Women's Work and the Employment of Married Women

In Finland, balancing paid work and domestic responsibilities was first debated in the early twentieth century. In this discussion “women's work,” and more specifically the “employment of married women,” stood at the center, as contemporaries reflected on the social implications of industrialization. The debate was fueled by a “scientization of the social”—a process where social science and its experts, arguments, and findings came to have a growing effect on the discursive construction of social problems and their potential solutions (Brückweh et al. Reference Brückweh, Schumann, Wetzell and Ziemann2012; Raphael Reference Raphael1996, Reference Raphael, Brückweh, Schumann, Wetzell and Ziemann2012). In this context, statistics and other social scientific methods were increasingly used to gather quantitative and qualitative knowledge about married women in employment (e.g., Bergbom Reference Bergbom1935; Tunkelo Reference Tunkelo1933), and these findings came to form the basis of political arguments for policies on the family and women's employment.

During the interwar period, some new policies were enacted to address married women's domestic responsibilities and their rights to engage in paid work. The proportion of married women in employment had started to grow in the 1910s, and by 1920 10 percent of urban working women were married (Lähteenmäki Reference Lähteenmäki1995; Tunkelo Reference Tunkelo1933). By 1917, unpaid maternity leave for industrial, commercial, and clerical workers was granted, and a law on state aid for municipal and private kindergartens came into force in 1927. Moreover, in the marriage reform of 1930, following the examples of other Nordic countries, married women gained legal independence. In contrast to the regulations in many Central European countries, the new Finnish law assigned both spouses joint responsibility to provide for their family, which was also in line with traditional agrarian values (Melby et al. Reference Melby, Ravn, Rosenbeck, Wetterberg, Kettunen and Petersen2011). According to the Marriage Act, both partners were obliged, “according to their ability” to “contribute to the family's maintenance,” either “with financial resources, through activity in the home, or by other means”. On the one hand, this obligation legally recognized women's unpaid labor in the home as a valuable contribution to family maintenance that was on a par with men's financial contribution. On the other hand, it also implied that women had to take economic responsibility for their family if the husband failed to do so, as they would in the absence of a male breadwinner.

Married women's right to participate in the labor market was, however, challenged in the economic and demographic context of the 1930s. Unemployment grew during the Great Depression, and polemics against women's employment outside the home spread from Western Europe and Sweden to Finland (Lähteenmäki Reference Lähteenmäki1995). At the time, it was not uncommon to dismiss women when they married or became pregnant, though this affected mainly clerical workers in commercial cooperatives, insurance companies, and banks (Kom. 1948: 24). However, no legal prohibitions or restrictions were imposed against working wives, unlike in Central Europe (Lähteenmäki Reference Lähteenmäki1995). Furthermore, the debate on the place of women was fueled by social anxieties about population decline and related pronatalist ideas that traveled to Finland from other parts of Europe (Meskus Reference Meskus2006; Pedersen Reference Pedersen1993). Demographic concerns were fed by the first Finnish population projection of 1934, and they united elites across the political spectrum and the professions. Nonetheless, when it came to putting forward proposals for action, tension arose between the proponents of a rigid pronatalist moralism and the advocates of “voluntary motherhood” (Helén and Yesilova Reference Helén and Yesilova2006). While certain right-wing circles opposed birth control and saw the mother's place as exclusively in the home, many social democratic women stood for family planning as a means to improve the position of working-class women. In neighboring Sweden, Social Democrats Alva and Gunnar Myrdal (Reference Myrdal and Myrdal1935: 245, 360) wrote about the “prophylactic social policy” and “well organized, public and free nursery schools” that, in their view, were needed to tackle the demographic crisis in modernizing Sweden. In Finland, where the government's financial resources were limited, little was done to develop such public nursery schools. However, some industrial companies undertook forms of “voluntary social welfare,” such as employee canteens, kindergartens, day nurseries, summer colonies, and playground activities for children (Kom. 1948: 25). Moreover, a small maternity cash benefit was secured for poor mothers through the 1937 Maternity Protection Act.

