deadbeat dads, which gained prominence in sociological commentaries during the 1990s (Popenoe, 1993, 1996; Blankenhorn, 1995). Second, and by far the most prominent and voluminous, in terms of academic research output, were development psychology and ethological concerns with the salience of father-involvement to child development (Lamb, 1976; Lamb et  al., 1981, 1986, 2004, 2010), and third, with mother–father comparisons in relation to parental interactions and child development (Yeung et  al., 2001; Lamb and Lewis 2004; Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda, 2004; Pleck and Masciadrelli, 2004). The latter studies tended to illustrate and emphasise robust differences between male and female parenting styles (Lamb and Lewis, 2004:277). Overall, the academic fatherhood

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fraternity in the USA set out to illustrate the significance of the role of the father to child development and to measure how involved fathers were with their children but from the start they ‘found it much more difficult than expected to obtain answers to this question’ (Lamb, 2000:30). More recently Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda described early research studies into levels of father-involvement in terms of their ‘detailed observation’ and their provision of ‘detailed maternal and paternal reports’ (2004:2). Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda described the first decade of research on fathers and child development in terms of a shift in tone from an outright defence of father involvement by Lamb (1976) to a less defensive focus on fatherhood by Lamb et  al. (1981) where both sets of research ‘not surprisingly emphasized the same conclusions’ (2004:1). This first wave of research into father-involvement and child development could therefore be described as a turning point from an outright defence of fatherhood salience to a more confident valorisation of father involvement. In essence, the first wave of father research from 1976 to 1982 was a preface to the development of the ‘new father’ ideologies. The origins of ‘new father’ ideologies were linked by Amato and Sobolewski to the emergence of the dual-earner model of American family life following the Second World War and to the promotion of a gender division of household labour and childcare (2004:341). However, the following paradox was observed to be at the heart of the American model of fatherhood: At the same time that our culture was encouraging fathers to play a larger role in their children’s lives, changes in family structure were undermining this process. (Amato and Sobolewski, 2004:341)

Research in the 1980s became increasingly concerned with the measurement of father-involvement and Lamb et  al. developed the ‘paternal involvement construct’ (1987:111–142). Paternal involvement was measured using three components, which were: (a) paternal engagement or direct interaction; (b) accessibility or being at home; and (c)  responsibility or making arrangements for the child. A father’s childcare time was re-conceptualised for the paternal construct model, in terms of engagement or a ‘father’s direct contact with his child through care-taking and shared activities’ and accessibility was defined in terms of ‘the father’s potential for interaction by virtue of being present or accessible to the child whether or not direct action is occurring’ (Lamb et al., 1985:884). The adoption of this three-dimensional model of father-involvement was widely embraced by researchers internationally, and was recommended by Zick as a conceptual model for the collection of all new time-use data regarding father-involvement in national surveys and studies in the USA (1997). However, American research on father-involvement revealed that fathers were typically spending less than three hours a week with their infants, and that only 43 per cent of American fathers and 50 per cent of Australian fathers had changed an infant’s nappy (Geiger, 1996:6). Geiger claimed that early studies on father-involvement were hampered by a legacy of academic neglect and by a previously limited focus on a father’s role in the development of gender identity (1996:6).

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Father–mother comparisons Concerns with father and mother comparison were a common theme of research studies that focused on paternal involvement in intact families (Yeung et al., 2001; Lamb and Lewis, 2004; Pleck and Masciadrelli, 2004). Research findings reviewed by Lamb and Lewis highlighted robust differences in maternal and paternal styles (2004:277), evidence of father–infant attachment for American children (2004:281) and greater predictive power in infant–mother attachments for American children (2004:283). However, despite four decades of dedicated ethological research, fathers continued to emerge ‘in a poor light relative to mother’ (Lamb and Lewis, 2004:292). On the basis of this finding, from a comprehensive review of ethological child development literature, Lamb and Lewis made a case for what they described as ‘more patricentric research themes’, or in other words methodologies that might more positively reflect a father’s role and the significance of father-involvement to child development (2004:292). Studies by Palkovitz (1997) and Warin et al. (1999) were provided as examples of more patricentric orientated research. These studies sought to expand conceptualisations of men’s caring roles and to develop a focus on fathers’ adult development. Ultimately, however, Lamb and Lewis conceded that fathers generally ‘have more distant relationships with their children than mothers do’ (2004:290). Research findings, overall, have continued to stress the primary importance of mother–infant bonds and mother–adolescent bonds over those involving fathers. Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda made the following points in relation to mother– father comparison: first, fathers spend less time with children than mothers; second, fathers in employment engage with children for about one-quarter of the time that full-time mothers interact with children; third, in dual-earner households the fraction of time spent by fathers with their children is about one-third that of mothers; fourth, in both instances many fathers assume little or no child-rearing responsibilities for their children, and significantly, the employment of mothers in dual-earner families generates proportionally greater father-involvement (2004:2). Non-resident fathers Amato and Rivera linked child well-being and behavioural outcomes to non-residential father-involvement and family structure (1999). Greene et  al. suggested from national survey evidence that there were between 5.6 and 7.3  million non-residential fathers in the USA (2001:21). However, there was a significant discrepancy between the number of non-resident fathers and the number of custodial mothers leading to the conclusion that non-resident fathers were under-represented in household surveys in the USA for three reasons. First, men in prison and the military were ignored. Second, weighting of surveys based on Census data perpetuated the under-representation of African Americans. Third, men seemed less inclined to report that they had children living elsewhere than women who would report that they had children by non-resident fathers. On this

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basis Greene et  al. estimated that a further 1.5  million non-residential fathers might be enumerated (2001:21). Studies of non-resident fathers identified three points of overall agreement. First, non-residents fathers have typically less involvement than resident fathers. Second, they were more likely to be involved in play and leisure. Third, their most active involvement was in relation to responsibility for education rather than in relation to direct engagement or accessibility (Greene et  al., 2001:21). The last fifty years marked a paradigmatic shift in understandings of the impact of father-involvement on child behaviour and child well-being. Earlier psychological studies placed little or no emphasis on father-involvement whereas in the contemporary era there was a normative US consensus that ‘fathers’ detachment represents a significant loss for children’ and that ‘high quality father involvement is beneficial for a range of child and adolescent socio-behavioural outcomes’ (Carlson, 2006:152). Fatherhood in a global perspective Growing concerns about fatherhood were especially evident in the Anglophone nations of Australia, the USA, the UK, Ireland and New Zealand. Russell posited the development of national social policy literatures relating to fatherhood in Anglophone nations as evidence of what he termed a ‘global perspective’ on fatherhood (2001:52). Examples of national literatures cited to support the case for a global perspective included Changing Fathers:  Fatherhood and Family Life in Modern Ireland (McKeown et al., 1998a). With reference to the development of the global perspective Russell made the point that ‘the discourse has tended to be dominated by USA data and commentaries’ (Russell, 2001:52). Russell’s global perspective made a direct beneficial link between ‘a fundamental change in the level of involvement of fathers and the emergence of a “new father” who is highly involved in the day-to-day care of children’ (Russell, 2001:52). Alternatively, Brown and Bumpus concluded from an extensive review of the literature that ‘fathers can make a difference’ but that a tendency to concentrate on married families and the failure to come to terms with the nature of family diversity meant that research in general is only ‘generalizable to a shrinking segment of the population’ (1998:315–330). Overall, Brown and Bumpus concluded that that some studies show ‘small effects of fathers on child development and in preventing antisocial behaviour. Others find no effects’ (1998:315). Moreover, research findings published in the Journal of Family Issues into young children’s behavioural and cognitive development revealed that there were few if any ‘unique effects of fathering’ and that once family resources were statistically controlled for, ‘the only discernable impact of fathers presence on children’s well-being appeared to result from the co-resident father’s economic contributions to the family’ (Crockett et al., 1993:372). Mintz challenged any idea of an elegiac historical journey away from patriarchy and dismissed ‘new father ideologies’ as a myth of American androgyny. Mintz suggested most men muddle through and continue ‘to define parental identity largely as family breadwinner despite the growing disjunction between this self-image

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and social realities’. Mintz expressed concern that the history of American men in families might ‘end not with a bang, but a whimper’ of post-modern ‘highly polarised fragmentations’ (1998:27). A central aim of ethological research into father salience over the past five decades was to establish the significance of the father–child dyad to child development outcomes. However, from a clinical-ethological perspective Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke ultimately conceded that there was ‘a tendency for mothers more than fathers to establish a secure attachment with their children’ (1997:9). Nonetheless, the ‘ethological quest’ (Rush, 2011:41) to establish evidence of father attachment or the salience of the father role to child development resulted in a ‘sprawling literature’ on father-involvement and the father–child dyad (Lamb, 2000:25). Therefore, the jury is still out on whether fathers matter to child development. On the other hand, not only was the sprawling literature on the father– child dyad less than convincing, it also failed to influence the development of father-friendly social policies in the USA. From the 1990s American fathers came under fire for their collective failure to respond positively in the home to the demands of paid female employment outside the home. In particular, non-resident fathers came under fire for their failure to provide adequate child support (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994; Garfinkel et al., 1998). A Janus-faced model of fatherhood subsequently emerged. This was typified by publications such as Good Dads-Bad Dads: Two Faces of Fatherhood (Furstenberg, 1988). Within this model the ‘good father’ combined a successful breadwinning role with father-involvement. On the other hand, the status of bad dad or ‘deadbeat dad’ was reserved for non-maintenance paying fathers or any loquacious father who failed to measure up to the moral, economic and psychological demands of paternity: inside marriage, outside marriage or outside of the custodial home. American sociology and the crisis of fatherlessness The ‘fathers under fire’ literature (Garfinkel et al., 1998) and the two-faces of fatherhood model (Furstenberg, 1988) were soon superseded by moral panics about ‘fatherless America’ and ‘family decline’ (Popenoe, 1993; Blankenhorn, 1995) and by the valorisation of fatherhood within marriage (Popenoe, 1996). Critics of the American family values perspective produced evidence to show that ‘once economic status was adjusted for, the difference in child outcomes between non-intact and intact families all but disappears’ (Crockett et  al., 1993:372). However, Popenoe argued that most social problems for children and young people were directly attributable to father absence and dismissed the case for blaming negative child-welfare outcomes on poverty and economic inequalities between two-parent households and one-parent households (1996:56). Popenoe’s principal claim was that ‘living in a single-parent family impacts negatively on almost all aspects of child’s life’ (1996:57) even to the point where he claimed that ‘father absence is, at least in the United States, a mental health risk factor for children’ (1996:56). Popenoe helped to engineer an American

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‘social science shift’ away from an epistemological ‘stamp of approval on divorce and father absence’ which had originated ‘at the height of the divorce revolution’ (1996:60). The social science shift involved a break from an earlier research paradigm on ‘father absence’ epitomised by the findings of Herzog and Sudia (1973), which recognised the beneficial aspects of divorce as a resolution to marital discord. The ‘social science shift’ led towards a normative belief that the high levels of divorce in American society were socially damaging with negative consequences for individual children and their fathers (Popenoe, 1996:61; Amato and Sobolewski, 2004:360). Social commentary on the negative societal impact of ‘fatherless families’ in the USA was reinforced by the argument that the percentage of American people who are divorced was ‘too high a number’ (McLanahan and Sandefur, 1994:137). McLanahan and Sandefur contrasted the benefits associated with two-parent families against the potential risks associated with divorce and non-marital child-bearing (1994:148). This research paradigm associated economic and relationship risks with ‘fragile families’ or out-of-wedlock families. Low marriage rates, high levels of marital disruption and an increase in births outside marriage were all taken as conflated indicators of negative social change that physically separated large numbers of fathers from their biological children (Amato and Sobolewski, 2004:341). Disputes surrounding the concepts of ‘fatherlessness’ and ‘family decline’ were played out in American social science journals and labelled by Stacey as the ‘national family wars’ (1993:545). The opening salvo by David Popenoe appeared in a review and appraisal of ‘American Family Decline’ (1993:537). Stacey criticised what she termed ‘virtual social science and family values’ and ‘centrist family ideology policies’, and argued ‘that the ruling paradigms of 1950s sociology  – structural functionalism, modernisation theory … have lost prestige and power’ (1999:187). Stacey claimed the 1960s and 1970s witnessed what she termed a ‘feminist onslaught’ on modernisation theory and on the functionalist theories of Talcott Parsons. Stacey claimed that sociologists such as David Blankenhorn were at the forefront of a ‘cultural campaign’ that claimed ‘the legitimacy of social science, in a crusade to restore eroded privileges and prestige to fathers and the heterosexual, married-couple nuclear families it wishes them to head’ (1999:186). Stacey strongly contested the idea of an academic consensus on family issues by arguing that few feminist academics sympathised with ‘support for heterosexual marital privilege or … disproval of single motherhood’ (1999:195). Stacey castigated the pro-marriage and traditional family perspectives in the USA and argued that ‘an unholy alliance of academic and political networks produce and sponsor sitcom sociology’ to promote a 1950s ‘fable of virtual family values’ (1999:199–200). Stacey went so far as to argue that the majority of American scholars in the field of family policy adhered to a liberal feminist perspective, but conceded that the ‘massive feminist and gender section’ of American social science remained in what she labelled ‘a female ghetto – alien, unfamiliar territory to most mainstream family scholars’ (1999:194). Stacey cited Karin Stoltenberg, the Director General of the Norwegian Ministry of Children and Family Affairs, who suggested

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Popenoe was ‘insane’ for believing that welfare state policies were the source of rising divorce rates in the Nordic nations (1999:194). Ultimately, Stacey argued that the ‘American family decline’ perspective conflated the negative economic consequences of growing up in a mother-headed household with the psychological effects of marital separation and divorce on children (Stacey, 1993:547). A more recent study on family policy and religious practice cited numerous American studies to support the thesis that children from intact families ‘seem to thrive more than children from any other family structure’ (Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996; Waite and Gallagher, 2000; Fagan, 2006:26). Fagan’s study suggested ‘that children from families that worship frequently thrive more than children from families that worship not at all’ and his basic argument was that the well-being of children in married church-going families was greater than that for children in non-married non-church-going families. Fagan reserved particular criticism for Coontz (1992), and the view ‘that all family structures are equivalent’ (2006:26). A tendency towards illiberal anti-secularism within the American literature was highlighted by Gottman who observed that the ‘religious right’ were pushing fathers toward authoritarian marriage and parenting styles through an American Men’s Movement advocacy that ‘men avoid becoming feminized or emotionally expressive or responsive’ (1998:185). Gottman singled out the Promise Keepers as the most fundamentally Christian of the mass fathers’ rights movements. Gottman explained that the Promise Keepers campaigned for a new conservative ideology of authoritarian religious fatherhood that licensed the corporal punishment of children. Gottman also explained that the tendency towards religious authoritarian fatherhood was becoming something of a social movement: As the religious right gains strength in the United States, there is also movement of some fathers toward authoritarian parenting in child-rearing patterns of discipline. In the United States, the religious right has reacted to the child advocacy movement as if it were a movement of the government designed to take away what they claim are the rights of parents to use corporal punishment with their children, and especially not to have corporal punishment treated as child abuse. Thus, they are advocating corporal punishment of children as part of what they see as strengthening the family. (Gottman, 1998:183)

From a family policy perspective, Aldous pictured the USA at a crossroads and cautioned against the promotion of patriarchal fatherhood and gender differentiated parenting: Presently we appear to be in time of flux. There are strong forces often backed by organised religion urging a return to fathers as family patriarchs who do not participate in the daily tasks of childcare or homemaking (Blankenhorn, 1995, Popenoe, 1996) … Active fathers are still in the substantial minority, but they set an example for their children and for other men that is impossible to overlook or to ignore. (Aldous, 1998:16)

Gavanas broke down fathers’ rights groups and the Family Responsibility Movement (FRM) into two strands; a ‘pro-marriage wing’, that saw marriage as

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the key to solving social problems, and a ‘fragile family’ wing, more concerned with unemployment, racism and discrimination. Gavanas explained that the two strands of the Family Responsibility Movement represented competing voices in social policy debates in the USA where marriage, work, religion, corporal punishment and sexual abstinence before marriage were all central themes in the new conservative politics of American fatherhood (2002:242). Parental and paternal leave The passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) in 1993 introduced entitlement to maternity leave to American mothers for the first time (Waldfogel, 2001:101). Espinola-Arredondo and Mondal identified the year 1993 as ‘the beginning of job-protected maternity leave policies at the federal level’ (2010:2). However, the FMLA did not provide for income replacement or pay during the twelve weeks’ leave so it was not an affordable option for most families. Thus it was found the FMLA has had only ‘small effects’ on new mothers accessing the entitlement and ‘no discernible effect on leave usage by new fathers’ (Waldfogel, 2001:102). Waldfogel concluded the review with the following observation: The fact that the law extended coverage, but had so little impact on usage, suggests that there are limits to the extent to which families are willing and able to use the unpaid leave offered under the FMLA. Given the financial constraints that families with new children often face, taking leave without pay may simply not be an option for many of them. (2001:102)

Another advance in legislation was the introduction by the state of California of the Paid Family Leave programme (CPFP). This was the most progressive approach because new mothers were eligible for 55 per cent of their pre-tax weekly wage in addition to Temporary Disability Insurance (TDI) benefits. TDI provided wage replacement from 1942 for non-work related sicknesses and disabilities in the five states of California, Hawaii, New Jersey, New York and Rhode Island. The CPFP guaranteed that six weeks of the FMLA were paid in California. As part of a national campaign to highlight state-by-state variations in social policies for families with young children in the USA, the National Partnership for Women and Families published a report entitled Expecting Better: A State-by-State Analysis of Laws that Help New Parents (2012a). The Expecting Better report summarised how the minimum standards set by federal laws were improved upon on a state-bystate basis. A follow-up ‘special report’ on Dads Expect Better: Top States for New Dads (2012b) found that only fourteen states had laws in place to support parents working in the private sector on the arrival of a new baby and these fourteen states (and the District of Columbia) had laws in place that had expanded on the federal FMLA support for fathers and mothers working in the private sector. However, eighteen states did nothing beyond the federal minimum of offering ‘protections for nursing mothers at work, time away from work to care for a new child, or time off to tend to a child’s or a spouse’s medical needs’ (National Partnership for Women and Families, 2012b:1) The Dads Expect Better report

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concluded that social policies to support parental leave for American fathers ‘lag behind those of other countries’ (2012b:3; Ray et al., 2008). Not surprisingly, the Dads Expect Better report concluded that: The United States cannot wait any longer for public policies that honour new parents and their children. Despite the imperative – for workers and families, for businesses, and for communities – to adapt our nation’s policies to the realities of the 21st century workforce, progress is painfully slow. Some states have begun to adapt to working parents’ needs by providing more support to more workers through public policies than federal law requires … Looking ahead, we hope and expect better … America’s families can’t afford to wait. The time for action is now. (2012b:10)

However, on a more realistic level, Malin concluded that although the ‘Ozzie and Harriet model of the 1950s is dead’, American fathers continue to ‘provide the lion’s share of income in many households’ and were therefore not in a position to take advantage of unpaid parental leave (1998:56). From a review of case law it seemed the courts in the USA combined with employer hostility to prevent the FMLA from being ‘the barrier breaker it was intended to be’ (Malin, 1998:56). Conclusion and discussion The ideal of the married father lay at the heart of the fatherless America and family decline paradigm (Blankenhorn 1995; Popenoe, 1996) and the fatherless family perspective thrived on the ‘ethological quest’ by the academic fatherhood fraternity to develop father-attachment theories (Rush, 2011:41). Ethological studies promoted the significance of father–child dyads to child development (Lamb et al., 1976). However, success was limited and mothers emerged virtually unchallenged as primary expressive attachment figures (Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke, 1997:9). Non-resident fathers were posited with an instrumental role as maintenance providers or as authoritative role models (Greene et al., 2001:21). American epistemology viewed the household separation of large numbers of fathers from their biological offspring as an outcome of negative social change (Amato and Sobolewski, 2004:341). The growth in father-involvement research in the USA coincided with key welfare reforms and penal policy reforms; first America witnessed an increasing level of imprisoned fathers in the 1990s (Cammett, 2011) and, second, the introduction of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996)  heralded a shift towards welfare to work strategies and limited lone-mother welfare entitlements under what Grogger labelled ‘the single greatest break from past policy’ (2003:394). The PRWORA (1996) combined with the Child Support Enforcement (1975) programme in an attempt to confine sexual relations and sexual reproduction within marriage, and to discourage out-of-wedlock births and divorce. However, the American stigmatisation of non-married and absent fathers was criticised by American scholars for creating a climate where non-resident fathers were either labelled as ‘deadbeat dads’, i.e. ‘those who could pay child support but choose not to’,

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or labelled as ‘turnips’, i.e. ‘fathers who cannot afford to pay child support because they are young, unskilled, and only intermittently employed’ (Britto, 2000:70). Cammett argued from a family law perspective that the decline of marriage into an era of divorce and non-marital motherhood meant that ‘parent–child ties’ became more lasting than spousal relationships (Cammett, 2011:132). Carbonne labelled this shift from partnering in marriage to parenting outside marriage as ‘the second revolution in family law’ (Carbonne, 2000). American demographic changes were summarised by Garfinkel when he observed that ‘whites marry and increasingly divorce’ and ‘blacks are increasingly likely never to marry at all’ (1988:11). However, there were few calls for the re-design of the American welfare economy to support these new child-rearing arrangements. Instead prominent members of the American epistemological community and fatherhood research fraternity, such as Garfinkel, blamed the availability of welfare for the increase in out-ofwedlock pregnancies and the increase in single mothers (1988:11). Critics of contemporary shifts towards conservatism in American epistemology included Coontz (1992), Akerlof (1998), Gottman (1998) and Stacey who argued that conservative social science conflated the negative economic consequences of growing up in a mother-headed household with the psychological effects of marital separation and divorce on children (1993:547). Akerlof argued that the crisis of fatherlessness perspectives helped to pave the way for lone-mother welfare reductions by almost 50 per cent in the closing decades of the twentieth century and that conservative epistemology moulded social policy reforms in the USA, such as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) of 1996 in order to promote marriage (1998:307). On the other hand, Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda emphasised the distance between the father-research output and social policy influence in the USA (2004:18), which left the USA as an outlier among Western welfare regimes when it came to the under-development of parental leave policies (Levmore, 2003:204). Overall, neo-patrimonial and familial conservatism in the USA combined with neo-liberal welfare ideologies, and fathers’ rights movements, to protect marriage and the last vestiges of American patriarchy from demographic change, social choice and gender equality. Put simply, the academic fatherhood fraternity in the USA theorised or invented the concept of father-involvement and popularised new father ideologies, but as Chapter 3 illustrates, it was the Swedish who put father-involvement into common practice.

3

The Swedish model: state-supported agency

Introduction This chapter makes a case for a distinct Swedish world of fatherhood. The Swedish model stands in contrast to the American model through the pioneering introduction of father-friendly parental leave in 1974. Similar developments occurred across the Nordic welfare regimes but Sweden stood out as the exemplar EU welfare state for father-friendly parental leave policies (Fusilier, 2009:252). The second contrast with the American model was the way Swedish social policy individualised child maintenance payments between lone-mother and non-resident father households, in keeping with a joint-custody approach to separation, divorce and the decline of marriage (Hiillamo, 2009:133). In addition, Sweden maintained a ‘state guaranteed payment’ or assurance of child maintenance that dated back to the introduction of the Income Maintenance Law in 1938 (Sultan et al., 2012:989). In stark contrast with the American model, Sweden abandoned earlier and more punitive approaches towards child support enforcement in the 1970s, because they were viewed to be anachronistically stigmatising towards children in lone-mother households and towards their non-resident fathers (Hobson and Morgan, 2002:16). The third paradigmatic feature of the Swedish model was the influence of the epistemic research community, and in particular, theoretical feminism on the development of ‘father-friendly’ parental leave policies and on social policy generally (Kaufman, 2002:469; Chronholm, 2009:231; Haas et  al., 2012:8). Overall, the Nordic model differed from the American model in the way gender equality and the dissolution of authoritarian patriarchal fatherhood were pursued as an epochal political project over the course of the twentieth century dating back to the 1915 Scandinavian marriage law reforms (Kjeldstad, 2001; Therborn, 2004). The first section of this chapter adopts a historical approach to the Nordic development of parental leave policies, which is traced back to the introduction of parental leave insurance systems in 1974. To illustrate the contemporary Swedish experience, as the paradigmatic case, the chapter draws on research by Bergman and Hobson (2002), Klinth (2008) and Chronholm (2009) on the welfare state promotion and take-up of father-friendly parental leave policies. The chapter also

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charts the evolution of the Swedish income maintenance system from its origins in the Income Maintenance Law of 1938 to its reform from the 1970s into a modern individualised system of child support for non-traditional family forms as a response to decline in life-long marriage (Sultan et al., 2012). The chapter concludes by drawing on Goran Therborn’s volume Between Sex and Power as a seminal contribution to social science perspectives on the decline of patriarchy. It also draws on the work of Matovic (1984), Edgren (1987), Wetterberg et al. (2001) and Melby et al. (2006) to highlight the historical significance of the nineteenth-century Stockholm marriages and the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws to Swedish and Nordic welfare state development. Unlike the American model where the decline of patriarchy was posited by Mintz in terms of a process ending in a ‘whimper’ of discontent (1998:27), this chapter illustrates that the Nordic approach to dismantling patriarchy was a classic exercise of twentieth-century modernism leading to what Kullberg termed ‘the ideal father’ being ‘proclaimed by the welfare state’ (1996:179). Parental leave in the 1970s Despite variations within and between Nordic nations it is the Swedish welfare state that is more often than not taken as the exemplar case for father-friendly policies. Sweden was the first country to introduce parental leave insurance for fathers in 1974 (Chronholm, 2009:227). Hobson and Morgan depicted Sweden as a welfare state where ‘there are fewer and fewer fathers who lose contact with their children after divorce’ and where ‘there has been a rise in joint residential custody’ (2004:4). In addition, Linda Haas, a leading American expert on Swedish fatherhood, claimed that Sweden was ‘a society where the public discourse about the importance of fathers’ active involvement in early childcare is best developed’ (Haas et al., 2002:321). Bergman and Hobson accredited the shift in Swedish thinking to the 1972 Commission on Family and Marriage, which recommended that parental leave should be gender-neutral and should be shared equally (2002:105). The principal aims of the Commission on Family and Marriage were to improve career opportunities for women and to increase men’s child-caring responsibilities. Haas et al. illustrated that the establishment of over fifty government commissions between 1929 and 2006 advanced epistemological thinking on gender equality and parental leave policies (2012:8). Hobson and Morgan singled out the 1972 Commission on Family and Marriage for recommending a ‘radical shift in the social construction of fatherhood’ through its encouragement of joint-custody as a response to the decline of marriage (2002:100). The shift in thinking about fatherhood began in Scandinavia when a Swedish investigation led by the sociology professor Edmund Dahlstrom was opened up to Norwegian academics culminating in a report for Swedish social policy development entitled Women’s Lives and Work (1962), which was also published separately in Norwegian (Chronholm, 2009:231). The reports introduced the concepts of ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender roles’ to the wider attention of Scandinavian society (2009:231). In the same year, the feminist journalist Eva Moberg sparked ‘intensive debate over the emancipation of women’

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and the interrelated importance of ‘changing the male gender role’ (Chronholm, 2009:231). Thus, Nordic epistemological thinking and social commentary about women’s emancipation began to focus on how to change or regulate men’s roles as husbands and fathers. Parental leave programmes were expanded during the 1970s and the 1980s in all the Nordic countries. Finland introduced similar schemes in 1980, Iceland in 1981, Denmark in 1984 and Norway in 1987. Leave periods varied from six weeks in Finland to thirty-three weeks in Norway. Several studies highlighted the role of Swedish government-sponsored media campaigns in the 1970s which promoted the concept of ‘velourpappa’ (Sanqvist, 1996:157; Hobson and Morgan, 2002:107), which translates into English as ‘plush dad’ (Klinth, 2008:26). Bergman and Hobson argued that velourpappa was depicted as a ‘soft, nurturing father’ (2002:107). It was opponents of the campaign who coined the term velourpappa as a label to epitomise the idea that the Swedish welfare state promoted ‘fathers who were too much like mothers’ (Sanqvist, 1996:157). In contrast to the American academic fatherhood fraternity which emphasised mother–father differences and the unique effects of father-involvement, the Swedish model turned fathers into mothers. This point was elaborated upon by Klinth who argued that ‘velourpappa’ was taken to be a condescending image of man ‘dressed in soft clothes, pushing a pram and speaking with a soft feminized voice’ (2008:26). Sanqvist concluded that the velourpappa controversy showed that ‘the idea of qualitative difference between fathers and mothers, as a necessary force in healthy child development’ was still persistent among a few social scientists in Sweden (1996:157). According to Sanqvist this was especially the case for the two Swedish psychologists, Bjerrum-Neilsen and Rudberg, who became renowned for their belief that mothers were the primary love objects for children and that fathers were only secondary figures in the child socialisation process (1966:157). The plush dad or velourpappa media campaigns were followed up by another, which this time featured Hoa-Hoa Dahlgren, a well-known Swedish weightlifter, holding a small baby. Dahlgren was pictured wearing a blue pullover with yellow crowns, the colours of the Swedish flag and the symbol of the Swedish realm. The message was two-fold. Caring fatherhood was both masculine and patriotically Swedish (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:107). According to Klinth it was a government promotion of proactive fatherhood through an appeal to Swedish working-class masculinity: It was probably not a coincidence that an almost hyper-masculine figure like a muscular weight lifter was picked to personify the new father. The message was clear: if a man takes paternity leave, he is no less of a man. (2008:26)

The government-sponsored media campaigns from 1976 to 2001 emphasised complementary parenting where Swedish men were idealised as macho-expressive fathers held back from reaching their child-rearing potential only by external factors such as recalcitrant employers, or wives and mother-in-laws who still held more traditional gender-role views on parenting (Klinth, 2008:28). Sanqvist identified

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the mid-1980s as an era when men first became ‘a research topic’, for example the Swedish Ministry of Labour established ‘The Man Group’ to study men’s roles including their roles as fathers (1987:147). The period from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s represented a break with traditional parenting roles of the past. To illustrate the origins of this break with tradition Sanqvist referred back to a newspaper campaign in mid-1950s Sweden, which asked the question ‘Can a Real Man Push a Pram?’ (1987:145). From the 1970s the unequivocal answer from successive Swedish governments was yes he can. A study of the reform of parental leave policies formed the basis of Helga Hernes’s seminal thesis on the Welfare State and Women Power (1987), which gave international importance to slogans such as the ‘woman friendly’ Nordic welfare states and ‘reproduction going public’. Parental leave programmes expanded not only geographically across the Scandinavian nations but in terms of quality, flexibility and duration. Fathers and mothers could choose how they divided parental leave up until the time a child reached eight years of age. Hobson and Morgan explained with regard to the Swedish case that ‘by 1989, parents could take up to one year and were compensated with 90 percent of their salaries up to a very high ceiling – about 32,000 American dollars per year’ (2002:105). The introduction of parental leave involved all-party support in Sweden and women’s active engagement at the political level. For example, Duvander et al. showed that even before parental leave was introduced in 1974 the Social Democratic Women’s Association ‘drew attention to the potential risk of the mother taking the whole leave, thereby undermining the policy’s goal of gender equality’ (2006:223). The period of parental leave was eventually extended to over a full year. The prediction of the Social Democratic Women’s Association that the gender-neutral approach to parental leave would lead to gender inequalities of take-up was eventually addressed in the mid-1990s with the introduction of the daddy months. At the time of introduction about 90 per cent of parental leave was taken by mothers. The daddy month or daddy quota was introduced to further advance the goal of gender equality between parents and on the basis that infants and young children had a right to close relationships with fathers. Klinth argued that Swedish parental leave campaigns developed over two stages. In the first stage from 1976 to 2001 fathers were considered as ‘secondary parents’ whereas from 2002 onwards fathers were encouraged to adopt a half-each approach to parenting (2008:20). The Swedish model from the 1990s The paid daddy month was first introduced to Sweden in 1995 and to Norway two years earlier in 1993 (Eydal, 2006:13). In Norway the daddy quota was conceptualised as part of a parental leave package where, according to Ellingsaeter, ‘long leave valorises parental care in the child’s first year of life’ (2006:124). The Christian Peoples Party promoted the daddy quota in Norway on the basis that it would ‘give fathers an insight into women’s care work and a better understanding of its importance’ (Ellingsaeter, 2006:124). In Sweden the main legislative advocates

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of the ‘daddy month’ were the Liberal Party. The passage of the daddy month required a deal with the Christian Democrats who had pledged in their manifesto to introduce care allowances for mothers. However, women in the Social Democratic Party campaigned in the 1995 general election to repeal care allowances and the repeal was one of the first pieces of legislation passed. Bergman and Hobson argued that, by contrast, the ‘daddy month on the other hand, aroused no opposition’ as it was widely understood to be ‘in the forefront of gender equality policies’ (2002:109). However, throughout the 1990s Swedish fathers continued to be positioned problematically as ‘secondary rather than primary parents’ and it was not until the dawn of the twenty-first century that normative and political commitments emerged to encourage the dual-earner dual-carer family model through parental leave promotional campaigns that emphasised a half-each approach for mothers and fathers (Klinth, 2008:20). The half-each campaign included a special magazine for fathers which placed a strong emphasis on dismantling fathers’ resistance to change and it also featured poster campaigns which explained joint parenting was an investment opportunity where ‘both of you have the chance to have a career as well as children’ (Klinth, 2008:33). The campaign emphasised biological fatherhood as life-long commitment to joint parenting. The emergence of the dual-earner dual-carer model in Sweden was described pithily by one young parliamentarian as ‘getting mom a job and making dad pregnant’ (Klinth, 2008:20). Most commentators attributed the shift in thinking from maternity leave to parental leave in the 1970s and the introduction of the daddy quotas from the mid-1990s to the influences of a broad-based political consensus and grassroots women’s mobilisation. This point was made by Bergman and Hobson when they explained that: Fatherhood has been a consensus social movement in Sweden supported by women’s groups within parties and a male minister of social affairs as well as men’s consciousness raising groups and feminist organizations … Most prominent in this discussion has been an advisory group mandated by the Government in 1993 to study fatherhood Arbetsgruppen om papporna, barn, och arbetsliver or (Working group on fathers, children and working life) to investigate the question of why men have not taken up more of the parental leave. (2002:110)

