Family Policy, Family Changes - Sweden, Italy and Britain Compared.

CIVITAS Institute for the Study of Civil Society, London. ISBN 1-903386-43-8

 

Chapter 2

 

Sweden:

Socialist Engineering in Family Policy

 

 

 


"The family thrives in countries in which the government doesn't interfere with it, according to a new international comparison of family policy published by the independent think-tank Civitas."

Chapter 2 of Patricia Morgan's book is published here by special consent of the publishing house CIVITAS.

Thanks to the Krister Pettersson who made this publication possible.

 

 

1. The Present Situation

The main characteristics of family formation in Sweden in recent decades are:

·        declining marriage, more divorce, and rising cohabit­ation;

·        first partnerships are formed at successively younger ages;

·        a growth in people living alone;

·        steady growth in one-parent families;

·        serial monogamy and serial cohabitations are increas­ingly common;

·        the percentage of births outside marriage is rising rapidly, and remains the highest in the EU;

·        fertility rates vary sharply, in response to pro-natalist policies;

·        suicide rates are among the highest in the EU, exceeded only by Finland.

 

Family structure

The family of a married couple with one or two children is the most common type in Sweden. In the 1990 census, about 67 per cent of families with children were married-couple-families, and about 15 per cent were unmarried couples. Lone-parent families were around 20 per cent. Of individuals born between 1892 and the mid-1950s, about 85 per cent grew up with both biological parents until 16. Death was the main reason for not growing up with both parents. However, 24 per cent of children born in Sweden during the 1960s and around 29 per cent of those born in 1970-76 no longer lived with both biological parents by age 16.

Living alone has increased: by 1995, 21 per cent of those aged 16-74 were living alone.

                      There is virtually no adoption in Sweden. The state looks after children who cannot live with their family, since professional educators and carers are preferred to parents. The link with the family of origin is preserved as far as possible.

 

Marriage

Marriage in Sweden has become a pattern of serial monogamy and serial cohabitations. The marriage rate in Sweden increased in the first half of the twentieth century and up to the 1940s. It began to fall in the late 1940s, and in 1967 a dramatic decline set in. In five years, marriages decreased from 60,000 per year to 40,000. Between 1966 and 1996 the annual marriage rate per 1,000 single women dropped by about a third. The marriage rate shot up in 1989, due to a change in widows’ pension rules. (Widows’ pensions were abolished to stop women depending on men, but women could still get them if they were born before 1944 and married by 1989.) The median age at marriage has increased by more than six years since the mid-1960s—in 1996, it was 32 for men and 29 for women. In one in ten marriages in the 1950s and one in five in the 1980s, the woman had been married before.

     In the 1970s, it seemed that replacement of marriage by cohabitation was taking place and there was no overall decline in partnerships. Indeed, first partnerships were formed at successively younger ages. In 1980, 78 per cent of women aged 20 to 24 in a union cohabited. Of women aged 30-35 this was 28 per cent. Among women born in 1949, about 19 per cent married when entering their first union, while only eight per cent of those born in 1964 married directly.

     The propensity for younger women to enter any union increased up to the 1990s, and then levelled off. While women often married after cohabiting for a short time, women in more recent cohorts are now more likely to separate than marry. The dissolution rate for cohabitation is estimated to be two or three times higher than for marriages.[i] While about 20,000 marriages dissolve each year, the number of cohabiting couples separating has increased from about 25,000 in 1981 to 30,000 for 1986-1991. Comparisons of stable cohabiting couples with those who separate reveal little or no socio-economic selection.[ii]

The increase of non-marital unions is contributing to ‘partnership mobility’, in Sweden as elsewhere. These usually last for a short time (shorter than was the case some years ago), and are often followed by successive unions. The Swedes have the highest proportion of women aged 35-39 who have had three or more live-in ‘partnerships’.[iii] By 1994, about 40 per cent of all new unions involved at least one partner who had been living with someone else before. However, the time between unions means that more people remain unpartnered over the long term. However, cohabitations still last longer than in Britain. It has been calculated that, for women in the age range 20-39 years, dissolved cohabitations had a duration of 29 months, compared with 19 in Britain. Cohabitants that led to marriage had a duration of 48 months, compared with 17 in Britain.

