Paper to be presented at the 4^th European Feminist Research Conference, Bologna, September 28^th-October 1^st, 2000.

 

 

 

NEGOTIATING NEEDS, REDEFINING ENTITLEMENTS

The articulation of claims on child care by organised women in Italy and Denmark

 

 

Chiara Bertone

Department of Social Sciences

Torino University

bertone@cisi.unito.it

 

 

 

 

Introduction

The importance of the role of public institutions in the distribution of responsibility for child care and for its costs in welfare systems and its crucial implications for gender relations have been highlighted in particular by feminist research (see e.g. McLaughlin and Glendinning 1994; Knijn and Kremer 1997; Daly and Lewis 2000). By legislative regulation, cash transfers and services, the state, in its central and local articulations, influences the distribution of responsibility for care among the potential providers: besides public institutions, these can be the mother, the father, the family, kinship, the market, non-profit organisations, informal networks.

To a different extent and in different ways, a broad range of women’s organisations have engaged in making claims for public provisions with the purpose of orienting this distribution. This paper is based on a comparative study of the claims that women’s organisations have addressed to public institutions on child care issues in Italy and Denmark, from the 1960s to the 1970s (for Italy) and early 1980s (for Denmark). The actors included in this study are women’s organisations and groups that identify political reform as a means to improve women’s situation and have engaged to a relevant extent in voicing claims for public measures regarding child care. They consist in the main autonomous women’s organisations, women’s organisations or units in political parties and trade unions, and groups of the new feminist movement, to the extent that they engaged in addressing claims on child care to political institutions.[1]

The study has been aimed at describing the definitions of needs and interests of women and of the other subjects on whose behalf these claims are made, and at interpreting them as outcomes of strategic choices. It is meant as a contribution to develop interpretations grasping the situated mechanisms of their construction, changing in time and in the different national contexts.

The analytical perspective

The present child care policies are outcomes of past decision-making processes, in which the claims articulated by the diverse actors were grounded upon different, and often contrasting, models of family and gender relations. Only recently, though, have the gender dynamics of these processes become object of research, with the contribution of studies on women’s agency, a term used here to indicate an analytical perspective characterised by attention to women as actors in welfare state change (Koven and Michel 1993; Bock and Thane 1991).

This is also the perspective chosen for my study. Nevertheless, while the studies on women’s agency have been mainly aimed at assessing the impact of women’s activity on the policies, my research focuses more strictly upon the processes of construction of the claims.

My focus upon these processes is due to the choice of a certain perspective in addressing the question of interests and needs ascribed to social groups or categories. By studying the articulation of claims by women’s organisations, in fact, I intend to consider women’s interests and needs, but also those of the other categories mentioned in the claims, primarily children, as outcomes of processes of construction (Pringle and Watson 1992), since demands for child care arrangements also imply certain definitions of the subjects on whose behalf they are made.

The purpose of the study is twofold: to analyse the contents of the claims and to interpret the claimsmaking processes by reconstructing the strategies of the actors involved.

As regards the first purpose, I intend to take up Fraser’s (1989) proposal and regard the claims as interventions in the political “struggle over needs interpretation”, where demands for governmental provisions are at the same time claims for the definition of the needs of certain social groups as legitimate political issues, and for a certain interpretation of their contents.

Two aspects of the claims are therefore identified: the first one is given by the demands for public provisions, the second one by the arguments used to justify these demands.

 

 

Table 1 - Components of the claims

1. Demands

- who should care?

- who should pay?

- how should care be provided?

2. Justifications

- whose needs?

- on the basis of which entitlements?

 

The demands. In the definition of the general object of the demands, namely state intervention on child care, different elements can be identified and must be considered in their interplay. The state, in its central or local articulations, can assume direct responsibility for the care of children by providing public child care services, but also financial provisions have a crucial influence over the distribution of caregiving. For instance, access to public or private child care services depends not only on their availability, but also on their costs for parents; financial compensation for maternity or parental leave can define at the same time the kind of economic conditions for mothers’ (or fathers’) full-time care for children.