The similar establishment of the Norwegian Men’s Panel by Karita Bekkemellem, Minister of Gender Equality, in the summer of 2007 triggered a public debate on men and gender equality. These debates focused on men’s participation outside the family in public ‘childcare and the lower levels of the education system’ (Parbring, 2007a:4). One of the first proposals from the Norwegian Men’s Panel was for parental leave to be divided into three parts on an Icelandic model, with one part for each parent, and one part divided as the parents chose. Norway considered a 4+4+4 months model or a 6+6+6 model on a lower compensation level because ‘its safer for children to start day care at 18 months’ (Parbring, 2007b:7). The normative consensus in the Nordic welfare states suggested that childcare for the first

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eighteen months post-partum should be a family-centred responsibility requiring working parents to be decommodified in order to take turns at being home alone as a full-time mother or father. Leira described the development of parental leave in Scandinavia in a progressively feminist sense as ‘childcare re-familised’ (2006:40). Klinth suggested that the major distinguishing feature of Swedish social policy in terms of caring father ideologies was ‘the immediate and long term connection to Government policies’ (2008:21), while Duvander et al. suggested that parental leave legislation ‘may enhance both the father’s and mother’s interest in a larger family’ (2006:229). On the other hand, Leira declared that the social policy provision of parental leave for fathers was a ‘spectacular proposal’ that had been advanced in large measure by grassroots women’s organisations and women members of parliament (2006:40). In addition, Haas and Hwang highlighted the role of Swedish trade unions in advancing the public discourse on combining work and care within a new ‘child oriented masculinity’ (2012:65). Haas and Hwang warned that although women made up 50 per cent of union members, membership was declining, and unions needed to become more radical if they were to meet the needs of a new generation of fathers (2012:65). Haas and Rostgaard emphasised the importance of assessing variations in fathers’ parental leave take-up between countries with father quotas and those without (2011:177). However, Ellingsaeter raised the issue of breastfeeding as a potential barrier to fathers’ take-up of parental leave. The review of Norwegian childcare schemes by Ellingsaeter cited mothers who had experienced a change in attitudes from the nursing and midwifery professions to the point where everything was ‘organized according to the baby … thereby many are sitting and breastfeeding all the time … when you are at home with the baby a year and everything has been led by the child’s needs, it easily continues that way’ (2006:126). Ellingsaeter cited child welfare-orientated ideologies, full-time breastfeeding and mothers’ increased reluctance to share parental leave as new obstacles to the further advancement of father-friendly policies and gender equality in Norway. Alternatively, Galtry argued that that father quotas did not impact negatively on breastfeeding and that international comparison showed a positive association between post-birth leave policies and duration of breastfeeding (2005). More indisputably, father-involvement was undermined by the re-introduction of controversial ‘cash for care’ schemes that were previously overturned by feminist campaigns in Sweden in the mid-1990s. Parental choice to stay at home was expanded in Norway and Finland during the 1990s through cash grants for parental care. For example, in Norway the father’s quota was introduced in 1993, and the cash for care scheme was introduced in 1998 and the two schemes were viewed as being contradictory because ‘they support different ideas about gender and family life’ (Brandth and Kvande, 2009:178). The cash for care scheme was introduced by the Conservative government and a condition for accessing the scheme was that parents didn’t access publicly funded childcare services (2009:180). Therefore, on the one hand, the fathers’ quotas or daddy months supported the dual-earner dual-carer model of family life by allowing mothers and fathers to combine caring for young children with building a working career. While, on the other hand,

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the cash for care schemes supported the ‘family model’ by attempting to shape the family as an alternative to day-care access for children (Brandth and Kvande, 2009:178). Brandth and Kvande explained that ‘all the Nordic countries have home care allowances’ which were granted by the state in Finland and Norway and local authorities elsewhere (2009:178). The contradiction in Norway between policies supporting the ‘family model’ and policies supporting the ‘dual-earner dual-carer model of family life’ was labelled as a ‘dualism in Norwegian family policy’ or as a ‘double track paradox’ (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006; Brandth and Kvande, 2009:179). Take-up of cash for care schemes was highest in Finland where there was a higher degree of social acceptance, whereas take-up was lower in Norway and very low in Sweden, and in these latter countries the future of cash for care schemes remains uncertain because ‘opposition is still strong’ (Ellingsaeter, 2012:1). In fact, only 37 per cent of municipalities in Sweden offered cash for care schemes by 2011 and Ellingsaeter was at pains to remind readers that the national cash for childcare scheme which was introduced in 1994 by the centre-conservative government was abolished when the Social Democrats returned to power later in the same year (2012:4). However, Ellingsaeter concluded that the negative impact on mothers’ employment was higher among Asian or African women and immigrant mothers generally, making immigrant children under-represented in day-care services (2012:12). Alternatively, a comparative study of the Nordic model of childcare and parental leave policies found that women’s labour market position at the lower end of the socio-economic scale had benefited from the development of parental leave schemes (Gupta et  al., 2006:33). Moreover, Haas and Rostgaard illustrated that in Denmark and Finland, where there were no father quotas, fathers took only 6 per cent of the parental leave that they shared with mothers as a parental choice entitlement, whereas take-up was higher in Sweden, Norway and Iceland, which all had individualised father quotas, leading to the conclusion that: Our results suggest that it is the presence of the fathers’ quota that independently creates the success of some Nordic countries in involving fathers in the early care of their young children. The absence of the fathers’ quota in some Nordic countries, on the other hand, has resulted in very few fathers in those countries taking much parental leave. (2012:193)

Notably, there was talk of a ‘gender squeeze’, meaning the upward trajectory towards greater gender equality was slowing down and Gíslason suggested that ‘unless we focus more on men and their roles, we have come as far we can go on the gender equality front’ (2011:13). On the other hand, Ellingsaeter and Leira depicted Scandinavian welfare states at an ideological crossroads faced with the option of dismantling gender equality through neo-liberal preferences for parental choice or the alternative option of transforming gender relations through the promotion of half-each policies in relation to employment and care, a choice they posited as pertinent to all welfare states in Europe (2006:275). Ellingsaeter and Leira’s final conclusion was that:

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The increasing involvement of fathers in the care of their children should not be overlooked, and the potential role of fathers in softening the work/care dilemma in Scandinavia should not be underestimated. (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006:275)

In this way the social politics of fatherhood emerged as a core concern of parenting, care and gender equality debates in the Scandinavian welfare regimes. However, Sweden remained the paradigmatic welfare state in relation to gender equality. This point was emphasised in a Nordic study on Shaping Gender Equality: The Role of the State, which upheld Sweden for having the most coherent policies in relation to ‘gender equality of family roles’ (Skrede, 1999:191). Moreover, it was still the left-leaning parties in the Nordic countries that tended to promote gender equality and individualised rights to parental leave and childcare, whereas right-wing parties tended to be more ambivalent about gender equality, and neo-liberals were, or as Gíslason suggested, ‘must be’, against all forms of paid parental leave (Gíslason, 2011:27). Gíslason identified four drivers of Nordic parental leave legislation irrespective of left–right ideologies. The four drivers included a growing societal acceptance that, first, individualisation was the way forward for family policies. Second, gender equality freed men and women from the restrictions of their biological sex roles. Third, women’s highly active and continuous participation in the labour market was good for economic competitiveness and, fourth, Nordic societies were starting to re-assess traditional or patriarchal conceptions about what was in the best interest of children (Gíslason, 2011:28). Duvander et al. explained that in the case of contemporary Sweden, as in other Scandinavian welfare states ‘all children, regardless of parents’ income or labour market status, are likely to stay at home with a parent for at least one year before other forms of childcare are initiated’ (2006:223). Moreover, Chronholm suggested that individualisation of parental leave insurance had become firmly embedded, and that despite differing approaches by ‘bourgeois governments’ and the Social Democrats, it was now safe to argue that ‘Swedish parental leave can be regarded as a stable system that will remain and develop in the future, irrespective of which government is in power’ and that ‘further individualisation of leave, with more father’s months’ might re-appear on Social Democrat agendas because ‘individualisation of parental leave has become part of the Social Democrat family policy’ (2009:239). Non-resident fathers and child support enforcement Nordic family laws assumed a legal duty for both parents to provide for children when mothers and fathers were living apart in separate households. (Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:215). In addition, the development of welfare states in the Nordic countries were based on ‘formal co-operation during the 20th century in the field of family law’ (Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:286; see also Therborn, 2004). However, Hakovirta and Hiilamo made clear that although family policies were similar across the Nordic welfare regimes, closer investigation revealed significant differences when it came to the provision of child maintenance payments

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(2012:287). Research by Hakovirta and Hiilamo illustrated that Finland differed greatly because family benefits did not support equally shared care arrangements between parents living in separate households, whereas in Sweden and Norway, maintenance schemes were designed to support shared childcare arrangements by parents living in separate households (2012:288). In the case of Sweden, Bergman and Hobson depicted the promotion of father-involvement as part of a historic social democratic project whereby from 1927 child welfare officers were assigned to oversee the economic support of children (2002:94). Fathers who did not support their children were deemed ‘negligent providers’ at the Social Democratic Conference in 1905, and social workers played a key role in the introduction of the negligent provider discourse. The National Association of Social Work was one of the first organisations to suggest that public authorities enforce maintenance payments and oblige non-resident fathers to fulfil a wider parenting role. Bergman and Hobson depicted the contemporary development of mandatory joint-custody arrangements as part of this tradition and labelled it as ‘compulsory fatherhood’ (2002:94). The legacy of compulsory fatherhood was traced back to the Swedish marriage law reforms of 1917, which formalised paternity for children born outside marriage. From 1917 all Swedish children were entitled to a formally recognised mother and father who were both obliged to be registered on the child’s birth certificate. During the 1920s non-married fathers were subjected to punitive measures such as wage deductions, imprisonment and mobility restrictions, and an amendment passed in 1927 introduced the legislative status of ‘negligent provider’ to the social politics of fatherhood in Sweden. Formal paternity was established, in the final instance, on the testimony of the mother rather than leave a child without a father (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:94). Bergman and Hobson illustrated that there was wide societal support for formal recognition of paternity on the testimony of mothers by referring to Isberg who at the time argued from a professional social work perspective that: It is possible to say, as the Germans do: the woman alone must take responsibility for the child, because she knew the risk. But it is also possible to say, in accordance with Swedish legislation: one of these men must take the responsibility. He knew the risk. (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:95)

From 1933 Sweden moved towards establishing ‘true’ biological paternity through blood testing rather than taking the mother’s testimony in disputed cases because it was understood to be in the best interest of the child (2002:96). Municipal social welfare departments ensured that paternity was established before qualification for advanced child maintenance support was awarded. The enforcement of biological paternity in Sweden through the child welfare bureaucracy produced, in the words of Hobson and Morgan, ‘an army of relentless child welfare officers to track down unwed fathers’ (2002:16). Surveillance of children in non-marital relationships by social welfare officers persisted until a child was eighteen or until the biological parents married. Opposition to this level of state encroachment into family life came eventually from ‘feminist opposition to the labelling and

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stigma that such surveillance attached to mothers and children of non-marital relationships’ (2002:16). Feminist opposition and changing norms surrounding cohabitation and births outside marriage, and the decline of marriage itself, led to the abolition of the child welfare system in 1973. This was just forty years after the introduction of blood testing for paternity recognition in 1933. At the same time there was a growth of commitment across the Nordic countries to encourage joint parental custody after divorce or separation and between lone mothers and non-resident fathers parenting independently (Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:271). The Clearing House on International Developments in Child, Youth and Family Policies at Columbia University explained that in the case of Sweden there was a general trend away from the welfare regime making financial claims on non-resident fathers and instead there was an attempt: To ease the burden on non-resident parents and improve the situation for the second family, thus placing responsibility for the first family on society at large … Lone parents are not a strong lobby group but their interests are powerfully supported by political and women’s organizations. Non-resident parents on the other hand are a vociferous group and have benefitted from changes made over the 1980s. As a result the Government has been keen to keep maintenance allowances for children down and encourage lone parents into work to supplement income payments. (www.childpolicyintl.org)

Where a non-resident father/parent had another family to support then payments to the first family were reduced so that children in more than one family were taken into account. Hiillamo contrasted Sweden’s commitment ‘to strengthening the egalitarian model’ of family policy with Finland’s shift towards a model of neo-familialism in social policy (2009:133). Hiillamo explained that: Child maintenance arrangements in Sweden give more support to partners who do not live together. Joint custody is the norm, and parents are allowed to split the maintenance allowance in Sweden … Housing allowances in Sweden are more individualized in two respects:  non-resident parents are entitled to a housing allowance, and household income is not combined when the housing allowance is granted. These differences indicate that Sweden is more progressive in supporting non-traditional family forms. (2009:144)

In addition Sultan et al. highlighted that recent improvements to the social status of fatherhood were underpinned by a children’s rights consensus: In Sweden, during the 1990s biological fathers have gained more rights with the widening powers of the state to enforce mutual custody and the hegemonic ideology that children need equal access to both parents even after divorce. (2012:989)

Sweden’s child maintenance reforms of the 1990s were internationally recognised for aligning child support orders more closely to the means of the non-custodial father/parent and for eliminating the practice of setting ascending indexes linked to the age of children (Sultan et al., 2012:990). When non-resident fathers cannot afford to make a payment the state foots the bill. A  custodial parent can claim an advance from the public social insurance office up to a maximum of €133.32

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in any one month and €1,407 in any one year (Sultan et al., 2012:990). In their comparison of Sweden and Denmark across the three measures of parental support, child allowance and child support, the findings of Sultan et al. showed that parental leave and child maintenance provisions worked better for children and lone mothers in Sweden, whereas childcare allowances worked better in Denmark (2012:991). In the Swedish case it would be erroneous to overstate the gender equality dimensions of social care services without due regard to the parallel ideological motivation which emphasised childcare as an equal opportunities child welfare measure, or anti-poverty measure for children. These motivations were rooted in the Swedish experience of rapid urbanisation and poor housing conditions in the 1930s which at the time were perceived as offering children an unhealthy playground and one with reduced adult supervision and pedagogical support (Bjönberg, 2002:49). Childcare provision was established as an ideological goal in 1972 to emphasise the importance of creating equal opportunities for child development irrespective of social class and family background. The comparative theoretical emphasis on gender equality in relation to pioneering childcare provision in Scandinavia has blurred the social consensus that childcare policy reform in Sweden was primarily ‘a far sighted welfare policy for children rather than a policy for promoting gender equality’ (Bjönberg, 2002:49).

Dismantling patriarchal fatherhood The decline of patriarchal familism and authoritarian fatherhood was traced back to the Scandinavian marriage laws of 1915, and to women’s interest group mobilisation, especially in the Swedish experience (Therborn, 2004). Further back, the decline of patriarchy was traced to the ‘Stockholm marriages’ in the mid-nineteenth century (Matovic, 1984). The Stockholm marriages were an arrangement whereby couples published their marriage banns from a shared cohabiting address. Hobson and Morgan suggested that the Stockholm marriages were a way for men to cohabit and to become fathers without bearing the formal financial responsibilities of fatherhood (2002:14). Matovic carried out the original research into the institution of the Stockholm marriage for a 1984 study of The Stockholm Marriage: Family Formation and Choice of Partners in Stockholm 1850– 1890. Edgren explained in a review of Matovic’s research that the ‘Stockholm marriages’ were considered a vice of the capital city where couples routinely cohabited and often bore children before marriage. Edgren illustrated the practice with the case of August Strindberg who was born on 22 January 1849 and was the third child of his parents, but the first following their marriage in 1847. Edgren observed that it was not clear how many couples in Stockholm marriages did not eventually marry (1987:782). Cohabitation was a common arrangement for both working- and middle-class families in nineteenth-century Stockholm. Over 40 per cent of couples that published marriage banns in Stockholm gave a shared cohabiting address

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(1987:781). At the time working men tended to marry slightly older women with a personal dowry earned through employment. The Stockholm marriages offered working-class men a route to cohabitation, fatherhood and eventually marriage without necessarily having to adopt a strong male-breadwinning role (1987:782). Edgren highlighted that the central argument made by Matovic was that the Stockholm marriages reflected working-class women’s and middle-class women’s earning potential in the labour market whereby they could afford to postpone the choice to marry until they were ready. The Stockholm marriages illustrated that nineteenth-century working women held strong negotiating positions in relation to choices surrounding cohabitation, marriage and family formation: Women had relatively good opportunities to support themselves without marrying and were therefore hesitant to enter a marriage, which would mean they would be legally subjected to their husbands will. (1987:782)

Thus, cohabitation in Stockholm was illustrated by Scandinavian scholarship to be a beneficial nineteenth-century arrangement, which heralded the dawn of Swedish women’s relational autonomy and liberation from marital dependence on patriarchal male-breadwinning. The dissolution of patriarchal family relations was one of three core themes in Therborn’s analysis of the decline of patriarchy, marriage and fertility in the West (2004). It was also a central theme for Wetterberg et al. in their analysis of the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws (2001). Therborn depicted the Scandinavian Law Commission (1905) as a pioneering event in the epochal process of de-patriarchalisation. The Commission proposed an individualist and explicitly egalitarian conception of marriage and the concept of no-fault divorce based on irretrievable damage. Scandinavian law reform was based on the principle that marriage was for the well-being of the contracted individuals as opposed to Canon Law, which previously depicted it as an unbreakable sacrament. New marriage laws were introduced to Norway (1909), Sweden (1915), Denmark (1922) and Finland (1929). The Scandinavian Law Commission consisted of senior legal experts and academics, and, most significantly from a gender equality perspective, there was obligatory female representation on all national commissions on family law from 1915 onwards (2004:79). Therborn also depicted a ‘significant and articulate women’s movement’ as a major influence on marriage law reforms and termed this the epoch of the ‘consensual vanguard’ (2004:79). Melby et al. in their study of ‘The Nordic Model of Marriage’ depicted the 1915 reforms as a necessary prerequisite to the formation of advanced welfare states in Northern Europe (2006). Specifically, they suggested that the marriage law reforms of 1915 were an early form of ‘state feminism’ which ‘contributed to women’s political subjectivity and prepared the way for the individualism necessary for a welfare system based on universal and individual rights’ (2006:660). Melby et  al. argued that the 1915 marriage reforms ‘abolished patriarchy in its traditional form’ and represented an individualisation of family life for women (2006:60). Moreover, Melby et  al. highlighted that the dissolution of patriarchy by the Nordic model of marriage meant that mothers and fathers ‘gained parellel positions as parents when it came

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to education and care of children’ (2006:656). In these early stages of Nordic welfare state development the ‘gender division of labour’ was understood most importantly to include an understanding of a ‘mutual obligation to provide support’ between fathers and mothers, but the marriage law reforms also served to highlight principles of gender equality and gender difference whereby ‘women’s reproductive work’ and ‘female devotion to caring work made a basis of the welfare state’ (2006:60). Overall Melby et al. suggested that: The reform was one of the founding stones of the Nordic type of welfare state, and seen from the longer perspective, it was a formative influence on the contemporary individualised model of equality in the Nordic countries. (2006:660)

This type of explanation, which located the origins of the welfare state with the dismantling of patriarchy and state recognition of the importance of women’s reproductive work, was echoed by the Swedish anthropologist Lena Sommestad who explained in her comparative study of male-breadwinning and human reproduction in Sweden and the USA that the origins of the welfare state coincided with an era when servicing ‘human reproduction’ shifted from being a female kinship activity, to a likely area for welfare state expansion. Sommestad explained that: Human reproduction is a basic economic activity in every society. It includes activities such as maternal care, childcare, old-age provision, poor relief, healthcare and labour protection. In pre-industrial times, human reproduction was typically a part of kin-based household economies, but since the onset of industrialization two new institutional solutions have developed:  male-breadwinning and the welfare state. (1998:153)

Sommestad presented pro-natalism in Sweden as a prerequisite to de-patriarchalisation and the weakening of male-breadwinning in Sweden (1998:112–115). This type of analysis was mirrored by comparative research on childcare regimes in the USA, Sweden and the Netherlands, which emphasised that Swedish labour market policies in the 1930s were accompanied by public concerns about the Great Depression, emigration to the USA and subsequent de-population issues, fuelling widespread ‘belief that women’s employment was at the expense of men’s jobs’ (Gustafsson and Stafford, 1994:342). Therefore, according to Gustafsson and Stafford, women’s employment and the weakening of Swedish male-breadwinning was driven by principles of gender equality, and notably by the influence of social science scholars such as Alva Myrdal, rather than by the demands of Swedish welfare capitalism: What is surprising is the turn of events in which Alva Myrdal was able to argue for labor market programs for women. As head of a committee on women’s labor market policy, she advanced the principle that mothers should have the right to participate in the labor market and that policies to accomplish this were needed. What in fact has evolved from this conception is a system of benefit for the joint condition of work and fertility. This belief is implicit in the design of the current Swedish system: simply working without children means that one loses out on extensive benefits and simply having children without labor market attachment implies a low standard of living. In

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addition to providing a maximum monetary payoff to joint work and fertility, the benefits are unrelated to family structure: unmarried women and married women receive the same benefits so long as they work in the market and have children. (1994:342)

This type of thinking offered new theories of welfare state development which challenged older class mobilisation and power resouces theories (Korpi, 1983; Esping-Andersen, 1990) and even older economically functional driven theories (Wilensky and Lebaux, 1965). This type of thinking put ‘reproductive work’, women’s employment autonomy, and the concept of care at the heart of the welfare state project, rather than as a peripheral concern of economic functionalism, class mobilisation or male-breadwinning. It also suggested that male-breadwinning had ceased to function as the parallel pillar to the the welfare state, and suggested instead, that paid work in public and private sector labour markets and unpaid care and reproductive work within families required individualising between working parents. Father involvement perspectives Although a more pronounced welfare state and legislative emphasis on the ‘ideal’ father or the ‘caring’ father emerged, Scandinavian scholars continued to focus primarily on mothers’ disadvantageous experiences. Even after the introduction of the daddy months in 1995, and as late as 1996, Kullberg was able to claim that ‘social scientists have, however, paid little attention to the transformation of this concept [of the caring father] into the daily actions of men’ (1996:179). Early studies included Lamb and Levine’s 1983 study, which denoted Swedish parental leave insurance in terms of An Experiment in Social Engineering and Haas’s 1992 study on parental leave. Björnberg and Kollind’s 1996 study of Men’s Family Relations took a specific focus on variations in father policies within the Scandinavian nations and across Europe. In relation to the Nordic nations Björnberg and Kollind argued that the normative promotion of parental leave schemes in Sweden from the 1990s represented a ‘major break with an earlier tradition, which connected caring of small children with women and motherhood’ (1996:6). The normative promotion of early infant care by fathers in Sweden was supported by empirical studies which posited young couples’ positive attitudes to changing gender roles and parenting (Björnberg and Kollind, 1996:5). A more recent study from Uppsala University involved a systematic review to describe longitudinal evidence on the effects of father-involvement. Sarkadi et al. used the Paternal Involvement Construct developed by Lamb et  al. (1987). The Sarkadi study revealed that father-involvement research from a psychological perspective of a longitudinal nature was almost an exclusively Anglo-American field of study. Sarkadi et al. concluded that ‘there is evidence to support the positive influence of father engagement on offspring social, behavioural and psychological outcomes’ (2008:153). The rationale behind the Sarkadi review of research was that if the social scientific community wished to argue for institutional policies

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to promote fatherhood the evidence of the role of fathers in child development needed to be presented in a convincing way. Sarkadi et al. posited a theoretical departure from Parsonian understandings of family life with the recommendation that ‘papers with data-sets from the 1950s or even the 1980s have questionable validity for today’s fathers’. Sarkadi et al. emphasised a social construction perspective rather than a natural science perspective. In addition, Sarkadi et al. refused to consider or conflate the vast literature concerning father absence into a review of father-involvement. Moreover, Sarkadi et al. criticised several of the American studies for being skewed towards the experiences of children in ‘economically advantaged intact white families’ (2008:156). Sarkadi et  al. suggested that laboratory observations of small groups of children by trained psychologists could be described as having more of an explanatory character rather than producing generalisable data (2008:156). Sarkadi et al. suggested that ‘another limitation is that 14 of the 24 articles included are from the U.S and another seven from the UK. Neither of these countries has policies promoting paternal involvement’ (2008:156). Sarkadi’s review was based on Anglo-American empirical data; however, Sarkadi’s theoretical perspective emphasised the importance of social policy to the time spent by fathers in the crucial early years of development. Sarkadi et  al.’s final conclusion was to urge ‘policy makers to improve circumstances for involved fathering’. Therefore, although Sarkadi et  al. drew on American ethological empiricism for accounts of father agency and father-involvement they did so to emphasise Scandinavian theoretical assumptions about the role of the social policy and social structure. According to Sarkadi et  al., ‘future research should also be designed to effectively take into account today’s diverse non-intact family structures with children, for example spending equal time with both parents’ (2008:156). The quote below emphasised the chasm between Scandinavian approaches and the Anglophile nations when it came to understanding the role of social policy: Paid parental leave for fathers, fathers’ groups and employers supportive of men staying at home with their infants and sick children are still but a dream in most countries. (Sarkadi et al., 2008:154)

Father-involvement literature in the Nordic model tended to focus on parental leave as a way of increasing fathers’ family orientation and daily involvement in the world of the family. Indeed, Huttunen argued that fathers who took parental leave made a ‘concrete manifestation’ of a new approach to fatherhood (1996:79). Huttunen’s study focused on the experiences of over 350 fathers in Finland and emphasised, as this study does, two contrasting father-involvement perspectives. The first perspective was more concerned with psychology and childhood development, whereas the second approach analysed take-up of parental leave from a gender equality perspective. Huttunen explained that: Psychological research might focus on the importance of a close father-child relationship for the development of the child, as well as for the man’s own development. For the researcher in the areas of women’s and gender studies the starting points could be the aspects of equality between the sexes or between the parents. (1996:80)

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Huttunen exemplified a Scandinavian approach by focusing mainly on the latter (1996). Nonetheless, Huttunen’s study showed that fathers were amazed at the closeness of the bond that developed during parental leave (1996:89). More recent studies illustrated that fathers spent their days with children differently to mothers and that Nordic fathers approached child-rearing more as a social and out-of-home activity including visits to cafes, picnics and forest walks (Brandth and Kvande, 2003). However, the Lammi-Taskula study also suggested that longer periods of paternal leave impacted positively on men’s contribution to time spent on housework inside the family home (2006:92). The focus of the Norwegian study was on children’s influence on the unmediated caring practices of fathers during long periods of parental leave. The study coined the term ‘home-alone’ to describe fathers on parental leave and used the term ‘absent fathers’ to describe fathers who subscribed to more traditional male-breadwinning practices (Brandth and Kvande, 2003:23). Brandth and Kvande placed a distinctive Scandinavian emphasis on the role the welfare state and social policy for improving the quality of father-involvement when they argued that ‘our research shows that while work life is the strongest hindrance for fathers, the welfare state policies are the most important door openers’ (2003:23). Instead of an American emphasis on psychology, behaviour and individual agency, the studies offered a distinct Nordic emphasis on the removal of structural constraints to father-involvement through the development of father-friendly parental leave policies. Moreover, the Scandinavian studies focused on children’s influence on fathers’ caring practices rather than on ethological concerns with fathers’ influence on child development. In other words, the Nordic focus was on how lengthy periods of unmediated contact with children and the practice of childcare socialised fathers as opposed to the focus of American ethology, which was on how fathers socialise children. Scandinavian studies on father-involvement challenged the significance of complementary sex-role parenting and any manifest emphasis on gender differences between mothers and fathers. For example, Sanqvist analysed parenting roles in 128 low- to middle-income families in Stockholm and Goteberg and showed that male and female gender identities were much less polarised in Sweden than in the USA (1996). The two most significant findings were that stern, critical or authoritarian fathers were rare or non-existent and that Swedish parents tended to be mild and gender-neutral disciplinarians and, second, that gender impacted most positively on children when parents acted as if gender didn’t matter (1996:169). Both Sarkadi et al. (2008) and Sanqvist (1996) suggested that the Scandinavian welfare regimes provided alternative national and social policy contexts for future research on fatherhood to the US contexts. Conclusion and discussion Unlike the American model, there was no sustained ethological focus on the father–child dyad in the Swedish model. Instead, the Swedish model of fatherhood

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changed in the mid-1970s from an early twentieth-century focus on ‘negligent providers’ towards a welfare state idealisation of men’s social citizenship roles as fathers through the invention of parental leave insurance (Bergman and Hobson, 2002). Welfare state individualisation of egalitarian fatherhood was introduced in 1995 and consolidated in 2002 by the introduction of non-transferable father quotas and by the promotion of the dual-earner/dual-carer model of parenting (Klinth, 2008). The making of Scandinavian men into non-authoritarian and expressive home-alone fathers was shaped by a century of change in gender relations and family law (Melby et al., 2006). Social change and the decline of patriarchy was first signalled by the Stockholm marriages in the middle of the nineteenth century, and legislated for by the 1915 Commission on Scandinavian Marriage Laws, and later still by the 1972 Commission on Family Marriage (Matovic, 1984; Bergman and Hobson, 2002). Bergman and Hobson also highlighted key legislative changes, such as the 1938 Income Maintenance Law for children of divorced or never married mothers, as an example of welfare state responsibility for child welfare replacing an area where traditional fatherhood had previously found its greatest legitimacy (2002:94). This chapter highlighted the consistent role of commissions in advancing twentieth-century conceptual and social policy developments, with fifty different government commissions held between 1929 and 2006 (Haas et al., 2012:8). Wetterberg explained that the Scandinavian marriage reforms, which took place during the 1910s and 1920s, were ‘preceded by an intense debate, a systematic Scandinavian cooperation and political pressure, not the least of which came from the women’s organisations’ (2013). In this respect, the chapter emphasised the role of feminist thinkers, whose conceptualisations of ‘konsroll’ (gender role) and ‘jamstalldher’ (gender equality) introduced ‘a theoretical basis for political decisions’ (Chronholm, 2009:228). In addition, the chapter highlighted the importance of gender studies and feminist activism at both grassroots level and at the parliamentary policy-making level (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:110; Leira, 2006:40). The Swedish welfare state de-legitimised patriarchy and symbolically legitimised an expressive idealised vision of fathers whose billboard imagery paradoxically combined childcare activity with an athletic sports car lifestyle (Klinth, 2008). The Swedish model of an idealised father denoted a masculine counter-image to the idealised image of the career mother who successfully combined work and childcare. This masculine counter-image was then re-shaped into a more ‘child-oriented masculinity’ (Haas and Hwang, 2012:65). Therborn’s definition of patriarchy as ‘paternal power’ or the ‘rule of the father’ (2004:8) made a major contribution to wider academic debates on gender, power and sex. In effect, it refreshed fatherhood as a core concern of social theory. This chapter presented nineteenth-century cohabitation in the form of the Stockholm marriages as a radical alternative to patriarchal marriage and as prelude to the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws and as an origin of welfare state development in Sweden. Moreover, the chapter presented research by Sommestad (1998), Melby et al. (2006) and Gustafsson and Stafford (1994), which illustrated that concerns surrounding pro-natalism, female employment,

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reproductive challenges, fertility, childcare, gender equality, the work–life balance and the social citizenship roles of fathers were all significant drivers of welfare state development in Sweden. Moreover, Gíslason identified four drivers of Nordic parental leave legislation irrespective of left–right ideologies. The four drivers included a growing societal acceptance that, first, individualisation was the way forward for family policies. Second, gender equality freed men and women from the restrictions of their biological sex roles. Third, women’s highly active and continuous participation in the labour market was good for economic competitiveness and, fourth, Nordic societies were starting to re-assess traditional or patriarchal conceptions about what was in the best interest of children (Gíslason, 2011:28). Overall, this chapter located ‘reproductive work’ and the concept of care at the heart of the Swedish welfare state project. The Achilles heel of the Swedish model was the clash between feminism and conservative and neo-liberal family preferences for freedom of choice, parental choice and cash for care schemes. Fatherhood emerged as a core concern of Scandinavian epistemology in the 1990s, when strong divergences in the American and Swedish ways of understanding the social construction of gender relations were presented by Huttunen (1996). Nordic epistemology on fatherhood reached a level of maturity with the publication of Making Men into Fathers by Hobson (2002). Father-involvement perspectives focused on the importance of social structure (Sarkadi et al., 2008), and were secondary to gender equality and welfare perspectives and the social politics of parenting (Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006). Overall, there was a homogeneous emphasis on structure over agency within the Scandinavian model of fatherhood, or alternatively on agency supported by the welfare state.

