In this impressive book, Kimberly J. Morgan sets out to explain the diversity of work-family policies, primarily child care, parental leave, and work-time arrangements, across Western countries, focusing on France, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. Her explanatory framework emphasizes the interplay among religion as a political force, gender and familial ideologies, the constellation of political parties and the nature of partisan competition, women's movements, policy legacies, and social structural changes. Central to the analysis is the temporal dimension of the welfare state, and the study examines three crucial periods: 1) the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when states began to extend their authority in social affairs, especially in education and family matters; 2) the period of welfare expansion after World War II to the mid-1970s when the first policies on mothers’ employment were adopted and started to diverge; and 3) the decades of welfare state crises from the mid-1970s onward with sluggish economic growth and the erosion of the traditional social bases of political parties.

A major argument is that church–state relations and religious divisions shaped educational policies and the role of the state vis-à-vis the family, producing four distinctive patterns. These distinctive policy legacies subsequently influenced the type of mothers’ employment policies adopted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and led to dissimilar policy trajectories. Once the policies were in place, they generated constituencies of support, making policy change more difficult but not impossible. For each of the four countries, Morgan provides a lucid analysis of its policies and their politics, and she skillfully uses comparisons to underline how certain differences were decisive in shaping policy outcomes in one country but not in another.

The book makes major contributions to both comparative welfare state research and the field of gender and politics, and accordingly, it should be high on the reading list of scholars and students in these two areas. By examining the role of religion, Morgan highlights the importance of an underresearched factor in the development of welfare states. Through its temporal dimension, the book bridges the divide between the scholarship on the origins of social policies and research with a contemporary policy focus; and Morgan also provides us with a useful analysis of policy change and continuity. Finally, in contrast to the first wave of comparative research on gender and welfare states, which mainly dealt with how gender relations were inscribed in policies and how policies could influence gender relations, this book is part of the recent wave of research primarily concerned with the politics of the policies.

Because of this concern, Working Mothers and the Welfare State is of immediate interest to academics working on politics and gender. Much of the analysis of politics and gender has been actor centered, taking women as the key actors. Coming from the field of women and politics or social movement research, scholars have formulated their key research questions in terms of what role women and the women's movement have played in policymaking and what difference it has made. Morgan's approach is policy centered. Her point of departure is gendered policies, and the main research question is: Why are the policies so different, in different countries? She sees feminist movements as primarily agenda setters and further observes that “there is no clear link between feminist organizing, either inside or outside political parties, and the development of policies on mothers’ employment” (p. 19), especially as evidenced in the French and Dutch cases. In other words, feminist organizing is only one piece of the puzzle, and the answer to the research question requires a broader analytical framework and an examination of the policy process that moves beyond agenda setting and focuses on converting demands into policies and why certain demands become policies and others do not. The implications are to recast the analysis of politics and gender in a more encompassing direction.

Still, the framework may tend to downplay the impact of feminist ideas, organizing, and strategies. Of the four countries, Sweden and the Netherlands have developed the most innovative policies, even if the policies have not had the effect on gender relations that feminists had hoped for. Swedish policies have encouraged women to become earners and men to become caregivers. Dutch policies have promoted part-time employment, envisioning that both parents would work part time and share care responsibilities for infants and toddlers. A common denominator of the Dutch and Swedish women's movements has been their insistence on bringing men's roles into the discussion of policy solutions. For example, Dutch feminists in the late 1980s called for policies that would end women's financial dependence on men and men's care dependence on women. However, since Dutch feminists did not succeed in putting child care on the agenda, their influence is largely written off (p. 163). Besides agenda setting, women's movements and actors have engaged in building coalitions of support, and here, strategies involving cross-gender and cross-class alliances has been an important variable influencing policy outcomes. To illustrate, in Sweden union women worked to convince union men to support the expansion of child care, while employed women from all classes forged an alliance around more day care.

Nevertheless, a major strength of Morgan's analysis is her incorporation of the structural dimensions of politics and autonomous forces of change and the insights it brings; and clearly, focusing on women's agency in the Dutch case would not provide the leverage of the author's framework in explaining the major policy change of the 1990s. Furthermore, Morgan is correct in reminding us that the institutional and historical setting shapes the prospects of feminists and other women's groups to influence policies across countries, and the need for greater attentiveness to how the structural dimensions of politics influence women's movements and women's agency.

In short, this excellent book is bound to become a classic in the comparative welfare state literature and the field of politics and gender. A short book review cannot convey the richness of Morgan's analysis and the many issues raised by it. The only way to do it justice is to read the book!