Other specific aspects of the provisions demanded can as well have fundamental importance in determining the meaning of a claim. There can be contention, for instance, on who manages services or has influence over their organisation (the central state, state-controlled institutions, local administrations, parents), the age of children to which they should be provided, opening hours, location, qualifications of the staff, etc.

Finally, legislative regulation is also an aspect of state intervention that has to be taken into account. The definitions of legal obligations of family members and relatives for care and the financial support of children, and other aspects of family law, as well as labour market regulations regarding leave arrangements have, in fact, an important impact on the distribution of the responsibility for child care and for its costs.

These considerations point to the need to include in the definition of state intervention on child care a broad range of measures. There can be different possible delimitations of these measures, according to the chosen criteria, as it has been discussed in relation to the broader concept of family policies (Kamerman and Kahn 1978; Hantrais and Letablier 1996; Borchorst 1998). Here, I will refer to public intervention on child care as a field of policies embracing the measures more directly influencing the distribution of the duty and costs of child rearing and care.

The demands cover a broad range of social protection measures relating to child care. I focus in particular on regulations on rights and financial compensation for maternity and parental leaves and on public provision of services, by financing or direct management. I also take into account family allowances and tax deduction, to the extent that they have been discussed as measures also concerning specifically the coverage of the costs of caregiving. Besides, my focus is only on the care of children under school age.

In the claims, a preferred combination of these measures is defined, in which public institutions are assigned a certain role in the distribution of child care duties and of their costs among the different subjects in an ideal welfare system or regime (Paci 1989; Esping-Andersen 1990). The models outlined thus define who should take care of children, but also who should bear the costs of caring and what should be the features of the caregiving tasks (Jenson 1997). These models also have important implications for women, since they presume, in general or for specific categories, different ideal combinations of work outside home and caregiving work in the family.[2]

 

The justifications. The second aspect of the claims, consisting in the arguments used to justify the demands, is in turn composed of two elements. The first one is given by the subjects on behalf of whom claims are voiced, i.e. the social groups that are entitled to claim public support. The second aspect is given by the bases of this entitlement, defined by the aim that a form of public support should achieve. It is by reference to this aim, in fact, that response by the state can be presented in terms of moral obligation.

This analytical structure enables me to investigate whether, and in which cases, claims are grounded on references to women’s needs. By doing so, I intend to establish to what extent the demands for a certain provision are at the same time “struggles to secure the political status of women’s needs” (Fraser 1989, 158), and for women’s entitlement to be themselves interpreters of their needs.

However, in claims on child care made on behalf of women, their needs are strictly intertwined with children’s needs. And, in turn, in claims voiced on behalf of children, one can privilege their needs, those of women, of other categories (families, workers) or other requirements, such as shortage of labour force or demographic concerns (Riley 1983; Bock and Thane 1991; Koven and Michel 1993; Pedersen 1993. Therefore it is important to understand whether women’s needs are defined in accord or in potential conflict with those of other subjects and which ones are given priority.

Moreover, claims made on behalf of women can refer to women in general, but also to specific groups, revealing which dimensions of differentiation among women are defined as relevant: class belonging, relations with the labour market, familial situation.

As regards the bases of women’s entitlement named in the claims, it is also important, although not always easy, to distinguish between direct entitlement to public support and indirect one, when women’s needs are incorporated in those of their family and subordinated to them (Sainsbury 1996). “The extent to which people are treated as individuals or as members of a family unit” (Millar and Warman 1995, 5) is actually one aspect of which comparative studies of welfare states and family policies have pointed out the fundamental relevance for women.