4

The United Kingdom: full-time breadwinners and part-time fathers

Introduction The changing nature of fatherhood was a controversial topic in British social science debates. At the heart of British debates lay a quintessentially liberal dilemma about the extent to which men’s traditional role as breadwinners came under strain from ‘new father’ ideologies, feminism and the ‘secular norm’ of both parents working and caring (Dean, 2001:267). On the one hand, research studies suggested that the shift towards new father ideologies had not come from British fathers themselves but rather from the changing expectations of working mothers, and from media representations of new, fully involved fathers. These new ways of thinking were understood to be extraneous to British liberalism and family traditions and to male preferences for combining full-time male-breadwinning with part-time fathering (Williams, 2008:500). On the other hand, critical social policy perspectives suggested that British men could no longer view their roles as fathers in terms of a full-time male-breadwinning role in ‘one and a half-earner’ households (Dean, 2001:269). Some British scholars focused on Sweden as a model of a ‘gender collaborative approach to incorporating fathers into the work-life balance’ (O’Brien, 2005:35), and as a ‘Nordic Nirvana’ in the promotion of gender equality and social justice for all (Lister, 2009:208). The changing nature of fatherhood was shaped by what Dean identified as ‘the death of the malebreadwinner model’ (2001:268) and by a child maintenance paradox whereby collecting regular child support payments was understood to ‘increase poverty’ for non-resident father households (Skinner, 2013:49), while at the same time failing to reduce child poverty in lone-mother households (Skinner and Main, 2013:39). This chapter sets these twenty-first-century welfare dilemmas in the context of the ‘two worlds’ model of fatherhood and highlights the importance of American epistemological norms to British fatherless family policy perspectives. Alternatively, it highlights the significance of Nordic experiences to critical social policy and feminist perspectives, and to public policy debates about the introduction of shared parental leave (O’Brien, 2005). Overall, the chapter highlights

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a shift in epistemological thinking towards a ‘Nordic turn’ in the British politics of parental leave, and signs of battle fatigue in following the Americans into a cost-recovery model of child support. The changing nature of fatherhood and parental leave debates A study of male attitudes towards parental leave in Great Britain explained that parental leave was introduced as a legal right for workers under the Employment Relations Act in 1999 following the European Union Directive on Parental Leave in 1996 (Dermott, 2001:146). Dermott explained that a cultural shift towards the new model of caring fathers followed a surge in publications such as Men and Their Children (Burgess and Ruxton, 1996), Next Left: An Agenda for the 1990s (Blackstone et  al., 1992) and Fathers and Fatherhood in Britain (Burghes et al., 1997), but that, paradoxically, British men didn’t avail themselves of their parental leave entitlement. Dermott explained that in the British case this was because: work has first claim on men, it limits the time men can spend with their families (Blackstone et  al 1992:120); (and) that for men paid employment takes precedence and pushes out family time, excluding fathers from childcare activities. (2001:145)

Dermott’s research distinguished between three types of British male preferences (2001). These were: ‘parental leavers’ (2001:156), that is those who want to share longer periods of parental leave; ‘paternity leavers’ (2001:158), that is those who are happy to take short periods of paternal leave; and men who don’t want to take leave or ‘no leavers’ (2001:153). The latter were men who held ‘a distinct division between roles of mothers and fathers and in terms of childcare’ and who held the view that ‘especially immediately after birth, the mother has pre-eminence’ (2001:160). Overall, Dermott warned that ‘finance alone’ did not explain men’s lack of take-up of parental leave and that as a society Great Britain needed to re-address fathers’ persistent ‘orientations to paid employment’ (2001:161). Dermott illustrated that fathers felt they were ‘able to achieve and maintain the status of good father and good worker simultaneously’, because ‘for fathers, the time required to be a “good parent” may be qualitatively different from the formulation of time that is required to be a good worker’ (2005:91). Dermott explained that the sexes may differ in their understandings and experiences of the time needed to be good mothers, fathers and workers: Accepting that the concept of involved fathering should correspond with men spending more time with their children fails to recognise that the role of fatherhood may not follow the model of motherhood. The tasks that women tend to take on are time intensive, with the role of the ‘good mother’ defined similarly to ‘good worker’, where time equals commitment. The same association may not apply to men. Understanding men’s perceptions of the work/non work of child care may be informative in better comprehension of the construction of fathering identity. (2005:102)

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Instead of adopting what she labelled as a blinkered typology of a ‘female model of balance’ versus a ‘male model of employment’, Dermott concluded by setting a research agenda to explore ‘other ways in which men modify their employment situation to accommodate family life’ (2006:631). Or, in other words, to see how British men were trying to bridge ‘the gulf between the culture and conduct of fatherhood’ (Dermott, 2006:629). In some respects Dermott’s distinction between three types of British fathers (2001) echoed the work of Hakim on ‘preference theory’ (2006). More recently, Stephen Williams adopted theoretical frameworks of reflexive modernisation to investigate the question of ‘what is fatherhood?’ and to explore whether or not British fathers experience a tension or gulf between ‘the concept and performance of fatherhood’ (2008:487). Williams suggested that the nature of fatherhood had been affected by a ‘process of de-traditionalization’ whereby men’s conceptualisation and practice of fatherhood was increasingly individualised to fit their personal biographies and circumstances rather than being scripted by traditional roles or beliefs such as that of ‘the male breadwinner ideology’ (2008:487–495). Williams interviewed forty fathers from a range of socio-economic groups to explore the central research question of whether men believed they were more involved in fathering than their own fathers were. Interestingly, Williams’ findings supported Dermott’s earlier conclusion that ‘fathers are not especially clear about what it means to be “involved” ’ (2008:500). Ironically, their memories of their own fathers and their own reflexivity on the matter of ‘father involvement’ only gave them ‘a sharper sense of what it means to be relatively uninvolved’ (2008:500). Not surprisingly, these reflexive British fathers retained varying degrees of ‘attachment to the breadwinner role’, which remained central to their sense of masculinity or sense of themselves as fathers (2008:500). Hilary Land argued that the United Kingdom was ‘starting from a very low base compared with many countries’ and that political willingness ‘to pay mothers, let alone fathers, to care for their own children, either when they are very young or ill in their own homes, remains limited’ (2002:25). Land argued that the Nordic concept of ‘the right to time to care’, as developed by Knijn and Kremer (1997), was not familiar or even understood in ‘UK policy circles’ (2002:27). Instead, Land argued that increased marketisation of childcare and elder-care from the late 1990s signalled a retreat from a Beveridgean-era welfare state expansion and of employing mothers in what were then expanding health, education and welfare systems, and that this signalled a return to a welfare system based on privatisation and male-breadwinning. Land argued that when it became clear to British policymakers in the 1980s that with ‘informal care out of reach’ and that ‘more formal care was needed’, the response was to try and increase lone-mother incomes by relocating resources from non-resident father households in the form of child support payments rather than by providing more formal childcare arrangements. Land explained as follows: reluctant to abandon the malebreadwinner model, however, the government attempted first to push these mothers back on the fathers of their children (even though many were not married to them) and it was not until after the Child Support Act 1991 had

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failed in a spectacular manner that they turned their attention more seriously to childcare. (Land, 2002:15)

From a critical social policy perspective, Brid Featherstone upheld the view that ‘securing gender equality’ had never been an explicit priority of the British welfare regime (2010:211). On the other hand, Featherstone held up Sweden as the ‘Nordic Nirvana’ of gender egalitarianism and compared the United Kingdom negatively against this feminist gold-standard (2010). In addition, Featherstone highlighted the paradox of new ways of thinking about father-involvement when she argued that ‘by constructing the father-child relationship as dyadic, mother’s contributions to fathering and childcare are obscured’ (2010:208). Featherstone suggested there was a basic weakness in the British welfare economy when she set it against the Nordic countries by arguing that: in many Nordic countries the focus has been on effecting more wide ranging changes at the level of policies that offer men and women universal entitlements to balance work and care within a commitment to promoting citizenship rights that recognize gendered inequalities. (2010:209; see also Lister, 2009)

In addition, Ruth Lister weighed up the pros and cons of the Nordic model of welfare in a ‘glass half-full’ versus ‘a glass half empty’ approach and concluded that: the strengths identified by the half-full analysis mean that many aspects of the Nordic model will continue to provide a source of inspiration in the search for a more equal and gender inclusive model of citizenship. (2009:268)

Lister raised the question as to whether the Nordic welfare regimes offered an exemplar ‘Nordic Nirvana’ in relation to gender equality, social citizenship and social justice, and concluded that from the standpoint of a ‘British socialist-feminist … there are many aspects of the Nordic model’s values and of its policy operationalization in individual welfare states that are enviable’ (2009:268). Lister was adding her ‘Nirvana’ or gold-standard type assessment of the Nordic welfare regimes to that of the American scholars Gornick and Meyers who contributed to the Real Utopias project (www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/RealUtopias) by using the Nordic welfare model ‘to demonstrate that our Real Utopia is in the realm of possibility’ (Gornick and Meyers, 2006:26; Lister, 2009:268). Lister was also adding to conclusion of Valerie Bryson and the standpoint of British feminist theory that ‘the Nordic welfare states are much closer to the feminist uchronia’ (‘non-existent ways of understanding and using time’) ‘than anywhere else in the world’ (Bryson, 2007:102–183; Lister, 2009:268). This Nordic proximity to feminist visions of uchronia was based on new ways of thinking about the individualised blocks of time that fathers and mothers spend away from the labour market to raise children in the early years post-partum. In this sense, decommodification from the labour market in the form of individualised entitlements to parental leave for fathers and mothers, plus Nordic women’s subsequent liberation from the gender-differentiated time constraints of childcare, were contributing to fresh feminist engagement with the concept of uchronia as an ideal of gender equality.

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Hartley Dean was an early entrant into the debate regarding the tensions placed on British parental relationships (2001:267). Dean’s small-scale qualitative study of low-income working families was carried out to explore the theory that the Beveridgean welfare settlement, as premised on what Lewis (1992) defined as a ‘malebreadwinner model’ of the family, was being unravelled by social and political understandings of both parents working as the new ‘secular norm’ (Dean, 2001:267–268). Overall, Dean put forward a British epistemological case for universalism across class and gender in parental leave policies: Social policy by itself cannot make working parenthood compatible with parental responsibility, but it could go much further than at present. This would entail making sure, on the one hand, that men have the same incentives as women to combine employment and parental responsibilities and, on the other, that the poorest working parents have the same substantive protection in terms of access to childcare and paid leave as everybody else. (2001:283)

Margaret O’Brien presented research evidence to the Equal Opportunities Commission (EOC) that illustrated the tide was beginning to turn in Great Britain as ‘parents, politicians and employer and employee organisations are increasingly bringing fathers into the frame’ of reconciling work and family life (2005:ii). The report explored contemporary ‘academic and policy developments’ on shared caring with a specific focus on the role of fathers in employment. The research evidence reviewed by O’Brien illustrated that ‘the ideal of the involved caring father’ was ‘culturally embedded in Britain’ with fathers in dual-earner families spending about three-quarters of the time mothers spend with children but having low involvement in the housework involved in running a family home for children (2005:iii). Previously O’Brien and Shemilt (2003) published a report for the EOC on Working Fathers: Earning and Caring, whose findings illustrated that: The Nordic experience indicates that father’s uptake of parental leave is greatest under four key conditions: when parental leave includes a designated paternal quota; where there is high wage compensation; where there is flexibility in the way leave can be used by couples and where male provision is publicised through government awareness campaigns. Other important factors in successfully encouraging active fatherhood through policy initiatives include establishing the ‘business case’ for its provision, modelling by political and organisational leaders and presenting policies within a gender collaborative context … Swedish fathers, who take up higher than average amounts of leave, report more engaged family commitment, working fewer hours and more involvement with family and childcare. (2003:ix)

The O’Brien report highlighted the work of prominent academics from the American academic fatherhood fraternity on the child development benefits of increased father-involvement and ‘the vital mediation role mothers play in facilitating men’s parenting’ (2005:4; Lamb et al., 1987). In general, the O’Brien report drew on American ethological research to illustrate the ‘beneficial impact of “positive” father involvement in children’s lives’ (2005:10; Pleck and Masciadrelli, 2004).

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O’Brien concluded by arguing that a ‘gender collaborative approach to incorporating fathers in work-life balance initiatives’ was ‘vital in achieving a sustainable balance of work and family life, as recognised in many Nordic countries’ (2005:35). In November 2012, the Liberal Party Leader and Deputy Prime Minister of the Conservative/Liberal coalition government, Nick Clegg, announced a reform towards flexible parental leave. Under the new reforms employed mothers would still be entitled to fifty-two weeks of maternity leave, but after taking the first two weeks mothers would be able to share the balance of fifty weeks of parental leave with fathers as flexible parental leave with effect from 2015 (www.gov.uk/reform-of-flexible-parental-leave). The new provisions were included in the Children and Families Bill which allowed the parent taking the first six weeks to receive 90 per cent of pay, thirty-three weeks at £135.45 and thirteen weeks unpaid. The Institute of Leadership and Management carried out a survey of 1,000 employees and 789 managers about their own experiences for a report entitled Shared Opportunity: Parental Leave in UK Business (2014). The report stated that with over 800,000 births per year the new proposals for shared parental leave ‘can help halt the drain of the female talent from the workplace’ (2014:1). The overarching conclusion from the Institute of Leadership and Management was that the ‘ingrained expectation’ among the British business community that mothers will take on the primary role of parenting in the first year of a child’s life must be challenged because: The introduction of shared leave is a crucial step towards achieving equality in the workplace and enabling women to progress into senior roles. In order to give more mothers a realistic choice of returning to their careers, organisations must first identify and address the cultural (and financial barriers) that risk preventing fathers from taking their shared leave entitlement. (2014:3)

However, on their official website the Fatherhood Institute criticised the Children and Families Bill for not offering ‘flexible parental leave’ but rather ‘transferable maternity leave’ where fathers gained no new independent or individualised eligibility to parental leave and were only eligible themselves if the child’s mother was ‘eligible for maternity leave, and chooses to share it with them’ (www.fatherhoodinstitute.org). The Fatherhood Institute also quoted examples of Nordic ‘father-friendly’ social or family policies to highlight the following liberal gender equality case for individualised parental leave entitlements for fathers: Evidence from Sweden suggests that a mother’s future earnings increase on average by 7% over a four year period for every month of leave the father takes. Iceland reserves 13 weeks for mothers, 13 weeks for fathers and 13 weeks of joint leave to be used as the family wishes. Ninety-one per cent of Icelandic fathers now take leave, with 83% using all their reserved leave and 23% also taking some joint leave.

The Trade Union Congress (TUC) argued that plans to encourage fathers to share maternity leave were being seriously undermined by government reductions in paternity and maternity leave pay. TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady

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responded to government announcements about shared parental leave proposals by stating that: Unless it is backed up with better pay many couples simply won’t be able to afford to take it. The government’s own estimates suggest that just 1 in 20 dads would be able to afford to take shared parental leave if it was paid at the current statutory rate of just £137 a week. (www.tuc.org.uk)

Non-resident fathers and child support debates Bradshaw and Skinner famously criticised Britain’s Labour government for introducing an understanding under the Child Support Scheme ‘that personal circumstances cannot negate responsibility for one’s children’, thereby effectively introducing ‘a transfer from one poor family to another poor family’ (2000:84). Bradshaw et al. (1999:416) criticised the Child Support Agency in the UK as ‘the worst policy-making disaster in modern British history’. According to Bradshaw and Skinner the British Child Support Act of 1991 was based on the principle ‘that biological fathers have an absolute and unreserved responsibility to support their children’, this despite the fact that research findings from non-resident fathers revealed somewhat provocatively that ‘not all the fathers accepted this principle’ (2000:83). The administrative framework for child support enforcement in the United Kingdom was established under the Child Support Act (1991). The Child Support Act transformed how divorced and separated families dealt with child maintenance by introducing an ‘entirely new system’ whereby the Child Support Agency (CSA) was established ‘to calculate, collect and enforce child maintenance payments’ (Skinner, 2012:233). Under the legislation children were understood to be living primarily with one parent, usually the mother, who was labelled as ‘the parent with care’ and the other parent, usually the father, was labelled as the ‘non-resident parent’ with ‘the obligation to pay maintenance’ (2012:233). Implicit in this labelling of parents was that it is only the resident-mother or ‘parent with care’ who has an obligation to care, whereas the non-resident father, still cast in the tradition role of a male-breadwinning provider for his children, had ‘the obligation to pay maintenance’ (Skinner, 2012:233). The dualism typified by residual welfare systems remained whereby ‘it was compulsory for parents with care who were claiming social assistance to apply for child maintenance through the CSA’ (2012:233), while for mothers not claiming social assistance it was not compulsory to apply for child maintenance through the CSA. Up until the Child Support Act of 1991 there had been a degree of dualism surrounding child maintenance payments by non-resident fathers. On the one hand, divorcing or separating couples made private agreements through solicitors or informally between themselves. On the other hand, the public system was focused on pursuing a residuum of non-resident fathers to recoup the cost of social assistance benefits paid to lone mothers. However, Skinner explained that after 1991:

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the relative positions of public and private systems for child maintenance reversed and since then it has been the public system that has been dominant … and it thus stepped into the new position of acting as ‘go between’ for the parents, setting the amount to be paid and transferring the monies from one parent to another. But it retained all of the maintenance paid where a lone parent was dependent on social assistance benefits in order to recoup some of the fiscal costs. (2012:232)

The policy logic of the child support system in the United Kingdom changed over time from being primarily focused on reducing the cost of welfare payments to lone mothers in the 1991 Act, to reducing child poverty under the terms of the Child Support, Pensions and Social Security Act 2000 (Skinner, 2012:238). Alternatively, the main aim of the Child Maintenance and Other Payments Act 2008 was to increase coverage and to ensure the act maximised the number of children ‘for whom effective maintenance arrangements are in place’ (Skinner, 2012:239). However, Skinner’s data exposed this logic as vapid by showing that: Overall, the consistent object throughout has been to increase the levels of child maintenance payments and reduce the rates of non-compliance. But, despite numerous regulatory changes and multiple amending acts over the preceding 19 years since the CSA was first introduced in 1993, population data show just an 8 per cent increase in the numbers of lone parents receiving child maintenance (38  percent in total). (Skinner, 2012:239)

Yet, the political rhetoric of getting tough on ‘runaway dads’ continued to reverberate at the highest level of British politics and was demonstrated by the following quote from David Cameron, the Conservative Party leader and British Prime Minister: We need to make Britain a genuinely hostile place for fathers who go AWOL. Its high time runaway dads were stigmatised, and the full force of shame was heaped upon them. They should be looked at like drink drivers, people who are beyond the pale. They need the message rammed home to them, from every part of our culture, that what they’re doing is wrong – that leaving single mothers, who do a heroic job against all odds, to fend for themselves simply isn’t acceptable. (Daily Telegraph, 19 June 2011)

The former Labour Minister for Higher Education, David Lammy, complained that the ground on fathers in families debate had been ‘ceded to right-wing commentators who attack absent fathers as feckless, demonise single mothers and blame cohabitation for the instability of families’ (Boffey, 2013). Lammy’s report for the Father Institute entitled Doing Family: Encouraging Active Fatherhood (2013) suggested that policies to promote the role of fathers were not working because they were ‘ill-thought out’ and the reason for the low take-up of leave by fathers was that pay entitlements were worth a ‘measly £135 a week – £100 less than a full time job on the minimum wage’ (Boffey, 2013). Cross-party political support for the ongoing implementation of the child support enforcement system remained high in the United Kingdom and provoked numerous attempts at improvement through legislative changes. However, criticism of the CSA became deeply entrenched, coming from the National Audit Office and the Committee of Public Accounts (Skinner, 2012:244). More recently,

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the Conservative government set out its new policy proposals in a Green Paper entitled Strengthening Families, Promoting Parental Responsibility:  The Future of Child Maintenance, which was passed into legislation by the Welfare Reform Act (2012). The 2012 Welfare Reform Act established a new ‘integrated model of relationship and family support services’ as a referral programme to ‘help parents reach private family-based agreements’ (Skinner, 2012:236). This ‘new’ family support services programme was in essence made up of the ‘existing “voluntary and community sector” providers working in this field’ (DWP, 2012:5–12). Through providing access to a three-pillar combination of the ‘mandatory gateway’, the ‘calculation only service’ and the new ‘integrated model of relationship and family support services’, the welfare system in the United Kingdom sought to ensure that separated families ‘avoid intractable financial problems from developing’ (Skinner, 2012:239). However, the Welfare Reform Act 2012 essentially added to the hardship costs of separation by operationalising a new fee structure that was introduced in the 2008 Act (Skinner, 2012:236). Conclusion and discussion This chapter has illustrated that, unlike the American model of fatherhood, British epistemology was unequivocally critical of child support enforcement schemes aimed at non-resident fathers (Bradshaw et  al., 1999:416; Bradshaw and Skinner, 2000:83). After decades of sustained criticism, the policy logics of child support enforcement in the United Kingdom shifted from a combination of cost-recovery and child poverty reduction approaches, but without any significant movement towards promoting joint-custody, shared parenting or the individualisation of child support. The recommendation for the introduction of advance child maintenance systems remained un-acted upon by the British welfare regime (Richardson and Bradshaw, 2009:16). Overall, the British model remained fashioned by the American model of animus towards non-resident fathers, despite decades of epistemological criticism. In the mid-1990s, the British sociologist Pringle argued that the British government’s promotion of men as fathers was ‘part of a much broader movement on both sides of the Atlantic’ (1995:56). According to Pringle, Anglo-American father-involvement policies were based on ‘right-wing ideologies’ which drew on the ‘underclass theories of the American academic, Charles Murray’ to explain social breakdown (1995:56). Pringle made a direct link between underclass theory and British institutional discourses of the social politics of fatherhood with the observation that ‘members of the government have attributed various social ills to the absence of fathers in families’ (1995:55). In addition, Pringle observed that authors such as Charles Murray (1984) in the USA and Dennis and Erdos (1992) in Britain had focused ‘on the growth of illegitimacy’ and ‘illegitimacy as a causal factor’ of social disruption, unemployment and poverty (1995:56). This type of pejorative social commentary on absent fathers and single-parent families was rare in British epistemological debates. But the British welfare regime exhibited an animus towards lone-mother families and non-resident fathers, in line with the

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American model of fatherhood. Overall, British welfare regime loyalties to marriage and male-breadwinning crowded out shifts in policy towards shared-care and gender equality. On the other hand, the chapter illustrated a British sea-change in feminist thinking about the Nordic welfare regimes. Previously, English-speaking feminism did not share ‘Scandinavian women’s optimism about the role of state’ (Lewis, 1992:171). More recently, British feminism and socialist feminism re-assessed the Nordic welfare regimes as a source of influence and inspiration in relation to gender equality, social citizenship and social justice (Lister, 2009; Featherstone, 2010). But turning gender equality into a priority goal of British welfare thinking still eluded British feminism (Featherstone, 2010:211). British liberal welfare-regime loyalties to male-breadwinning as the twin pillar of the welfare state promoted the practice of full-time breadwinning and part-time fathering which combined with full-time mothering and part-time working for mothers. However, there was a shift in critical epistemology and British socialist-feminism towards a Nordic turn which was supported by sections of British industry such as the Institute of Leadership and Management and the Trade Union Congress. However, a Nordic turn would require the British welfare regime to embrace the concept of gender equality, which according to Brid Featherstone was never a priority of the British welfare regime (2010:211). On the other hand, British parental leave debates involving academics, business organisations, trade unions, politicians and the print media increasingly viewed parental leave as a public good because it benefited gender equality by reducing the penalties mothers suffer in terms of lost earnings and damaged career prospects. In addition, there was increasing support for the claim that parental leave could promote improved gender balance and diversity in Britain’s companies and boardrooms (Institute of Leadership & Management, 2014:3). The research finding that the failure of British fathers to take up parental leave could not be reduced to financial concerns (Dermott, 2001:161) was contradicted by the view of Peter Moss from the the International Network on Leave Policies and Research (LP and R), who suggested that the best way to improve parental leave take-up by fathers was through the provision of well-paid and non-transferable parental leave (2011:127).

5

Ireland: ‘vulnerable fathers’, invisible fatherhood

Introduction This chapter investigates the extent of American or Swedish influences on the social politics of fatherhood in the Republic of Ireland. The chapter begins by reviewing the introduction of the Liable Relative Provision (LRP) under Part III of the Social Welfare Act (1989) as a way of recovering ‘some or all of the social welfare issued to the One Parent Family Payment recipient concerned’ (Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs, 2000:106). The chapter locates the Irish variant of the American-style cost-recovery approach to child maintenance within a longer-term policy trajectory of reducing social protection expenditure on lone-mother households. This process was accelerated in 2012 when the Irish government attached American-style ‘time limits’ to the One Parent Family Payment (OFP). The chapter contrasts the selective emphasis on child support enforcement with the lack of universal paid parental leave policies. Academic debates about the social politics of fatherhood adhered to a focus on ‘vulnerable fathers’ within a selective framework of family support and activation policies (Ferguson and Hogan, 2004). The focus on vulnerable fathers was paradoxically accompanied by a hardening of attitudes in social commentary about ‘deadbeat dads’ and ‘welfare moms’. The most notorious of these occurred when the journalist Kevin Myers described single mothers as ‘mothers of bastards’ or ‘MoBs’ in an article about the ‘heresy underlying welfarism’ (The Irish Times, 8 February 2005). The hardening of attitudes in print media reporting towards lone mothers was paralleled by their depiction as ‘brides of the welfare state’ by Irish fathers’ rights groups. The chapter concludes that an Irish welfare regime legacy of strong male-breadwinning (Lewis, 1992) combines with a ‘social care infrastructure deficit’ (Fanning and Rush, 2006:4) to prevent the development of a Nordic dual-earner and dual-carer model of fatherhood in Ireland. Overall, the chapter shows that the Irish welfare regime is moving further away from a Nordic-type focus on universalism, father-friendly parental leave policies and welfare adequacy and moving closer to the residual American model of fatherhood and welfare.

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Family support and parental leave debates Epistemological concerns with fatherhood and family life in Ireland reflected a legacy of a socio-anthropological focus on gender relations in traditional farm families (Arensberg and Kimball, 1940). They also stemmed from social liberal concerns about the disadvantageous position of women in Irish society and traditional orthodoxies that ‘the primary responsibility for child care lies strictly with the mother’ (Fahey, 1984:188; Kennedy, 1989:65). Prominent sociologists from the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), such as Hannan (1972), Kennedy (1989) and Fahey (1984), were at the forefront of social enquiries into the changing nature of gender relations and fatherhood. Hannan’s study anticipated the emergence of ‘new father’ ideologies with the finding that 25 per cent of husbands were taking on more ‘expressive roles’ (1972:561). However, Finola Kennedy’s report on Family, Economy and Government in Ireland expressed reservations about the extent to which gender roles could be transformed. Kennedy warned that ‘if fathers are to pursue more active fatherhood than under the breadwinner system, then more far-reaching changes may be required in the organisation of the work place as well in role-sharing in the home’ (1989:150). During the 1970s and 1980s Irish social science focused on the disadvantageous position of wives and mothers vis-à-vis gender inequalities in the household and the labour force. Yet in the final analysis, Finola Kennedy’s report cautioned that there were limits to reducing gender inequalities because: No amount of equality legislation or paternity leave will alter the fact that the bearing and breast feeding of children devolves to the mother. Nor can the historic fact that the world of work outside the home has hitherto been structured mainly to accommodate persons who do not bear or nurture children. (1989:150)

The Family, Economy and Government in Ireland (Kennedy, 1989) report rejected the Swedish model of fatherhood and egalitarian family policies in favour of an American welfare approach, which sought ‘to combine liberal and conservative impulses’ where ‘a credible family policy will insist that responsibility begins with the individual, then the family and only then the community’ (Kennedy, 1989:149; see also Moynihan, 1985). The first major research study to focus specifically on fathers’ changing roles was carried out by Professor Gabriel Kiely for the Family Studies Centre in University College Dublin (1995). Kiely’s findings, based on a survey of 513 urban mothers, were that fathers made only a modest contribution to domestic chores and child-rearing. Kiely suggested that fathers were suffering from ‘role-strain’, caught between the legacies of traditional breadwinning and new father ideologies, which emphasised a more expressive role (1995:157). However, Changing Fathers: Fatherhood and Family Life in Ireland criticised what it termed the ‘moral reasoning’ of the Kiely study for being implicitly rather than explicitly based on principles of gender equality (McKeown et al., 1998a:109). The basic criticism was that Kiely had adopted a ‘feminist/fairness perspective’ for analysis of ‘women’s perceptions’ of changing father roles in Irish families (McKeown et al., 1998a:106).

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Instead, McKeown et al. adopted a ‘developmental perspective’ on fatherhood, which was derived from American research to argue that ‘the primary developmental task of adulthood is learning to care for others … and guiding the next generation’ (1998b:115). The American-influenced developmental perspective was posited as a progressive stride in fatherhood debates beyond a singular gender-equality concern with ‘justice and domestic democracy’ (1998:115). The developmental perspective was specifically chosen over ‘the fairness perspective’, which McKeown et al. argued had ‘developed out of a feminist paradigm in the 1970s’ (McKeown, 2000:120). The research for Changing Fathers:  Fatherhood and Family Life in Modern Ireland (McKeown et al., 1998a) was originally carried out for the Final Report of the Commission on the Family, Strengthening Families for Life, in the period 1995–1998. The report raised concerns about negative images of fatherhood in the media and television, and their portrayal in situation comedies where wives were ‘shown to be more practical and connected, children to be more with it and savvy’, while ‘Dad is a little dumb’ (1998a:405) and that: Commentators on contemporary fatherhood complain that he is being made to look foolish and antiquated, because this weakened image helps to take down the stuffed shirt power of patriarchy, makes more equal the relations between genders and blurs the hierarchal differences between fathers and children. (McKeown et al., 1998b:4)

McKeown et al. expressed wider concerns that caring father ideologies were not supported in the sphere of birthing practices, in work, in the legal sphere and the sphere of statutory services (1998b:406). Following a recommendation from Strengthening Families for Life (1998), the Department of Health and Children launched the Springboard Family Support Initiative in 1998, as an early intervention programme to support families with children at risk which was the first ‘major family support initiative of its kind in Ireland’ (McKeown et al., 2003). The Springboard Family Support Initiative commissioned the publication of Fathers and Families:  Research and Reflection on Key Questions, which recommended that fathers’ involvement in parenting was important for child development (McKeown, 2001b). The report argued that family structure was ‘more important than poverty in determining behavioural and psychological problems’ (McKeown, 2001b:17). Here, McKeown, a key figure in much of Irish fatherhood research, was drawing on research by Sara McLanahan (1997), a key figure in much of the American research on absent fatherhood and single-motherhood, on the basis that ‘the contemporary experience of fatherhood in the United States, as described by one writer, is probably not very different from that in Ireland’ (McKeown, 2001b:3). Family support research in Ireland increasingly emphasised the negative consequences of non-marital and post-marital family structures. For example McKeown’s 2001 research report into Father and Families argued that unless the trend towards divorce was halted, the ‘inter-generational instability on the well-being of children will be powerful and result in high levels of personal disorganisation for years to come’ (McKeown, 2001b:17). McKeown drew on American

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research by Waite to argue in the Fathers and Families report that marriage produced ‘substantial benefits for men and women in the form of better health, longer life, more and better sex, greater earnings (at least for men), greater wealth and better outcomes for children’ (2001b:6; see also Waite, 1995:499). Ultimately, the 2006 Family Research in Ireland report contradicted the ‘marriage benefit’ perspective by concluding ‘that the type of family in which one lives has virtually no impact on family well-being’ (Cousins, 2006a). In a similar manner, a study of Young Men on the Margins carried out under the Family Research Programme by Cleary et al. played down the significance of family structure to child well-being outcomes by arguing that in general ‘the absence of a father is not inherently problematic for the male child’ (2004:24). Under the Family Research Programme there was an increasing emphasis on the individual agency of ‘vulnerable’ fathers. For example, the Strengthening Families through Fathers report recommended a therapeutic approach to ‘vulnerable fathers’ who were trapped in dangerous non-expressive masculinities (Ferguson and Hogan, 2004:11). However, according to Garret, the major flaw in this type of ‘post-modern life politics’ was a failure to recognise the constraints that social structure imposed on people as explained by the following quote: The life politics approach is apt to place too great an emphasis on human agency and this is bound up with a failure to recognise the constraints that social structure impose on an individual’s capacity for action. (2003:389)

According to Garret the main problem with the post-modern life politics perspective was an insistence that the ‘destiny of individuals’ was entirely ‘in their own hands’ (2003:389). In essence family support debates concerning fatherhood in Ireland have been influenced primarily by a combination of American-derived and post-modern therapeutic approaches. The Commission on the Family (1998) ushered in an era of exponential growth for family support services and research on fatherhood in Ireland. However, the Commission on the Family also brought a fresh significance to selective welfare provision and a renewed commitment to marriage. Fatherhood became a core issue for men’s groups with the establishment in 1993 of Parental Equality: the Shared Parenting and Joint Custody Support Group. McKeown et al. described the group as a ‘response to the problems experienced by fathers of obtaining shared custody of their children’ (1998b:31). Traditional assumptions about the primacy of maternal custody were reinforced by the courts in Ireland, which were traditionally sceptical about the role of fathers, especially non-resident fathers, and remained ‘unwilling to recognise that any significant weight should be given to paternal bonding’ (Conroy, 1998:93; Rush, 2004:105). When a child is born to parents who are not married, it is only the mother who acquires automatic guardianship rights. Non-married fathers have no rights to guardianship except where the mother agrees to sign a statutory declaration of guardianship. Marriage-based understandings of the family in the 1937 Constitution served to ensure that fathers outside marriage had no formal recognition and had no automatic legal rights to guardianship or a father–child relationship. A 1965 Supreme Court decision based on Article 41 of the Irish Constitution

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decreed that natural fathers had no family status in relation to their biological offspring born outside marriage and that according to Article 42 they held no parental status. In addition there was no legal obligation to name a father when registering the birth of a child outside marriage. McKeown characterised non-resident fathers in terms of ‘exclusion from family life and an active role in parenting their children’ (2001:21). According to the Supreme Court interpretation of the constitutional status quo, however, cohabiting fathers and non-resident fathers shared a similar lack of formal parental status, so much so that the 1996 Constitutional Review Group (CRG) report made reference to the ‘continued constitutional ostracism of natural fathers’ (1996:325). The CRG raised concerns that Articles 41 and 42  ‘had distorted attitudes to non-marital families’ (1996). However, the Children’s and Family Relationships Bill (2014) repealed the Guardianship of Infants Act (1964) and proposed that cohabiting unmarried fathers would be entitled to automatic guardianship when they have cohabited with the birth mother for at least one year prior to the birth of the child. Margot Doherty from Treoir, the unmarried parents’ family advocacy group, suggested that: We know from calls to our national specialist information service that there are many unmarried fathers who are not in cohabiting relationships with the mothers of their children, who are committed fathers and who wish to be actively involved in the lives of their children. There is no provision in the Bill for acquiring joint guardianship rights more easily for these fathers. (www.treoir.ie/information-guardianship)

Treoir went on to suggest that ‘parents could be informed at the point of registration that putting the father’s name on the birth certificate does not give the father guardianship rights’ (www.treoir.ie). Fatherhood outside marriage exacerbated what McGinnity and Russell found to be an already peripheral role for many fathers in the parenting and physical care of children (McGinnity and Russell, 2008:47). McGinnity and Russell concluded from studies of time-use data that there were ‘wide gender differences in both the proportions participating in caring, housework and employment and in the time devoted to these activities on weekdays and weekend days’ (2008:46). McGinnity and Russell argued that Irish public policy on caring was similar to the USA where there was ‘a strong emphasis on market forces and individual freedom, with relatively little intervention by the state’ (2008:15). While McGinnity and Russell agreed that increasing men’s family time was a useful policy strategy to pursue for increasing gender equality and child well-being, they also pointed out that the extent of parental leave in Ireland was low by EU standards (2008:15). Ireland’s failure to introduce paid parental leave arrangements was located at one end of an international continuum by Hearn and Pringle, who explained that ‘parental leave is relatively generous in Nordic countries … At the other extreme stands Ireland: the Irish government website announces “Paternity Leave is not recognised in employment law in Ireland” ’ (2006:377). However, from a comparative family policy perspective, Daly and Clavero concluded that Sweden offered a Ireland and other nations a model because:

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Parental leave in Sweden offers families a meaningful parental care option and has achieved a higher take-up among fathers than in any other member state. Half of all fathers now take parental leave for an average of approximately two months. (2002:166)

More recently, Daly concluded that ‘the emergence in Scandinavia of policies that target men’s behaviour as fathers’ through the individualisation of parental leave in the form of a daddy quota was ‘proving influential across Northern Europe’ (2011:12). The issue of parental leave was addressed at the height of the Celtic tiger period by the Parental Leave Review Group (1998) as part of the Social Partnership agreements. The Farming Pillar were represented on the Parental Leave Review Group (1998), where along with Irish Employers and the Department of Finance they chose to derail the primary recommendation of the Group that parental leave in Ireland should attract payment (Richardson and Rush, 2006). This served to reinforce Ireland’s strong male-breadwinning status and maintain inequalities in the gender division of parenting responsibilities. A more recent entry into Irish parental leave debates came from a children’s welfare perspective in the form of the Report of the Expert Advisory Group on the Early Year Strategy: Right From the Start (September 2013), which recommended that parental leave in Ireland should include: Significantly longer periods of paid leave for parents, introduced by each year incrementally extending paid parental leave at the end of the present period of paid maternity leave. The aim should be within 5 years to: (a) achieve one year’s paid leave after the birth of each child, and (b) introduce 2 weeks’ paid paternity leave around the birth of a child.