World War II established the position of married women in employment, especially in urban settings. During the war, women's work was essential to keep the social and material infrastructure running. After the war, the earlier practice of discharging married and pregnant women was increasingly abandoned in view of the labor shortage plaguing the country (Kom. 1948: 24). In this context, the question of mothers working outside the home—no longer a prospect but an unavoidable fact—provoked increasingly public discussion. It was debated in the press and parliament whether women were able to focus on two “difficult and responsible” vocations in tandem—motherhood and employment outside the home—and whether the state should do something to support these women (e.g., by protecting their income and thus ensuring them some time to rest after childbirth), on the one hand, or respond to employers' demands for labor, on the other (Lähteenmäki Reference Lähteenmäki and Parikka1994).

The Ministry of Social Affairs set up two committees that discussed the issue. Even if the committee reports occasionally referred to the “personally great demands” placed on employed mothers (Kom. 1948: 9), they predominantly viewed the issue from the macroperspective of the nation-state, giving top priority to demographic and economic considerations. Neither of the reports cited the term risk—a word quite foreign to Finnish language at that time—but used other vocabularies to describe the problem. In 1945, the Population Committee, which had operated during the war, made a proposal for better maternity protection that should not only “guard [a] working woman and her child against the dangers caused by labor,” but also “compensate for the economic harm” that resulted from the fact that she was prevented from taking care of her regular work because of childbirth (Kom. 1945: 10). The lack of such protection was seen as a “societal flaw.” On the one hand, the committee's justifications for maternity protection emphasized the “social obligation of government” to “support those women who give birth to the new generation of the nation.” On the other hand, the committee highlighted the “purely economic reasons,” according to which it was essential to “preserve women's work ability,” quite simply because the “country needs the work of women” as part of the “national labor force” (ibid.).

In 1945, during a short period when the Left held a strong position in government, a Committee on the Employment of Married Women was set up, initiated by leftist women's organizations. It also maintained that the increase in women's employment had created “a set of problems” that were either “labor market questions” by nature or related to “population policy or family matters otherwise” (Kom. 1948: 9). The committee argued that industrialization had played a special role in fostering the employment of married women outside the home:

This thinking exemplified the common strategy in Finland of depoliticizing social policies by discussing social reforms as functional needs that resulted from societal progress (Kettunen Reference Kettunen2001). Moreover, it rearticulated the typical explanatory scheme of both functionalism and historical materialism, in which something—in this case married women's employment—was derived from a large-scale socioeconomic process, namely the transformation of the conditions of production. However, what was at stake in this transformation was not “postindustrialization,” as is presumed in the literature on NSRs, but the transition to an “industrialized” society.

It is important to recognize that political discourse of the 1930s and 1940s did not focus on the ways in which the state or employers could “facilitate the reconciliation of work and family” for employed parents, nor did it invoke the need to “support a better work-life balance” as a general principle. Instead, the question was how to “ease the work of married woman in light of the demands placed on her by waged work and the home.” In other words, it was a matter of “reconciling housework and waged work”—two kinds of work historically understood as belonging to separate spheres. And women remained the focus of discussion. The problem was that “employment outside the home” was usually “just one part of woman's daily work,” with the “many duties of housekeeping making up the other part” (Kom. 1948: 51).