Women’s needs, and thereby the subject «women», can be constructed in different ways. Riley (1983, 193) effectively discusses the relation between the forms of definition of the subjects of needs and how these needs are defined. Needs can refer to fundamental and unchanging attributes generated by a social role: «One effect of the fixing and freezing of the Mother as a social category is to create an inflexible notion of needs as well to accompany this social role». A less normative definition of «women» or «mothers» requires, instead, needs to be related to the different and changing subjectivities and social positions, opening a broader space to choice possibilities and to recognition of differences.

 

As regards the second goal of the study, the interpretation of the claimsmaking processes is aimed at reconstructing the strategic choices that have shaped these processes, identifying the actors involved and the perceived opportunity structures on which their choices were based. This allows me to point out the context-specific mechanisms of which the claims are product (Adams 1998; on the concept of mechanisms, see Hedström and Swedberg 1998).

The relevant features to be taken into account thus concern both the actors and the social, political and institutional contexts on whose basis the actors have identified the opportunities and constraints conditioning their strategies.

As regards the actors, i.e. the women’s organisations and groups voicing claims on child care, the relevant elements of variation in time and across the two countries have been detected along two dimensions. The first one is the degree of conflict and co-operation among them. The second one is the degree of integration in institutional politics, including the co-operation with or integration within political parties. As far as context is concerned, I have focused in particular upon the features of child care arrangements and the normative bases of public intervention on child care.

The setting: comparing claims in Italy and Denmark

The study discussed here is thought as a contribution to understanding upon which past experiences the activity of women’s organisations is, or can be, grounded, in the present discussion on child care policies in two European countries, namely Italy and Denmark, and to highlight their specificity by contrasting them.

The chosen historical period, from the 1960s to the early 1980s, witnessed in both countries an important welfare state expansion. In particular, as regards child care, it was marked on the one hand by the development of legislation and creation of child care services, and on the other hand by the extension of maternity leave and the introduction of leave for fathers (albeit as a «derived» right in Italy). The starting point for the analysis is set in years (1959 in Denmark, 1960 in Italy) marking the diffusion among women’s organisations of discussions on the definition of child care as a social problem, requiring public intervention. The end is set in the years when some kind of leave for fathers was introduced (1977 in Italy and 1983 in Denmark).

Moreover, it was a period characterised by dramatic social changes, brought about by economic growth, industrial development and urbanisation, including changes in the gender division of labour. These ones took however different forms in the two countries, with an earlier and much stronger increase in women’s labour market participation in Denmark, and a more limited increase in Italy, beginning in the 1970s. Finally, this period includes a fundamental change in the actors involved in claimsmaking, namely the presence, in the 1970s in both countries, of the new feminist movement.

The choice of this historical period has made it possible to investigate two aspects of the allocation of responsibility for care that were present in the claims: the move towards greater public responsibility appeared the general concern in the 1960s; in the 1970s, this aspect was accompanied by attention to balancing responsibilities between women and men.

These two aspects seem to correspond to what Knijn and Kremer (1997, 357) have identified as the two directions for improving women’s social rights in relation to care and for integrating the caring dimension in the definition of citizenship: «degender caregiving and revalue care». Revaluing care could be here intended as demanding public support to caregiving in terms either of direct provision of services or of financial support under the form of cash transfers or regulation of income maintenance provisions, de-gendering caregiving as requiring public measures that should allow, encourage or oblige men to take a greater share of it.

The countries chosen for the comparison, Italy and Denmark, represent two largely different settings, as regards child care arrangements and the normative bases of child care policies, but also as regards the patterns of relations among women’s organisations. Contrasting these settings has the purpose of highlighting national specificity in the claimsmaking processes concerning the two issues mentioned above, namely the claims for revaluing and de-gendering care. In fact, seemingly analogous claims, such as more public crèches or extending to fathers the right to leave to care for children, can be assigned different meanings, and can be supposed to satisfy different needs. Crucial in this respect appeared the relation established in the claims between children’s and mothers’ needs and the definitions of whose needs were included when claims were voiced on behalf of women.

