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Review Essay: Wanted, Dead or Alive – Families and Welfare States

Families and welfare states are no longer what they used to be. The 1960s feminist movement considerably transformed gender relations particularly in the US and Western Europe. In the following decades, these regions witnessed popularization of new cohabitation styles and changes in the rates of divorce, remarriage and births out-of-wedlock. Today, gay and disability rights activists dispute the conventional notions of family and dependence. The mounting influence of neoliberalism, multinational corporations and supra-national institutions also limits the degree to which individual states are able and willing to intervene in the production or the delivery of social services – such as health insurance, child care, unemployment benefits. Some scholars even declare ‘a crisis of welfare across western industrialized countries’ (Cunningham-Burley and Jamieson, p. 15). Yet, both families and welfare states are still alive and kicking in the industrialized West. Their significance in domestic politics is most recently observed in the 2004 US presidential election. The presidential nominees strove to gain votes by their stance on ‘family values’, nonheterosexual unions, restructuring of the social security system and affordable health care. Among many other examples across the world, these North American debates vividly demonstrate that one cannot blindly accept the decline or disappearance of family and welfare structures. Thus, contemporary sociologists of the state are confronted with