Fewer low-status men are married and more are excluded from family life.

 

Fertility trends

During the 1930s, Swedish fertility fell to a TPFR of only 1.7 children per woman. In the 1940s, birth rates rose to replacement level. In the 1960s, when birth rates were very high in the Anglophone world, the Swedish rate fell back to just above 1.6. There was a dramatic upturn in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the TPFR rose to 2.14, the highest in Europe. Women had more children and had them earlier, after policy changes allowed women to stay at home on generous allowances during the children’s early years. In 1980, the mother (or father) could stay at home with a child for a longer period of time if another child was born within 24 months of the last one. In the 1970s, a woman only had the right to a second period of maternity leave without returning to work if the interval between births did not exceed 12 months—although it had already lengthened with holiday and sick leaves. By the time the period was extended to 30 months, many parents could have two or three children reasonably close together to take advantage of all the benefits and easily remain on paid leave for five years or longer. This meant more births as well as reducing the interval between births, with a big boost in second and subsequent births as the last child reached two years of age. Women in their thirties had a fertility rate higher than those in their twenties. The fertility rate of younger women then started to rise as well, as several cohorts first put off childbearing and then compensated for this, or brought births forward.

Birth rates fell back to a low level by the mid-1990s. The reason may lie partly in cutbacks on wage replacement policies and other adverse economic developments that threatened wages. Also, as in the UK in the 1970s, the very low birth rate may have been due partly to the fact that young women had already brought their birth plans for­ward and had their children. There was a reduction in the number of couples having third children and a post­ponement of the birth of the first child. The fall proved to be as temporary as the artificially induced peak, for by 2000 the birth rate had recovered to 1.65—very slightly higher than the UK.[iv]

 

Unwed births

Sweden already had a high illegitimacy rate at the end of the nineteenth century (ten per cent) compared with other European countries, partly because there was a surplus of women, as men migrated, and a very late age at marriage, as people waited to inherit land.

In 1979, 35 per cent of births were out of wedlock compared with less than ten per cent in Britain. Over 50 per cent of births are now outside marriage, over­whelmingly within cohab­itat­ions. More first births are within cohabitations than marriages. There appear to be fewer ‘single’ unwed births than in Britain, where the unwed birth rate is higher than might be expected from the rates of cohabitation. The overall proportion of women who had a child prior to any union was seven per cent in Sweden in 1995 and there has not been the upward movement seen in Britain. On the other hand, there has been an upward movement in Sweden in first births post first partnership.[v]

There is also the role of cohabitation in driving birth rates down. As elsewhere, cohabiting couples have fewer children than married couples. The formation and disruption of these unstable relationships absorbs time in which children might be conceived and born.

Abortion now deals with nearly 70 per cent of pregnancies out of wedlock in Sweden.

 

Lone parents

Sweden had one of the highest proportions of lone mothers in Europe in 1979. The increase was greater in the UK in the 1990s, and it has now overtaken Sweden. There is a much lower proportion of young lone mothers in Sweden, with only eight per cent under 25 years old. As elsewhere, lone mothers have fewer children than married mothers (63 per cent have only one child, compared with 37 per cent of married mothers in 1995).

However, more single cohabiting mothers marry than in Britain. France and Britain have the lowest proportion of single, cohabiting mothers who marry, at around one-third, while in Sweden it is 56 per cent within five years, and 70 per cent in Italy.[vi]

A high proportion of lone mothers are foreign born, or 20 per cent by 1995. Figures for 1990 show there are more children with lone parents in blue-collar families (25 per cent live with a lone parent) compared with white-collar families (17 per cent). As elsewhere, lone mothers are more likely to be the less educated, low-ability women. Not only do women with higher education have a considerably lower propensity to become lone mothers, but higher earnings before the first child also reduce the risk of entering lone motherhood.[vii]

 

Divorce as a springboard

Overall, the number of individuals experiencing family disruption (from all sources) annually is 140,000-150,000 adults and children. The increasing risks of union dissol­ution for women born after the late 1950s, in contrast to women born before, is probably due to cohabitations increasing the separation rate. Until the late 1980s, divorce was the main route into lone motherhood.