The study has been aimed at interpreting this diversity, in the models of distribution of responsibility for child care proposed as well as in the definition of the subjects entitled to public support and in the construction of their needs and interests emerging in the claims, as outcome of strategic choices, made by the actors involved on the basis of the perceived opportunity structure. In the following, in discussing some results of the comparison, I will therefore point to two elements: variation in women’s organisations’ positions and goals, and variation in the sets of opportunities and constraints that they found in articulating their claims, as well as in the boundaries that they avoided to overcome.

As regards the actors, I have aimed at detecting whether, to what extent and how claimsmaking processes entailed the construction of a common identity and the definition of common goals among the organisations and groups involved and, conversely, which dimensions of conflict emerged. This accent on construction has the purpose of questioning assumptions on the existence of given shared goals and an orientation to social change among women’ organisations based upon a common socio-economic position or of common experiences of women, which often characterises studies on women’s agency.

Relating the strategies to the changing perceived opportunity structures is then aimed at highlighting the context-bound character of the definitions of the subjects included in the claims and of their interests and needs, in relation to the features of child care arrangements and to the normative bases of child care policies. An implication can be pointed out in this respect concerning those claims voiced on behalf of women. Contextualised interpretative frameworks allow us to move beyond descriptions of feminist arguments as characterised by oscillation between claims for equality and statements of difference (Offen 1988). They can help to understand the different ways in which women’s organisations and groups have dealt with the impossible choice between equality and difference, shaping themselves opportunities for proposing their definitions of the categories «woman» and «mother» (Bock and James 1992; Sarvasy 1992; Bacchi 1996), but also meeting constraints for these definitions. 

The actors involved and their claims

The actors involved in claimsmaking on child care issues included a broad range of women’s organisations, varying widely in the degree of integration in or distance from institutional politics. Relations of co-operation, opposition or division of work with each other, even multiple affiliation of their members, appeared relevant in the definition of their claims.

These relations in the 1960s mainly developed among autonomous (to different degrees in the two countries) women’s organisations oriented towards influencing institutional politics and women’s units within political parties and trade unions.

In the beginning of the 1960s, in both countries, these actors engaged in claimsmaking on the basis of a concern for the politicisation of the question of child care. This concern seemed to be based upon the construction of a shared definition of the situation: the increasing presence on the labour market of women with small children and other social changes brought about by economic development were making women’s combination of child care tasks and work outside the home a social problem that required public intervention. The constructed character of this perception is particularly evident in Italy, where the notion of an irreversible process of women’s integration in the labour market appears to be in contrast with the trends in women’s activity rate: in this case, it rather seemed the outcome of a successful strategy pursued in the first place by the UDI, the large Leftist women’s organisation. It appears instead in line with the actual trends and dimensions of the changes in women’s presence on the labour market in the Danish case.[3] This common concern resulted, however, in different degrees of involvement and claims.

The 1970s were marked in both countries by the appearance of a new actor, the new feminist movement, characterised by a strong collective identity and opposition to the established political system (Ergas 1986; Dahlerup 1998). Its presence changed the patterns of relations among organised women, introducing new conflict dimensions, and between them and the other political and social actors, setting new boundaries between action inside and outside political institutions. New common features emerging in the articulation of claims in the 1970s derived, in my interpretation, from the influence of this movement.

A first element was the definition of women as a group, without other specifications, as subjects of the claims, representing a move from references to women as belonging to different categories (working mothers for choice or for need, housewives, etc.), which had characterised the definitions of women’s needs in the 1960s’ claims.

A second aspect was the issue of the gender division of labour in the family and of public measures that could promote it. Taken up by the new feminist movement, this question had to be dealt with also by the other organisations, although its relevance as an issue concerning public intervention on child care varied widely in the two countries and in the agenda of the different organisations.

 

Besides the common features, representing the construction of common grounds for the different claims, main conflict lines have emerged from the analysis of the claims. These conflicts found expression in the identification of different reference subjects in the claims, children or women, but also of different groups of women: housewives or workers, working mothers for need or for choice, middle-class or working class women.