This emphasis on housework and bringing up children as a form of “work” was intelligible in the context of the Nordic marriage legislation, according to which both spouses were responsible for family provision, either in the form of wages or unpaid household chores (Melby et al. Reference Melby, Ravn, Rosenbeck, Wetterberg, Kettunen and Petersen2011). But viewing the unpaid familial activities of women in terms of “work” or “labor” also echoed the classical sociology that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Even Émile Durkheim's elaborate argument for separate spheres for men and women, for example, rested on a notion of “division of labor” between the sexes that underpinned “civilized” societies. In his view, the functions of women and men had become differentiated over time so that women had the “affective function” and men the “intellectual function.” Durkheim saw the sexual division of labor not just as an economic arrangement, but also as an important part of the social and moral order of developed societies and the “organic solidarity” typical of them (Durkheim Reference Durkheim1964: 60–61). Important currents of Marxist thought, by contrast, saw the sexual division of work rather as a sign of women's “domestic slavery,” maintaining that women's refusal of “private housework” and their participation in “social productive work” was the prerequisite for their “emancipation” and “equality” with men (Marx et al. Reference Marx, Engels and Lenin1977: 97, 197–98). This terminology of the “sexual division of work,” including the understanding of child care and housekeeping as “work” and even a form of “slavery” or the “forced labor” of married women, had been widely used in Finnish working women's magazines and organizations from the turn of the century onward (e.g., Eräs tuhansista. . . 1920; Gripenberg Reference Gripenberg1898; H. A. 1907; Salmela-Järvinen Reference Salmela-Järvinen1919 in Husu et al. Reference Husu, Katainen, Peltonen, Purra, Raevaara and Tiukka1995). However, the ultimate goal of early-twentieth-century social democratic women and socialist feminists had been to “emancipate” working-class mothers from paid work so that they could dedicate themselves to the upbringing of their children, even if “minor reforms,” such as municipal kindergartens and maternity insurance had also been supported by most (Lähteenmäki Reference Lähteenmäki1995: 228).

The Committee on the Employment of Married Women finished its work in 1948 and made a number of proposals for measures that would either “ease work in the household” and support measures that involved the “care and placement of children,” or “offer employed mothers work opportunities” that were compatible with the “reconciliation of domestic duties and waged work” (Kom. 1948: 51). The proposals of the committee included, for example, better maternity protection, part-time work for those who were willing to take it, the development of employers' social activities, the introduction of a municipal system to assist with life in the home, and research on the rationalization of housework (see also Davis Reference Davis2012; Nolan Reference Nolan1990; Taylor Allen Reference Taylor Allen2006; Thane and Evans Reference Thane and Evans2012; von Oertzen and Rietzschel Reference Von Oertzen and Rietzschel1997). The committee also called for the implementation of the 1936 Child Welfare Act, which obliged municipalities either to establish facilities that would complement the parental input into child development or support such facilities. These institutions, such as nursery schools, kindergartens, hobby clubs, playgrounds, and sports fields, were seen—in the spirit of the Myrdals—as forms of “preventive child welfare” (Kom. 1948: 43).

In the conservative political and social climate of the 1950s, these proposals were not realized. In general, the question of working mothers and reconciling housework and waged work remained on the margins of social policy during the following decades. Rather, policy was maternalist in nature, relying on universal benefits that addressed women's interests as mothers rather than as paid workers (Anttonen Reference Anttonen1998). A state-funded child benefit, payable to the mother, was introduced in 1948 for children under seventeen. Similar state allowances had been introduced in most European countries, the Antipodes, and Canada before and after World War II (Bock and Thane Reference Bock, Thane, Bock and Thane1991; Pedersen Reference Pedersen1993). Moreover, in 1949 the maternity benefit, which could be taken as either a lump sum payment or a package of newborn supplies (such as baby clothes, sheets, and toiletries), was guaranteed to all expectant mothers on condition that they undergo a medical examination. In general, significant policy reforms at that time emphasized the aspect of social and public health. They included the development of social assistance and health care infrastructure, including maternity and child welfare clinics, among other provisions.

In sum, the 1940s saw an early articulation of the “social risk” of work-home reconciliation. However, this did not lead to the introduction of many relevant policies. Through its focus on socioeconomic development and socially or nationally valuable forms of work, the functionalist and materialist social-scientific knowledge of the interwar and immediate postwar period helped to formulate the tension between the two social obligations of women: the obligation to give birth and raise children for the nation, on the one, and the obligation to earn a living for the family and participate in the workforce, on the other. This knowledge was perhaps too abstract and categorical to make sense of the realities of employed mothers, and thus biased toward an “either/or” solution (i.e., supporting women either as mothers or as workers), rather than a “both-and” conclusion (which would improve their situation both as mothers and as workers). Moreover, the broader political debate at the time favored maternalist welfare provisions, which consolidated childbirth and child care as women's main function in society.