There was a gradual, continuous increase in divorce from the beginning of the century. The divorce rate increased dramatically in the 1970s following a change in the divorce law in 1974 that allowed divorce on request and at short notice. No reason has to be given, and there is no wait unless there are children (where there is a six month consideration period). Public interference occurs in the case of property and custodial settlements if the couple cannot agree. The annual divorce rate increased immed­iately by almost 70 per cent, from 8.6 per 1,000 in 1973 to 14.5 per 1,000 marriages in 1974. As elsewhere, after the legal change, the divorce rate dropped somewhat but settled at a far higher level than before. In 1988, the Swedish divorce rate had dropped back to 10.8 per 1,000 married women to rise again by the mid-1990s. Other countries have similar rates: Norway 9.4, Australia 10.8, England and Wales 12.7 in 1989, New Zealand 12.0 in 1990, US 21.0 in 1988.

A factor in the divorce rate is unemployment: as elsewhere, women expect men to be the main breadwinner and reject men who cannot offer much financial support. Amongst children born into marital or cohabiting unions that subsequently became marital unions, there is little difference in the chances of children seeing their parents’ relationship break up by their fifth birthday. This is unlike Britain and the US, where children with parents who married from cohabitation are more likely to see their parents split than those born into marriage.

 

Cohabitation as a springboard

As elsewhere, because cohabitation has such a high dis­solution rate compared with marriages, and because cohabitation has become a common way to live, it becomes a leading engine behind the expansion of lone parenthood. According to the cohort study using the Fertility and Family Surveys, 93 per cent of marital unions survive five years after the birth of the first child, compared with 75 per cent of cohabitations (compared with only 48 per cent in Britain).[viii] Moreover, previously cohabiting mothers are much less likely to enter a new union compared with those who have been married. Contrary to assumptions about Sweden in the UK, cohabitations have not become equal to marriage in longevity and stability.

 

2. The Historical Background

These trends paint a picture of increasing social frag­mentation. Nonetheless, Sweden has the reputation as the beacon of enlightenment and progress in Europe. One demo-legend has it that Sweden is living proof that cohabitations are as durable as marriages. Another has it that Swedish experience proves that lone parents and their children are more than equal to two-parent families and their children in all outcomes, so long as they get proper support. Sweden ‘proves’ that young children do better when they go to day care, rather than being reared by mothers at home, and so on. Policy analysts turn to Sweden ‘as a widely touted example of modern family policy, a system that recognises the social transformations made necessary by the commitment to gender equality and the full industrialisation of social life… the purest model for a regime of day care, progressive schooling, paid paternal leave... which reconciles the need for human reproduction with the drive for gender equality.’[ix] Sweden’s welfare state is the model to emulate. The present bias is to classify welfare/fiscal or family policies in such a way as to juxtapose the ideal of the dual-career family who share household duties with the horror of the male breadwinner family and its rigid role segregation. Policies which do not aim to engineer the former are seen as setting out to subjugate women in the latter. The only enlightened policy has become one which gives women equal access to jobs in the labour market, financial inde­pendence and high quality subsidised childcare services, so that they never have to choose between a job and having children. This perspective is promoted by Swedish social scientists (as well as policy-makers), who ‘have devised several classifications of welfare states that always place the modern Nordic welfare state at the apex of typologies, as the best practice model’.[x] They demand that it must also be exported everywhere else, and it has long been favoured by UK establishment feminists, in and out of government. In 1996, Allan Larsson, Director General of DGV (Directorate General V, responsible for Employment, Industrial Relations and Social Affairs) in the European Commission, complained that women’s work-rates in the EU were still lower than men’s. He insisted that the days of the male breadwinner had gone and dismissed the ‘old social contract’ with a division of responsibilities between spouses as ‘no longer valid’. Effectively, he demanded that the ‘traditional’ sexual division of labour must be outlawed, and the Swedish model extended to all in Europe, irrespective of pref­erences.[xi]