As regards the 1960s, in Italy women’s organisations reproduced the polarisation characterising the two blocks, the Catholic and the Leftist ones, marking the contexts of institutional politics and collective action. The two main organisations, the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane) and the CIF (Centro Italiano Femminile), are commonly depicted as being, until the Sixties, strictly connected to the two main political parties, the Christian Democratic Party (DC) and the Communist Party (PCI), and as largely complying to their strategies (Gaiotti de Biase 1994; Michetti, Repetto and Viviani 1984). To this polarisation corresponded a usually close co-operation among actors on each side: the autonomous women’s organisations, women’s units in the parties and in the unions. At the same time, the ideological polarisation did not always prevent from co-operation across ideological divides on concrete claims and legislative initiatives.

Despite a gradual weakening throughout the Sixties, the confrontation between the Catholic and Leftist side resulted, in particular for children under three, in the proposal of opposing models of allocation of responsibility for care, constructed in the claims by actors on the two sides in opposition to each other, especially in the beginning of the decade. They were based upon the principles of socialisation of care, supported by Leftist organisations, and of subsidiarity, supported by the Catholic ones. On the one side, demands for public provision of child care were intended as demands for services to be directly run by central or local public administrations. The UDI was the protagonist of the struggle for a national law promoting and financing the development of municipal public crèches, co-operating then for this purpose with trade union women from the CGIL, the main and Leftist trade union, and acting in connection with PCI women’s units and PCI women MPs.

Catholic women’s organisations, instead, required public support for the care of small children mainly under the form of an extension of maternity leave, thus in order to promote the assumption of caring tasks by the family. Claims were articulated at congresses and meetings (important events were, for instance, the Congresses of the DC women’s movement and of the CIF, held in 1967), and in the pressure activity for legislation the DC women’s movement represented the fundamental reference point.

Despite these diverging models, a concern for the needs of working mothers opened to possibilities of co-operation in support of concrete measures. For Leftist actors, the commitment to requiring public crèches was also accompanied by demands for improvement of maternity leave, to be integrated by a leave for the care sick children, and for shorter working hours. In turn, Catholic organisations generally supported, first of all, longer maternity leave for working mothers, but a large part also joined the demand for a broader diffusion of crèches.

In Denmark there was a long tradition of presence of autonomous and cross-party women’s organisations, oriented to pressure politics: the DK (Dansk Kvindesamfund) and the umbrella organisation DKN (Danske Kvinders Nationalråd). These organisations were the protagonists of women’s politics and provided the space where political party women engaged in women’s politics; protagonists on family policy, with multiple belongings, were often, although not only, Social Democratic women (Rimmen Nielsen 1989). Women’s units in political parties were instead weaker and lacked legitimacy (Christensen 1999). The diversity of positions was thus articulated within these organisations, whose activity, given their non-party character, was strongly consensus oriented, reproducing a widespread feature in political decision-making processes: they usually only took sides on questions upon which there was consensus or a broad compromise could be reached. At the same time, confrontation often marked the relations between them, primarily the DK, and the union for women workers (KAD, Kvindeligt Arbejderforbund), their reference subjects being respectively middle-class and rural women for the DK and working class, unskilled women for the KAD.

In the 1960s, despite the strong conflict on married women’s work, the related question of child care did not appear the main one on which women’s organisations engaged (Borchorst 1985). For the organisation playing the major role, the DK, child care was an important issue, although not the main priority, but it was often related to cash transfers rather than to public child care services. As regards the measures demanded, expansion of public services and increase of cash transfers in support of child care tended to be presented more as joint than as conflictual solutions, despite the underlying conflict on married women’s work, concerning who the reference subjects of women’s organisations should be, housewives or women working outside home. A controversial issue was instead that of publicly financed day-care in private homes, a measure introducing a form of caregiving in the family, but within a system of public provision of care.