However, in response to a parliamentary question about the potential introduction of paternity leave or shared leave the Labour Party Minister for Social Protection, Joan Burton, explained that ‘Male employees are not entitled under Irish law to either paid or unpaid paternity leave’, and that: The introduction of paid parental leave or paternity leave would have significant cost implications for employers, the Exchequer and the social insurance fund. In addition, the question of introducing a paternity benefit payment would depend on establishing an underlying entitlement to statutory paternity leave in the first instance and in the case of paternity leave would require legislation on the part of the Minister for Justice and Equality. (Written Answers Nos. 134–141)

While Irish epistemological perspectives took a Nordic turn in relation to thinking about parental leave, the answer from a Labour Party minister to a parlimentary question privileged the vested intersts of Irish employers over the social protection and decommodification of Irish working fathers. Non-resident fathers and the liable relative provision Fathers, especially non-resident ones, became central to Irish social policy debates about welfare reform for lone-parents. This was not always the case (Rush, 2005). The Irish Constitution sets out, under Article 41, an explicit role

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for women as full-time mothers in the home. Fatherhood had no institutional status. Similarly, fatherhood had largely escaped explicit scrutiny in social policy debates. In accordance with Article 41 of the Irish Constitution (1937), and as far back as the introduction of Poor Law ‘Outdoor Relief ’ in 1847, the state supported widowed mothers without requiring them to engage in paid work. Social Assistance Schemes for widows were expanded in 1935. Additional categories were introduced through the Deserted Wives Allowance in 1970 and the Unmarried Mother’s Allowance in 1973. The introduction of this latter payment without time limits followed a recommendation from the Commission on the Status of Women (1972). The Lone Parent Allowance was introduced in 1990 and was the first payment open to both men and women. The One Parent Family (OPF) payment was introduced in 1997 to amalgamate some of the previously existing payments. The Final Report of the Commission on the Family, Strengthening Families for Life (1998), highlighted the importance of welfare adequacy to lone-mother households and placed a strong emphasis on the ‘financial security afforded by the One Parent Family Payment’ (Government Publications, 1998:102). This emphasis on financial security for women and children outside the labour market reflected a traditional legacy of strong male-breadwinning and patriarchal-familism based on old-fashioned notions of gender differentiated and complementary sex-roles for parents. Article 41.2 of the Irish Constitution elevated the status of motherhood in Ireland and served to insulate lone mothers from labour market dependency. Article 41.2 reads as follows: 41.2.1 In particular the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the state a support without which the common good cannot be achieved 42.2.2 The State shall therefore endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.

State legitimacy and responsibility to protect lone mothers from enforced and, in the Irish case, highly competitive labour market dependency, was reinforced by revelations of their previous ill-treatment and abuse in the institutional care of the Magdalene Laundries for ‘unmarried mothers’ (Fanning, 2004:16). An institutional ‘hands off ’ approach evolved to the financial responsibilities of non-resident fathers, with the tax and welfare system traditionally treating non-resident fathers as single men without any regard for their parental status. That began to change in 1990 when the Liable Relative Provision was introduced to the social welfare code for the purposes of ensuring that where a claimant of Lone Parent Allowance had no success securing maintenance the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs could, in individual cases, ‘recover some or all of the social welfare issued to the OPF recipient concerned’ (DSCFA, 2000:106). McKeown, a prominent figure in the Irish fatherhood research fraternity, argued consistently that the active pursuit of child maintenance from absent fathers ‘would further damage relationships in these fragile families’ (McKeown et al., 1998a:416), and that:

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At least for low income non-resident fathers, measures to improve their employment and earnings, in conjunction with measures to improve family relationships, may have more beneficial impact on the payment of maintenance than stricter enforcement. (McKeown, 2001:28)

Nonetheless, an institutional shift towards more stringent supervision and regulation of the OPF payment was signalled by the Final Report of the Commission on the Family, Strengthening Families for Life, with the recommendation below, which was subsequently replicated in full (two years later) by the 2000 Review of the OPF Payment: There should be a stronger link between social welfare policy and the legal maintenance system. There should be more coordination in the policy approach adopted in the two systems in relation to securing maintenance for families. Lone Parents are legally obliged to attempt to obtain maintenance but now that the maintenance offsets the One-Parent Family Payment, there is no clear incentive for fathers/parents to top up the family’s social welfare income. The systems should be coordinated and mechanisms developed to ensure partners have an incentive to pay maintenance. (Commission on the Family, 1998:115; DSCFA, 2000:111)

McKeown singled out the above recommendation to argue that non-resident fathers were a residual concern of Irish social policy and that ‘the most powerful illustration of this can be found in the report of the Commission on the Family where the only issue about lone fathers that is given any serious consideration is maintenance’ (2001:14). The report of the Senior Officials Group on Social Inclusion Steering Group on labour market activation of lone mothers explained that maintenance recovery legislation was aimed at making non-resident fathers ‘contribute to the state towards the cost of their spouse and/or children’ (DSCFA, 2006:91). Maintenance recovery from non-resident biological fathers was not linked to social policy logics of ‘ending child poverty’ but was instead linked to the cost-recovery logic of public expenditure reduction. The emphasis on public expenditure recovery was demonstrated in the following passage from the 2006 Working Group on Lone Parents report: In addition to supporting the lone parent via the OFP, legislation now provides for the recovery of some or all of the cost of supporting the OFP recipient from the other parent of the children. Under liable relative provisions, if lone parents require support through a social welfare payment because of inadequate maintenance, then the State is entitled to recover an appropriate amount from liable relatives. (DSCFA, 2006:42)

This concept of a ‘state entitlement’ to income from non-resident fathers was new to Irish social policy. It was, in essence, a form of non-resident father tax. The LRP empowered the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs to recover maintenance through the courts where a lone parent had achieved no success in claiming maintenance. Part III of the Social Welfare Act 1989 (as amended by Part IX of the Social Welfare Act 1993) imposed an obligation on spouses to maintain their children and ‘each other’. This was at a time when the epistemological research community and civil servants alike were promoting the concept

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of egalitarian ‘individualisation’ in tax and social welfare debates (Department of Social and Family Affairs, 2006:17; Kiely, 2004). The LRP was linked to an ‘efforts condition’ whereby under Article 6 of the Regulations (SI 426 of the 1996) lone parents were obliged to make ‘and continue to make appropriate efforts, in the particular circumstances to obtain maintenance from a liable relative’ (DSCFA, 2000:107). The wider cultural and social legitimacy of these new powers over non-resident fathers had not been tested during the 1990s owing to an absence of institutional conviction. This was illustrated by the following conclusion of the 2000 Review of the OPF Payment report: Apart from the resource issue, it would require social acceptance generally to the use of the extensive range of powers, which are available under the current legislation to enforce the Liable Relative Provision. While the operation of the Liable Relative Provision has attracted little attention or controversy to date, this may be more to do with the comparatively low level at which it operates at present. A  concerted campaign to increase the level of contributions could dramatically change that situation. (DSCFA, 2000:121)

Institutional reluctance within the Irish welfare regime to implement the ‘make appropriate efforts’ clause was based on the understanding among civil servants that ‘the lone parent will receive no benefit as such … it will merely reduce the rate of OFP paid’ (Government of Ireland, 2000:111). This view, candidly stated, illustrated an Irish institutional ambivalence towards the new economic-liberal hegemony of welfare retrenchment and individual disentitlement. Child maintenance recovery By the time of the publication of the Review of the One Family Payment (2000) there were 75,000 claimants, of which 52,625 were never-married claimants. In 2004 the Minister for Social Welfare reported that 1,779 fathers/spouses were making a regular maintenance payment to the Department. Two years later, the 2006 Report of the Working Group of Senior Officials reported that 14 per cent of 2,768 liable relatives targeted made a contribution the previous year. Figures released for 2003 and 2004 in respect of further liable relative cases investigated are shown in Table 2. The data in Table 2 illustrated that over a quarter (26 per cent) of non-resident fathers or ‘liable relatives’ were deemed untraceable, unknown or violent. An additional 60 per cent were deemed unable to make a contribution because they were social welfare recipients (13 per cent) or in low-income employment (47 per cent). Only 14 per cent of non-resident fathers/spouses were deemed to be in a position to make a payment. Just 2 per cent of liable fathers were eventually compliant with this assessment. Significantly, the data in Table 2 showed that only about 25 per cent of liable working fathers investigated in Ireland were deemed to be in a position to make a financial contribution towards the social costs of their children.

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Table 2  OFP payment cases assessed by Maintenance Recovery Unit Category No trace Social welfare recipients Other (unknown/violent) Working - No contribution due - Determination order Total

2003

2004

2,285 (12%) 2,518 (13%) 2,899 (14%)

2,031 (11%) 2,564 (13%) 2,564 (13%)

9,447 (47%) 2,749 (14%) 19,998

9,516 (49%) 2,768 (14%) 19,443

Source: Report of the Working Group of Senior Officials/SOGSI (2006).

Bradshaw and Skinner argued from a critical academic perspective that in the British case there has been a ‘tendency to exaggerate the capacity to pay of non-resident fathers’ (2000:81). But overall, the political assumption in Ireland, that a ‘liable relative should contribute to the cost of a welfare payment to the other parent of their child’ (Department of Social and Family Affairs, 2006:91), was shown from the 1990s to be a relatively unworkable one, even from institutional data. By this time Bradshaw and Skinner had labelled national attempts at ‘cost recovery’ in the United Kingdom as the ‘British fiasco’ which involved ‘the British government, borrowing policy from the United States and Australia’ (2000:80). This finding, from across the Irish Sea, didn’t deter the Irish welfare regime from joining Australia, the United Kingdom and the USA in the punitive and unworkable Anglo-Saxon logic of ‘cost recovery’. The prosecution of non-resident fathers through the courts from 2004 for non-payment of maintenance caught the interest of the print media. Moreover, the way prosecutions of non-resident fathers were reported, illustrated a hardening of attitudes. An archival search through The Irish Sunday Times broadsheet newspaper in the five years from 2003 to 2008 revealed fourteen articles referring to ‘deadbeat dads’, compared with four articles in The Irish Times broadsheet and three articles in the Irish Independent broadsheet. The first four ‘landmark Court judgements’ against men for ‘failure to contribute to the costs of One-Parent Family Payment for their wives and children’ were reported in The Irish Times on 12 April 2004 (Holland, 2004). A week later John O’Keefe, Head of the Law School at Portobello College Dublin, reported in the Sunday Independent: For the first time last week, the Maintenance Recovery Unit of the Department put the talking to one side and hit fathers where it hurts – in their pockets. The Departments maintenance recovery is expected to yield €14m this year through complying relatives … no small change in anyone’s language. (18 April 2004)

The minister at the time viewed the courts as offering ‘a strong reminder to all liable relatives that they have a statutory obligation to maintain their spouses’ and in addition the ‘department is serious about enforcing legislation in this regard’ (Minister Seamus Brennan T.D. PQ 28158/04). In a written response to a Dail question the minister took the opportunity to publicly warn lone mothers and

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non-resident fathers that entitlement to welfare now carried legislative obligations in relation to maintenance recovery: Applicants for One-Parent Family (OPF) Payment are legislatively required to make ongoing efforts to seek adequate maintenance from their former spouses, or in the case of unmarried applicants, the other parent of their child. (Minister Seamus Brennan T.D. PQ 28158/04)

The Irish Sunday Times welcomed maintenance recovery prosecutions as a hard-hitting punitive measure with headlines such as ‘Absent fathers dodge child pay crackdown’ (Bushe, 2004)  and ‘Brennan to get tough with deadbeat dads’ (O’Brien and McDonald, 2004). This latter article in The Irish Sunday Times welcomed the establishment of a special Maintenance Recovery Unit in Ireland with the suggestion ‘that Brennan is expected to strengthen the maintenance recovery unit of his department and examine how it targets deadbeat dads’. John Waters, a renowned media commentator and fathers’ rights activist, defended non-resident fathers under the banner headline ‘State usurps role of fathers’ (The Irish Times, 17 October 2005). The basis of John Waters’ defence was: The real ‘story’ is that, for two decades, the Irish State has been usurping the role of fathers by, in effect, offering inducements to mothers to rear children alone. By asserting that the father is not involved with his children, a mother can obtain an array of benefits and allowances.

Waters echoed the National Men’s Council of Ireland’s claim that ‘the stepfather state’ was usurping the role of fathers. The Unmarried and Separated Fathers of Ireland (USFI) emerged as one of the more vocal Irish fathers’ rights groups and gained increased media attention. The overall demand of the USFI was for joint custody and equality of access to children for unmarried and absent fathers. Fatherless families emerged as central theme in media accounts of social breakdown and social pathology in Ireland. The following quote illustrated the trend: One impact of divorce is the growing number of absent fathers, which Professor Casey feels is contributing to juvenile crime. She believes Chief Justice Ronan Keane was right when he said recently that absent fathers are contributing to the rise of juvenile crime and lawlessness. (Cork Examiner, 9 February 2004)

By blaming fatherless homes for social pathology, while expressing benign concerns about children’s welfare, the USFI in Ireland echoed loudly the demands of the Fathers Responsibility Movement (FRM) in the United States. According to Anne Carey, a feature columnist with The Irish Sunday Times: ‘the narrative of the men’s movement assumes that we live in a post-feminist world’ where ‘men are now victims of our (women’s) tyranny’ (The Irish Sunday Times, 27 May 2007). Carey suggested that the depiction of an Irish feminist dystopia was a result of wholesale societal amnesia regarding the previous incarceration and ill-treatment of lone-mother families by the Irish welfare regime and by religious actors in its mixed economy of welfare: How many awful films, books and documentaries have we seen about Magdalene Laundries and babies sold for adoption? How many pregnant women were packed

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off in disgrace and never heard from again? Why was the state obliged to pay deserted wives and single mothers an allowance in the first place? The fathers weren’t exactly banging down the doors and rescuing the women from the laundries, were they? Shared custody is a relatively new concept for a nation that in one generation went from locking up pregnant women to supporting them financially  – in both cases because the fathers weren’t interested. (Rush, 2011:49; The Irish Sunday Times, 27 May 2007)

However, in a continuation of the punitive turn, the Civil Law (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill (2011) proposed to introduce penalties for non-compliance with child maintenance orders. The Bill removed family law maintenance debt from civil debt thereby meaning that any father found to be non-compliant with a child maintenance order could be found to be in contempt of court and sent to prison. The decline of patriarchal power The decline of patriarchal power was posited by Kennedy (2001) as a phenomenon in Ireland that was rooted in the 1920s and the 1930s. Kennedy’s account revealed four overarching historical influences on the decline of parental power in Ireland. First, was the influence of British marriage and family law and in particular the Guardianship of Infants Acts (1927) which removed the parental marriage veto for offspring under twenty-one. Second, young peoples’ dress codes and leisure activities in the 1930s and 1940s, in particular ‘the craze for dancing’ and ‘fashions bordering on indecency’, which provoked the ire of the Catholic Bishops. Third, was the refusal of young women to accept patriarchal and theological control in terms of gender and sexual relations. These trends provoked Catholic Bishops in the 1920s and the 1930s to give licence to parents ‘lay the lash’ on their daughters’ backs. The Catholic clergy in Ireland advocated this as parental duty. The fourth influence was fathers’ and parents’ relaxation of control over their children from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. The decline of patriarchy in Ireland was understood as a cultural/political phenomenon where Ireland benefited indirectly from British secularisation and internal church liberalisation, leading ultimately to emigration as a form of escape from parochial legacies especially for women and young people. Fahey highlighted the Supreme Court judgement in the 1951 Tilson case. This judgement abolished paternal supremacy and awarded mothers equal child-rearing rights to fathers (Fahey, 1998:392). Conclusion and discussion This chapter highlighted an Irish individualisation paradox. On the one hand, civil servants and the epistemological community promoted Scandinavian principles of gender equality, and individualisation of the tax and welfare system (Kiely, 1999; SOGSI, 2006:17). On the other hand, the Social Welfare Act (1993) introduced a system of liable relative provision based on the principle that ‘spouses’ living apart had a duty to maintain their children and ‘each other’. The liable relative provision introduced a duality into the tax and welfare systems. Individualisation of taxation between married couples encouraged dual-earner households, whereas, the

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duty to maintain ‘each other’ introduced new states of co-dependency between non-resident fathers and single or non-married mothers. The outcome of the Irish paradox was that the welfare regime fostered an American-style animus towards non-resident fathers and poor lone mothers. The influence of the American model on the Irish welfare regime was evident in the cost-recovery approach to child support enforcement adopted under the Social Welfare Act (1993) and in the US-style ‘time limits’ for lone mothers which became a core proposal of the Report of the Senior Officials Group on Social Inclusion (SOGSI):  Analysis of Obstacles to Employment for Lone Parents (Government Publications, 2006)  and was eventually implemented with effect from July 2014, when the age limit for children recieving the One Family Payment was reduced to seven. The Irish case exemplified a trend within the residual Anglo-Saxon welfare model to treat fathers as a peripheral concern of welfare and activation policies targeted at single-mother families. The liable relative provision was a new form of tax on absent fathers, which wasn’t passed on to single mothers. Departmental data served to illustrate that non-resident fathers were predominantly on low-wage incomes or non-wage incomes. A significant finding from the departmental data was that the liable relative provision was unworkable, because many fathers were untraceable, and so many were on inadequate incomes. Despite the availability of departmental data, income inadequacy of working non-resident fathers and out-of-work non-resident fathers was never raised as a core concern of Irish social policy. Contemporary research into family well-being and fatherhood brought a significant shift towards American psychological and individualist explanations of poverty and well-being. Fatherhood and family well-being research was carried out within a framework of selective family-support initiatives targeted at ‘vulnerable fathers’ and ‘fragile families’. Vulnerable fathers, fragile families and non-married family structures were all considered to be more important determinants of well-being, and family structure was considered more important than poverty in determining the well-being of children (McLanahan, 1997; McKeown, 2001:17). Income inadequacy and child poverty were core issues for child well-being in Ireland, and for parents, because of the very high rates of workless households in Ireland. Twenty-two per cent of Irish adults under sixty-five live in workless households or households with ‘very low work intensity’ (VLWI) and jobless adults are more likely to live with children than with working adults (Watson et al., 2012:ii). The rate of worklessness in Ireland was 23 per cent compared to 13 per cent in Europe and the rate was high even during the Celtic tiger years (Watson et  al., 2012:88). Workless households and in-work-poverty make up the Achilles heel of the Irish welfare economy, and the risk factors of children living in poor households were unacceptably high and transcended family structure. An exponential focus on Irish fatherhood brought a significant shift towards greater engagement with American positivism and ethological epistemologies. Within the new discourse of father research, various aspects of ‘authoritative’

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fathering were depicted as beneficial to child development and child socialisation, as was a focus on the father–child dyad. By contrast, the mechanisms of the welfare state and in particular the One Parent Family Payment were depicted as damaging to the societal status of fatherhood by politicians, the print media and fathers’ rights groups. Fathers’ rights groups were increasingly vocal in their opposition to the ‘stepfather state’ and in support of marriage. But in the words of the Constitutional Review Group, the situation outside marriage in Ireland was ‘continued constitutional ostracism of natural fathers’ (1996:325). The problem for non-married parents in Ireland, and their children, was that the religious privileging of marriage by the Irish constitution and by the Irish welfare regime ostracised non-married fathers and led to the incarceration and punishment of single mothers and their children. The 1937 Irish constitutional version of marriage was based on inequitable caring and working roles and gender differentiated sex-roles. In the contemporary era, the The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, Tenth Progress Report – The Family upheld the traditional definition of marriage and the continued ostracisation of non-married fathers based largely on American perspectives on Why Marriage Matters (2006, 62; Waite, 1995). Moreover, the social exclusion of single mothers was exacerbated by American-style ‘time-limited’ welfare strategies for single mothers and by an American-style cost-recovery model of child maintenance, which Irish single mothers had spoken out against in a consultative survey especially commissioned by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs (Russell and Corcoran, 2000:17). In essence, the selective Irish social policy focus on vulnerable fathers bypassed the institutional invisibility of fatherhood in relation to universal social citizenship roles, decommodification and gender equality.

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Fatherhood and the European Union

Introduction This chapter sets the EU social politics of fatherhood in the context of the ‘two worlds’ of fatherhood model. The chapter highlights the prevailing influence of the ‘Swedish system’ on the shaping of the EU Parental Leave Directives (Fusilier, 2009:252). In addition, the chapter illustrates that the EU promotion of a dual-earner model of parenting has combined with the influence of epistemic feminism to undermine outdated ways of thinking about fathers as malebreadwinners or ‘economic providers-in-chief ’ (O’Brien and Moss, 2010). The chapter illustrates that new ways of epistemological thinking about the EU social politics of fatherhood were shaped by discussions in several institutional settings, including:  the European Observatory on National Family Policies, the Confederation of Family Organisations of the European Union, the European Commission Childcare Network, the Network on Leave and Policy Research and more recently by the European Union Network of Experts on Family Policy and by the European Parliament’s Quality of Childhood Group. These institutional settings elevated the profile and influence of the epistemic research communities across the European Union and led to the development of a school of thinking which took ‘the birth of a child as a starting point’ in the re-design of social care arrangements in modern European welfare states (Kamerman and Moss, 2009b:260). This chapter highlights that the influence of the Swedish dual-earner and dual-carer model of fatherhood and parenting in the EU remained diluted by neo-liberal welfare ideologies and by conservative legacies of traditional patriarchal familism, leading to alternative critical frameworks such as the ‘adult worker model’ (Lewis and Guillari, 2005)  and the less catchy ‘dual earner, gender specialised, family model’ (Daly, 2011). Nevertheless, the chapter shows that, while on the one hand, critical studies continued to illustrate the shortcomings of the European social model, on the other hand, the Scandinavian ‘dual-earner and dual-carer model’ has risen to become unopposed as the gold-standard or ‘ideal-type’ against which the social politics of fatherhood are now set within the European Union (Moss, 2011:129).

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Fatherhood and the European Union Parental Leave Directive (1983) As a political entity with the power to set legally enforceable supra-national standards across twenty-eight countries, and with a combined population in excess of half a billion people, the European Union has established ‘an international politics’ of maternity and parental leave ‘where countries with very different welfare regimes have to try for a common ground’ (Fusilier, 2009:243). Fusilier’s study on the evolution of the first EU Directive on Parental Leave explained that it was eventually adopted as Council Directive 96/34/CE of June 1996 after more than a decade of equivocating because ‘it proved impossible for the member states to agree on this legislation’ (2009:243). The clash between the liberal-market ideologies of the United Kingdom and the more coordinated market ideologies of other EU member states was highlighted by Fusilier when he explained: This story of UK opposition and finding a way to get round it was a recurrent theme in the long-running saga of getting a directive on parental leave. However, this time there was another logic and institutional procedure. The parental leave directive was the first agreement obtained in the framework of the European social dialogue between social partners. (2009:244)

Social dialogue was the term used to describe the consultation procedure involving the European social partners made up of the Union of Industrial and Employers’ Confederations (UNICE), the European Centre for Enterprises with Public Participation (CEEP) and the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC). Fusilier suggested that as a model of corporatist policy-making, the European social dialogue was completely original as a supra-national development and was predicated on ‘a strong tradition of collective industrial relations in many European countries’ (2009:245). The European Commission first proposed the directive on parental leave for family reasons in 1983 as part of an action programme on the promotion of equal opportunities for women 1982–1985 (Fusilier, 2009:245). The proposal came about because the provision of extra leave for mothers to take care of young children was understood to be discriminatory towards men, and therefore, the concept of ‘parental leave’ was arrived at as a gender-equality measure open by definition to fathers as well as mothers (Fusilier, 2009:248). Fusilier situated the EU adoption of the concept of parental leave within wider international campaigns and instruments to promote gender equality and improved labour relations, and explained that the general definition of parental leave was taken from the International Labour Organization (ILO) as: leave given to the father or the mother in a period after the end of the maternity leave, in order to allow the working parents to take care of their newly born child for a certain time, while maintaining a certain number of guarantees in matters of employment, social security and salary. As is the case for maternity leave, the birth of twins, triplets, etc does not open a right to a supplementary period of leave and no specific provision has been planned for those cases. It must be clear, however, that parental leave, as maternity leave, can be granted again when other children are born. (Fusilier, 2009:248)

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Although competence for family policies remained outside the scope of the Treaty of Rome, by the end of the 1980s a shared understanding had developed across EU member states that social policy responses to demographic and family changes required an intra-national research approach from the epistemic research communities. Consequently, the European Observatory on National Family Policies was established on the basis of a meeting between the Ministers responsible for Family Affairs and the Council of Europe held on 29 September 1989. Contemporary thinking about the need for an intra-national corporatist approach, involving the epistemic research community, trade unions and other organisations, was explained at the time by Vasso Papandreou from the Directorate-General for Employment, Industrial and Social Affairs in the ‘Foreword’ to the Observatory’s Families and Policies: Evolutions and Trends in 1989–1990: The Countries of the Community are faced with profound changes affecting the family in demographic terms, not only as a result of trends in the classic indices (birth, fertility and marriage rates), but also through the growing diversity of family structures. What is more, all these changes must be taken into account by policy makers not only at the economic and legal level but also in social and cultural terms. In view of the inevitable barrage of questions raised by such developments it is especially useful to consider the ins and outs of each aspect and to compare the solutions adopted by each of the Member states. A large number of persons with responsibility for family matters, including administrative staff, leaders of family organizations, trade unions or other associations, and university staff, frequently misjudge the fundamental realities at the root of family life and structures in countries other than their own. (Papandreou, 1991)

The European Observatory helped to shape an international epistemic research fraternity from leading universities in Belgium, Denmark, West Germany, Greece, Spain, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Consequently, national variations in the family situation of men, husbands and fathers gained previously unparalleled prominence. The Observatory coordinator, Professor Wilfried Dumon, located the role of husbands and fathers, and in particular ‘the providing role’, as a core issue of the Conference on the Future of the Family (Bonn, 13–14 September 1994), which was held to contribute to the United Nations ‘International Year of the Family’. By the mid-1990s the ongoing decline of male-breadwinning fatherhood was understood to be a significant aspect of demographic change in the European Union. So much so, that in the context of promoting parental gender equality, Dumon was able to argue that: In some member States (e.g. France among others) the ‘position of the husband as sole breadwinner and provider has turned from a dominant pattern to a situation where it is no longer representative for society. In many member states family policy measures have been taken to the effect that men/husbands/fathers are offered incentives to take on more tasks within the household’. (2004:306)

Within family policy debates in the European Union there was an institutional emphasis on the welfare state promotion of ‘new father roles’. The availability of paid paternal leave was seen as step in the right direction and this was explained by Dumon in the following observation:

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Whatever the case, paternal leave does not only favour more gender equity but has an intrinsic component for men/fathers in that it enables them to come into closer contact with their children; thus shaping the so called new father role. (2004:307)

The contemporary emphasis of European research communities on the changing significance of husbands and fathers was rooted in demographic concerns about the decline of male-breadwinning and patriarchal familism, changes in family types, fertility declines and the growing rate of female employment. Europeanisation or Scandivisation In the ‘Epilogue’ to the Making Men into Fathers the possibility of the ‘Europeanisation’ of Scandinavian social policy was raised as a serious concern (Morgan, 2004:276). Europeanisation implied a dilution of the egalitarian Scandinavian welfare model. This had been a controversial issue for some ever since Finland and Sweden joined the European Union in 1994. Against this view, Hagen, a political scientist from the Institute of Applied Science in Norway, argued more cogently that there was little basis for concern in relation to the Europeanisation of Scandinavian social policies because ‘the EU will probably pay more interest to the Scandinavian model, rather than the other way around’ (1999:681). The transnational influence of Sweden and the wider Scandinavian welfare model was a consistent theme in a series of comparative studies of family policies in Europe by Kaufman et  al. (1997, 2002). Kaufman argued that while competence on family matters was lacking at the European level the widespread adoption of the principle of children’s rights and gender equality would probably heighten the influence of Scandinavian social policy in response to the modernisation in family relationships (2002:419). Kaufman argued that the Nordic turn in the European social politics of family life occurred due to declines in fertility, disinclination to marry, the rise in divorce and from a wider acceptance of diverse family types (Kaufman, 2002:423). Moreover, a study from the University of Bielefeld in Germany on The New Fathers predicted a Scandinavian trajectory for the European social politics of fatherhood on the basis that: Scandinavian states especially have practised an active policy in this direction e.g. integrating fathers in measures for paid leave for new parents or for sick children [Leira, 1993] The success of such measures [also in other European states] was not overwhelming but certainly regardless of the immediate success they may help to establish a new role model in the awareness of the public. (Herlth, 2002:315)

Herlth’s study was based on structured questionnaires carried out between 1992 and 1997 with over 300 families. The thrust of Herlth’s argument was that all European welfare states gave symbolic importance to ‘foster the presence of fathers in the interior of the world of the family because it logically seems an answer to the role change of women … to combine motherhood and gainful employment’ (2002:314). Herlth labelled this as a change from traditional gender relations towards an ‘egalitarian sex role orientation’ (2002:314).

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Herlth argued that complementary parenting roles associated with what he termed the ‘Parsonian normal family’ had ‘been lost’ because women’s mass entry into paid employment had effectively ‘terminated the gender contract’ associated with the ‘Parsonian normal family’. Herlth suggested that family policies which aimed to stabilise a traditional ‘female role orientation’ or encourage part-time working among mothers would only serve to ‘hinder paternal participation in housework’. Herlth’s promotion of full-time mother-employment across Europe was made on the assumption that ‘shared responsibility in the so called breadwinner role seems to be a pre-requisite for shared responsibility in the interior world of the family’ (2002:317). On the other hand, the tendency of neo-liberal and conservative politicians to valorise ‘traditional social relationships in the face of pervasive change’ was warned against by Wallace in a study of family and demography commissioned by the European Commission (2006:184). Wallace blamed the post-war construction of European welfare states around ‘patriarchal assumptions’ of male-breadwinning for falling birth rates and poverty and for the social exclusion of young people who don’t automatically make the transition into married family life. In this respect patriarchal familism that ‘relied on the economic and legal authority of the male head of the family’ was generally depicted in the wider European social model as a hindrance to young people’s autonomy and fertility (Sgritta, 2006:136). This perspective was reiterated by O’Brien and Moss in their study of ‘Fathers, work and family policies in Europe’, which proclaimed that ‘the patriarchal fatherhood model, with its emphasis on fathers’ rights and male family power, no longer regulates formal legal jurisdictions across Europe’ (2010:551). Instead, they argued that the rise in maternal employment and the dual-earner model of parenting had combined with feminist scholarship and with demographic family policy change to undermine any persistent cultural and social understandings across the Europe Union that fathers should be the main breadwinners or ‘economic providers-inchief ’ (O’Brien and Moss, 2010:551). The influence of Swedish social policy on negotiations leading up to the 1989 Parental Leave Directive was highlighted by Fusilier when he explained that ‘the existing Swedish system’ was considered by the EU social partners ‘to be the best example of leave policy’ (2009:252). The transnational influence of the Swedish model on the development of ‘father-friendly’ parental leave regimes across Europe was also highlighted by O’Brien and Moss in the following quote: Since the introduction of parental leave by Olaf Palme’s Swedish Social Democratic government in 1974, other European governments have followed suit. No longer is it the case that Sweden alone has paternity leave provision for men on becoming fathers. European governments have commenced marking the relevance of paternal care to the earliest period of children’s lives. Europe has witnessed an acceleration of explicitly father-targeted provision, with experimentation in incentive and penalty based measures … Within Europe, the European Union has been a vital organisational body for formulating work-family reconciliation frameworks. The EU directive on parental leave was a hallmark piece of legislation. Its genesis was over decade earlier within the European Commission’s Action Programme on Equal Opportunities  – Article 1  …

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The primary intent and formulation was to ‘enable women and men to reconcile their occupational, family and upbringing responsibilities arising from the care of children.’ Twenty years earlier when Sweden initiated parental leave, child well-being was higher on its national policy agenda (Haas and Hwang, 1999). The principles of promoting child well-being, as well as enhancing gender equality through women’s economic independence and facilitating men’s involvement in family life, were enshrined in policy formulation. (2010:559)

O’Brien and Moss labelled the pivotal role of the European Commission in framing gender equality and work–family reconciliation directives as a ‘pan-national remit’ which included a responsibility for incentivising fathers to avail of the increasing opportunities among EU member states to take parental leave, paternal leave and leave to care for older family members (2010:552). O’Brien and Moss argued that it was macro-structural frameworks or ‘structural and cultural infrastructures’, such as the availability of childcare provisions and parental leave arrangements, which had the most significant impact on the social construction of father-involvement in child-rearing and family life (2010:557). Individualisation and the Parental Leave Directive (2009) An early understanding in negotiations for the 1989 Parental Leave Directive was that parental leave was an individual rather than a family entitlement on the basis that: ‘a worker’s right to parental leave should not be transferable’ (Fusilier, 2009:248). But, the 1989 Parental Leave Directive had left it up to member states whether or not leave was paid or unpaid. However, the Framework Agreement on Parental Leave (Revised) 18 June 2009 updated the earlier directive on the basis of a series of ‘general considerations’ about gender equality, increasing women’s employment, sharing of care responsibilities between women and men and equality between men and women in the reconciliation of professional, private and family life. Clause 2 on Parental Leave states: 1.  This agreement entitles men and women workers to an individual right to parental leave on the grounds of the birth or adoption of a child to take care of that child until a given age up to eight years to be defined by Member States and/or social partners. 2.  The leave shall be granted for at least a period of four months and, to promote equal opportunities and equal treatment between men and women, should, in principle, be provided on a non-transferable basis. To encourage a more equal take-up of leave by both parents, at least one of the four months shall be provided on a non-transferable basis. The modalities of application of the non-transferable period shall be set down at national level through legislation and/or collective agreements taking into account existing leave arrangements in the Member States. (Council Directive 2010/18/EU) However, it also stated that: Whereas the right of parental leave in this agreement is an individual right and in principle non-transferable, and Member States are allowed to make it transferable.