Sweden has been cast as the prime example of the ‘maximalist welfare state’. Its project is to ‘put people’s lives straight by defining the content of the good life and controlling the institutional instruments leading to it’. There is even an official list of names from which babies must be named.[xii] The justification for such far-reaching intervention and attempts to shape people’s fundamental choices in life rests on assumptions that someone knows better than the individuals concerned what the good life is and how it can be achieved. Not least, this has involved the comprehensive political control of family life, where Sweden has made just about the most concerted attempt in history to engineer the freedom of women from child-rearing responsibilities and the demise of the traditional family through economic manipulation, social pressures, and massive public re-education.

In 1968, Sweden became the first country in the world to frame a government policy of achieving equality between the sexes by changing the role of men as well as that of women. In a statement to the United Nations that year the Swedish government had declared that it was not enough to guarantee women their rights. All legislation and all social policy must support a shift from man-the-breadwinner and woman-the-homemaker to a society of independent individuals and of partnerships in which all tasks were shared.[xiii]

In the new century, the remaking of the sexes has been joined by the attempt to equalise ‘sexualities’. Books and other media marketed to Swedish schools containing ‘unsatisfactory or discriminatory passages concerning homosexuality or bisexuality’ are destined for the bonfire. To this end, the National Academy for Education is con­ducting an extensive review of all schools to deter­mine how principals choose and use textbooks. Schools are now ‘empowered’ to ‘integrate gender equality and sexual orientation issues into their operations and every­day tasks’. As any criticism or objection to the complete normalisation of homosexuality is tacitly defined as psychological abnormality, research is meant to focus upon how ‘norms and attitudes make homophobia possible’ even where there are ‘no statistics or consistent studies which can pinpoint discrimination due to sexual orientation’.[xiv] Making what may be regarded as offensive statements about homosexuality or homo­sexuals merits a prison term.

One of the last places in Europe to give anyone the franchise, Sweden is essentially an authoritarian, cult­urally (and genetically) homogeneous, and small-scale society, with traditions of strong, centralised government, and minimal citizen participation. The cultural and racial homogeneity are largely a function of its small size. As shown in Tables 1 and 2 (pp. 7-10), Sweden is one of the six smallest countries in the EU, whereas Italy and Britain are among the four largest. Historically, little or nothing in the way of intermediate stages or groups developed between a fairly egalitarian and primitive clan-based peasantry and the monarchy. There have been no auto­nomous trading cities, no merchant classes, no nobility to challenge the state, whose position of power and direct hold over the people has no counterpart elsewhere in Western Europe. This all endowed the expansion of the state and its educative pretensions with a natural legitimacy, and furthered the introduction of collectivist perspectives which demanded strong institut­ional uni­formity and subordinated the rights of the individual to the best interests of the community.[xv] Sweden quickly took to twentieth century collectivist notions of the rule of ‘expert’ elites, possessed of a superior knowledge, of how best people should live.

Added to this, the ‘mature industrialism’ which took root in the early twentieth century was a ‘paradoxical and highly unstable combination of market and command economy’. In 1870 three-quarters of the population were engaged in fishing, farming and forestry, and only nine per cent in manufacturing or crafts. (In Britain, 45 per cent of the labour force were in industry at that time.) Sweden had no coal, but developed hydro-electricity, which led to very rapid economic growth. The ‘big factories of mass production were veritable plan and command economies in miniature. Their organisational principles were strictly hierarchic and their top-down chain of command as explicit as in military organisations’.[xvi] The commanding organisational rationality of big business helped inspire the ‘social Fordism’ that was repudiated in the USA, but favoured in Germany, the Soviet Union and Sweden, or countries with more corporatist and hierarchic traditions. The Swedish welfare state was to develop along lines which reproduced the centralist and standardised prin­ciples of mass manufacturing big industry, the happy factory, or cybernetic Utopia.