Consensus on the demands was accompanied by a gradual move in the definition of the subjects on whose behalf claims were voiced, from women to children, acknowledging the positive function of child care services on the basis of their pedagogic adequacy. By claiming for children’s individual entitlement to universal coverage of the services, women’s organisations, and in particular the DK, actually defined, but only indirectly, a model of combination of care and work outside the home for women, including uninterrupted presence on the labour market.

 

In the 1970s, the presence of the new feminist movement introduced a stronger division between activity inside and outside political institutions, resulting in Italy mainly in conflictual positions in the claims on child care, and in Denmark rather in a division of labour, with the feminist movement often taking a more radical stance and parts of the established women’s organisations and women’s units in political parties a more moderate one on common issues.

This difference can be illustrated by focusing in particular on the issue of fathers’ leave, i.e. of the extension to fathers of the right to a part of the leave after childbirth that before had only been available to mothers.

The struggle to define the relations between women and men in the family, including the division of caring tasks, a public, political issue can be considered as a common feature for the new feminist movement in the two countries. In this way, what the focus upon women’s emancipation through wage work left unquestioned, namely the need for women to be freed from oppressive relations in the family that burdened them with domestic work and the responsibility for caring, was instead identified as a necessary condition for women’s liberation and, therefore, as a central issue in feminist struggle. At the same time, fundamental differences emerged in feminists’ politicisation of the gender distribution of child care tasks in the family and in their positions in the debates on fathers’ leave.

In Italy, the possibility of extension to fathers of the right to leave was discussed in relation to the optional part of the leave; the proposals debated differed in giving to the father an independent right or conditioning his right to the mother renouncing hers, as the 1977 law would state in the end. Related to fathers’ leave was the discussion on the extension to the father of the right to unpaid leave to care for sick children. The demand for leave for fathers was mainly discussed, in the political debate, in the equal rights framework of the Parity Law. This framework was strongly criticised by feminists, who, with their reference to women as a group, tended to overcome the sectoral focus upon working mothers that had characterised claims in the 1960s, and that lay behind the focus on equal opportunities at work of the Parity Law (Beccalli 1985). Although they pointed to economic independence as a crucial condition for women’s self-determination and liberation from the family, both women working on the labour market and housewives were included in the notion of women as a group, as illustrated by the importance of the mobilisation for wages for housewives.

In Denmark, the object of debate was instead, besides the extension itself of the right to leave to fathers, the optional or mandatory (in the sense that a part could only be taken by fathers) character of the leave. The question of men’s participation in child care was one of the objects of debate within and across the established women’s organisations, and leave for fathers was a main demand in this respect. This demand could thus represent a common ground around which a broad mobilisation of women’s organisations was realised, although without great direct co-operation: from the Redstockings, joining other grassroots organisation in a common campaign, to the DKN, but with the exception of trade union women. At the same time, the two kinds of demands that were articulated, requiring optional or mandatory leave (in the sense that it could not be used alternatively by the mother), had different implications. The demand for mandatory leave, made by the Redstockings, but also by the DK, incorporated a conflictual view of family relations and was more clearly conceived in terms of affirmative action, requiring state intervention explicitly aimed at conditioning the distribution of caring tasks in the family; it thereby entailed a questioning of the gender neutral equal opportunities framework.

Finally, looking at the main subjects of entitlement mentioned in the claims, a shift occurred from the 1960s, towards widespread, greater focus upon women, as a result of the new feminist movement’s construction of women as a group. Unlike in Italy, however, this construction referred to a model of women’s permanent presence on the labour market, which had clearly prevailed in the 1960s’ conflict on married women’s work.

Shaping opportunities and meeting boundaries

I will point here to elements of the opportunity structure that emerged as relevant in the articulation of the claims in the two countries. Among the elements of the contexts influencing the set of perceived opportunities and constraints orienting the definitions of the strategies by the actors involved, besides relations with other social and political actors, I have focused on the actual features of child care arrangements and on the normative bases of public intervention on child care, concerning the legitimate models of distribution of care responsibilities, the subjects carrying legitimate needs and their entitlement to need satisfaction.