Gender Roles and the Day Care Question

Work-family issues came to the forefront of political debate again in the 1960s and 1970s. In this period, discussion drew on newer functionalist thought in particular, bringing into focus women's and men's dual “roles” at home and at work in the context of modernizing society. Moreover, the related “day care problem”—that is, the shortage of day care facilities and the risk of inadequate care that many children of working parents faced—became a hot topic that derived authority from the insights of developmental psychology and economics.

It was by no means self-evident, however, that the debate would develop in this way, because there was a strong expectation that the “problem” would simply go away. Despite rapid industrialization and urbanization during the 1950s, the prevalence of women's work outside the home was still commonly seen as an outcome of Finland's heritage of agrarian social practices and relative poverty. Many Finnish politicians and social policy makers expected that, over time, the female employment rate would decrease and more women would become housewives as urbanization accelerated and the standard of living rose (Julkunen Reference Julkunen, Anttonen, Henriksson and Nätkin1994). For example, the important book on “the social policy of the 60s,” which was written by one of the “founding fathers” of modern Finnish social policy, Pekka Kuusi (Reference Kuusi1962), did not mention measures that would facilitate mother's employment. This blueprint for the development of Finnish social policy was inspired by Gunnar Myrdal and saw the structural change and modernization of society as inevitable and desirable processes that could be managed through rational planning. Kuusi, like Myrdal, was a Social Democrat, and he shared Myrdal's view of the positive relationship between social policy and the economy. He believed in the dialectic between political democracy, social equality, and economic growth within modern society, and his ideas had a strong influence on the development of Finnish social policy during the following decades (Kettunen Reference Kettunen2001). Kuusi articulated many revolutionary ideas that later informed the promotion of family policies, but although his book included a separate section on family policy, it dealt primarily with child benefit schemes.

Accordingly, the social policy reforms of the 1950s and 1960s focused on the “old social risks” of income loss and implied the formation of a Finnish “social insurance state” (Anttonen Reference Anttonen and Simonen1990). Here the demands of Social Democrats were reconciled with the interests of farmers and their representatives. As Kari Salminen (Reference Salminen1993) concluded in his study of pension policies, the Agrarian Party expressed its opposition to the targeting of social benefits exclusively at wage earners by advocating the “citizenship model” (often in alliance with the Communists). This model sought to guarantee minimum provision for all Finnish citizens through unconditional flat-rate benefits. By contrast, Social Democrats promoted solutions based on the “work performance model,” which sought to secure a basic level of consumption for those who had participated in paid work (Reference Salminenibid.; Kettunen Reference Kettunen2001). In the end, both of these models of social insurance were institutionalized in Finnish social security through the reform of unemployment benefits (1960), pensions (1956 and 1961), and the introduction of compulsory sickness insurance (1964), which now all included both earnings-related benefits and minimum compensation for those without employment history. Sickness insurance also entailed an element of maternity cover that granted all expectant mothers maternity leave and allowances. In general, this set of reforms was obviously spurred by the International Labour Organization (ILO) convention on the minimum standards of social security (1952) and the Nordic convention on social security (1955) (Kettunen Reference Kettunen, Christiansen, Petersen, Edling and Haave2006).

The practical outcome was that the social security system that was earnings related, individualized, and therefore gender neutral wrote the male breadwinner out of the equation, and encouraged more and more women to participate in the labor market (Julkunen Reference Julkunen, Anttonen, Henriksson and Nätkin1994). By 1965, women's participation in the labor force had risen to 63 percent in Finland, a high figure compared to Sweden (51 percent), Germany, and the United Kingdom (both 49 percent) (Ostner and Schmitt Reference Ostner, Schmitt, Ostner and Schmitt2008). However, as Finnish social scientist Raija Julkunen (Reference Julkunen, Anttonen, Henriksson and Nätkin1994) has pointed out, this increase did not mean that the paid work of women with children had become culturally normalized, nor was it supported by the availability of child care and other social services, which remained minimal at the time. For normalization to take place, two social facts had to be articulated as problems in ways that could make them amenable to political solutions: first, the dual role of women as mothers and workers; and second, the lack of public day care for children. The articulation of both of these issues rested on forms of scientific knowledge and expertise.