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Experience shows that making the leave non-transferable can act as a positive incentive for the take up by fathers, the European social partners therefore agree to make a part of the leave non-transferable.

Feminist epistemology highlighted that non-transferable daddy-months were an important element of the shift towards individualisation in contemporary social policy reforms for gender equality (Daly, 2011:9). Daly’s assessment of the ‘adult worker model’ (Lewis and Giullari, 2005)  located daddy quotas within an overall trend towards individualisation which also included granting social rights to children and expanding childcare services outside the home. Ultimately, Daly could not find enough empirical evidence to support the notion of the European adult worker model because of prevailing norms of a ‘one-and-a-half earner model’ and instead she proposed that future research would benefit from a focus on a ‘dual-earner, gender specialised, family model’ (2011:19). However, Daly argued that individualisation was ‘a significant social policy development that does not receive the attention it should’ (2011:12). Daly also observed that ‘the emergence in Scandinavia of policies that target men’s behaviour as fathers’ through the individualisation of parental leave in the form of a daddy quota was ‘proving influential across Northern Europe’ (2009:12). In addition, Haas and Rostgaard explained that the EU Directive extended ‘parental leave to four months and introduces a quota, so one month is reserved for each parent’ (2011:177). Deven and Moss explained that this was a bold move towards individualisation of parental leave throughout the European Union: Various measures have been introduced to encourage fathers to use parental leave. Mostly these take the form of wholly or partly individualized entitlements, whereby fathers not using their ‘quota’ lose it, since unused parental leave cannot be transferred to a partner. (2005:14)

Moreover, Peter Moss explained to the Quality of Childhood Group in the European Parliament that the basic improvement of the new Directive (2009) was that it increased parental leave from three months to four months ‘with one month that is non-transferable, i.e. at least one month of leave for the father which cannot be transferred to the mother’ (2011:127). Peter Moss from the Network on Leave and Policy Research and co-author, with Sheila Kamerman, of The Politics of Parental Leave Policies (2009), was at pains to point out that the EU directives represented a minimum standard, ‘which many member states exceed’ (2011:123). Moss was speaking on the topic of ‘improving the quality of childhood’ and he explained that he ‘wanted to find a yardstick’ by which to compare national variations in parental leave provision across European Union member states and came up with ‘the number of months of leave at two-thirds of earnings’ (2011:127). On the basis of this yardstick Moss developed ‘a ranking order of parental leave in Europe’ and the countries at the bottom of the European league table were the United Kingdom, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy and Poland. On the other hand, the countries at the top of the European league table were Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Slovenia, Germany, Estonia and Hungary. These were

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all Nordic and ex-communist welfare regimes, with the exception of Germany, whose parental leave regime was influenced by the previous experiences of the East German communist regime (Erler, 2009:132). When it came to consideration of a gold-standard or ideal-type Moss recommended the Icelandic model which consisted of three distinct periods, the first being three months of non-transferable leave for mothers, the second being three months of non-transferable leave for fathers and the third being a period of three months’ transferable family leave. But Moss recommended that each period should be increased to four months leave thereby providing a total of twelve months’ leave. Moss suggested that Sweden provided an alternative gold-standard because its policies combined parental leave provision with high-quality childcare provision wherein ‘well paid leave runs for 13 months, while all children are entitled to a place in a pre-school centre from 12  months’ (2011:129). In essence, Moss explained that when it came to integrating generous parental leave provision with early childhood education and care then ‘the Nordic countries again show the way’ (2011:129). O’Brien and Moss were able to conclude that ‘time use trends demonstrate an increase in fathers’ time with children notably in the Nordic countries’ where the highest participation levels were to be found, followed by other Northern European countries, the Baltic states and Southern and Eastern Europe (2010:557). These findings prompted Smith and Williams to construct a European father-involvement continuum, represented at one end by Nordic countries with higher levels of father-involvement, and at the other end by Southern European countries with lower levels of father-involvement (O’Brien and Moss, 2010:557). O’Brien and Moss identified eight EU member states with strategies to ‘enhance the visibility of fathers’ through parental leave entitlements:  Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Slovenia and Sweden, plus Norway and Iceland outside the EU, making ten countries overall (2010:564). However, outside the Nordic and ex-communist welfare regimes, some of the other countries that passed father-friendly parental leave policies such as Portugal (2004), Spain (2007) and Germany (2007) had previously experienced right-wing dictatorships and upheld strong male-breadwinning regimes with subordinated roles for women as mothers (O’Brien and Moss, 2010:566). On this basis, O’Brien and Moss argued that ‘it is clear, within Europe at least, that the incorporation of fathers into work-family reconciliation policies is no longer the province of liberal or left of centre parties’ as countries such as Germany increasingly promote a ‘paradigm-breaking’ parental leave package as part of an overall promotion of the dual-earner/dual-carer model spurred on by concerns about low fertility (2010:566). On the other hand, a detailed account of the struggle to introduce parental leave in Germany illustrated that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Green Party had accused the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the Christian Social Union (CSU) parties of ‘hindering women’s employment opportunities’ (Erler, 2009:123). But the study also showed that when confronted with the expectations of East German women ‘policy makers within all political parties’ began

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to see the merits of offering women equal opportunities for a work–life balance (2009:131). Erler’s account illustrated that the ‘Nordic turn’ in the German politics of parental leave was driven by Social Democratic and Green party politics in combination with grassroots feminist demands for gender equality in the work– life balance. Erler’s account overturned the idea that top-down concerns about low fertility drove the ‘Nordic turn’ in the German politics of parental leave by suggesting that ‘West German policy makers’ were ‘catching up with the gender policy legacy of their East German brethren’ (2009:132). In a similar fashion Moss observed that the German parental leave reforms of 2007 followed the example set by ‘East Germany before 1991’ (2011:130). In the cases of the Eastern European welfare regimes the shape of the Estonian parental leave regime was heavily influenced by the Swedish model, and Karu and Pall argued that this was because there were ‘several similarities between Nordic and communist countries, such as the explicit emphasis on the role of the of the state, the redistribution of income and the promotion of equality between citizens’ (2009:83). During the 1970s and 1980s ‘Sweden was a model for Yugoslavia, and particularly for Slovenia’ (Karu and Pall, 2009:150). In the case of Slovenia, the Female Forum of the United List of Social Democrats (ZLSD) would only support the revision of parental leave provisions if they ‘included incentives for fathers to assume more care’ or decreased ‘the long hours that young children spent in childcare centres’ (Karintus and Stropnik, 2009:146). Achieving greater participation by fathers in childcare and reconciling family and work were the two main issues for the Female Forum (Karintus and Stropnik, 2009:146). In the case of Portugal the origins of progressive maternity, paternity and parental leave were to be found in the early 1980s and in the policies of the coalition government between the Socialist (PS) and Social Democratic Parties (PSD) parties (Wall and Escobedo, 2009:211). More recently, the promotion of gender equality and the fathers quota by the Socialist Party, through the establishment of a High Commission for Family and Gender Equality, was influenced directly by the 1996 EU Directive on Parental Leave and by the Nordic model, especially in relation to the father quotas (Wall and Escobedo, 2009:212). O’Brien and Moss mapped out the limited literature on the impact of father-friendly parental leave policies on father-involvement in child-rearing, and concluded that parental leave policies were affecting men’s behaviour positively in relation to sharing household chores and greater participation in childcare (2010:570), and concluded that: At a global level, Europe has led the way in innovative father sensitive policy experimentation in support of dual-earning families. A  variety of father enhancement schemes have developed based on incentive, penalty and even compulsion. Evidence shows that utilization is greatest when leave is reimbursed at least two-thirds of regular earnings and is ‘father only’. (2010:571–572)

Finally, O’Brien and Moss warned compellingly of a global polarisation between infants who are born into ‘parental-leave-rich’ or ‘parental-leave-poor’ households situated in ‘parental-leave-rich’ or ‘parental-leave-poor’ countries or welfare regimes. They proposed that future research required a macro-focus on social

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policies and practices because micro-level studies of family practices by fathers and mothers needed to be embedded in broader considerations of ‘wider socioeconomic factors, including employment security and gender equity’ (2010:572). At the forefront of the parental-leave-rich nations and the father-friendly nations were the Nordic welfare regimes, the Eastern European welfare regimes of Slovenia and Estonia, and the Southern European welfare regime of Portugal, based on principles of gender equality and social equality. Shared parenting and child maintenance individualisation A comparative study on shared parenting by Hakovirta and Rantalaiho provided social policy lessons for application ‘in different national contexts within the Nordic regime and beyond’ (2011:249), and argued in the wider context of European social policy that: Support for shared parenting presents a particular important step in family policy, since lone mothers are becoming more integrated into the labour market. This development coincides with fathers’ increasing involvement in the care of children. (2011:261)

The Hakovirta and Rantalaiho study was carried out in response to the tripling of divorce rates in Europe over the last forty years (Therborn, 2004:190) and to the idea that the ‘increasing diversity in the structure of families responsible for raising children is a serious challenge for welfare states’ (2011:248). The basic hypothesis of the Hakovirta and Rantalaiho study was that: Arrangements, where parents share the custody of the child and both play active parts in the child’s everyday life, regardless of whether or not they live with the child, create a pressure for change in the organization of family policy. (2011:248)

The basic proposition of the Hakovirta and Rantalaiho study was that there has been a lag in social policy legislation which responds to the rise in divorce, family diversity and the ‘idea of shared parenting’ in ‘families of all kinds’ (2011:250). Hakovirta and Rantalaiho focused in particular on the changing nature of child maintenance policies in the Nordic countries as a response to the growing demographic trend of shared parenting and joint-custody arrangements across separated mother and father households. The Hakovirta and Rantalaiho study illustrated that in Norway and Sweden, child benefit could be split between both parents. It also explained that child support payments in Sweden were not required if the child spent equal time in each of the parents’ households and that in Norway ‘the maintenance capacity of both parents determine the level of child support’ (2011:256). However, Hakovirta and Rantalaiho observed that the most substantive difference between Finland on the one hand, and Norway and Sweden on the other hand, was that in ‘both Sweden and Norway, advanced maintenance can, in certain situations, be paid to both parents when a shared residence arrangement is in place, whereas in Finland there is no corresponding arrangement’ (2011:256). Sweden and Norway offered the

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European Union pioneering examples of the individualisation of welfare entitlements across separate households based on a shared principle in Norwegian and Swedish social policy that ‘the benefit system should not lead parents to make an agreement in which the child lives almost exclusively with one parent’ (2011:257). Hakovirta and Rantalaiho also emphasised the core principle that ‘the benefit system should not impede the use of part-time leave when the parents live separately, or when one parent takes the sole responsibility for the child’s custody and upbringing’ (2011:258). On 8 April 2008, the International Child Custody website posted the following quote on its website: The European Union signed yesterday a new international convention making it harder for absentee parents to escape child support payments. The Hague Maintenance Convention agreement sets up ‘a worldwide system for recovering child support and other family maintenance payments’, also providing for free legal aid in international child support cases, the EU said. It extends beyond the external borders of its 27 states, home to half a billion people, the broad thrust of internal EU rules on recognising and enforcing maintenance decisions, which will apply from June 18 this year. The decision has still to be ratified and will not acquire legal force until 2013. The United States, Norway and Ukraine have already signed the convention. Others including Japan, China, Russia, Australia, Canada and Brazil are expected to do so, the EU said. (internationalchildcustody.com)

Subsequently, on 17 April 2013, MEPs approved the final amendments to the Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and the establishment of a new central European authority. The UK Child Support Laws website suggested that the ‘ideal solution is to provide effective child support that is enforceable throughout the EU and is proficient in acquiring and collating information and distributing maintenance, regardless and irrespective, of nationality place of residence and circumstances’. In essence, the website called for ‘common child maintenance payment enforcement’ across the EU (www.childsupportlaws.co.uk). The Guardian newspaper reported that German Justice Minister Brigette Zypries who chaired the EU talks said those owing maintenance ‘should no longer be able to hide behind borders’ (Brand, 2007). The Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support was closely allied to the EU Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (2007), the Protocol on the Law Applicable to Maintenance Obligations (2007) and the Maintenance Regulation (EC) No 4/2009. The EU emphasis on enforcement and collection obscured the more interesting developments in member states such as Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands where child support payments were individualised (Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011:257). Moreover, Richardson and Bradshaw recommended that countries prioritising coverage of child support payments should consider advance maintenance payment programmes, as a critical aspect of an efficient anti-child-poverty strategy (2009:16). Overall, the social politics of child maintenance in the EU shifted towards a predominantly English-speaking animus towards non-resident fathers, driven by traditional loyalties to male-breadwinning fatherhood within

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marriage, as opposed to Scandinavian ideals of joint-custody, family diversity and individualised approaches to child support and welfare. Fatherhood, political economy and the European social model The increased focus of the European epistemic research community on the gender politics of parental leave and on the social politics of fatherhood prompted questions about ‘what form of capitalism do we want’ (Moss, 2011:126). It also raised questions about how the European social dialogue for gender equality and the extension of social care services could continue to advance whilst also taking better account of important stakeholders such as European women’s movements and family-alliance activists (Fusilier, 2009:256). Moss and Fusilier brought attention to the work of Thomas A. Kochan on Restoring the American Dream: A Working Families’ Agenda for America (2006) and the work of Tim Jackson on Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (2011). Both Kochan and Jackson recommended coordinated market alternatives to free-market or ‘casino-capital’ ideologies. In a similar way, the new literature on varieties of capital (Hall and Soskice, 2001) raised similar questions about the merits of liberal market economies (LMEs), associated with the English-speaking welfare regimes versus the merits of coordinated market economies (CMEs) associated with Central European and Nordic welfare regimes. The USA and the UK were considered to be archetypal LMEs whereas the archetypal CMEs were considered to be Sweden, Germany and Japan (McCall and Orloff, 2005:162). The varieties of capitalism (VoC) literature sparked a revival of feminist interest into ‘the nature of patriarchy as a family-based system of control, over women and children, rather than merely a form of gender equality’ (Folbre, 2009:208). Some theorists such as Mandel and Shalev expressed a clear preference for the coordinated market economies of the Nordic welfare regimes on the basis that they have dismantled patriarchal social relations in favour of developing ‘vast women friendly labor markets in the public services sector’ (Mandel and Shalev, 2009:166). Mandel and Shalev argued that the varieties of capitalism model was gender blind to the political forces that shape female employment patterns but that the model was useful because its focus on ‘skill specifity’ and ‘skills regimes’ had served to raise questions about the ‘different implications for women in different class positions’ and the ‘gendered implications of different types of business systems’ (2009:162). In particular Mandel and Shalev welcomed the focus of the varieties of capitalism literature on ‘the diverse features of gender relations, including occupational sex segregation, female labor force participation, divorce rates and the household division of labor’ (2009:162). Mandel and Shalev called for a more focused approach to the ‘intersections between class and gender’ within varieties of capitalism debates (2009:163). Mandel and Shalev brushed away claims within VoC debates that social protection in LMEs or CMEs might intensify employer discrimination against women with the counter-claim that:

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The Scandinavian CMEs provide both extensive childcare facilities and generous parental leave. These countries are also highly distinctive in having developed vast women friendly labor markets in the public services sector. (2009:166)

Mandel and Shalev argued that the VoC perspective was hampered ‘because of its inherent blindness to the political forces that separate the Scandinavian from the Continental CMEs’ (2009:166). Mandel and Shalev argued strongly against the idea that that reducing employment protection for women was a pathway to a free market variant of gender equality (2009:176). Nancy Folbre challenged what she labelled as an androcentric or masculine perspective of ‘pure capitalism’, which ignored the role of welfare states, families and reproductive labour. Folbre suggested that within the logic of the varieties of capitalism school it was imperative to view welfare states as mechanisms for the redistribution of market surpluses to sustain the needs of business communities or, in other words, ‘the market is the horse; the welfare state the cart’ (2009:205). Alternatively, Folbre argued that non-market work carried out mainly by women in family households and in welfare state services was the horse that helped ‘pull the cart’ of welfare capitalism (2009:206). Folbre highlighted that the varieties of capitalism literature ‘could benefit by more explicit attention to concepts of patriarchal structure and patriarchal capital hybrids’, an approach she suggested that would support the conclusions of Mandel and Shalev that ‘low income women are particularly disadvantaged’ in liberal market economies (2009:207). Folbre offered a definition of the welfare state that went beyond serving the interests of business and capital: The welfare state does not merely distribute the surplus of or the ‘fruits’ of capitalism. It invests significant amounts of money in the production of care services and educational services that develop human capabilities and promote economic development. To gain citizenship in an advanced capitalist country is to gain access to an extremely valuable means of reproduction – access to health services and education for one’s children as well as oneself.

However, a much less positive assessment of the Scandinavian and European varieties of welfare capitalism was offered by Jill Rubery from the Manchester Business School who found ‘very depressing policy messages’ in the CME paradigm because: The message in practice is that women will always lose out where there are high levels of employment protection, either through exclusion from the labour market as in the classic conservative CME case or by segregation into female-dominated sectors, as in the social democratic case, the state steps in to overcome the low demand for female labors. (2009:199)

On the other hand, a comparative study of women’s opportunities under different family policy regimes marshalled a legion of feminist epistemic investigators to support a more optimistic view about the reduction of gender inequalities in CMEs with high levels of social protection (Korpi et al., 2013). Korpi et al. argued that after years of being viewed by social scientists as ‘fortifying patriarchy’, a change in understanding came about:

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When comparative research indicated that western welfare states involve complex structures and actors possibly generating ‘woman friendly’ policies and reducing gender inequalities especially in labour markets. (2013:2)

Korpi et  al. (2013:5) took issue with the ‘discovery’ by Mandel and Semyonov (2009:1917) of a ‘welfare paradox’ where the employment of women in ‘large public sectors’ managed to reinforce women’s tendency to accept secure working conditions thereby deterring them ‘from attaining high-paying positions’ (Mandel and Semyonov, 2009:950). According to Mandel and Shalev, this welfare paradox also meant that Scandinavian ‘public care’ infrastructures segregated women in lower paid public sector or ‘feminized service jobs’ which lowered women’s ‘representation in better paid male dominated jobs’ (Mandel and Shalev, 2009:1878). However, the acerbic response from Korpi et al. was to inquire: Are the women employed in the public sectors of earner-carer countries relegated to a ‘female ghetto’? This facile labeling would appear to indicate that some view public sectors in these countries as large sheltered compounds with low skilled women spending days in low-intensity child minding. However, while center based staff qualification differ greatly among countries, in earner-carer countries qualifications have been upgraded to high professional standards. (2013:12)

Korpi et al. concluded with the argument that there was no obvious trade-off in terms of labour market segregation or of a ‘glass-ceiling’ in the Nordic CMEs by observing that: the earner-carer policies of the Nordic countries have been successful in enhancing the employment levels of women across the class spectrum but not undermined the opportunities for women, especially if they are well educated, to gain access to top occupations and wages. (2013:4)

Korpi et  al. were expressly concerned to address the concept of intersectionality, a term coined by feminist scholars to capture the complexity of inequalities involving race, class and gender (2013:2). The Korpi study illustrated that there were national variations in outcomes for poorer women and that ‘family policies clearly differ in the extent to which they improve opportunities for women without university education’ (2013:1). However, Korpi et al. went on to conclude that ‘the earner-carer policies developed in the Nordic countries hold the promise of working to promote gender egalitarianism and class equality simultaneously’ (2013:30). A more recent finding in relation to intersectionality and employment protection for fathers in the form of parental leave was that, in Sweden, ‘the group that used very long leaves also had on average lower incomes’ (Duvander and Jans, 2008:12). This was a very significant finding, which illustrated that individualised parental leave with high levels of wage replacement increased father-involvement in low-income families. Verloo and Walby explored the concept of intersectionality within the context of what they labelled as the ‘Equality Architecture in Europe’, which was a term they coined in order to designate:

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The set of institutional arrangements to achieve equality. Equality architecture is understood then as specific configurations of functionality different equality institutions in which different components serve complimentary strategies in pursuing gender-equality policies. (2012:435)

The equality architecture of Europe was understood to involve ‘equality policy makers and the epistemic community of scholars on equality policies as part of a broader set of projects for equality’ (2012:440). This analysis placed responsibility for the promotion of gender equality and individualisation in the realm of the epistemic community of scholars, and on cross-national alliances between feminism, family policy activism, children’s rights activism, social partners and the gender equality architecture across the European Union. Conclusion and discussion This chapter illustrated that the influence of the Swedish and Nordic models helped to shape the EU Parental Leave Directives (Fusilier, 2009:252). The influence of the Swedish and Nordic models was also evident in the discussion of the epistemological community of scholars involved in conceptualising European social policies. The vocationalist status awarded to the epistemological community of scholars by the European Union was evidenced with reference to the establishment of the European Observatory on National Family Policies in 1989 and the subsequent establishment of the European Union Network of Experts on Family Policy. The chapter provided unequivocal evidence of the influence of the Nordic models of father-friendly parental leave policies on the discussions of the epistemological community, and highlighted that Sweden and Iceland were presented as ideal-types to the Quality of Childhood Group of the European Parliament (Moss, 2011:127). This chapter highlighted that key epistemologcal actors, such as Peter Moss and Fred Deven, helped to promote father-friendly parental leave measures in the EU, and were co-founders of the Network on Leave and Policy Research. Family policy activism organisations in the EU, such as COFACE, produced key publications such as Men in Families (Julemont, 2006). COFACE included a growing alliance of policymakers, organisations, academics and individuals, which campaigned to make 2014 the European year for reconciling work and family. The alliances between campaigning civic organisations, key academic actors and social partners on the issues of work–life balance and gender equality epitomised the supra-national European Union as a site of grassroots welfare and gender-equality activism. The chapter highlighted that epistemological studies were typically influenced by the Nordic and Swedish social politics of fatherhood and gender equality (Herlth, 2002:315; Daly, 2011:12), and, on the other hand, Scandinavian scholars were inceasingly seeking to influence EU-level debates. For example, Hakovirta and Rantalaiho sought to inform EU-level debates about Scandinavian research on shared parenting and child maintenance individualisation (2011). Instead of

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the feared Europeanisation of Scandinavian welfare regimes (Morgan, 2004:276), there was a Scandivisation of the European social model. Moss suggested that the Nordic states of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, plus the ex-communist welfare regimes of Slovenia and Estonia, plus partially ex-Soviet Germany, were in the European premier league of paid parental leave policies (2011:127). This suggested that the characteristics of nations in the premier league of parental leave provision were welfare regimes with strong traditions of feminism, social democracy and communism. The premier league regimes were at the vanguard of the individualisation and decommodification of parenting and at the vanguard of achiveing gender equality through father-friendly parental leave policies. The political profiles of welfare states in the European premier league of parental leave regimes suggested that politics still mattered to welfare state development, as did state feminism and what Verloo and Walby labelled as the European Equality Architecture (2012:435). Exchanges between welfare regimes at the EU level involving the epistemological communities of scholars, policymakers, social partners, feminists and family policy activists brought key concepts to the foreground, including: individualisation; non-transferability; and shared parenting. These concepts were applied to work–life balance, gender-equality and parental leave debates. The agenda of Nordic scholars was to bring these concepts to bear on all family policies, including policies for non-nuclear families, because social policy seriously lagged behind the decline of male-breadwinning, increases in divorce and the structural diversity of families raising children (Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011:248). Scholarly exchange was also focused on the varieties of capitalism framework and and the superiority of Nordic and Central European coordinated market economies in terrms of social protection, gender equality, intersectionality, employment in professionalised social care infrastructures and outcomes for women with lower levels of education (Korpi et al., 2013). On the other hand, reseach from Sweden addressed the issue of fatherhood and intersectionality by showing that individualised paid parental leave, as a form of social protection, and decommodification, was accessed readily by lower income fathers (Duvander and Jans, 2008:12).

7

Crystallising the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan and patriarchal decline in China

Introduction Peng and Wong explained that ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘welfare laggardness’ within the East Asian model of welfare regimes was blamed on shared Confucian heritages and legacies of patriarchal fatherhood, which held back welfare state development: respect for education, filial piety, deference to authority, patriarchy, and above all the centrality of the family and kinship ties in social organisation – constrained the development of more western conceptions of the welfare state. (2010:657)

However, Peng and Wong rejected explanations of ‘exceptionalism’ and instead they identified two distinct variants within the East Asian welfare typology (2010:658). The first variant was the ‘inclusive social insurance model’ exemplified by Japan and the second variant was the more ‘individualistic and market-based model’ exemplified by China (Peng and Wong, 2010:658). Alternatively, Choi argued that Japan was far from being ‘a laggard welfare state’ and was well on ‘the way to crystallization’ (2007:9–16). Fukuda made a similar case that Japanese family policies were not very different from those in European welfare regimes (2003:43). However, Choi argued that the basic criteria for distinguishing Western welfare regimes had not been fully achieved in China and for that reason its inclusion in the East Asian welfare model made ‘comparative studies harder’ (2007:8). Peng and Wong illustrated that, in China, high levels of household savings combined with a preponderance of three-generation households, to suggest that the family or household was still mainly responsible for social protection (2010:657). This chapter sets the social politics of fatherhood in Japan and China in the context of the two regimes of fatherhood model, and identifies a ‘Nordic shift’ in Japan, driven by grassroots, epistemological and government concerns (Lambert, 2007:2), but one that was hampered by Japanese employer intransigence (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:351). In the case of China, the chapter suggests that Confucian values no longer apply (Therborn, 2004:94; Xia et al., 2014:258), but instead the privatisation of housing and the practice of families buying houses exclusively for their sons, created new gender inequalities between young men and women and

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between young husbands and wives (Fincher, 2014; Lovell, 2014:6). The chapter illustrates that, in both countries, the elevated status of marriage diminished the autonomy of young people, especially young educated women who chose not to reproduce or to postpone reproduction (Schoppa, 2009:431; To, 2013:1). On the other hand, the chapter illustrates that gender equality and the decline of patriarchy are the main drivers in new ways of thinking about fatherhood, rather than child-development perspectives. However, the chapter also illustrates that American child-development perspectives were influential on banning corporal punishment in China, and on mass parenting classes to diminish authoritarian fatherhood. American child-development perspectives were also influential on East Asian father-involvement perspectives, which were ambivalent about the decline of patriarchy in Japan since the end of the Second World War. Overall, the chapter concludes that the decline of patriarchal fatherhood in Japan in China was a prerequisite to welfare state development, but that property ownership anomalies in China still give some married men a patriarchal-familial dividend, and exclude some wives from property ownership (Fincher, 2014; McDonnell, 2014:1). Japan: crystallising the Nordic turn Kwon explained that the Japanese government declared 1973 as a turning point of welfare state development in Japan, that would match Western welfare states, and that from the 1980s, the government attempted to shape a neo-liberal ‘Japanese-type welfare society’ as opposed to a ‘Western type of welfare state’ (1997:468). However, opposition from civic society groups illustrated a grassroots commitment to more, not less, welfare, leading Peng and Wong to conclude that the neo-liberal agenda of a ‘Japanese-style welfare society’ failed ‘to resonate’ with the Japanese electorate (2010:662). Instead, welfare state innovations in elder care and long-term care during the 1990s exemplified Japan as a nation with a high level of welfare state legitimacy among the electorate. Sano and Yasumoto explained that Japanese family policies were driven by demographic concerns about the decline in total fertility rates (TFR), to about 1.4 in 2010, and that government campaigns to increase fertility levels, by moving towards a Nordic dual-earner and dual-carer model of the family, were undermined by traditional beliefs about gender roles (2014:319). In addition, Japan led the trend towards later marriage in Asia (Therborn, 2004:216). The most alarming aspect of Japanese fertility concerns was the prediction that by 2020 about 30 per cent of Japanese men and 20 per cent of women would not marry at all, and those who did marry would only do so after completing tertiary education (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:320). It was within this context that ‘family policy’ became ‘a topic of national debate’ (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:320). Traditionally, Japan operated what was known as the ‘ie’ or household system, under which Japanese law required couples to use the same family name, although not necessarily the husband’s name. The system worked as a patrilocal marriage system whereby nearly all women adopted the husband’s name on marriage and entered the husband’s family. Sano and Yasumoto described the ‘ie’ system as a ‘patriarchy in which the

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most senior male household member held ultimate authority over various matters, including the marriage of family members’ (2014:320). The ‘ie’ system was abolished after the Second World War under the revision of the civil code (Meiji Minpo), which had been established in 1898 (Therborn, 2004:17). Therborn located East Asia during this period as being at the ‘actual centre’ of the twentieth-century decline of patriarchy (2004:74). Therborn suggested that this was an era when ‘the elaborated patriarchal traditions of Confucianism and of the feudal samurai norms were attacked head on, by US occupation-emboldened Japanese reformers and by Comintern-taught Chinese communists’ (2004:74). Therborn also suggested that the Japanese Consitution of 1947 included ‘a ringing affirmation of gender equality’ and that the Chinese Marriage Law of 1950 was equally significant. Therborn concluded that: Eradicating millennial patriarchy was, of course, a protracted and difficult operation, which has not been fully completed in the past half century, but in China and Japan an epochal process of change was set in motion around 1950. (2004:74)

From a fatherhood-research perspective, Shwalb et  al. also suggested that the legacies of American occupation turned Japan into a nation where ‘fathers were reduced in legal status to equals with their wives and grown children’ (2003:150). Shwalb et  al. focused on the de-patriarchalisation process through an elegiac lens under the subtitle ‘Japan: once Confucian, now fatherless?’ and Shwalb et al. were ambivalent towards ‘the modal Japanese family’ which had evolved, since American occupation, ‘to become democratic, individualistic, and achievement orientated, with fathers as primary wage earners and mothers as domestic authorities’ (2003:150). Shwalb et al. blamed the American occupation for weakening the social status of fatherhood and fathers themselves: In our opinion, changes in the family have impacted the parenting styles … of Japanese fathers. Specifically we consider the effects of the American occupation of Japan following World War II to be one cause of weakness in many of today’s Japanese fathers. The occupation ostensibly promoted democracy, equality, and individualism, and although its goal of democratization succeeded in overturning the traditional patriarchy, for some Japanese it replaced authoritarian fathering with permissive rather than authoritative fathering … We also believe that as a result of this historical influence, Japanese fathers generally have become weaker than Chinese or Korean fathers. Objective research, however, is needed to test this thesis. (2003:154)

The epistemological discourse of weak or weakened Japanese fathers highlighted the introduction of an ‘anti-authoritarian American ideology’, not as an element of de-patriarchalisation, but rather as a type of social liberal ‘new-father ideology’ that was alien to the social politics of Japanese fatherhood. Shwalb et  al. also suggested that access to ‘compulsory schools’ in the latter half of the nineteenth century further diminished patriarchal-paternal power by ‘taking away the traditional functions of families and fathers’ (2003:150). On the other hand, the nineteenth-century introduction of mass education was described by Therborn as a core feature of the ‘Japanese path’ towards de-patriarchalisation, which was spearheaded by the Meiji Restoration, when from 1868 Japan sought to abandon

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‘the evil customs of the past’ (2004:58). The progressive law of 1872, on compulsory education, included education for girls, albeit to ‘become good wives and wise mothers’ (2004:59). But Therborn explained that by 1910  ‘schooling had become virtually universal’ and in ‘the same year the buying and selling of daughters for prostitution was prohibited’ (2004:59). Therborn also explained that in the early 1880s ‘there were also female voices to be heard in public attacking patriarchy’ (2004:59). Therborn suggested that Japan ‘pioneered industrialization by female labour’ with women making up 60 per cent of Japanese factory workers in 1900, albeit ‘under conditions of chaperoning and with hardly any leisure time’ (2004:144). The education system in the modern era had a positive impact on father-involvement following a reduction of the public school week to five days, making weekends more family-friendly for fathers and children of school-going age (Shwalb et al., 2003:151). Following the reduction in school hours it was found that the number of fathers taking two days off at the weekend increased from 39 per cent in 1990 to 60 per cent in 1996 (Shwalb et al., 2003:151). A corresponding sign of modern progress on the ‘Japanese path‘ towards de-patriarchalisation was that 46 per cent of mothers of young children were employed in the year 2000 compared with 39 per cent in 1996 (Shwalb et al., 2003:155). Shwalb et al. associated the trends towards smaller family sizes in Japan with the rise to prominence of ‘Japanese education-centred mothers’ or ‘Kyoiku-mama’ (2003:155) and contrasted them with fathers suffering from ‘lanshin-funin’ or ‘transfer isolation’, which occurred when men were involved in job-transfers to cities unaccompanied by their wives and children (Shwalb et al., 2003:152). Shwalb et  al. reviewed the literature on fathering research in China, Japan and Korea and suggested that previously ‘psychological research and theories on fathering have been dominated by a western viewpoint’ associated with the work of Michael E.  Lamb (Shwalb et  al., 2003:146). Shwalb et  al. also illustrated that fathering research was ‘far more active in Japan than in either China or Korea’ and that research on Japanese fathers had flourished since the 1980s (Shwalb et  al., 2003:146). However, Shwalb et al. argued that there was a marked difference in the impetus for the growth of fatherhood research from the 1980s between the USA and East Asia and cited the case of Japan where research was ‘needed to address the widespread social concern that poor fathering’ was ‘a root of childhood psychopathologies’ (2003:148). However, blaming perceived increases in social pathology among young people, on the diminution of fatherhood, had echoes of American perspectives on fatherhood (Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996). More specifically, the fatherhood research agenda in Japan was driven by concerns within epistemological communities that ‘ineffectual fathering’ bore ‘partial culpability’ for increases in childhood psychopathology and increasing acts of violence by some adolescents towards their parents (Shwalb et al., 2003:148). Ineffectual fathering and ‘a lack of paternal guidance’ was also associated by Japanese epistemology and society with moral panics about a rise of bullying in the 1990s and with murders carried out by ‘terrorist cults’ in 1995 and more particularly with the murder of a young elementary schoolboy by a 14-year-old boy in