Like democracy, Sweden came late to many develop­ments in sexual equality and family law. ‘Modernisation’ meant the telescoping of the two phases of reform that elsewhere occurred between 1880 and 1900 and then between 1960 and 1975, with Sweden being much later with some and much earlier with other measures. Until 1920, married women had no control over their own earnings, which belonged to the husband. Until 1909, there was no civil marriage. However, illegitimacy as a legal entity was abolished in 1917, not out of radicalism, but because of the ways in which stig­matisation was adding to the problems surrounding children born out of wedlock and their mothers. Liberal divorce laws were introduced in the 1920s and extended in 1974. Homosexuality was decriminalised in 1944. Compulsory sex education was introduced into schools in 1956.

Pronatalism

The impetus behind the family policy measures of the 1930s-1960s was population maintenance, given the low birth rates of the pre-war period. Over a million Swedes left the country between 1860 and 1914, mainly for the USA. There was concern over population shrinkage, as the net fertility rate fell below one in 1927—although it is now alleged that the fertility decline was overstated.[xvii] The low birth rate resulted, to a not inconsiderable extent, from a low marriage rate and a high proportion of unmarried women. The same was true of the illegitimacy rate. Migration, plus the need to inherit land before marrying, depleted the supply of marriageable men, reduced further by the Great Depression.[xviii]

Swedish pro-natalism owed much to Alva and Gunnar Myrdal’s 1934 book Crisis in the Population Question, which provided a pertinent analysis of reproduction in a capitalist society.[xix] They argued that, since having children was (irreversibly) voluntary, and based on a living standard criteria, birth rates would probably continue to fall unless something was done to equalise the financial status of those with and without this burden. Those who produced children were massive contributors to the upkeep and perpetuation of the nation, in whom it should invest heavily to secure its future. The Myrdals spoke prophetically of how the long-term development of the proposed welfare state, which would include provisions for the aged as well as children, might add dramatically to anti-family pressures which discouraged the birth of children by passing massive resources and influence to the elderly.

Old age pensions stripped children of economic value and reversed the incentives structure. It had become rational for people to avoid the expense of children, while hoping that others will be foolish enough to rear the children who would later pay for everyone’s retirement. Young people were required to support the retired and the needy through the welfare system as well as the children to whom they gave life. Consequently, they reduced the number of children because it was the only factor over which they had any control. In contrast to the neo-Malthusians, who saw increased living standards as the result of population decline, it was argued that an aging population would mean more medical and welfare costs falling on a decreasing number of economically active people, as the economy contracted with falling demand and less capital formation. Also to consider as the aged inherited the earth, was the prospect of the debilitating and stultifying power of the elders.

The Myrdals wrested the population question away from conservatives and nationalists and turned it towards the service of socialist goals. ‘With exquisite timing, the Myrdals offered the [Social Democratic] party a wildly popular, politically effective, scientifically justified res­ponse to what had been seen as an unsolvable problem, and they went on to reshape their nation.’[xx] As transformers of the Swedish state, their achievement knows few parallels. They epitomised the collectivist social engineer who manages society according to scientific principles for constructive ends. To the elite expert, existing social life was just ‘the illogical result of human choices; at any moment we could decide whether to maintain or change it’. Distinctions ‘between facts and values were blurred and jargon became a convenient cover for political goals’.[xxi] As the Myrdals pursued ‘social revolution they foreclosed other options and possibilities and so served as progenitors of the post-family welfare state’.[xxii]

Calling for a ‘forced march into modernity as the only hope for families and children’, the Myrdals linked vol­untary parenthood, sex education and birth control to the feminist theme of women’s full engagement in the labour market and thence to the nationalist desire to ensure population stability. Gunnar Myrdal himself had an authentic desire to increase the birth rate, while Alva was more committed to a gender role revolution, achieved through the use of the population issue as a political tool. Both saw the radical-conservative consensus on the population question as the crowbar for the socialisation of Sweden. Only sex would be left to individuals and the hope was that this would secure enough children to fund the whole enterprise.