The 1960s saw the radicalization of public discussion about “gender roles” that had begun in the Nordic countries during the preceding decade (Jallinoja Reference Jallinoja1983). This discussion drew on the American sociologist Talcott Parsons's concepts of social roles and “sex roles”Footnote ² (e.g., Parsons Reference Parsons1954; Parsons and Bales Reference Parsons and Bales1955). The dominant Parsonian role theory legitimated gender-specific (expressive and instrumental) roles as functional to the maintenance of society. Against this, critical intellectuals argued that polarized roles had become dysfunctional. In Finland, the university-based equality movement Association 9 in particular formulated ideas that came to have a decisive impact on Finnish gender equality and family policies for many decades. The members of this single-issue movement included both women and men, and they campaigned for the abolition of prescriptive roles for both women and men (Holli Reference Husu, Katainen, Peltonen, Purra, Raevaara and Tiukka1992).

Association 9 distinguished itself from what it called a “moderate sex-role ideology”: a reformist vision that acknowledged women's two roles at home and at work but saw them as ideally consecutive phases of their life course. Such a view had been promoted, for example, by Alva Myrdal and Viola Klein (Reference Myrdal and Klein1956) in the preceding decade. Instead, the association was committed to what it termed a “radical sex-role ideology”: an outlook according to which men and women had equal and simultaneous commitments to paid employment and family life. In this view, child care and housework were to be shared (Rotkirch Reference Rotkirch and Eskola1968: 64–66). However, the movement looked beyond these aspects of the life of individuals, emphasizing civic activism as an important activity as well. The association subscribed to the idea of multiple roles, according to which individuals should be able to move freely between different roles as they wished. The term reconciliation was not used by the movement, likely because it discussed gender roles and the sexual division of labor in a more programmatic fashion without much focus on the actual interplay between work and family roles. In any case, some of the main policy issues of the movement included the collective organization and rationalization of child care and domestic work, and legislation for parental leave for fathers.

Like other Finnish student radicals, many activists of Association 9 ended up in party politics, especially on the political left, and in public administration (Jallinoja Reference Jallinoja1983). This exemplified the “state feminism” typical of Nordic countries, in which the political mobilization of women occurred through established political institutions, and that produced influential if limited results (Hernes Reference Hernes1987). Initiated and strongly influenced by Association 9, a Committee on the Status of Women was set up in 1966 by the left-wing government. In its final report released in 1970, the committee put forward many proposals addressing the multiple roles of women and men, such as gender-neutral parental leave, care allowances for children, and day care legislation (Kom. 1970).

As for the second issue, the “day care question” became a widely contested topic in the 1960s. It was increasingly brought to public attention that a significant proportion of children were left without regular care at home when their parents were both at work (Raitasuo Reference Raitasuo1959). This was often the case with working-class children; middle-class children were typically taken care of by domestic helpers. In the case of “latchkey children,” an important precondition for the problematization of their situation was the rise of developmental psychology, which had gained a firm foothold in the child welfare institutions established after the war. Psychological knowledge about childhood development emphasized the fundamental significance of a child's “growth environment”—the quality of nuclear family bonds and the mother-child relationship in particular—for their development and “mental hygiene” (Kom. 1966: 22). Alongside advocates for gender equality, many women in trade unions and political parties, as well as child welfare and demographic organizations, supported the development of children's day care. But they faced resistance from various groups. The political right opposed public social policy as a matter of principle, while the agrarian population was antagonistic toward welfare policies that were seen to be primarily targeted at the urban part of the population (Julkunen Reference Julkunen, Anttonen, Henriksson and Nätkin1994).