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1997 (Shwalb et al., 2003:148). According to Shwalb et al. perceptions of a crisis of ineffectual or weak Japanese fathering engendered a series of social policy reforms during the 1990s to encourage greater father-involvement: Government policies in the 1990s encouraged fathers to become more involved with child development. Researchers want to know the effects of policy and social changes, and whether fathers might be responsible for the various social ills. In recent years, increasing numbers of mothers (and fathers) have shown either apathy or disgust toward children, and child abuse has become more noticeable, all of which has spawned an interest in studies of parental cognition. (2010:148)

The quote above questioned ‘the effects of policy and social change’ and raised concerns about levels of parental cognition in Japan (Shwalb et al., 2003:148). An alternative interpretation was that the Japanese government and policymakers focused on fatherhood because, during the 1990s, numerous offiical reports linked the decline in total fertility rate with a shortage of childcare facilities, deficiencies in the work–life balance for mothers, and an absence of fathers’ involvement in child-rearing (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:323). Thus, from a fatherhood research perspective it was suggested that the series of policy initiatives of the 1990s were driven by social problems linked to ineffectual fathering (Shwalb et  al., 2003), whereas family policy perspectives suggested that the ‘Nordic turn’ in the 1990s was driven by concerns with fertility decline, and were mainly focused on improving the work–life balance for mothers (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014). The series of family policy iniatives, which constituted the Nordic turn, centred on the Basic Direction for Future Childrearing Support Measures (1994), otherwise known as the ‘Angel Plan’, which was revised in 1999 and 2004, to promote more flexible working environments for mothers to accommodate child-rearing (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:323). The policy initiatives also included the Childcare and Family Care Leave Act, which offered a replacement rate of 50 per cent of parents’ pre-birth wage for up to a maximum of eighteen months’ leave. The law allowed fathers to take leave ‘regardless of their partner’s employment status’ and fathers were allowed to take a second period of leave, if they only took a brief eight-week period after the birth of their child (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:324). However, less than 2 per cent of Japanese fathers took parental leave, which was explained by the suggestion that ‘hierarchical Japanese corporate culture, which is deeply rooted in traditional Japanese culture, does not support men taking paternity leave’ (2014:324). In order to overcome fathers’ low take-up of parental leave, the Japanese government passed the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999 and the Ministry for Health, Labour and Welfare launched a nationwide campaign with the slogan ‘men who don’t take part in raising their children shouldn’t be called fathers’ (Porter and Sano, 2009:13). The prominent academic, Dr Miyuki Shimoebisu, suggested that wage-replacement levels would have to be increased drastically in order to facilitate government targets for increased take-up of parental leave by fathers (Porter and Sano, 2009:15). In addition, Shimoebisu recommended that policy initiatives had to be matched by changes in corporate practices and expectations surrounding

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fatherhood. Moreover, the National Women’s Education Centre carried out a survey which illustrated that the number of fathers who expressed a desire to spend more time with their children had increased from 27.6 per cent in 1994 to 41.3 per cent in 2004 (Porter and Sano, 2009:15). This finding led Porter and Sano to conclude that the number of ‘fathers who wish to spend more time with their families’ was ‘undoubtedly increasing in number’ and it was time to ‘change the social system to actualise these desires’ (2009:15). Japan’s contemporary family policies were characterised variously in terms of crafting ‘Nordic shades’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:332) and in terms of employing a ‘Nordic model’ and as having already ‘gone Nordic’ (Toivonen, 2007:2). Previously, Japan’s system of tax exemptions for married couples (Fuyo Kojo) discouraged women from going out to work in a similar way to the German tax system (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:343). However, from the 1990s Japan exhibited ‘social democratic’ features, albeit ‘in principle but less so in practice’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:345). Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen illustrated that ‘significant discursive shifts’ occured in the mid-1990s centred on the crisis of the family, but also on the Japanese phenemonon of ‘parasite singles’ (2011:348). Conservative sociologist Masahiro Yamada described ‘parasite singles’ as the masses of young Japanese women who were happy to stay at home with their parents in order to ‘channel their personal incomes into entertainment and luxury goods’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:348). In reponse to the combined problems of ‘parasite singles’, declining fertility rates and low take-up of parental leave by fathers, the Japanese government encouraged companies to become more ‘family friendly’ (fuamiri fuendori) through reports such as Aiming for Family Friendly Corporations, published by the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour (2000). The government also initiatied a ‘high-profile policy campaign built around the English language term work-life balance (waku-raifu baransu or WLB)’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:349). Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen illustrated that leading scholars from the epistemological research community and women’s equality organisations such as The Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour and the National Women’s Education Centre were at the forefront of shaping the new social politics of Japanese fatherhood (2011). Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen specifically highlighted the way ‘well-known scholars in Japan’ helped to shape print media debates surrouding support for WLB including Hiroki Sato, Emiko Takeishi, Machiko Osawa and Kazou Yamgauchi who they referred to as ‘policy entrepreneurs’ (2011:349). The ‘key policy entrepeneurs’ made ‘an essentially econonmic argument for strengthening important employment-oriented family measures, inlcuding but not limited to parental leave and childcare’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:349). Sato and Osowa were engaged by the state in a public–private ‘work and life harmonization’ committee coordinated by the Cabinet Office but led by business and trade union organisations, which produced the Work-Life Balance (WLB) Charter. The WLB Charter included the aim of ‘increasing the parental leave take-up rate of women and men’ and ‘targets for men’s participation in housework and childrearing’ (Seeleib-Kaiser

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and Toivonen, 2011:350). However, Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen concluded that: ‘although influential as academics, the key policy entrepeneurs Sato Takeishi and Osawa … were not in a position to seriously challenge employers’ and their strategy of gently pursuading employers of the need for WLB measures ‘ultimately failed to suceed’ (2011:351). Toivonen explained that from the early 1990s a concerted series of ‘meetings by ministries, deliberative councils, (shingikai) and sets of experts’ were summoned to consider social policy development to meet the needs of citizens to balance work and family duties (2007:1). On this basis, Toivonen considered the question as to ‘whether elements of Nordic-style family policy’ had ‘begun to emerge in Japan’ (2007:2). This was clearly the case for the Democratic Party of Japan, which put forward a proposal that emulated the Nordic pappa quota (Toivonen, 2007:3). On the other hand, Toivonen suggested that the failure to increase parental leave take-up by fathers in Japan was due to the ‘comparatively weak political influence of women’ (2007:4). By contrast Toivonen also argued that Nordic women’s influence was stronger because of their ‘strengthened position in labour markets and politics from the 1960s … and in the case of Finland, policies developed through the outcome of gendered power struggles’ that were played out on the basis of ‘continuous pressure from women’s organisations’ (2007:8). On the other hand, Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen compared the cases of Japan and Germany primarily to challenge theories that ‘organized women’s movements’ and ‘social democracy’ were ‘the primary drivers of welfare state development and social care arrangements’ (2011:332). Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen argued that in the case of Japan, social policy reforms were driven by ‘conservative political leadership’ and by the efforts of key academics or policy entrepreneurs with ‘private companies’ acting as antagonists, whereby the ‘structural dynamic’ of firm-specific skills requirements and cultural aversions to ‘causing trouble to others’ (meiwaku wo kakeru) combined to limit ‘the propensity of many Japanese employers to support robust parental leave schemes’ (2011:332–351). Alternatively, Lambert argued that the 1990s represented ‘a significant shift in policy’ but that ‘the foundations of these changes reach back decades’ (2007:1). Lambert challenged the idea that the ‘women-friendly’ turn in Japanese social policy arose from ‘a benevolent desire to promote gender equality’ (2007:1). Instead, Lambert suggested that change was prompted by ‘increased demand for female labor and the need to ensure labor market and economic stability’. However, Lambert also emphasised the importance of post-war changes including the ‘legislation of maternity leave; the legislation of childcare leave for teachers, social workers and nurses in public facilities; and the establishment of a fairly extensive system of publicly funded childcare’ (2007:7). Lambert also emphasised the importance of post-war legislation during the US occupation and the fact the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP) placed a great emphasis on child welfare and on the implementation of the 1947 Child Welfare Law which ‘far exceeded pre-war programmes’ by seeking to ‘ensure the health and welfare of future generations’ (2007:7). In addition, Lambert highlighted the significance of grassroots women’s political activism by explaining that:

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Throughout post-war history, mothers’ groups and the women’s bureaus in union organisations rose up and demanded more childcare services and longer maternity leaves. Groups such as the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyoso) and the Mothers’ Association (Hahaoya no Kai) were important initiators of policy. However, the biggest changes in childcare and childcare leave policy coincided with periods of high labour demand and challenges to the dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party. (2007:2)

Lambert’s study referenced the role of the powerful Japan Teachers’ Union, which began to demand childcare leave and was the main initiator of the 1975 childcare leave legislation, which was first tabled at the 1963 Teachers’ Union annual conference (2007:19). In addition, the Socialist Party submitted a proposal for childcare leave in 1967 which specified one year’s leave at 80 per cent of wages (Lambert, 2007:19). Lambert’s study contradicted theories that the ‘Nordic turn’ in Japan was driven by top-down government concerns with fertility rate levels, and instead posited a theory of grassroots driven change, shaped by women’s bureaus in trade unions, grassroots mothers’ groups and electoral pressure on the LPD. However, Henneck’s comparative study of five nations suggested that Japanese working mothers suffered a severe burden because Japanese fathers took ‘minimal responsibility for childcare and housework’ (2003:9). Henneck highlighted survey data, which illustrated that Japanese women commonly responded that stress and anxiety, related with child-rearing, made them reluctant to have babies, and that this was due to inadequate support systems (2003:9). Moreover, only 15 per cent of mothers took parental leave and the reasons given were that the atmosphere in work ‘made it difficult to leave’ (Henneck, 2003:9). On the other hand, Schoppa suggested that since Japan was a ‘late developer’ among welfare states, Japanese women faced different challenges to their Swedish counterparts forty years earlier, because Swedish women made the ‘push for equality’ at a time when women had children at a younger age, which encouraged them to fight for social change to balance work and family life (2009:431). Alternatively, modern Japanese women were choosing not to have children or to just have one child in order to mitigate the problems of balancing work and motherhood (2009:431). Schoppa suggested that without women’s groups telling them what to do and ‘using their muscle to push for change’ the bureaucrats of the Japanese welfare regime would not manage ‘to engineer a gender role revolution’ (2009:431). Alternatively, Lambert suggested that women’s groups had used their muscle to push for change, and that when set in a historical context, the push for change remained ongoing and would result in ‘more mother-friendly family policies’ (2009:28). The research suggested that Japan was at an interpretative crossroads. On the one hand, women had engineered a ‘silent revolution’ by opting out of marriage and childbirth or postponing marriage and children (Schoppa, 2009:428). On the other hand, women’s groups, public sector workers, trade unions, academics and small leftist parties had fought, since the 1940s, for a Japanese path towards de-patriarchalisation and a ‘gender role revolution’, which was halted in the 1990s by employer intransigence and the conservative welfare ideologies of organisations

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such as the Housewives Association (Lambert, 2007). Dismantling the breadwinner status quo in Japan was also halted by the failure of the Japanese welfare regime to follow the recommendation of Dr Miyuki Shimoebisu to drastically increase wage-replacement levels for parental leave (Porter and Sano, 2009:15). The push for gender equality in Japan was maybe forty years behind the push for gender equality in Sweden, as interpreted by Schoppa (2009), but the feminist push in Sweden remained very active in the 1990s and the 2000s, and won decommodified and individualised parental leave for fathers (Chronholm, 2009), irrespective of whether Swedish women postponed childbirth or not. Child support Japan’s marriage rate was second only to the United States, cohabitation was rare and divorce was rare, but increased to about one in three marriages (Henneck, 2003:10). The number of single mothers in Japan increased from 789,000 in 1993 to 1,224,400 in 2003, an increase of 55 per cent in one decade, while on the other hand, the number of divorces increased from 141,689 in 1980 to 261,917 in 2005 (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:727). Single mothers in Japan were entitled to universal child allowances (kodomo teate), means-tested child-rearing allowances (jidō fuyō teate) and stringent public assistance (seikatsu hogo), which most single mothers were ineligible for. However, single mothers were given priority to public housing access, childcare access and training access and had an 85 per cent representation in the labour force, albeit in low-wage employment (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:727). Raymo and Zhou illustrated that about 29 per cent of Japanese single mothers co-resided with parents (2012:728), leading to the conclusion that ‘single mothers in Japan seek to limit the economic, temporal and emotional strains of single-parenthood by co-residing with other adults, typically their parents’ (2012:710). Moreover, data from the Survey on Work Assistance for Single Mothers (SWASM) illustrated that only 18 per cent received child support from non-resident fathers (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:740), which was not inconsistent with Western welfare regimes on the lower levels of comparative compliance. It was not clear from the SWASM data, whether child support payments were formal or informal private arrangements. More significantly, Raymo and Zhou suggested that since the collection of SWASM data in 2001, Japanese welfare reforms had ‘resulted in reductions in public income support for single mothers’ (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:740). Sano and Yasumoto explained that there were no clear policies surrounding child support payments after divorce. Ninety per cent of divorces took place by agreement, and by registration to a municipal office outside the court system, and while on the one hand, agreement had to be reached regarding primary custody, on the other hand, there was no obligation to make an ‘agreement regarding child support’ (2014:322). Less than 40 per cent of divorcees had an agreement, and only two-thirds of those were written agreements, with less than 20 per cent of divorced mothers receiving a payment in 2006 (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:322). The main reason that women gave for not entering child maintenance agreements and not

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receiving child support payments was ‘men’s inability to pay’ (2014:322), leading to the conclusion that: the compliance rate will not increase unless there is an improvement in both fathers’ – particularly low-income fathers’– earning capacity and awareness regarding child support payment. (2014:323)

With specific reference to child support payments for lone mothers receiving public assistance, the numbers were small, amounting to about 8 per cent of welfare recipients generally, but single mothers on welfare were among the poorest people in Japanese society (2014:326). Moreover, the Act on Welfare of Mothers (2003) introduced American-style time-limited welfare, which reduced entitlements after five years. In addition, the government introduced stronger enforcements for child support payments leading to the conclusion by Sano and Yasumoto that similar to ‘the United States and the United Kingdom, the goal of Japan appears to be promotion of self-sufficiency through work’ (2014:326). About 90 per cent of single mothers were in employment in Japan – ‘the highest in industrialised countries’, this, despite the fact that ‘educational attainment, which is a strong predictor of earning capacity, is significantly lower for single mothers than married mothers’ (2014:326). Overall, Japanese lone mothers and Japanese academics shared a belief that non-resident Japanese fathers did not have the earning capacity to pay child support. Nontheless, Japan shifted towards the American model of fatherhood in relation to child support enforcement. China: the decline of Confucian patriarchy Abbot et al. identified six events that wrought changes to the nature of fatherhood in China (1992:46). First, the Communist Revolution eroded wives’ traditional dependency on their husbands by encouraging female employment. Second, these changes were protected by the Marriage Law of 1950. Third, wives’ participation in employment resulted in a more active parenting role for fathers. Fourth, fathers began to carry out household chores, prompted in part by media reports in the popular press from 1973 of men and women sharing housework. Fifth, from the 1950s, the Chinese government embarked on a campaign to ban the corporal punishment of children. Sixth, the introduction of the one-child-per-family policy created a greater societal sensitivity to the significance of child well-being, which resulted in a ‘massive parent education effort called “Schools for Parents” ’ on the initiative of the Women’s Federation and the provincial governments. The schools for parents taught fathers and mothers the principles of child development and child psychology and changed the traditional Confucian emphasis on punishment towards a modern emphasis on the inclusion of rewards and praise. Abbot et al. concluded that there was evidence to support the idea of an ongoing ‘transformation that is occurring in the father’s’ role in the People’s Republic of China, which was influenced by ‘greater exposure to Japanese and western childrearing values and practices’ (1992:52). A comparative study of patriarchy in China and Western Europe explored to what extent Chinese patriarchy was distinct from the

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Mediterranean variant (Hamilton, 1990). A nineteenth-century expert on patriarchy defined patriarchalism as ‘the absolute power of the patriarch over those included within the circle of the family’ (Maine, 1861; Hamilton, 1990:79), while another suggested that ‘paternal authority’ was ‘the most necessary, the most legitimate of all social powers’ (Le Play, 1866:189, cited in Therborn, 2004:13). In his study of Law and Society in Traditional China, Ch’u T’ung-tsu gave a definition of patriarchy which suggested there was no difference between patriarchy in China and the West: The Chinese family was patriarchal. The grandfather or father was the ruling head and had authority over all members of the family, including his wife and concubines, his sons and grandsons, his unmarried daughters, his collateral relatives who were junior to him and who shared his domicile and his slaves and servants. His control of the family economy and his power to make financial decisions strengthened his authority. In addition, since the concept of ancestor worship was central to the perpetuation and solidarity of the family, the authority of the family head, who was also the family priest, was further enhanced. Finally, his authority was recognized and supported by the law. (T’ung-tsu, 1961:20; Hamilton, 1990:83)

Hamilton suggested that all the above characteristics were shared by Chinese and Western patriarchy but that ‘China, if anything, was more patriarchal and remained that way long after the west left patriarchalism behind’ (1990:83). Hamilton cited Weber to support the suggestion that when compared with patriarchal Lutheranism, Confucianism elaborated ideas of patriarchy and the patrimonial notion of the ‘father of the country’ in a much more complex and consistent manner, so that subordination to high-ranking officials outside the realm of the family was based on ‘the cardinal virtue of filial piety’ (1990:83; Weber, 1976:1050). Hamilton was at pains to suggest that not only was Chinese patriarchy different but that, while ‘eventually in the west patriarchy vanishes’, on the other hand, Chinese patriarchy was a ‘fairly modern’ phenomenon that was still an active force in ‘China today’ (1990:85–88). On the other hand Therborn suggested that the Chinese Revolution of 1949 brought a ‘full-scale assault on the most ancient and elaborate patriarchy of the world’ (2004:93). Therborn illustrated that the first major institutional change was the Marriage Law of 1950, which abolished the feudal marriage system and child betrothal, and made marriage a relationship between partners of equal status with equal rights to work and to participate in social activities. Moreover ‘the Communist leadership took the marriage law very seriously’ with 3.5  million party comrades promoting the principles of the law (Therborn, 2004:94). Therborn concluded that ‘China in a few decades has dismantled the central institution of a two-to-three-thousand year old social order’ (2004:95). In a similar manner, Xia et al. suggested that Confucian patriarchal values were consigned to history by the 1950 Marriage Law (2014:258). Xia et al. explained in a historical account of Chinese family policy, that since 1949 China had ‘passed its most significant family policies and laws in marriage; child-rearing; child, women and elderly protection; family planning and health care’ (2014:257). Xia et  al.

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explained that the Chinese family was paradoxical, on the one hand, Chinese families were ‘tight and private’ but on the other hand, families accepted government regulations such as the One Child Family Planning Policy (2014:258). The laws were highly prescriptive and offered protection to women ‘by placing restrictions on husbands’ who were seeking divorce, and would not grant a divorce to a husband if his wife was pregnant or before his child became one year old (Xia et al., 2014:260). In addition, the minimum age for marriage was twenty-two for men and twenty for women (Xia et al., 2014:260). No-fault divorce was added to marriage law in 1980 and since then the divorce rate tripled, leading to concerns about the instability of marriage especially in the big cities of Shanghai and Beijing (Xia et al., 2014:259). The One Child Family Planning Policy was enacted in 1979 and stipulated that married couples should have one child (Xia et al., 2014:262). The one-child policy confined reproduction within marriage, which stigmatised single-motherhood. In 2013, the city of Wuhan proposed a fine of 82,000 RMB (about $13,000) on women giving birth without proof of paternity as a ‘social rearing fee’, or in other words, as a fine for taking the One Child Family Planning Policy outside the confines of marriage. Incentives for complying with the one-child policy included incentives in employment, education, housing, welfare and elderly social security, and one- and two-girl families were given additional points for college entry (Xia et al., 2014:262). The law resulted in disproportionate birth rates; and 115 boys were born for every 100 females, probably as a result of abortion of female fetuses or because female births were not always registered and were called ‘black babies’. Rural couples were allowed to have a second child after five years, if the first child was a girl, which was a ‘clear acknowledgement of the traditional preference for boys’ (Hesketh et al., 2005:1172). The recent phenomenon of sheng nu or ‘leftover women’ highlighted the disadvantageous position of younger women in Chinese society. Sheng nu was the label given by the All China Women’s Federation to stigmatise women over the age of twenty-seven, who had not yet married, or remained single out of choice. A survey of fifty sheng nu, who were all professional women, illustrated the ‘discriminatory’ and ‘controlling’ constraints that were issued to the women by male suitors and partners, which according to Sandy To ‘reflected the persistence of Chinese patriarchal structures’ (2013:1). However, a more recent study of the sheng nu phenomenon contradicted this interpretation of persistent Confucian legacies, and instead focused on the issue of housing (Fincher, 2014). The author, Leta Hong Fincher, explained in an interview ‘that current levels of gender inequality’ were ‘not just a byproduct of outdated Confucian principles’ (McDonnell, 2014:1). Instead, Fincher blamed China’s privatisation of housing for creating stark new forms of gender inequality because Chinese parents buy houses exclusively for their sons, and because most homes are usually registered in mens’ names, due to the controlling constraints of husbands and their families during courtship and after marriage. Gendered property inequality was also shaped by a ruling of China’s supreme court that decided marital real estate ‘belongs to the person … whose name is on the property deed’ (Fincher, 2014; Lovell, 2014:6).

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Shwalb et  al. observed that ‘China maintained (with notable exceptions) a united historical identity and Confucian heritage of philosophical, ethical and political beliefs’ combined with a traditional parental settlement based on the family principle of ‘strict father, kind mother’ (2010:150). However, Shwalb et al. also suggested that, in the modern era, the ideology of gender equality was more influential than the ideology of the ‘kind mother-strict father’ because modern Chinese fathers had rejected this role (2003:156). This suggestion was supported by research illustrating that 77 per cent of respondents to a Chinese National Bureau of Statistics (CNBS) survey agreed with the statement that ‘men should perform half of domestic housework’ (2003:156). This type of understanding was supported by a survey of Chinese mothers and fathers, which showed no gender differences between parental attitudes and more unequivocally that: The current generation of Chinese parents does not seem to observe traditional parental prescriptions that differ between fathers and mothers either by Chinese … or Western cultural norms … Our interpretation of the findings points to the extraordinary and historically unprecedented social transformation that has taken place in China in the past 30 years. (Chang et al., 2011:111)

Chang et al. concluded that ‘the lack of parental role differentiations’ supported a cultural evolutionary approach, which would ‘help to rectify the widespread portrayal of Chinese parenting as Confucian and following traditional social and gender roles’ (2011:112). Conclusion and discussion The Japanese word shōshika described the trend towards having fewer children, and concerns about falling fertility rates, and increasing the baby count, were at the heart of policy initiatives in the 1990s (Toivonen, 2007). Government attempts to promote increases in fertility through the promotion of parental leave for fathers since the early 1990s were understood to have failed through a combination of low levels of wage replacement and because compliance by private sector employers remained voluntary ‘with no legal recourse available to employees who are discouraged from taking leave’ (Boling, 1998:173). The idea of a ‘Nordic turn’ was epitomised by a fresh focus on fatherhood in the Basic Direction for Future Childrearing Support Measures (1994) otherwise known as the ‘Angel Plans’ which were revised in 1999 and 2004, and by the Childcare and Family Care Leave Act which allowed fathers to access parental leave (Sano and Yasumoto, 2014:324). The other step towads a Nordic turn was taken when the Japanese government passed the Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society in 1999 and launched a nationwide campaign with the slogan ‘men who don’t take part in raising their children shouldn’t be called fathers’ (Porter and Sano, 2009:13). The Japanese campaigns for father-involvement had clear echoes of the Swedish model. Yet, the Japanese government was upbraided, in epistemological accounts, for taking a top-down approach which failed to gain popularity with Japanese society and fathers (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011). For an alternative

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interpretation, this chapter highlighted combined grassroots and state feminism campaigns of the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour (2000), the National Women’s Education Centre (2005), and groups such as the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyoso), the Mothers’ Association (Hahaoya no Kai), and the role of prominent academics, who were labelled ‘key policy entrepreneurs’ (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:349). The roles of the small Japanese Socialist Party and the Democratic Party of Japan were also significant and both made proposals for paid parental leave and non-transferable father quotas (Lambert, 2007:2). Overall, the chapter emphasised a combination of grassroots pressure, state feminism and cross-party political will to introduce father-friendly parental leave policies, which were stifled by the organised corporate intransigence of Japanese employers. Japan was caught in what Norwegians call the ‘double track paradox’ (Brandth and Kvande, 2009:179), whereby government promoted day-care, parental leave and gender equality, but at the same time was unwilling to challenge the vested interests of the male power-bloc of Japanese employers. In the Japanese case, there were also ‘deeply ingrained cultural values about marriage, women’s obligations to care for their children and elderly parents, role complementarity, and the value of self-sacrifice for the good of the whole’ (Boling, 1998:188). On the other hand, the social choices of young women who were labelled as ‘parasite singles’ for delaying marriage (Schoppa, 2006:155), suggested that young Japanese women were rejecting deeply ingrained cultural values about marriage, even when faced with patrimonial stigmatisation by the welfare regime. On the issue of child support enforcement, the Japanese government took an American turn towards cost recovery, but one which lone mothers did not believe in, because they failed to accept that male Japanese workers had the income adequacy to financially maintain two households. Instead, the numbers of single mothers relying on co-residency with parents (29 per cent) to compensate for low-waged incomes and reductions in public support outnumbered the 18 per cent receiving child support (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:740). The Japanese epistemological communities gained in influence and status through incorporation onto government committees and media campaigns for the promotion of parental leave (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:351). Ethological perspectives on the father–child dyad blamed ‘ineffectual fathering’ on a range of social ills among young people and took an ambivalent attitude to the decline of patriarchy post-Second World War (Shwalb et al., 2010). On the other hand, Therborn illustrated that conservative Japanese patriarchy suffered two epochal blows over the last two centuries, first, in 1868 when the Meiji Restoration established what Therborn labelled as the ‘Japanese path’ towards a decline in patriarchy (2004:58), and second, when Japan was at the epicentre of international patriarchal decline during the American occupation following the Second World War (Therborn, 2004:74; Lambert, 2007:7; Shwalb et al., 2010:154). The concept of patriarchy had added significance for debates surounding the East Asian welfare regime model. The epochal events of the American occupation of Japan after the Second World War, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, were important to ways of thinking about the decline of patriarchy in East Asia. There was one school of

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thought, which suggested that Confucian patriarchy had been swept aside since the epochal events of the 1940s (Therborn, 2004; Chang et al., 2011; Fincher, 2014; Xia et al., 2014). The decline of patriarchy was evidenced in China by a historically unprecedented lack of ‘parental role differentiation’ (Chang et al., 2011:111). On the other hand, there was evidence of welfare regime mysogyny towards young educated working women, labelled as ‘parasite singles’ in Japan (Toivonen, 2007), and as ‘leftover women’ in China (To, 2013). Sandy To suggested that the term ‘leftover women’, and the controlling constraints of husbands, and their families, on young, well-educated and professional Chinese women, reflected a persistence of patriarchal values and structures (2013:1). On the other hand, in an examination of Chinese father–daugher relationships Qiong Xu suggested that the One Child Family Planning Policy had narrowed gender biases against girls, which were ‘traditionally rooted in Confucianism’ (Xu, 2009:12). At the beginning of the twentieth century, when the the decline of patriarchy began, East Asia ‘was the most elaborate patriarchy in the world’, and as Therborn illustrated it has ‘undergone radical change … but male advantages remain in a number of fields’ (2004:108). The last vesitages of the rule of the father in China remained rooted in patrilocalism powers before and after marriage, filial obligations and the idea of a bride-price, which was rising (2004:122). The ‘communnist ideological implosion’ provided a new context of marketisation, which led ‘some ancient forms of patriarchal culture’ to reappear, in particular ‘economic inter-famial marriage transactions and extended families’ (Therborn, 2004:122). Similarly, in Japan, ‘a considerable amount of patriarchal and/or parental weight’ remained, despite the dimunition of the ‘post-war salaryman father’ (Therborn, 2004:123). Hamilton suggested that East Asian and Chinese patriarchy differed from the Western version, because Confucian patriarchy was much stronger and still reigned in ‘China today’ (1990:88). Alternatively, Therborn located Japan and China at the epicentre of the twentieth-century decline of patriarchy (2004:74). However, if the decline of patriarchy and the reform of marriage were prerequisites to welfare state development in twentieth-century Scandinavia and the West (Wetterberg et al., 2001; Melby et al., 2006), then the starting point for China and Japan was half a century later than the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian welfare regimes, and although marriage was reformed in both Japan and China, if anything communism reinforced the social status of marriage in China, as did legacies of the traditional stem family in Japan. This chapter illustrated that theories of East Asian exceptionalism or under-development were superseded by theories of two distinct East Asian variants; the Japanese ‘inclusive social insurance model’ and the Chinese ‘individualistic market based model’ (Peng and Wong, 2010:658). The chapter supported the dualistic model of East Asian welfare regimes. However, the chapter also suggested that it was China’s combination of market-based privatisation, familial welfare and legislative decisions on home ownership, which fostered gender inequalities between young men and women in modern China, rather than any lasting hybrid of outdated Confucian patriarchy. The Chinese welfare regime’s

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reliance on familial savings seemed to have combined with the One Child Family Planning Policy and social status of marriage to create a neo-patriarchal model of home-ownership. Alternatively, Japan developed an independent infrastructure for gender equality or a gender-equality architecture. In Japan, women in organisations such as the Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour, the National Women’s Education Centre, and groups such as the Japan Teachers’ Union (Nikkyoso) and the Mothers’ Association (Hahaoya no Kai) were able to gender the Japanese welfare regime, to some degree, and take on the vested interests of Japanese employers, up to a point.

8

Individualisation and two varieties of patriarchy and fatherhood

Introduction The previous chapters illustrated that comparative social policy studies focused primarily on national variations in welfare state development outcomes. The development of ‘models’ or ‘typologies’ was illustrated to be a core feature of comparative social policy research, otherwise referred to in the literature as ‘welfare regime theory’ or the ‘welfare modelling business’ (Abrahamson, 1999). Welfare regime theory was popularised by the publication of the Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Esping-Andersen, 1990). The welfare regimes approach was adopted by Hobson and Morgan for the ‘policy regimes and father regimes’ typology (2002). Gender studies and feminism also shaped ways of thinking about welfare state development, and gender studies scholarship pioneered a focus on the social citizenship roles of fathers and the politicisation of parenthood (Siim, 1993; Ellingsaeter and Leira, 2006). The previous chapters expanded upon the central hypothesis, which was that the two archetypes of Sweden and the USA represented divergent and influential ways of thinking about fatherhood. In addition, the previous chapters illustrated that the mid-1970s represented a turning point in the social politics of fatherhood. The mid-1970s turning point in the social politics of fatherhood led to divergent ways of thinking about fatherhood, as welfare regimes responded to:  a decline of patriarchy (Therborn, 2004); a decline of male-breadwinning (Sommestad, 1998); a decline of the Parsonian gender contract (Herlth, 2002:314); and an ‘increasing diversity in the structure of families responsible for raising children’ (Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011:248). To paraphrase Hilary Land, the American and Anglo-Saxon welfare regime regimes were reluctant to abandon the malebreadwinner model, so they attempted to push separated mothers and single mothers onto the fathers of their children (2008:15). The aim was to reduce the cost of welfare expenditure on separated mothers and single mothers by recovering income from non-resident fathers (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001). On the other hand, the Swedish welfare regime began dismantling the malebreadwinner model in the 1930s, when Alva Myrdal recommended

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labour market policies for women ‘at the expense of men’s jobs’ (Gustafsson and Stafford, 1994:342). Instead of pushing single mothers and separated mothers onto non-resident fathers, the Swedish and Nordic welfare regimes abandoned outdated child maintenance enforcement laws, in favour of promoting joint-custody after separation, and shared parenting outside marriage, in some cases through individualisation of welfare and housing entitlements (Bergman and Hobson, 2002; Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011). In addition, the Swedish and Nordic welfare regimes came up with the ‘spectacular proposal’ of parental leave (Leira, 2006:40). Parental leave was a form of labour market decommodification, which enabled fathers and mothers to take time off work, with pay, to care for children in the early years post-partum. Alternatively, the academic fatherhood fraternity in the USA came up with ‘new father’ ideologies and measurements of ‘father-involvement’ (Lamb, 1975; Lamb et al., 1987, 2010), but it was the Swedish and Nordic regimes that put the spectacular proposal for father-involvement into practice. Moreover, it was in the Swedish and Nordic regimes where ‘the public discourse about the importance of fathers’ active involvement in early childcare’ was best developed (Haas et al., 2002:321). Drivers of parental leave regimes and father involvement Epistemological feminism focused on concepts of ‘care, autonomy, citizenhsip, (in-dependence) political agency and, equality’ and re-envisoned ‘welfare states as core instutions of the gender order’ (Orloff, 2009:317). On the other hand, welfare regimes shaped the gender equality, or inequality, of family roles in the mixed economies of welfare states (Skrede, 1999:191). Whether or not gender equality was promoted more by left partisan parties or right-leaning parties remained a contentious issue within gender studies and welfare regime debates (Orloff, 2010:261). Nonetheless, Gíslason argued that it was left-leaning parties within the Nordic regimes that tended to promote gender equality and individualised rights to parental leave and childcare, whereas right-wing parties tended to be more ambivalent about gender equality and neo-liberals were opposed to all forms of paid parental leave (Gíslason, 2011:27). Gíslason identified four drivers of Nordic parental leave legislation irrespective of left–right ideologies. The four drivers included a growing societal acceptance that, first, individualisation was the way forward for family policies. Second, gender equality freed men and women from the restrictions of their biological sex roles. Third, women’s highly active and continuous participation in the labour market was good for economic competitiveness and, fourth, Nordic societies were starting to re-assess traditional or patriarchal conceptions about what was in the best interest of children (Gíslason, 2011:28). Gíslason’s analysis highlighted the importance of the concept of individualisation to fatherhood and gender equality debates, and the importance of de-patriarchalisation to children’s rights and child well-being. Gíslason suggested that ‘unless we focus more on men and their roles, we have come as far we can go on the gender equality front’ (2011:13).