In Italy, the studies on the political debates surrounding family and child care policies have pointed to the presence of different orientations. On the one hand, the Catholic one, based on the principle of subsidiarity, requiring avoidance of public interference on child care, until the family and other institutions in the social sphere could provide for it; on the other hand, the Leftist concern for securing women’s rights as wage workers. The prevailing interpretation proposed by these studies is that the absence of the question of public support for child care from the political agenda was the result of a compromise between these orientations, which appeared thus a constraint to the politicisation of child care issues (Saraceno 1998; Naldini 1999; Bimbi 2000).

In the study of women’s organisations’ claims on child care, despite the presence of these conflict dimensions, a space seems to emerge for a different strategy than confrontation or removal of the issue. A different kind of compromise seemed to take place, realised between parts of the Leftist forces, mainly the UDI, and parts of the Catholic organisations, especially those with a workerist orientation (women in the ACLI, a catholic workers’ organisations, and the CISL, the Catholic-oriented trade union). This compromise represented an opportunity for grounding common claims on a combination of the different orientations on women’s needs and entitlements. It was based on an interpretation of women’s needs defining the combination of child care in the family and work outside the home as a legitimate life pattern for women, which was the Leftist position. At the same time, it implied a broadening of the bases of entitlement for women, as mothers and as workers, opening space on the Left to a recognition of the value of care in the family, and on the Catholic side to a recognition of sources of women’s self-fulfilment outside their family function.

This compromise can be interpreted as an outcome of strategies pursuing the definition of an autonomous space for action for women’s organisations, and at the same time a co-operation in claimsmaking across ideological divides.

What studies on policy-making on these issues seem to point out in this respect, however, is that the action of women’s organisations had little impact on the actual policies. Focusing on the processes of construction of the claims rather than on the influence upon policy-making has instead allowed me to point out in this study that the conflict between Catholic and Leftist forces not only led to an alignment of positions, with the Leftist forces accepting the constraints involved in Catholic normative definition of women’s role as primarily mothers, as it often has been emphasised, but also represented an opportunity for the articulation of claims opening to a broader range of options for women, developed by processes of mutual influence among the involved organisations.

On the other hand, the compromise was defined within boundaries rooted in the normative bases of child care policies: avoiding to question them represented a condition for that co-operation to be possible. These boundaries consisted in the first place in the idea of the family as a harmonic unit, as a site of solidarity, and also, to a large extent and especially for children under three, in the primacy of motherly care.

As regards the idea of the harmonic family, public support to child care tasks was conceived as a help to women to be able to combine work outside the home and motherhood, not as a means for securing women’s autonomy from the family. Indirect support to this interpretation can be found in the absence of the question of single mothers in the discussions surrounding the claims (Simoni 2000). In the 1970s, this idea was instead openly challenged by the new feminist movement. Feminists’ focus on conflict and power relations between men and women in the family sharpened the conflict between Leftist and Catholic women’s organisations, breaking down the previous bases for a rapprochement of positions on child care across ideological divides. At the same time, feminists did not strongly propose alternative principles for distribution of responsibility for care. They rather seemed to leave the child care question in uncertainty, which might be due to their emphasis on women’s self-determination, implying that they wanted to avoid defining an ideal life pattern for women in favour of a broadening of their possibilities of choice, and to their difficulty in coming to terms with the question of maternity, rejecting it as an all-encompassing role (Saraceno 1976; Passerini 1994).

As regards motherly care as the ideal form of care, research on the political debates surrounding the 1971 law on public crèches (Naldini 1999) points to the strength of this notion. At the same time, it has been argued that the idea that provision of care in child care institutions, especially in private, but also in public ones, also entailed professionalisation of care remained highly controversial, although the focus on pedagogic quality of the services linked to professionalisation of the staff was spreading gradually and locally (Trifiletti and Turi 1996).