In the 1960s, the vision of children's day care as an instrument of “preventive child welfare,” which had been introduced in the 1940s, gained ground and was used to justify new policies. Day care centers were thought to be key to the structural prevention of a range of social problems (see Harrikari Reference Harrikari2008), because their expert staff would manage the children's health, nutrition, outdoor recreation, and rest, in communication with parents. By providing children with a safe environment and a balanced daily program of guided activities and spontaneous play in small groups, these social and pedagogical institutions could be expected to benefit society in a number of ways. As a committee discussing day care put it,

In discussions of day care as a tool for preventive child welfare and a worthwhile state investment, the insights of child psychology merged with economic calculation. More generally it was asserted that the resources expended on family policies should be regarded as “economically very profitable investments” in that they contributed to the “mobilization of so far unused human resources.” In this line of thinking, the population was “the most valuable capital for the nation and the state” (Kom. 1966: 10–12). The explicit notion of risk also appeared occasionally in these discussions. For example, one cited function of day care institutions was to “take special notice of those children who [constituted] a risk group from the perspective of child welfare because of their social conditions” (Kom. 1971: 13).

The Nordic principles of preventive child welfare and investment in family policies, as articulated in Finnish discussions of the 1960s, thus resembled the kind of social investment strategy that is often referred to in current debates about NSRs (Morel et al. Reference Morel, Palier, Palme, Morel, Palier and Palme2012). The aim of preventive measures was to minimize the risk of any physical or psychological damage that might negatively affect the utilization of children's human resources in the future and require retrospective intervention or compensation. Therefore, these principles embraced a particular orientation to the future, in which current investments were seen as generating future dividends (Jenson Reference Jenson2008: 135). This orientation encouraged a focus on childhood because the returns of investments were supposedly much better than in equivalent expenditures on adults. The conviction that investment in the present was less costly than remediation in the future meant that prevention was seen as a more efficient use of resources (Reference Jensonibid.).

This was the context in which a series of governmental committee reports in the late 1960s and early 1970s addressed the issue of day care. While they all shared the common explanatory frame of industrialization and urbanization as well as the preference for preventive investment in family policy, they differed in their particular standpoints and emphases. The first report, for example, focused on day care institutions only and approached them from the perspective of a social problem. It represented full-time day care as an economic necessity, the lesser of two evils, for those families in which there were “compelling reasons” for mothers to go out to work (Kom. 1967: 13). The final report of the Committee on Children's Daycare, by contrast, discussed different forms of child care and was careful not to moralize against any of them, whether institutional day care, child minder's care, or parental care at home. Furthermore, the committee went on to define children's day care services as “social services” (Kom. 1971: 43–44, 86–87, 92). This reflected a new understanding of social services, which were now viewed as an integral part of the system that was replacing the remnants of poor relief with universal social security.

The social policy reforms of the 1970s and 1980s developed this vision, focusing on the development of a “social service state” in Finland (Anttonen Reference Anttonen and Simonen1990, Reference Anttonen1998). Publicly organized and funded social services were strongly advocated by left-wing parties and the entire labor movement. In the case of child care, for example, communist and social democratic women campaigned for municipal day care centers. The parties of the center and right, for their part, favored the “mother's wage” (i.e., cash benefits for homemaking mothers) and child minding. This political conflict between left-wing and center-right parties with respective urban–rural alignments was temporarily resolved in favor of the former, and legislation on public day care came into force in 1973. Municipal home help services were also developed with a view to guarantee every household, including families with children, access to these services, for example in such situations in which children fell ill and could not go to day care. Moreover, many other reforms were implemented throughout the 1970s, including separate spousal taxation, abortion rights, family planning, and paternity leave (1978). In general, public education, health provisions, and social care created preconditions for the “liberation” of women from unpaid care tasks. At the same time, they created new professional opportunities for women.