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A major driver of de-patriarchalisation, gender equality, father-friendly social policies and father-involvement was formal Nordic cooperation during the twentieth century in the field of family law (Therborn, 2004; Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:286). Haas et al. also highlighted the role of fifty different government commissions that took place in Sweden between 1929 and 2006, which were staffed by academics and researchers from the fields of gender studies and family law (2012:8). Haas et  al. were citing from a volume by Lundqvist on Family Policy Paradoxes:  Gender Equality and Labour Market Regulation in Sweden, which emphasised the role of men and parental leave in transforming the gender relations of the family, and as a prerequisite to transforming the gender relations of labour markets (Lundqvist, 2011; Haas et al., 2012:8). Hobson and Morgan singled out the 1972 Commission on Family and Marriage for recommending a ‘radical shift in the social construction of fatherhood’ through its encouragement of joint-custody as a response to the decline of marriage (2002:100). Chronholm singled out cooperation between Sweden and Norway for the report on Women’s Life and Work (1962), which introduced the concepts of ‘gender equality’ and ‘gender roles’ to the wider attention of Scandinavian society, as did the social commentaries on the changing male gender role, sparked in the same year, by the feminist journalist Eva Moberg (Chronholm, 2009:231). O’Brien and Shemilt highlighted four conditions for take-up of parental leave by fathers, based on the Nordic experience, which were individualisation or non-transferability in the form of father quotas, high wage compensation, flexibility of when leave could be taken and publicity through government awareness campaigns (2003:ix). In a similar fashion, O’Brien and Moss argued that it was macro-structural frameworks or ‘structural and cultural infrastructures’, such as the availability of childcare provisions and parental leave arrangements, which had the most significant impact on the social construction of father-involvement in child-rearing and family life (2010:557). The list of welfare regimes in Peter Moss’s premier league of parental leave provision included the Nordic states of Denmark, Norway and Sweden plus the ex-communist states of Slovenia and Estonia, and the partially ex-communist and now unified case of Germany (2011:127). These were all welfare regimes with shared legacies of social democracy, communism, Nordic feminism and Eastern European feminism, which were all at play in shaping the revolution in father-involvement, and transforming the gender relations of family life in Europe. The analysis also highlighted that ‘decommodification’ (Polyani, 1944; Esping-Andersen, 1990) and ‘individualisation’ (Kiely, 2004; Daly, 2011:12) were core concepts for ways of thinking about father-involvement, parental leave and gender equality. Within the Swedish model, the social policy regulation of fathers was primarily concerned with making all fathers into involved fathers (Hobson, 2002). The development of parental leave programmes from the 1970s and introduction of the individualised father quotas in the mid-1990s resulted in fathers being idealised, as secondary parents, and then as ‘equal parents’, with the increase of father quotas to more than one month from 2002 (Klinth, 2008). The policy of fathers being ‘home alone’ (Brandth and Kvande, 2003), in the first year of child-rearing

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was implemented, first and foremost, as a gender equality measure to facilitate the early re-entry of birth-mothers into the labour market and, second, to socialise fathers into close caring parental relationships and housework. Brandth and Kvande coined the term ‘home alone’ fathers to suggest a new way of fathering children, which was independent of mediation by the birth-mother, and therefore a challenge to primary attachment theories regarding the significance of the dyadic mother–child relationship to child socialisation (Bowlby, 1969). ‘Home alone’ fathers were compared favourably against strong malebreadwinners otherwise termed by Brandth and Kvande as ‘absent fathers’ (2003:22). According to Duvander et  al. parental leave was found to improve well-being and individual behaviour and encouraged parents to consider having larger families (2006:229). The advocacy of ‘parental choice’ to adopt more traditional parenting arrangements, through stay-at-home cash-for-care schemes, was presented in terms of battle between ‘parental choice’ ideologies, on the one hand, and gender-equality ideologies, on the other hand. In the words of the Nordic Institute for Women’s Studies and Gender Research ‘increased parental choice can lead to reduced gender equality’ (Westlund, 2007:8). A  major problem with cash-for-care schemes from a children’s rights perspective was that in Norway, only mothers who did not send their children to public day-care centres were entitled to cash-for-care (Brandth and Kvande, 2009:80). Therefore, cash-for-care schemes compromised the idea of a child’s universal right to out-of-home care, which raised the question of whether ‘parental choice’ undermined children’s rights to universal day-care socialisation. Ellingsaeter concluded that the negative impact of cash-for-care schemes on mothers’ employment was higher among Asian or African women and immigrant mothers generally, making immigrant children under-represented in day-care services (2012:12). In Sweden and Norway it was small Christian Democratic parties who were the main protagonists of cash-for-care schemes (Ellingsaeter, 2012:12). The promotion of parental choice and cash-for-care schemes were the Achilles heel of the Nordic and Swedish models, and Brandth and Kvande labelled the duality or conflict between familial welfare ideologies and gender equality in Norwegian social policy as the ‘double track paradox’ (2009:179). The Swedish and Nordic models of parental leave were also inlfuential in shaping EU Parental Leave Directives and for introducing the concepts of individualisation and non-transferability to the 2009 EU Parental Leave Directive (Fusilier, 2009:252). Korpi et  al. (2013:1) showed that Nordic and Central European coordinated market economies were superior, when compared with liberal market economies, in terms of social protection, gender equality, intersectionality, employment in professionalised social care infrastructures and outcomes for women with lower levels of education. Korpi et  al. also illustrated that the Nordic welfare regimes addressed class and gender inequalities simultaniously (2013). The concept of intersectionality, and gender and class inequalities, were at the forefront of gender and political economy debates (Verloo and Walby, 2012). In this respect Gupta et al. illustrated that women’s labour market position at the lower end of the socio-economic scale in the Nordic countries had benefited from the

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development of parental leave schemes (Gupta et al., 2006:33). In addition, reseach from Sweden addressed the issue of fatherhood and intersectionality by showing that individualised and long periods of paid parental leave were accessed readily by lower income fathers (Duvander and Jans, 2008:12). Therefore, Nordic research on parental leave take-up illustrated that social protection, labour market regulation, individualisation, and parental leave as a form of worker decommodification, were all key drivers of improving father-involvement for low-income fathers, improving the labour market conditions for low-income mothers, and improving gender equality in low-income families. Autonomous single-mother and non-resident father households Therborn suggested that a central difference between patriarchal heteronomy and individual autonomy was marked by the freedom to choose a marriage partner outside paternal or parental influence (Therborn, 2004:107). However, European marriages declined sharply from the 1960s, in favour of the three alternatives of informal cohabitation, living as a single person (which included single-parenthood) or postponement of marriage (Therborn, 2004:194). The tendency towards postponement of marriage or living as a single person was treated punitively by Japan and by communist China, because, in the words of Therborn ‘whatever communism did, it did not do away with marriage’ (2004:168). Young women in the contemporary era, especially professional women, who were not married by their late twenties, were systematically and institutionally stigmatised as ‘parasite singles’ in Japan, and as ‘leftover women’ in China (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011:348; To, 2013:1). Alternatively in Sweden and in many European cities cohabitation became normalised from the mid-nineteenth century (Matovic, 1984; Edgren, 1987; Therborn, 2004:195). And from the 1970s child maintenance schemes in Sweden and Norway were individualised to support shared childcare arrangements by parents living in separate autonomous households (Hakovirta and Hiilamo, 2012:288). In a revolutionary way, the Swedish and Norwegian welfare regimes extended the concept of autonomous lone-mother households to incorporate the idea of autonomous non-resident father households. The European decline of marriage was not as evident in the USA:  instead there were dualisms of marriage and non-marriage, of marriage and divorce and of married family values and single-parenting (Therborn, 2004:222). However, the introduction of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA, 1996), legislated that marriage was the ‘foundation of a successful society’ (Britto, 2000:68) and ‘made it harder for a single woman to raise a child alone’ (McLanahan, 2006:11). The PRWORA (1996) and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which introduced ‘time-limited’ welfare for lone mothers, were internationally influential and were copied, after much institutional equivocation, by the Irish welfare regime (Rush, 2011:51). Making it harder for single mothers to raise children was not a new approach for the Irish welfare regime, as evidenced by the phenomenon

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of the Magdalene Laundries, where single mothers and their children were systematically incarcerated and punished (Fanning, 2004:16). Land argued that the British approach to reducing welfare expenditure on lone-mother poverty was to try and increase lone-mother incomes by relocating resources from non-resident father households in the form of child support payments (Land, 2008:15). However, the British and Irish models of child support were based on the American ‘cost-recovery’ model, which in reality did not attempt to relocate resources from non-resident fathers to single-mother households. Instead, from 1974, the American ‘cost-recovery’ model attempted to relocate resources from non-resident fathers to the welfare state as reimbursement for welfare expenditure on lone-mother households (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:1). The policy logic was that non-resident fathers owed a debt to the welfare state for failing to support single-mother welfare recipients, or as it was candidly stated by the Irish welfare regime, the state was ‘entitled’ to expect non-resident fathers to ‘contribute to the state towards the cost of their spouse and/or children’ (DSCFA, 2006:42). The American model regulated fatherhood primarily in terms of a widening justice net where non-resident fathers appeared in court for failing to pay child maintenance, adding to a chronic situation where over 2.3 per cent of American children were separated from their incarcerated fathers (Cammett, 2011:127). High levels of incarceration in the USA caused the welfare state theorist, Jens Alber, to argue that ‘judged by the comparatively large proportion of the American population in prison, the high degree of poverty and inequality in the United States has its price’ (2006:409). The US Bureau of Prison Statistics showed that some 744,200 fathers and 65,000 mothers were in prison in 2007, with 1,706,600 minors between them, or about 2.3 per cent of the American under-eighteen population, leading to the argument that mass incarceration was not in the best interest of American children (Cammett, 2011:127–130). Political animus towards ‘deadbeat dads’ and ‘welfare moms’ in the USA served to illustrate a lack of welfare regime empathy for large constituencies of American children. The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme of 1974 and the TANF (1996) gave little or no consideration to whether or not they would contribute to child well-being in the USA (Cammett, 2011:30). Williams argued that the lack of empathy from centre-right politicians stemmed from hostility towards the ‘racial composition’ of people on the welfare rolls, which were predominantly made up of ‘African Americans’ (1997:2). The exponentially punitive ‘cost-recovery’ model of child support enforcement failed spectacularly to increase levels of payment compliance over a forty-year period (Cancian et al., 2011:16). Epistemological support for child support enforcement in the USA led to the Garfinkel dilemma, which arose from the proposition that American epistemology could find itself in the disgraceful position of playing ‘Robin Hood in reverse’ by collecting money from ‘the relatively poor fathers of the children on welfare’, secure in the knowledge that the money would ‘not be used to reduce poverty’, but instead, would be used to ‘reduce the taxes of the middle and upper classes’ (Garfinkel, 1988:16). The Child Support Enforcement (CSE) schemes produced a dualism within American epistemology of exponents, on the

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one hand (Furstenberg et  al., 1987; Garfinkel, 1988; Seltzer et  al., 1998; Amato and Gilbreth, 1999; Garfinkel and Nepomnyaschy, 2009; Garfinkel et  al., 1998; Huang and Han, 2011), and critics, on the other hand (Hansen, 1999; Britto 2000; Crowley, 2003; Cammett, 2011; Solomon-Fears, 2014). Alternatively, the British, and to some extent, the Australian epistemological communities were consistently critical of their countries’ decisions to follow the American cost-recovery model (Bradshaw et al., 1999:416; Bradshaw and Skinner, 2000:84; Summerfield et  al., 2010; Cook and Natalier, 2013; Skinner and Main, 2013). The British and Australian welfare regimes eventually admitted that the social policy logics of child support enforcement as a ‘poverty reduction’ mechanism and as a ‘cost-recovery’ mechanism were not working, and both countries began to consider the ‘shared-costs post-separation’ for non-resident fathers (Summerfield et al., 2010:76; Skinner, 2013:254). The American establishment of the CSE in 1975 went ‘back to the future’, or turned back the clock on the efforts of civil rights movements, welfare rights movements and civil rights lawyers who by 1965 had ‘largely dismantled’ the harsh surveillance of people on welfare, which included midnight raids and home searches with ‘the explicit goal of limiting access’ to welfare and keeping costs down (Britto, 2000:68). In this sense there was a historical divergence from the Swedish regime, which dismantled its child welfare system in 1973 following feminist and social work opposition to the labelling and stigma attached to children and families from decades of oppressive surveillance of non-resident fathers (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:95). Swedish epistemology in the 1960s and 1970s was critical of the overzealous regulation of non-resident fathers, which had been in force ever since the term ‘negligent provider’ was coined in 1927 (Hobson and Morgan, 2002:16). Swedish family law had formalised paternity outside marriage from the Marriage Law Reforms of 1917, ultimately on the testimony of the mother, and from 1933 through blood testing in disputed cases. Within the Scandinavian welfare states a flight from formal fatherhood was regulated against through obligatory registration of fathers on children’s birth certificates (Hobson and Morgan, 2004:96). A change in Swedish family law from the 1970s brought an increase in joint-custody arrangements and a contemporary situation where according to Haas there were ‘fewer and fewer fathers who lose contact with their children after divorce’ (2004:4). Child maintenance in Sweden was individualised and non-resident fathers were entitled to housing allowance and the Swedish child maintenance reforms of the 1990s were internationally recognised for aligning child support payment more closely to the means of the non-resident father (Hiillamo, 2009; Sultan et  al., 2012:990). Moreover, Norway and Sweden promoted individualisation of welfare benefits on the basis that the welfare system should promote joint-custody and not create financial barriers to shared parenting across dual household families (Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011:257). In 1973 the Swedish and Nordic models took a leap forward in the social politics of fatherhood towards individualisation of parenting across dual household families, at the behest of grassroots social work and feminist opposition to the stigmatising effects of child maintenance surveillance and enforcement (Bergman

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and Hobson, 2002:95). On the other hand, American feminism rowed in behind middle-class mothers’ organisations to extend child maintenance enforcement to non-welfare families in what Britto labelled as the ‘trickle-up effect’ (2000:68) and Crowley labelled as the ‘gentrification’ of child maintenance enforcement (2003). Crowley detailed the growth of middle-class mothers’ movements in the USA and how they lobbied female civil rights and political activists, and eventually Ronald Reagan, to support their cause, in what essentially became an appeal to right-wing conservative family values (2003:599). In stark contrast with the Swedish model, which rejected surveillance and child maintenance enforcement from 1973, the American model went ‘back to the future’ of stigma, surveillance and incarceration of non-resident fathers and a welfarisation of family law that had been successfully campaigned against a decade earlier (Britto, 2000:68). The Anglo-Saxon regimes of Australia, Great Britain and Ireland followed the ‘back to the future’ model of ‘cost recovery’, but with less enthusiasm for the penal aspects of the American model. Non-resident fatherhood remained non-prevalent and largely un-regulated in the East-Asian model because of the stigma attached to non-marriage and non-marital births, especially in China. However, in Japan, where it was not a fineable offence to raise a child without paternal identity, most lone mothers did not seek child support because they believed Japanese men could not afford to support two households, and about 30 per cent of lone mothers alleviated poverty by living with their parents (Raymo and Zhou, 2012:740). The Hague Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support was closely allied to the EU Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (2007), the Protocol on the Law Applicable to Maintenance Obligations (2007) and the Maintenance Regulation (EC) No 4/2009. The EU emphasis on enforcement and collection obscured recommendations for EU family policy by Hakovirta and Rantalaiho for individualisation of child support payments and the promotion of shared parenting on the model of Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, where child support payments were individualised (2011:257). The EU emphasis on collection and enforcement also obscured the recommendation by Richardson and Bradshaw that countries prioritising coverage of child support payments should consider advance maintenance payment programmes, as a critical aspect of an efficient anti-child-poverty strategy (2009:16). The Achilles heel of an emphasis on child support enforcement was that it invariably fostered an animus towards non-resident fathers, which was not in the best interests of children or lone-mother household autonomy. Fatherlessness and the flight from fatherhood The question of the growth of fatherlessness or the flight from fatherhood could be alternatively phrased: ‘was he pushed or did he jump’? That is to say what best explains the emergence of moral panics about the crisis of fatherless families in the USA and Great Britain (Dennis, 1992; Dennis and Erdos, 1992; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996). In Japan there was no crisis of a flight from fatherhood, instead there were concerns about ineffectual fathers and weakened fathers

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(Shwalb et al., 2010) The term ‘flight from fatherhood’ suggested a weakening or loosening of male acceptance of the conventions or constraints of traditional patriarchal familism and an unwillingness to embrace the fiscal responsibilities associated with traditional male-breadwinning fatherhood. Björnberg et al. expressed concerns about the erosion of fatherhood through welfare state encroachment into areas of child welfare and socialisation such as education and income redistribution which had previously given patriarchal fatherhood its core legitimacy (1996:176). Alternatively, Jensen implied that births outside marriage could be taken as indication of a flight from fatherhood when she argued that in the contemporary era there was ‘a lack of strong interest on the part of men to defend their right to children through formalization by marriage’ (1994:6). The idea of a flight from fatherhood was a core feature of Jensen’s thesis concerning the pauperisation of women and children and the feminisation of childhood in Europe (1994:74). Jensen’s analysis suggested that men had ‘jumped ship’ on formal fatherhood. On the other hand, Irish epistemology suggested that fathers were excluded or pushed into a form of social exclusion by an unsupportive welfare regime and were ostracised by the constitutional status quo (Constitutional Review Group, 1996:325; Ferguson and Hogan, 2004). The elevated status of marriage in the Anglo-Saxon regimes, which in the contemporary era was boosted in the USA by the PRWORA (1996) and boosted in Ireland by the The All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution, Tenth Progress Report (2006), created a situation where the Anglophone welfare regimes only became interested in non-married fathers when a single-mother made a claim for welfare. By contrast a flight from fatherhood was regulated against in the Nordic welfare regimes since the Scandinavian marriage laws of 1915 abolished the concept of illegitimacy and gave children born outside marriage a right to paternity, a father’s name and inheritance (Therborn, 2004:81). The Scandinavian processes of de-patriarchalisation involved the recognition and regulation of formal fatherhood across a plurality of family forms and the welfare state prevention or prohibition of a flight from fatherhood outside or after marriage. From 1917 all Swedish children were entitled to a formally recognised mother and father who were both obliged to be registered on the child’s birth certificate and from 1933 Sweden moved towards establishing ‘true’ biological paternity through blood testing, rather than taking the mother’s testimony in disputed cases, because it was understood to be in the best interest of the child (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:96). On the other hand, many American fathers were ‘pushed’ into a flight from fatherhood through an absence of any redistributive welfare state support for working- and middle-class families (Olah et  al., 2002). In the American case, the flight from fatherhood was understood to be a major break with the past through what Popenoe (1996) termed ‘the human carnage of fatherlessness’. From American sociological perspectives, Blankenhorn (1995) and Popenoe (1996) argued that fatherlessness represented the single biggest social problem in the USA, to be blamed for all manner of social problems from teenage promiscuity to rising crime and mental health problems. Within conservative sections of the

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American epistemological communities, there occurred what Popenoe termed a ‘social science shift’ against an earlier ‘stamp of approval on divorce and father absence’ (1996:60). The answer, according to Blankenhorn, was for men to reject the idea that fathers were unnecessary and take a three–fold-pledge that marriage was the answer, that every child needed a father and that America needed more good men (1995:226). Ultimately, the American model of fatherhood offered a ‘jumped’ explanation with a stigmatising emphasis on non-resident fatherhood as a deviant form of contemporary male agency. The Irish and Great British welfare regimes offer similar ‘jumped’ explanations with politicians from the main centre-right parties, such as David Cameron, suggesting that non-resident fathers had gone AWOL and runaway dads should be stigmatised like drink drivers (Cameron, 2011). The animus towards non-resident fathers in the Anglo-American regimes of the USA, Ireland and Great Britain was reinforced by the implementation of ‘cost-recovery’ models of child support enforcement that were first introduced in the USA in 1974 (Lerman and Sorensen, 2001:1). Alternatively, Akerlof argued that academic depictions of rising social pathology and a crisis of fatherlessness in the USA were linked closely to underclass theories, which contributed to reductions in welfare entitlements for lone mothers by almost 50 per cent over the last twenty years (1998:307). Akerlof ’s core argument was that ‘welfare mothers are poor and unfortunate and are therefore deserving of decent support’ (1998:287). According to Akerlof (1998) and Pringle (1995), Anglo-American father-involvement and father absence policies were based on ‘right-wing ideologies’ which drew on the ‘underclass theories of the American academic, Charles Murray’ to explain social breakdown (Pringle, 1995:56; Akerlof, 1998). Pringle observed that authors such as Charles Murray (1984) in the USA and Dennis and Erdos (1992) in Britain had focused ‘on the growth of illegitimacy’ and ‘illegitimacy as a causal factor’ of social disruption, unemployment and poverty (1995:56). Overall, when considering the question of the flight from fatherhood, and the question of ‘was he pushed or did he jump?’ the answer laid a laissez-faire type ostricisation of non-married fathers in Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes. But in the case of America it also lay in the status of the USA as an ‘outlier’ welfare regime in terms of income redistribution, where explanations of negative child well-being and endemic poverty were blamed by prominent sections of American epistemology on agency, family structure and fatherlessness (Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe, 1996; McLanahan, 2006), rather than on structure and an absence of redistributive welfare. Alber suggested that mass incarceration was the response to the endemic poverty, created by the redistributive inadequacies of liberal welfare capitalism in the USA (2006). Epistemology and two influential regimes of fatherhood Four decades after the publication of the ‘forgotten father’ thesis, Michael E. Lamb claimed that the ‘scholarly landscape’ had ‘changed completely’ (2010:2; 1975). The

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influence on the global landscape of epistemological fatherhood research, and the ‘quest’ to attach significance for fathers to child development, were paradigmatic features of the American model of fatherhood (Rush, 2011:41). The ‘thousands of professional articles’ which explored ‘the ways in which fathers affect their children’s development’ (Lamb, 2010:2), represented the ‘turning point’, or explosion, in patricentric focused research, which occurred following the publication of the ‘forgotten father’ thesis in 1975 (Lamb, 1975; Robinson and Barrett, 1986:ix; Shulman and Seiffge-Krenke, 1997:9). The claim of global influence by the American fatherhood research fraternity was upheld by Shwalb et al., who suggested from an East Asian perspective that ‘psychological research and theories on fathering have been dominated by a western viewpoint’ (Shwalb et al., 2003:146). The claim of global influence was extended to the realm of social policy from a situation in 1976 when ‘policy making was unmentioned’ in the first edition of the Role of the Father in Child Development, to a situation in 2010 when it was argued that ‘the increased awareness paid to fathers by policy makers’ could be attributed to the work of the American school of ethological research over the last four decades (Lamb, 2010:12). This was a change from six years previously when Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda lamented the distance between fatherhood research output and social policy development (2004:18). Lamb proclaimed in the fifth edition of the Role of the Father in Child Development, ‘How do fathers influence children’s development? Let me count the ways’ (2010:1). Again, this was a big change from forty years earlier when ‘detailed observation’ and the provision of ‘detailed maternal and paternal reports’ mounted a defence of father-involvement (Lamb, 1975), moving on to a less defensive focus on fatherhood by Lamb et al. in 1981 (Lamb and Tamis-LeMonda, 2004:2). The much less amplified counter-view was that studies show ‘small effects of fathers on child development and in preventing antisocial behaviour. Others find no effects’ (Brown and Bumpus, 1998:315). And, in a similar less amplified fashion, research findings published in the Journal of Family Issues into young children’s behavioural and cognitive development revealed that there were few if any ‘unique effects of fathering’ and that once family resources were statistically controlled for, ‘the only discernable impact of fathers presence on children’s well-being appeared to result from the co-resident father’s economic contributions to the family’ (Crockett et al., 1993:372). A core hypothesis of the two regimes of fatherhood model was that the academic fatherhood fraternity of child-development perspectives was a paradigmatic feature of the American model of fatherhood, and that it was globally influential within the patricentric-focused academic research community (Russell, 2001; Shwalb et  al., 2003; Lamb, 2010), The analysis also illustrated that it was gender-equality agendas rather than theories about gender-differentiated parenting, which were the drivers of parental leave policies. In the Scandinavian literature the question of whether patricentric research influenced social policy was turned on its head. The development of parental leave policies since the 1970s generated research rather than vice versa. Sarkadi et al. argued in research carried out at Uppsala University that it was time to enrich the almost exclusive Anglo-American literature on father salience to child development

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with research from Nordic ethological perspectives (2008). A major proposition of Sarkadi et al. was that the further advancement of father-friendly social policies in Scandinavia and elsewhere would benefit from ethological research, as this type of research could posit the benefits of father salience to child development (2008:153). A  major contradiction of this research proposal was the fact that the vast body of Anglo-American research failed to generate ‘father-friendly’ policies of any substance in the Anglo-American nations. On the other hand the Scandinavian welfare states developed generous father-friendly parental leave and redistribution policies based on egalitarian principles of gender equality and child welfare rather than social science research into father salience to child development. The Scandinavian ethological approach was differentiated by the importance attributed by Sarkadi et al. to the role of social policy and the welfare state in creating greater opportunities for father-involvement through the promotion of parental leave regimes and a gender equality approaches to parenting (2008:154). Huttunen’s study of over 350 fathers in Finland emphasised two contrasting father-involvement perspectives. The first perspective was more concerned with psychology and childhood development whereas the second approach analysed take-up of parental leave from a gender-equality perspective (1996). Huttunen exemplified a Scandinavian approach by focusing mainly on the latter (1996:80). Brandth and Kvande placed a distinctive Scandinavian emphasis on the role the welfare state and social policy for improving the quality of father-involvement when they argued ‘our research shows that while work life is the strongest hindrance for fathers, the welfare state policies are the most important door openers’ (2003:23). Instead of an American emphasis on psychology, behaviour and individual agency, Scandinavian studies offered a distinct Nordic emphasis on the removal of structural constraints to father-involvement through the development of father-friendly parental leave policies. Moreover, Scandinavian studies focused on children’s influence on fathers’ caring practices rather than on ethological concerns with fathers’ influence on child development. The Nordic focus was on how lenghthy periods of unemediated contact with children and the practice of childcare socialised fathers as oppossed to the focus of American ethology, which was on how fathers socialised children. Alternatively, Scandinavian studies on father-involvement questioned the significance of complementary sex-role parenting and any manifest emphasis on gender differences between mothers and fathers. For example, Sanqvist analysed parenting roles in 128 low- to middle-income families in Stockholm and Goteberg and showed that male and female gender identities were much less polarised in Sweden than in the USA (1996:169). The two most significant findings were that stern, critical or authoritarian fathers were rare or non-existent and that Swedish parents tended to be mild and gender-neutral disciplinarians and, second, that gender impacted most positively on children when parents acted as if gender didn’t matter (1996:169). In stark contrast, a major theme of the American literature was on gender-differentiated parenting and mother and father differences (Lamb and Lewis, 2004:277). Instead of focusing on fathers’ influences on child development, the new Scandinavian research agendas are focused on how

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children influence fathers’ caring practices and on how children, as active agents, contribute to the production of the adult world and their place within it (Brandth and Kvande, 2003:25). A major difference between the Scandinavian model and the American model in terms of epistemology was the paradigmatic role of the epistemological community of scholars within the Scandinavian model and the role of epistemological feminism in generating conceptual advances for the Scandinavian welfare regimes. Chronholm emphasised the conceptualisations of ‘konsroll’ (gender role) and ‘jamstalldher’ (gender equality), which introduced ‘a theoretical basis for political decisions’ (2009:228). The unique influence of epistemology on the development of Swedish social policy and on its core aims of promoting ‘equality between the sexes and quality of population’ was highlighted by Kaufman in the following quote from comparative studies of families and family policies in Europe: In no other country the inspiration to family policy has been shaped so strongly by social scientists, namely the couple Alva and Gunnar Myrdal. This is a symptom for the highly rationalist and functional conception of society which has evolved in Sweden. It seems remarkable how Sweden succeeded in carrying out a completely active family policy that was guided by a principle, according to other countries, rather hostile to families (Popenoe, 1988). Beginning in the mid-19th century one can observe how Sweden pursued a policy of expanding women’s rights, which led to the establishment of a far-reaching formal equal status of both sexes in the early 1920s … Thus the family in Sweden was seen more as an agency of society than a realm of privacy. Moreover, the husband’s assumption of family responsibilities is accorded special importance. The reverse of the coin in Swedish family policy is that the breadwinner-homemaker model of marriage has been made almost impossible. (2002:469)

The decline of patriarchy The American literature portrayed a chronological and elegiac decline from colonial-era patriarchy to the Parsonian American family of the 1950s (Aldous, 1998; Mintz, 1998). American fatherhood in the contemporary era was characterised in terms of dualistic, or Janus-faced, understandings of good dads and bad dads (Furstenberg, 1988). American family decline perspectives, epitomised by David Blankenhorn’s Fatherless America (1995) and David Popenoe’s Life without Father (1996), blamed a range of social problems on the decline of life-long marriage and absent fatherhood. American family decline perspectives idealised a nostalgic view of the Parsonian gender contract, where mothers stayed at home to nurture children and fathers were breadwinners and secondary parents. Aldous argued that American fathers gradually surrendered authority over children to their mothers, and that changing concepts of fatherhood resulted in a small minority of ‘new fathers’ taking on more child-rearing responsibilities (1998). Linear explanations of the decline of American fatherhood were cautioned against by Mintz in the absence of international comparison (1998:23).