 

Importing the revolution

Before it erupted in the West in the late 1960s, the doctrinal base for sexual liberation and gender equality was laid in Sweden by the same body of feminists influential in the early Soviet Union’s programme for sexual freedom. Both communists and social democrats, supported by Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, were part of the interwar functionist movement which attacked the garden cities of England and the workers’ apartments of Europe as incompatible with women’s employment and freedom from ‘household drudgery’. Even if it was ‘inspired by socialist sympathies’, the low-cost housing built in Western Europe between the two world wars did not have as its goal the remodelling of the family or society, but the amelioration of an ugly by-product of capitalism—the squalid slums of the industrial cities. ‘The [limited] goals were space, hygiene and fresh air.’[xxiii] Embracing Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for living’, the Myrdals and other policy-makers wanted the ‘collective house’ to house the new people, with the women at work, the children in care centres, and social workers and educators overseeing everything. The family dilemma in Western society would be resolved—on Friedrich Engels’s terms—by the development of more ‘efficient’ forms of child-rearing better suited to the industrial age. Daycare and summer camps would be less expensive than supporting the antiquated and maladaptive family where children were exposed to a damaging psychological atmosphere. The ‘falsely individualistic desire’ of parents for the ‘freedom’ to raise their own children was unhealthy. It was ‘based on a sadistic disposition to extend this “freedom” to an unbound and uncontrolled right to dominate others’.[xxiv] In the collective nursery, small children would be cared for twenty fours hours a day by highly trained personnel, in hygienic conditions, with pedagogically correct playthings. (This is not far from the ‘children’s centres’ envisaged by the Blair government as an outcrop of the Sure Start programme, where children can stay from early morning to evening while the parent works.)

In these conditions, women would have more children. If there were not enough jobs, then public works, sound economic planning and a growing economy would create enough for everybody. The blueprint was for com­munities where ‘property was owned jointly, work was shared, food was prepared in common, and children brought up together’. Men and women would then ‘be equal and independent, and sexual morality... not defined by legal norms’. The ‘aim was to break the bonds that private property and conventional family ties imposed on the development of the individual in a free society’. Collective housekeeping was ‘not just a convenience for women but... part of the structure necessary for creating socialist relationships’.[xxv]

In turn, reducing the time together in the home would undermine the influence of parents on their children’s development.

For the reformers, a rational allocation of resources meant benefits in kind, or as ‘social consumption’ rather than cash. Otherwise, family allowances might be added to the main family budget, rather than spent directly on the children. Society must assume most of the child support function, financed by taxes on the whole population, and dispense free meals, free medical care, clothing, infant care, ‘modern, hygienic furniture’ and so forth. Such collectivised programmes would prove cheaper, more effective and adequate in meeting need, than individual choice, and allowed for social trans­formation through the removal of independent action. Ordinary people lacked the sense to know what was good for them. Consumption, the last economic function left to the family, must be socialised.[xxvi]

The Myrdals dominated political and social discourse in the interwar period to the extent that to engage in sexual intercourse was ‘to Myrdal’ and a sofa was a ‘Myrdal couch’.[xxvii] But the reform programme, with its day­care for children, went beyond the confines of Social Democratic policy-making and opinion in the 1930s and 1940s. Actual family policy reforms included free matern­ity care in public clinics, rent rebates according to family size, child tax allowances, marriage loans and employ­ment protection for mothers. In 1948, family allowances for all children were introduced to replace child tax allowances. Many of these measures existed in the UK, such as maternity care and child health measures; family allowances were introduced in Britain in 1943, and ran alongside child tax allowances until 1979. Policies sup­porting full employment through Keynesian manip­ulation were also common pro-family measures through­out the post-war Anglophone world—as in Australia and New Zealand. However, in Sweden, a more explicit pro-natalist population policy, allied with Keyne­sian counter-cyclical public expenditure policies, specif­ically legit­imated the expansion of the welfare state. The goal was to increase fertility by 25 per cent, and to improve the quality of the next generation by improve­ments in child welfare. As elsewhere, pro­natalism and the preservation of the nation were not then deemed to be racist or fascist.

From the time that Swedish welfare programmes were first constructed in the 1930s, there was much concern, not just with horizontal equity, but with the vertical redistribution that was eschewed in the Anglophile world. The welfare state was seen as an instrument of equality, rather than simply a device for easing pressure at various points in the life cycle.