Among women’s organisations, the prevailing strategy in the 1960s, also shared by organisations like the UDI, when their claims were oriented at achieving consensus among Catholic organisations, was to avoid challenging the primacy of motherly care. This also meant, though, avoiding challenges to a definition of children’s needs as being in potential conflict with women’s work outside the home. This might have been a reason, besides that of the general workerist orientation of the Left, for the choice of the UDI to keep working mothers, rather than children, as central subjects in the claims for the crèches.

The fact that, in the 1970s, not even the issue of fathers’ leave was discussed, except occasionally, in terms of redistribution of child care tasks in the family, but rather in the framework of equal rights in the labour market, could be an indirect confirmation of the difficulty in challenging the notion of the primacy of motherly care.

 

In Denmark, the child-oriented character of child care policies, and the importance of the pedagogic legitimacy of child care services for their expansion, which have been pointed out in studies on the political debate (Siim 1997; Borchorst 1998), were taken by women’s organisations as an opportunity to focus on children’s needs in their claims. In this way, political consensus on the development of child care services was not used by women’s organisations to assert women’s entitlements to them, thereby securing political relevance to women’s needs.

The difficulty of women’s organisations to voice claims on behalf of women’s specific needs seems to point to a boundary for the justifications, leaving little space to arguments defining motherhood or women’s caring role in the family as bases of their entitlement to special support. This might be related to the centrality of the value of equality in Danish political culture and to the tradition of primacy of individual entitlements in family law.

At the same time, investigating the processes of claimsmaking has allowed me to identify in the focus on children not a simple alignment of women’s organisations to the features of the political debate, but a result of a process, with a move from accent on women’s free choice to children’s individual rights, involving strategic choices in which I have pointed out the importance of the consensus orientation of the cross-party women’s organisations. Emphasis on children allowed in fact these organisations to claim for greater public responsibility on child care while avoiding internal conflicts on the definition of models of combination of care in the family and work outside the home for women.

The concrete claims on child care policies articulated by groups of the new feminist movement in the 1970s, setting women as central subjects of entitlement, were also based on a gender equality goal, although in a more radical version, not limited to equal opportunities on the labour market but referring to the conditions for real equality, including reallocation of responsibility for caring in the family.

Finally, the development of public services was accompanied by a redefinition of caregiving in the direction of higher professionalisation (Borchorst and Siim 1984). This tendency can also be found in women’s organisations’ claims, where professionalisation of caregiving appeared a condition for the legitimacy of child care services, but even tended to permeate the notion of caregiving at home, for publicly financed day-carers, but also for mothers. Moreover, the focus on professionalisation, also entailing a de-gendering of caregiving, might be interpreted as opening opportunities for claims for redistribution of care in the family between women and men, and for assigning this meaning to the claim for fathers’ leave.

Conclusion

The analysis of women’s organisations claims proposed in this paper has showed how common goals and conflict dimensions among the women’s organisations involved were themselves shaped by the claimsmaking processes, and were expressed as conflicts over the definition of whose needs should be fulfilled, not only between children and mothers, but also among women: e.g. housewives or workers, middle-class or working class women.

At the same time, the interpretation of the strategies leading to these claims has showed that the interpretations of needs included in the claims can be related to the general features of women’s organisations and to the existing conflict dimensions among them, but they also appear as outcomes of choices grounded on perceptions of opportunities and constraints. It is the case of the 1960s, with the autonomy strategy pursued by part of women’s organisations in Italy, based on a compromise on working mothers’ needs, and of the consensus strategy pursued by women’s organisations in Denmark, based on reference to children’s needs. But the same can also be said of the strategies of the different actors regarding fathers’ leave in the 1970s, with presence of oppositional and bargaining positions towards the prevailing definition of the issue in political institutions in Italy, and the prevalence of orientation to bargaining in Denmark.

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