Thus, work-family issues became a socially recognized and administered “risk” in the intellectual context of the 1960s and 1970s. Even if the functionalist notions of gender roles, women's dual role as mothers and workers, or indeed parents' multiple roles within the family and society were rather stereotyped, they still managed to denaturalize conventional assumptions about women's and men's main tasks. Therefore, they were, for example, an important precondition for the introduction of paternity leave. In discussions during this period, however, it was mainly children who were seen as “at risk.” The spread of developmental psychological knowledge helped to bring the figure of the neglected child to the center of the debate. The insights of psychology were supported by economic arguments that emphasized the gains to be won from preventive investments in children as human resources. This alliance of psychology and economics provided powerful justifications for the development of children's day care and other work-family policies.

The Reconciliation of Work and Family Life

The third policy discussion about issues concerning paid work and private life took place in the 1980s. Now the focus was explicitly on the opportunities for parents to “reconcile work and family life” in the context of industrial and postindustrial society. This problematization was informed, above all, by the sociology of everyday life and it marked a process of “secondary scientization,” in which new reflexivity was demanded by policy designers (Ziemann et al. Reference Ziemann, Wetzell, Schumann, Brückweh, Brückweh, Schumann, Wetzell and Ziemann2012). It was still common to invoke functionalist paradigms, explaining the emergence of this issue by reference to structural change and modernization. Thus the Memorandum of Working Group on Work and Family Life argued in familiar terms that “in industrial and postindustrial society . . . the relocation of work outside home, and the participation of both or the only provider in work” had generated “a new kind of need to reconcile the demands of working life and family life” (STM 1983: 2–3). The reference to postindustrial society here anticipated the recent literature on NSRs. In the 1980s, however, the issue was not approached in terms of “risks,” but drew on other vocabularies; the key term here was needs, which had become the central principle of welfare provision after the war (Kemshall Reference Kemshall2002). There were some significant shifts, though. In a typically Nordic manner, work-family reconciliation was now being addressed within a gender-neutral frame, in which both men and women were called “providers” (see Hobson Reference Hobson and Hobson2003), and single parents were also included in the discussion.

Moreover, the vision of reconciliation of work and family life was increasingly informed by a new analytical approach that shifted attention from large-scale socioeconomic processes and systems of social security to the microlevel of everyday life. In this context, the work-family issue appeared as a new and underresearched topic. For example, the same working group pointed out that the work of policy planners suffered from a lack of knowledge about citizens' real-life situations and outcomes of their earlier interventions that should be incorporated into the design of work-life policies:

In Finland, then, the issue of “reconciliation of work and family life” emerged as a legitimate object of social policy in a context that was characterized by a partial dissatisfaction with the predominant intellectual approaches of both functionalism and historical materialism. The focus shifted from socioeconomic structures and national policy institutions toward human actors and their subjective experiences. When the working group called for more information about the “lifestyles” and “life conditions” of families, it was invoking two notions that—along with “way of life”—came from a new sociology that focused on everyday life (e.g., Goffmann Reference Goffmann1959; Heller Reference Heller1984), and that had also become current in popular discourse by the turn of the 1980s (Eskola Reference Eskola1985).Footnote ³ In sum, these policy discussions called for making everyday life more humane by designing practices that would overcome fragmentation and promote the harmonious integration of its various aspects.

The limited number of sociological studies of parents' life conditions also reflected this shift in thinking, as researchers sought to develop theoretical perspectives that could help integrate different dimensions of individual lives and foster interconnections in the lives of families with children. For example, three Finnish sociologists, Elina Haavio-Mannila, Riitta Jallinoja, and Harriet Strandell (Reference Haavio-Mannila, Jallinoja and Strandell1984), examined women's and, to a certain extent, men's experiences of employment and family life. While one part of their book was theoretically rooted in the concept of social roles, another section instead drew on the thought of West German sociologist Ulrike Prokop (Reference Prokop1976) and her notion of Lebenszusammenhang, or the structures of interconnectedness that characterize people's lives. This notion challenged the tendency of role theory to see individuals as objects of external norms and expectations. It highlighted the subjective dimension of human action and the need to resolve conflicts actively, which Prokop saw as a key element in women's lives (Haavio-Mannila et al. Reference Haavio-Mannila, Jallinoja and Strandell1984).