 

Social engineering: the feminist paradise

By the 1960s, the goal of achieving a real redistribution of wealth, or even a reduction in income differentials through full employment and measures for non-earning members of society, seemed even further off. Inequalities had widened. Oppor­tunities for advancement went to those who already had opportunities, while grants, loans and tax breaks for enterprise increased the wealth gaps. Victims of a ‘new poverty’ were principally those with children, and especially lone parents, big families and immigrants. What was ‘redistributed’ back to parents was little compared with what they paid in taxes to finance benefits and services (plus the administrative costs) that went primarily to others—especially the retired. By 1958, pensioners were receiving a higher income than members of families with dependent children.

Sweden saw much the same upsurge in crime in the 1960s as other Western countries; lower than the UK, France and the Netherlands, but higher than Germany, Italy and Austria.

The contemporary counter-cultural upheaval in the Anglo­phone world was re-cycling feminist and socialist perspectives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—perspectives that already had greater promin­ence and success in Sweden.

The debate on class equality was joined by a re-vamped gender debate, dominated by progressive socio­logists and psychologists. By now, ‘social parenting’ was a definite pre-requisite for a liberated sexuality which was incompatible with child-rearing based in marriage. With reformers preoccupied with class and gender equality, the aim was a society where individuals, undefined by sex, marriage, or parenthood, were never dependent upon any­body else, and in continuous full-time work regard­less of marital and parental status. The Erlander Report,[xxviii] adopted by the Swedish Social Demo­crats in 1964, and supported by communists and liberals, insisted that government powers over industry and education were to be used to eliminate sex discrimination, sex-determined choices of occupation, and to set up childcare. In comparison, moves to diminish the conflict between work and family merely perpetuated the idea that women’s task was homemaking and the care of children. There must be no ‘right to choose’ between home and career at any time in life, and men and women must unavoidably have the same obligations. People did not know their own minds; they were just ‘culturally conditioned’ and frozen into an impoverishing mould.

With the goals being the sameness of contribution and equality of outcome, attained by the break-up of the sexual division of labour in the home, and equal opportunities and affirmative action policies outside, the Social Democrats’ women’s organisation got them incorporated into the party’s ‘Programme for Equality’, adopted in 1969. It involved a sleight of hand and was never really debated publicly. The programme was presented as having something for everyone, so the inclusion of women, or the social engineering of the new women and new men, remained largely implicit.

 

Everybody working

The reduction of poverty was sought through wages policy, in the context of the pursuit of full employment. This is not the ‘living wage’ policy pursued by governments and trade unions in Anglophile countries from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century—the aim of ensuring male breadwinners an income sufficient to keep a smallish family at a modest but adequate living standard. Instead, with the aim of keeping all parents in employment there had to be the same remuneration, as well as employment and family work patterns, for both sexes. Twinned with the goal of reducing gender inequality was one of equalising income between family types. This itself was part of ensuring equality across classes. Labour shortages dictated that all women had to work, to avoid the need for immigration, with its consequent social problems. (Other countries, like the UK and Germany, imported labour from less developed countries.)

To engineer these outcomes, unmarried and married couples were treated alike in respect of tax assessment, housing allowances and child benefit. Individual taxation of spouses replaced joint taxation in 1971. The principle of family equity as applied fiscally—that income be taxed in proportion to the numbers dependent upon it—was annulled on the grounds that nobody should rely on anybody else, and children were preferably reared by the state.

‘Social democrats sacrificed one of their most hallowed principles... in order to force a tax on the imputed income of the homemaker and to drive all mothers into the marketplace.’[xxix] As an added penalty on mutual support, a family with only one earner received a lower housing benefit than one with the same net income earned by two. Housing benefit is paid per person. Since 1995, a ‘partner’ with no income is not entitled to any housing benefit, so that the couple will have an income limit under a half that allowed a lone parent.

With very high progressive taxation, it became impossible (as intended) to live on one wage, and more economically advantageous for the woman to work, than for the man to work longer hours or get more remunerative work. The resultant high female work-rates have been interpreted as reflecting women’s preferences for paid work over family work and for financial independence over interdependence with a spouse.