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Alternatively, the decline of patriarchy was explained in terms of international linear developments in the Scandinavian and European literature (Therborn, 2004; Hobsbawn, 2005; Castells, 1997), but not without consideration of national variations and cultural differences. Therborn located the beginning of the decline of patriarchy with the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws (2004). However, the two regimes of fatherhood model located the mid-nineteenth century Stockholm marriages as the beginning of the end for patriarchy, and the 1915 Nordic model of marriage as a prerequisite for Western welfare state development (Wetterberg et al., 2001; Melby et al., 2006). The Stockholm marriages were an arrangement where women cohabited and began raising children before publishing marriage banns (Edgren, 1987; Matovic, 1984). However, cohabitation was not confined to Stockholm and was a widespread practice throughout European cities in the nineteenth century, including Paris (Therborn, 2004:195). Therborn depicted the decline of patriarchy as an epic dismantling process carried out in three ‘acts’ over the course of the twentieth century. In what may well be a putative classic sociological text of the twenty-first century, the volume entitled Between Sex and Power from Uppsala University posited a fresh definition of patriarchy as ‘paternal power’ or the rule of the father, over the daughter’s sexuality and son’s social advancement (2004:8). This definition was an alternative to Dual System Theory, which viewed gender inequality as an outcome of autonomous systems of capitalism and patriarchy, and viewed any focus on fathers as contingent or confusing (Walby, 1990). Dual system theory was not universally accepted by epistemological feminism and the meaning of patriarchy as the dominance of fathers within families remained an alternative feminist perspective (Orloff, 1993:304; Folbre, 2009:208). Therborn’s account of the decline of patriarchy was separated into three acts. Act One was labelled ‘revolution or reform’, and referred principally to the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws and the 1917 Russian Revolution, which both delivered decisive blows to patriarchal familism. Act Two was labelled as the ‘constitutional moment’ when the 1948 United Nations Convention on Human Rights delivered a major blow to arranged marriages and prohibited bars on inter-racial marriage, especially in the USA. In the same period, new marriage laws or constitutions, which emphasised gender equality, were enshrined in revolutionary China and post-war Germany and Japan. Act Three was labelled global feminism which delivered the coup de grâce to patriarchy and was driven by the mass entry of young women in the West into tertiary education (2004:73). Therborn used the allegory of a three-act play to provide a historical narrative, and in addition, he used the allegory of battle to identify four ‘fronts’ of the attack on patriarchy; first, feminism pioneered in Scandinavia and advanced in the Anglophile nations; second, socialism, communism and egalitarian cultural modernism; third, secular liberalism; and, fourth, nationalism, which engendered secular concerns with demography and gender relations (2004:79–130). Eastern European feminism was also at the vanguard of global feminism. Therborn’s account offered a historical explanation of the politicisation of patriarchy, and the epochal social choices of civic society and governments to dismantle paternal power. The introduction of parental leave in

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Sweden in 1974, and the exponential growth of individualised and non-transferable ‘father quotas’ or ‘daddy months’, from the mid-1990s, signified the denouement of patriarchal fatherhood in the Nordic welfare regimes, and the beginning of post-patriarchal macro-structures and post-patriarchal gender relations. Therborn suggested that the process of American de-patriarchalisation was harder to follow but that from the 1960s, the Supreme Court played a major role in dismantling the type of patriarchal family law clauses that were also being dismantled across Western Europe (2004:101). The disappearance of chaperoning culture and the phenomenon of ‘American dating’ was also significant, and was propelled along by the freedom from parental surveillance that came with autonomous access to automobiles (2004:86). The consolidation of patriarchal decline occurred through spates of legislation across Western Europe and the USA from the 1970s, which gave mothers the same parental rights as fathers. Therborn highlighted the dismantling of patriarchy in Germany and France, which ‘was one of the most explicit and strongly institutionalised’ patriarchal regimes up until the late 1970s (2004:100). Key dates in the dismantling of patriarchy in Great Britain were the English Royal Commission on Matrimonial Clauses of 1912 and the 1973 Guardianship Act, which gave mothers the same rights as fathers (2004:101). In the Irish case, Fahey traced de-patriarchalisation trends back to the Supreme Court judgement in the 1951 Tilson case. This judgement abolished paternal supremacy and awarded mothers equal child-rearing rights to fathers (Fahey 1998:392). The decline of patriarchal family relations in Ireland was explained not only in terms of the legislative dismantling of paternal power, but also in terms of the declining influence of the Roman Catholic clergy over the regulation of sexual codes of behaviour inside and outside marriage (Kennedy, 2001:169). Seward posited the Irish women’s movement and second wave feminism as a major force behind Irish patriarchal decline, particularly through their mobilisation around the two commissions on the status of women in the 1970s and 1990s, and their ongoing challenges to the ‘protections’ offered to mothers by the 1937 Constitution (Seward et al., 2005:424), which still remained intact. The decline of patriarchy in Japan and China began from a different place to the nineteenth-century Stockholm marriages and the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws. The study of East Asian patriarchy introduced the related concepts of patrimonialism and filial piety (Hamilton, 1990). Patrimonialism was a form of state governance by authoritarian leadership, which had its genesis in the piety of children and was to be found in patriarchal Lutheranism but was much more elaborate in Confucian societies (Weber, 1976:1050; Hamilton, 1990:83). Filial piety was a principle of Confucianism which made a virtue of respect for family elders and ancestors but it also translated into a ‘doctrine of sincere submission’ between sons and fathers, between bureaucrats and rulers, between wives and husbands and throughout the mechanisms of Imperial Chinese governance (Hamilton, 1990:77). Chinese epistemology suggested there was no difference between East Asian patriarchy and Western patriarchy (T’ung-tsu, 1961:20; Hamilton, 1990:82). The key dates in the decline of Japanese patriarchy were the introduction of compulsory education in 1872 during the Meiji Restoration, and the abolition of the

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‘ie’ or household system under the revision of the civil code (Meiji Minpo) for the new Japanese Consitution of 1947. According to Therborn, the latter brought about ‘a ringing affirmation of gender equality’ to Japan (Therborn, 2004:74). The key dates in China included: the abolition of Confucianism as an imperial exam subject in 1910; the Communist Revolution of 1947 and the new Marriage Law of 1950 and the Cultural Revolution of 1966, which paved the way for the One Child Family Planning Policy of 1979. Therborn suggested that at the dawn of the twenty-first century there were still three large areas of the world where patriarchy remained well entrenched:  first, South Asia, and especially its northern Hindu and Muslim parts; second, ‘West Asia/North Africa, with Turkey a significant but far from complete exception and including with some reservations, Central Asia; third, most of sub-Saharan Africa, with partial exceptions on the West Coast and in the South’ (2004:107). But Therborn argued optimistically that despite ‘a strong Islamic religious revival … and … surges of Christian, Jewish and Hindu fundamentalism … the prospects for patriarchy are certainly far from bright’ (2004:305–310). On the other hand, the British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawn, was less optimistic and questioned whether the Iranian Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the growth of Christian fundamentalism in the USA with the election of George W. Bush in 2001, spelled a departure from the late twentieth-century hegemonies of cultural libertarianism and theoretically libertarian capitalism, which thought it could function without the traditional family (2005:9). Hobsbawn questioned whether the inadequacies of economic neo-liberalism revealed by the global economic crash also meant that the inadequacies of the ideology of cultural libertarianism were beginning to show (2005:9). On the other hand, the Nordic welfare regimes continued to develop the post-patriarchal social citizenship roles of fathers based on the model of dual-earner and dual-carer families to promote gender equality in labour markets and families. Moreover, in contrast to the more patrimonial welfare regimes of China and the USA, the Nordic welfare regimes developed welfare systems based on state feminism and third stage or ‘gender reconstruction’ feminism (Kjeldstad, 2001:77). Kjeldstad explained that the first stage of Nordic feminism in the early part of the twentieth century was concerned with basic political and equality rights. The second wave came in the 1960s, and was concerned with employment rights and access to positions of power with the Nordic welfare regimes. The second stage continued in the 1970s, which heralded the introduction of parental leave schemes, public childcare infrastructures and the reform of health-care systems to make them more ‘women friendly’ and ‘child friendly’. The third stage, from the late 1980s, was focused on ‘gender reconstruction’ and highlighting the unfair distribution of housework and child-rearing (2001:77). Nordic third-stage feminism promoted the post-patriarchal social citizenship roles of fathers through the conceptualisation and implementation of new types of individualised and non-transferable social insurance benefits. Third-stage feminism campaigned for new forms of decommodification for working parents, and the re-familisation of childcare to mitigate against the social risks of fatherhood and motherhood (Kjeldstad, 2001:80). Far from signalling an end to secular feminism and cultural

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libertarianism, third stage or ‘gender reconstruction’ feminism promoted the ‘role of men as fathers’ and concepts of autonomy and mutuality (Kjeldstad, 2001). Therborn suggested that the decline of patriarchy might be seen as one of the lasting legacies of Eastern European communism (2004:85), and as if to illustrate the case, the East European welfare regimes of Estonia and Slovenia have joined the Nordic welfare regimes at the vanguard of re-constructing the social citizenship and gender equality roles of post-patriarchal fatherhood. Melby et  al. (2006) and Wetterberg et  al. (2001) argued that the 1915 Scandinavian marriage laws and the ‘Nordic model of marriage’ were the beginning of the end for patriarchy, and the origins of Western welfare state development. This type of analysis was mirrored by claims that Confucian heritages and legacies of patriarchal fatherhood held back welfare state development within the East Asian model of welfare and were to blame for ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘welfare laggardness’, particularly in China (Peng and Wong, 2010:657). Strong marketisation in China and free market ideologies in the USA combined in both countries with the legislative protection of marriage to foster the emergence of neo-patriarchal practices shaped by market inequities and private familial welfare arrangements, and in the case of the USA by religious resurgence. On the other hand, the Swedish model, and to a lesser extent, the Japanese model, promoted gender equality and de-patriarchalisation. The two regimes of Sweden and the USA represented divergent varieties of patriarchy and fatherhood, with the American model promoting marriage and the Swedish model promoting parental individualisation outside marriage, inside marriage and after marriage. The American and Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes shared what Sommestad labelled as moral loyalty to male-breadwinning (1998), and what O’Sullivan et  al. labelled as individualist approaches to childcare, which served to strengthen the malebreadwinner and female carer model (2009:248). Conclusion and discussion The central hypothesis of the two regimes of fatherhood model was that American and Sweden represented divergent, and internationally influential, ways of thnking about fatherhood. The paradigmatic features of the American model included a globally infuential ethological and exponential canon of literature on the significance of the role of the father to child development (Lamb, 1975; Russell, 2001; Shwalb et  al., 2003; Lamb et  al., 2010). The second paradigmatic feature of the American model of fatherhood was the invention in 1974 of an internationally influential Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme, based on the principle of cost recovery (Hansen, 1999; Lerman and Sorensen, 2001). The third paradigmatic featue of the American model was an internationally influential canon of American sociolology on the crisis of fatherlessness (Dennis, 1992; Dennis and Erdos, 1992; Blankenhorn, 1995; Popenoe 1996; Shwalb et al., 2003). American and British fatherless-family perspectives were linked by Akerlof (1998) and Pringle (1995) to underclass theories, and a conservative view of illegitimacy associated with Charles Murray (1984). Hobson and Morgan raised concerns that

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depictions of the crisis of fatherhod had become ‘woven into the warp of a crisis in the welfare state’ (2002:2). The fourth paradigmatic feature of the American model was a mass fathers’ rights movement, which valorised marriage and work for men, and neo-patriarchal Christian promotion of corporal punishment for children (Gottman, 1998; Gavanas, 2002). The paradigmatic features of the Swedish model of fatherhood included a unique approach to social policy and welfare state development based on political and epistemological cooperation between Nordic countries and the regular establishment of commissions over the course of the twentieth century, involving the epistemological communities of scholars from the fields of gender studies and family policy (Bergman and Hobson, 2002; Chronholm, 2009; Lundqvist, 2011; Haas et al., 2012). Kaufman argued that in ‘no other country the inspiration to family policy has been shaped so strongly by social scientists’ (2002:469). The second paradigmatic feature of the Swedish model of fatherhood was the invention of parental leave schemes for fathers and mothers in 1974 and their subsequent expansion in 1995 and 2002, to include individualised and non-transferable father quotas or daddy months (Bergman and Hobson, 2002; Klinth, 2008; Chronholm, 2009). The exponential public discourse in Sweden about the importance of father-involvement in early childcare was developed through decisive political leadership, grassroots feminism and government-sponsored media campaigns (Bergman and Hobson, 2002:100; Dermott, 2006:630; Klinth, 2008; Chronholm, 2009; Haas et al., 2012:8). The third paradigmatic feature of the Swedish model was the provision of advanced maintenance schemes or state-guaranteed maintenance payments to lone mothers, and the individualisation of child maintenance arrangements and childcare arrangements to support a policy of joint-custody after divorce, and shared parenting between single mothers and non-resident fathers (Sultan et al., 2012; Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011). The two regimes of fatherhood model emphasised the competing international influence of Sweden and the USA and investigated evidence of influence in Great Britain and Ireland as representatives of the Anglo-Saxon model of welfare regimes, Japan and China as representatives of the East Asian model of welfare regimes, and the European Union as a unique political entity with powers to set legally enforceable supra-national standards across twenty-eight countries spanning several welfare regime models (Fusilier, 2009). Table 3 presents a summary of the six welfare regimes featured in the case study in relation to decommodification through parental leave and shared parenting policies for non-resident fathers, plus child support obligations for non-resident fathers. The following sections give a summary of each country case study and the European Union. Great Britain Great Britain exhibited strong evidence of American influences on the introduction of a cost-recovery model of child support enforcement under the Child Support Act (1991) and the establishment of the Child Support Agency. The British case took a tentative Nordic turn through the introduction of the Draft Statutory

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Table  3  Decommodification for fathers, child support obligations and sharedparenting policies for non-resident fathers

Sweden USA Great Britain Ireland China Japan

Parental leave decommodification

Child support obligations

Shared-parenting policies for non-resident fathers

High Low Medium/low Low Low Medium/low

Low High High Medium/low Low Low

High Low Low Low Low Low

Instrument:  Shared Parental Leave 2014. However, the proposed legislation fell short of individualised or non-transferable parental leave for fathers, and was, in essence, a mother-mediated access scheme to shared maternity leave at low-wage replacement levels. The British epistemological communities of scholars were universally critical of the treatment of fathers by the child support enforcement programme and British epistemological feminism took a Nordic turn towards the idea of a feminist uchronia based on gender equality in relation to care, paid work and liberation for mothers from the burden of being primary carers in families (Lister, 2009; Featherstone, 2010). Ireland The Irish case exhibited strong evidence of American influences on the introduction of the cost-recovery model of child support enforcement under the Social Welfare Act of 1989. Allied to this were further American influences on the introduction of time-limited welfare for single mothers from 2014, when the age limit of the youngest child for lone-parent welfare entitlement purposes was reduced to seven years of age. However, the Irish case illustrated that low-income non-resident fathers, who were the majority of non-resident fathers, were not actively pursued for child maintenance. The Irish case mirrored the USA by having no paid parental leave for fathers and no anticipated introduction of father-friendly social policies. The Irish epistemological communities of scholars were influenced by the American model in relation to patricentric focuses on fatherhood and child development (McKeown, 2001), but took a Nordic turn on the issue of individualisation of parental leave, and on the importance of father-involvement to gender equality (Daly, 2011). China The Chinese case exhibited nascent influences of the American model on patricentric research, where there was a ‘deepening Chinese interest in Western fathering’ (Shwalb et al., 2010:343). Otherwise the Chinese case was significant because the new context of marketisation was understood to be leading to the revival of

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‘some ancient forms of patriarchal culture’ (Therborn, 2004:122). Alternatively, neo-patriarchal arrangements were emerging based on the patrimonial welfare regime promotion by the Communist Party of marriage, marketisation and familial-based welfare. Within the new context of marketisation, young men were provided with privileged familial access to home ownership, which was protected in the case of divorce by implicitly neo-patriarchal property ownership laws (Fincher, 2014). The elevated status of marriage and familial based private welfare arrangements in the new context of hyper-marketisation located China much closer to the American model of fatherhood. Japan The Japanese case exhibited strong evidence of the American model of fatherhood on patricentric research in Japan where discourses of weakened and ineffectual fathering under the rubric of ‘Once Confucian Now Fatherless’ echoed American sociological perspectives on fatherlessness (Shwalb et  al., 2010:345). Moreover, Japenese and East Asian epistemology on fatherhood was strongly allied to, and directly influenced by, the American ethological perspectives on the role of fatherhood in child development (Shwalb et  al., 2010:365). On the other hand, the Japanese welfare regime took a distinct Nordic turn in the 1990s towards gender equality and government promotion of parental leave and father-involvement, with prominent public support from Japanese scholars and upward pressure from grassroots women’s organisations and women’s trade union bodies (Lambert, 2007; Toivonen, 2007). Paternity leave was available for up to one year if the mother was working three days a week, but low-wage replacement levels kept take-up by fathers down to 0.57 per cent in 2006 (Shwalb et al., 2010:355). However, Fukuda’s welfare regime study of comparative family friendly policies illustrated that Japanese parental leave and maternity leave policies were more generous than those of the UK and Ireland, which were positioned together as a unique two-nation cluster below Japan and the rest of Europe (2003:40). The Fukuda study illustrated that when compared with the European Anglo-Saxon welfares of Great Britain and Ireland, Japan was far from being exceptional. Fukuda concluded that ‘family friendly policies in Japan are not very different from those in European countries’ (2003:43). The ubiquitous promotion of marriage by the Chinese and Japanese welfare regimes and concerns with falling fertility reduced the significance of non-resident fatherhood and child support arrangements. This was further evidenced by the phenomenon of young non-married women being stigmatised as ‘leftover women’ in China (To, 2013) and ‘parasite singles’ in Japan, which in the Japanese case also stigmatised the purchasing power of young single professional women living in the family home (Seeleib-Kaiser and Toivonen, 2011). The European Union In the case of the European Union there was strong evidence of Swedish influence on the development of the Parental Leave Directives of 1996 and 2009 and on

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the recommendation for individualised non-transferable father quotas (Fusilier, 2009:252). The European epistemological communities were drafted on to bodies such as the European Observatory on Nation Family Policies, where a normative focus on gender equality and on men’s social citizenship roles as fathers, mirrored, and was influenced by, the Swedish model of fatherhood (Dumon, 2004). Moreover, scholars such as Peter Moss promoted Sweden and Iceland as the gold-standard of parental leave regimes to bodies such as the Quality of Childhood Group in the European Parliament (2011). In a typical example of the Scandivisation of the European social model, and the influence of Nordic ways of thinking on EU social policy debates, Hakovirta and Rantalaiho recommended shared parenting and the individualisation of welfare entitlements to accommodate family diversity across the European Union (2011). On the other hand, the EU Convention on the International Recovery of Child Support and Other Forms of Family Maintenance (2007), the Protocol on the Law Applicable to Maintenance Obligations (2007) and the Maintenance Regulation (EC) No 4/2009 all reflected child support enforcement agendas similar to the American and Anglo-Saxon model of fatherhood. The question ‘does father research matter’ could be alternatively phrased ‘to whom does it matter and why?’ A  vast exponential canon of psychological patricentric-focused studies spanning over four decades failed to impact significantly on levels of father-involvement in the USA or the Anglo-Saxon welfare regimes. Alternatively, in Sweden, epistemological feminism, social policy perspectives and government commissions shaped a revolution in levels of father-involvement in the first year of childcare (Kaufman, 2002; Chronholm, 2009; Haas et al., 2012). Epistemological feminism also set European-wide agendas for shared parenting outside marriage, within marriage and after marriage (Hakovirta and Rantalaiho, 2011). The Nordic welfare regimes, and to an emerging extent, the Eastern European welfare regimes of Slovenia and Estonia and the Southern European welfare regime of Portugal all illustrated that a patricentric research focus on the father–child dyad and the role of the father in child development was not required to increase father-involvement in childcare. Instead, welfare ideologies, which emphasised social protection, decommodification, individualisation, children’s rights, gender equality and social equality successfully increased father-involvement and revolutionised the gender roles of parenting for families in the twenty-first century.

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Index

Abbot, Douglas, A., 113 Aldous, Jane, 7, 11, 24, 42, 132, 141 alliances civic and epistemological, 102 cross-class, 12 cross-national, 102 women, 14 American child-development perspectives, 105 American exceptionalism, 22 American family decline, 41, 132 values, 40 American influences, 6 American occupation, 106 American perspectives, 2 ancestor worship, 114 androgyny, 11 anti-child-poverty strategy, 21, 98, 127 anti-feminist backlash, 24 Arts, Wil, 14 attachment theory, 36 Australia, 13, 17, 26 Austria, 13, 26 autonomy, 19, 27, 57, 59, 92, 121, 124 Bambra, Clare, 5, 14 Barrett, Robert, 10 Barrett, Michelle, 12 Basic Law for a Gender-Equal Society, 108 Belgium, 13, 26 Bergman, Helena, 23, 25, 46, 48, 50, 54, 137 Between Sex and Power, 24, 47, 133 Beveridgean era welfare, 66

Bjornberg, Ulla, 56 Blankenhorn, David, 3, 11, 41, 107, 129, 132 Bleijenbergh, Inge, 14 Borchorst Anette, 13 Bowlby, John, 36, 123 Bradley Amendment, 34 Bradshaw, Jonathan, 20, 21, 70, 83 Brandth Berit, 51, 61, 117, 123 breadwinner role, 66, 92 breastfeeding, 22, 51 British fiasco, 83 Britto, Tonya, 25, 45, 127 Brown Susan, and Bumpus, Mathew, 39 Bryson, Valerie, 67 Burgess, Adrienne, 11 Bush, George, W., 25, 135 Cameron, David, 71 Cammett, Ann, 17, 26, 30, 33, 34, 45, 125 Canada, 13, 20, 21, 98 Cancian, Maria, 17, 35, 125 Casey, Timothy, 20 cash for care schemes, 51, 52, 63, 123 Castells, Manuel, 4, 6, 11 Chamberlayne, Prue, 5, 11 child development, 6, 25, 36, 40, 48, 108, 113, 130, 131, 140 child poverty, 8, 19, 71, 86 child poverty reduction, 26 Child Support Agency, 70 child support debts, 18, 34 Child Support Enforcement (CSE) programme, 30, 36, 125

159

Index children’s rights, 27, 55, 91, 121, 140 China, 133, 138 Chinese Communist leadership, 114 Chinese Communist Revolution, 2 Chinese father–daugher relationships, 118 Chinese National Bureau of Statistics, 116 Chinese patriarchy, 113 Choi, Young Jun, 104 Christian fundamentalism, 25, 135 Chronholm, Anders, 23, 46, 53, 112, 132 Clearing House on International Developments in Child, Youth and Family Policies, 16 Clinton, Bill, 30 Clegg, Nick, 69 Confucian fatherhood, 2 Confucian values, 104 Confucianism, 106, 114, 134, 139 Cook, Kay, 17, 126 Coontz, Stephanie, 42 coordinated-market economies, 13, 99 Corden, Anne, 20 corporal punishment, 42, 113, 137 cost-recovery model, 7, 17, 26, 29, 65, 72, 74, 86, 125, 126 Crowley, Jocelyn Elise, 33, 127 Daly, Mary, 12, 88, 94 deadbeat dads, 30, 36, 44, 83 Dean, Hartley, 68 decline of patriarchy, 1, 4, 7, 9, 24, 25, 47, 57, 85, 105, 117, 118, 133 decommodification, 9, 13, 14, 122, 140 deficit mode of fatherhood, 36 Democratic Party of Japan, 117 Denmark, 20, 21, 26, 52, 56, 57, 90, 94, 95, 103, 122, 146 de-patriarchalisation, 11, 24, 57, 121, 122, 134 Dermott, Esther, 65, 66 developmental perspective, 76 Deven, Fred, 102 dismantling gender equality, 52 divorce, 11, 16, 41, 42, 45, 57, 97, 112, 126, 137 double track paradox, 52, 117, 123 dual-earner dual-carer model, 50, 51 dual system theory, 25, 27, 133

Dumon, Wilfried, 90 Duvander, Ann-Zofie, 49, 53, 123, 124 East-Asian exceptionalism, 104 East-Asian model, 104 East Germany, 96 Eastern European feminism, 133 Edgren, Lars, 56, 124, 133 elaborate patriarchy, 118 Ellingsaeter, Anne-Lise, 49, 51, 52, 123 emancipatory politics of welfare states, 14 equal parents, 122 Equal Rights Amendment, 24 equality architecture, 9, 101, 102, 103 Esobedo, Anna, 96 Esping-Andersen, Gosta, 5, 15, 27 Estonia, 26, 96, 97, 136 ethological quest, 40 EU Parental Leave Directives 123 European Commission, 93 European father involvement continuum, 95 European Observatory on National Family Policies, 90 European Social partners, 89 European Union, 1, 8, 46, 65, 102 Europeanisation of Scandinavian social policies, 91 Evolution of Child Support Policy, The, 17, 31 Eydal, Guony Bjork, 23, 49 Fahey, Tony, 75, 85 Family and Medical Leave Act, 43 family friendly corporations, 109 Fanning, Bryan, 74 father quotas, 4, 26, 51, 96, 122, 137 fatherless America, 3, 40 fatherlessness, 6, 7, 45, 127 Featherstone, Brid, 67 Fehlberg, Belinda, 19 Female Forum, 96 fertility, 35, 63, 92, 96, 108, 111, 139 filial piety, 114 Fincher, Leta Hong, 115 Finland, 19, 20, 26, 48, 51, 52, 54, 60, 97, 110 flight from fatherhood, 4, 23, 127 fluid labour markets, 13

160 Folbre, Nancy, 27, 100, 133 France, 12, 22, 26, 90, 134 Fukuda, Nobutaka, 104, 139 Furstenberg, Frank F., 40 Fusulier, Bernard, 89, 93, 123 Garfinkel, Irwin, 17, 30, 31, 125 Gavanas, Anne, 42, 137 Gelissen, John, 14 gender blind, 5, 25, 99 gender equality, 23, 122 gender relations of care, 9 gender role, 23, 47, 62, 132 gender squeeze, 52 Germany, 9, 13, 20, 21, 22, 26, 90, 91, 94, 95, 99, 103, 110, 122, 133, 134, 143, 145, 147, 155 Gíslason, Ingolfur, V., 23, 52, 121 global feminism, 24, 133 Gornick, Janet C., 44 Gottman, John M., 42, 137 Gramsci, Antonio, 12 grassroots feminism, 3, 9, 137 grassroots mothers’ groups, 111 grassroots welfare activism, 102 grassroots women’s mobilisation, 50 Great Britain, 4, 134, 137, 138 Gustafsson Siv, 58, 121 Haas, Linda, 3, 46, 47, 51, 94, 122, 137 Hagen, Kare, 91 Hakovirta, Mia, 53, 97, 102 half each approach, 50 Hansen, Drew D., 29, 30 Henneck, Rachel, 22, 111 Hernes, Helga Maria, 13 hierarchical Japanese corporate culture, 108 High Commission for Family and Gender Equality, 96 high wage compensation, 15, 68, 122 Hiillamo, Heikki, 55 Hoa-Hoa Dahlgren, 15, 48 Hobsbawn, Eric, 25, 135 Hobson, Barbara, 10, 15, 23, 25, 46, 48, 50, 54, 56, 137 household savings, 104 human reproduction, 58 Hungary, 21 Huttunen, Jouko, 60

Index Iceland, 22, 95, 140 illegitimacy, 72, 128 immigrant children, 123 immigrant mothers, 123 inclusive social insurance model, 104 individualised child maintenance, 46 individualistic and market-based model, 104 individualisation, 4, 16, 21, 53, 62, 121, 140 of welfare entitlements, 98 ineffectual fathering, 107 International Child Custody, 98 international continuum, 6 International Labour Organization, 89 International Network of Child Support Scholars, 16 International Network on Leave Policies and Research, 21, 73 intersectionality, 8, 101, 103, 123 Ireland, 4, 12, 13, 138, 139 Islamic (Iranian) Revolution, 25 Jackson, Tim, 99 Janus-faced approach, 35 Japan, 1, 13, 99, 133, 138, 139 Japan Teachers’ Union, 111 Japanese Consitution, 106 Japanese education-centred mothers, 107 Japanese employer intransigence, 104 Japanese fertility, 105 Japanese lone mothers, 113 Japanese path, 107 Japanese Socialist Party, 111 Jensen, Jane, 12, 128 joint-custody, 7, 46, 99, 137 Kamerman, Sheila B., 19, 21, 94 Karintus, Marta, 96 Karu, Marre, 96 Kaufman, Franz-Xaver, 91, 132 Kemeny, Jim, 12 Kennedy, Finola, 75, 85 Kiely, Gabriel, 75 Kjeldstad, Randi, 135 Klinth, Roger, 2, 23, 48, 50, 137 Kochan, Thomas A., 99 Korean fathers, 106 Korpi, Walter, 12, 100, 101 Kullberg, Christian, 47, 59 Kvande, Elin, 51, 61, 117, 123

161

Index Lamb, Michael E., 10, 29, 36, 45, 59, 107, 120, 130 Lammi-Taskula, Johanna, 61 Lammy, David, 71 Land, Hilary, 66 left leaning parties, 53, 121 left-over women, 115, 139 Leira, Arnlaug, 51 Lerman, Robert, 17, 29, 31, 120 Levmore, Saul, 22, 45 Lewis, Jane, 4, 12, 68, 73 Liable Relative Provision, 74 liberal market economies, 13, 99 Lister, Ruth, 67 lone-mother poverty, 20 long-term care, 105 low-income families, 34, 124 low-income fathers, 34, 81, 103, 124 low-income mothers, 124 low income replacement levels, 22 low-income women, 100 MacLean, Mavis, 19 macro-structural frameworks, 122 Maldonado, Laurie, 20 male breadwinner ideology, 66 market-based privatisation, 118 marketisation, 118 marriage benefit, 77 mass incarceration, 17, 33, 125 mass men’s movements, 29 maternity leave, 43, 69, 110 McGinnity, Frances, 78 McKeown, Kieran, 76, 80 McLanahan, Sara S., 35, 76 MDRC Parents Fair Share Demonstration Progam, 35 means testing, 13 Meiji Restoration, 106, 134 Melby, Kari, 7, 47, 57, 118, 133 Meredith, William H., 113 Meyers, Marcia, K., 35 Ming, Zheng Fu, 113 Mintz, Stephen, 39, 47, 107 mixed economy of welfare, 14 Moberg, Eva, 122 Moral Majority, 33 Morgan, David, 56 Moss, Peter, 73, 92, 94, 95

mother–child dyad, 36 Mothers’ Association, 111 Mrs. Doubtfire, 11 Murray, Charles, 3, 72, 129 Myrdal, Alva, 58, 120, 132 Natalier, Kristin, 17, 126 national family wars, 41 National Fatherhood Initiative, 30 National Partnership for Women and Families, 43 National Women’s Education Centre, 109 negligent provider, 54 neo-familialism, 55 Nepomnyaschy, Lenna, 30 new father ideologies, 37, 64, 121 New Zealand, 13 no fault divorce, 115 non-transferable parental leave, 7, 62, 93, 117, 134, 137 Nordic Council of Ministers, 26 Nordic countries, 13 Nordic feminism, 6, 13, 122 3rd stage wave, 135 Nordic nirvana, 67 Nordic-style family policy, 110 Norway, 7, 23, 26, 49, 51, 97 Norwegian Men’s Panel, 50 O’Brien, Margaret, 2, 21, 68, 92, 95, 122 O’Sullivan, Oriel, 15, 136 OECD, 16 Olah, Bernhardt, 23 One Child Family Planning Policy, 115, 119 One Parent Family Payment, 74 Orloff, Ann Shola, 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 19, 121, 133 paid paternal leave, 90 Pall, Katre, 96 Papandreou, Vasso, 90 parasite singles, 109, 139 Parbring, Boss, 50 parental choice, 51, 63, 123 Parental Leave Review Group, 79 parental role differentiations, 116 parental-leave-poor countries, 96 parental-leave-rich countries, 96 Parsonian functionalism, 36

162 paternal involvement construct, 37, 59 patriarchal assumptions, 92 patriarchal-familial dividend, 105 patricentric, 29, 130 patrilocalism powers, 118 patrimonial marriage system, 105 Peng, Ito, 4, 104, 105, 118 permissive fathering, 106 perpetuating patriarchal structures, 12 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 25, 32, 44, 124 Plotnick, Robert, 34 policy regimes and fatherhood regimes, 10, 15 Popenoe, David, 11, 36, 40, 41, 42 Porter, Noriko, 109 Portugal, 9, 95, 96, 140 post-patriarchal fatherhood, 136 preference theory, 66 primary carers, 138 Pringle, Keith, 72, 129 prison, 17, 33, 34, 125 private patriarchy, 3, 5 privatisation of housing, 104 Promise Keepers, 30, 42 public patriarchy, 5, 25 pure capitalism, 100 Quality of Childhood Group, 8, 88, 94, 102 Quebec, 21 Rantalaiho, Minna, 97, 102 Ray, Rebecca, 44 Raymo, James, M., 112 Reagan, Ronald, 25, 127 Real Utopias project, 67 religious authoritarian fatherhood, 42 religious resurgence, 136 re-patriarchalisation, 9, 25 replacement levels, 43, 108, 112 high, 101 low, 138, 139 reproduction going public, 49 Review of the One-Parent Family Payment, 18 Richardson, Dominic, 20, 72, 127 Robinson, Bryan, 10 Roggeband, Conny, 14

Index Role of the Father in Child Development, The, 2, 29, 130, 140 Rostgaard, Tine, 51, 94 rule of the father, 4, 11, 62, 133 Rush, Michael, 3, 40, 74 Russell, Graeme, 29 Russell, Helen, 78 Russian Revolution, 24, 133 salaryman father, 118 Sano, Yoshie, 105, 109 Sandqvist, Karin, 48, 61 Sarkadi, Anna, 26, 63, 131 Scandinavian Law Commission, 57 Scandinavian marriage laws, 47, 62, 128 Scandinavian perspectives, 2 Scandinavian social policy, 91 Scandinavian women’s optimism, 13 Scandivisation, 140 of the European social model, 103 Schmitt, John, 44 Schoppa, Leonard J., 111 secondary parents, 23, 49, 122 second revolution in family law, 45 Seeleib-Kaiser, Martin, 14, 104, 117, 124, 139 shared parenting, 97 Shemilt, Ian, 122 Shimoebisu, Miyuki, 108 Shwalb, David, 107, 108 Siim, Birte, 13 Skinner, Christine, 70, 83 Slovenia, 97, 122 Smith, Alison, 15, 27, 95 social care arrangements, 110 social citizenship, 26, 63, 73 gender, 12 post-patriarchal, 135 roles of fathers, 120, 140 social construction of fatherhood, 122 Social Democratic Conference, 54 social democratic features, 109 Social Democratic Government, 92 Social Democratic Party, 50, 96 social democratic project, 54 Social Democratic Women’s Association, 49 social dialogue, 89 social politics of fatherhood, 2, 9, 12, 15, 25, 53, 74, 91, 126 social protection, 26, 79, 100, 103, 104, 140

163

Index social stratification, 14 Socialist Party, 96 Solomon-Fears, Carmen, 35, 126 Sommestad, Lena, 26, 58, 120 Sorensen, Elaine, 17, 31, 120 Southern European welfare regimes, 21, 95, 140 Spain, 20, 90, 95 Springboard Family Support Initiative, 76 Stacey, Judith, 41 Stafford, Frank, P., 58, 121 state feminism, 26, 57, 103, 117 Stockholm marriages, 7, 47, 133 Stoltenberg, Karin, 41 Stopnik, Nada, 96 strengthening families, 18, 72, 80 Strindberg, August, 56 Sultan, Tipu, 19, 46, 55, 126 Summerfield, Tracey, 126 Survey on Work Assistance for Single Mothers, 112 Sweden, 12, 19, 23, 26, 67, 69, 78, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 112, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 132, 138 Sweden gold-standard, 95 ideal type, 102 premier league, 103 Swedish Commission on Family and Marriage, 23 Swedish influences, 6 Switzerland, 13 Talcott, Parsons, 41 Tamis-Lemonda, Catherine, 36, 45, 130 TANF, 27, 44, 124, 125 Temporary Disability Insurance, 43 theories of power, 12 Therborn, Goran, 6, 24, 47, 57, 97, 105, 106, 117, 118, 124, 128, 135, 139 Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism, 5, 14, 120 Toivonen, Tuukka, 14, 104, 110, 116, 117, 139 Torremocha, Isabel Madruga, 16 Trade Union Congress, 69 trans-national influence of the Swedish model, 92 turnip dads, 45

uchronia, 67, 138 underclass theories, 3, 72, 129 United Kingdom, 11, 12, 13, 113 United Nations ‘International Year of the Family’, 90 United Nations Convention on Human Rights, 24, 133 USA, 1, 3, 10, 16, 19, 22, 27, 29, 72, 83, 113, 121, 124, 127, 138 varieties of capitalism, 8, 13, 99, 103 velourpappa, 48 Verloo, Mieke, 101, 123 vulnerable fathers, 74 wage replacement, 101 wage-replacement levels, 108 Walby, Sylvia, 5, 12, 25, 101, 123 Wall, Karin, 96 wall of separation, 32 Waller, Maureen, 34 weak Japanese fathering, 108 welfare effort, 13 welfare ideologies, 45, 140 conservative, 111 neo-liberal, 88 residual, 5 universal, 5 welfare regime theory, 4, 5, 12, 13, 120 welfare state, redesign of, 21 Welfare State and Women Power, 49 welfarisation of family law, 32 West German policymakers, 96 Wetterberg, Christina-Carlsson, 7, 57, 118, 133 Williams, Donald, 15, 27, 95 Williams, Stephen, 66 Women’s Bureau of the Ministry of Labour, 109 Wong, Joseph, 4, 104, 105, 118 Work–Life Balance Charter, 109 Xia, Yan Ruth, 114 Yamada, Masahiro, 109 Yasumoto, Saori, 105 Zhou, Yanfei, 112

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