This shift in perspective also meant that, in the 1980s, dilemmas arising from the need to reconcile work and family life were very often depicted from the viewpoint of individual parents. Some of the documents from this period reflected upon the advantages and disadvantages of being employed or being a stay-at-home parent. For example, the report of Finland's Committee on the International Year of the Child 1979 focused on the potential troubles involved in these options. It claimed that parents who stayed at home were liable to lose earnings and pension entitlements and to suffer a deterioration in their skills and “isolation from other adults.” By contrast, if a parent returned to work, he or she faced the dangers of not finding “affordable, permanent and reliable daycare” and of the “insecurity” and “stress” incurred by workplace arrangements that took no account of the situation of parents of young children (Kom. 1980: 96). In accounts such as these, work-family reconciliation was presented as a problem not only in terms of short- and long-term income, which were considered definitive for the “old social risks,” but also in terms of parents' occupational skills, social relations, use of time, and, not least, confidence about the well-being of their children. Even if the key term in some of this literature was insecurity rather than risk, it paved the way for increasingly individualized assessments of the risks that parents faced.

The 1980s has often been considered the golden age of welfare state expansion in Finland. During this period, the Nordic principles of preventive child welfare and investment in family policies, which had taken root in Finland in the 1960s, were still being used to justify the development of policies that would help parents of young children better balance paid work and family responsibilities. For example, the report of Finland's Committee on the International Year of the Child 1979 asserted that “increased social expenditure on family policies” would yield “direct ‘profit’” as unemployment costs would decrease, parental leave would be extended, and jobs would be created in the care sector. In a similar vein, it noted that “securing good care options” would, in the long run, contribute to “cost savings” by “preventing social and psychological disorders” in children and adults, which would be difficult and expensive to remedy retrospectively (Kom. 1980: 97).

This same decade saw reforms that introduced liberal-individualistic elements of “choice” in family policies, with regard to the form of child care, the gender of the family member taking leave to provide care, and parents' daily time use. These reforms made significant aspects of parental leave gender neutral, extended the length of the new parental leave, and increased the amount of parental allowance (Haataja Reference Haataja and Castrén2007). Moreover, public provision became available for both municipal and familial care when leave for child care was integrated into Finnish family policies in 1985 with a new flat-rate system of individual allowances. This alternative to public day care enabled parents to take care of their child at home until the age of three. The reform was combined with a decision to create an unconditional right to day care for children under the age of three. The day care right was to come into force five years later, in 1990, and it was considered a move toward a truly universal social service (Hiilamo Reference Hiilamo and Takala2005). All in all, this policy package represented a compromise in the old political conflict between center and left-wing parties about child care. It also exemplified the ethos of postwar planning and the pragmatic idea of proceeding step-by-step within the limits of economic possibilities, which had become typical for Finnish social policy (Kettunen Reference Kettunen2001).

Family friendly working-time arrangements were also discussed and developed toward the end of the 1980s. Even if part-time work was generally rejected because of the inadequate earnings and social security of part-time employees, the possibility of reducing working time to 30 hours per week was institutionalized in law, as partial leave for child care was introduced in 1988. Regulations on flextime were developed at the same time. For emergency situations, legislation on temporary child care leave also came into force in 1988, making it possible for parents to stay home for four days with their sick child.

All in all, therefore, work-family reconciliation became an explicitly articulated and fully recognized “risk” in the transformed intellectual climate of the 1980s. By shifting the focus from macrolevel structures, functions, and tensions of society to the microlevel lifestyles, interactions, and experiences of citizens, the new knowledge originating from the sociology of everyday life managed to shed light on the entirety of families' daily life better than its predecessors. This knowledge contributed to the formulation of more individualized “risk” assessments of parents' life choices as well as to the development of new policy options that offered them more flexible possibilities to reconcile work and family life.