 

All in the crčche

To put further pressure on both parents to work, subsidised day-care became the main form of ‘help’ for families. The state took on, and socialised, many family responsibilities to a degree unseen outside of the Soviet bloc, not least the rearing of children in crčches (ideally) or with minders.[xxx] To rid the world of sex roles was not only an educational endeavour, it also demanded intervention into personality development and attitudes. Given assumptions about the overwhelming role of early experience, pre-school care offered the opportunity to combat early differences in the personalities of the sexes while parents were occupied at work.[xxxi]

Parenthood was separated from marriage, and the word ‘custodian’ adopted to designate the person immediately responsible for a child. These custodians are acting for the state which ‘is not only the supervisor but also the agency which creates the conditions under which mothers and fathers are acting as parent’.[xxxii] An ‘aspect of the integration of paid work and parenting is that in child development and education, parental work must be shared with paid professionals. The professionals do their job as paid work, which means that the rules of their working organisations and labour unions set certain limits on parental influence’.[xxxiii]

While parents are expected to go to meetings at day­care centres ‘to be informed about the situation and the plans for the daycare centres and the children… Parents are generally not supposed to interfere... In school there are even fewer possibilities to influence the way children are taken care of and the education they get. All in all, there is a loss of parental control over the development of the child.’[xxxiv]

The public care system, introduced in the 1960s, covers about 50 per cent of children aged six or under (school starts at seven years of age), and about a third of under-threes are cared for in municipal nurseries or by salaried childminders. Fees at day-care centres are heavily subsidised and amount to around 10-15 per cent of the actual costs. They are determined separately in each municipality. A place in a centre cost about two thirds of the average gross wage by the mid-1980s. Lone parents have generally had priority for places, even if they do not work, at reduced rates. The proportion of children in public daycare is higher for lone- than for two-parent families. By the 1990s, almost half of children with two parents used municipal childcare compared with three-quarters of children with lone parents.

Childminders have to look after at least four children full-time, or eight to ten part-time, to get their salary. One reason so many children still go to childminders is that many municip­alities only admit children needing full-time care to nurseries, since nursery places are too costly to use part-time. Another reason is the need to meet targets for daycare coverage, which has meant registering unofficial or ‘black day mothers’ as salaried childminders (many are women trying to finance the rearing of their own children by taking in other people’s at a knock-down price). The local authority hires the mother by inserting a subsidy into the system that helps her to pay her taxes while staying at home. Unlike the nurseries, childminders only have to meet minimal standards to be approved.

There has been some conflict between local authorities and the central government over the expansion of institutional daycare, and in some municipalities by the 1990s lone mothers only had priority for places if they were employed. The availability of ‘socialised’ childcare has been patchy compared with both aspirations and proclamations, not least because it turned out to be the most unimaginably expensive and inefficient way to look after children. The necessary resources, not least in terms of trained personnel, were simply not there. Although daycare became the largest single item on many mun­icipal budgets by the 1970s, and the construction and staffing of a network of care facilities proceeded apace (the number of nursery places increased ten-fold between 1970 and 1980), the timescale for national coverage of all pre-school children was continually revised.

There are objections to the removal of childcare from unemployed parents on the grounds that this violates the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is seen as discrim­inatory that children are denied something as fundamental to their development and freedom as child­care purely because of their parents’ work status.[xxxv]

 

The benefits system

Benefits in kind, or as ‘social consumption’ rather than cash, allowed for social transformation through the removal of independent action and choice. Applications to deal with child poverty by paying municipal family allowances (a tradition in the Germanic and Scandinavian world) to ‘unfavoured’ families (i.e. those without a working mother), which might in part compensate for the daycare subsidies they had paid for but did not use, were disallowed.

A strict ‘availability for work’ test has been applied to the unemployed, with no allowance for lone parents or anyone’s childcare responsibilities. (In Britain, there are relatively weak work tests, so a lone parent does not have to work until the youngest child is 16.) In Sweden, parenting is allowed for in the employment programme, but it is a break from a career. Work is not supposed to be fitted around a family. Instead, allowances are made for families in employment.

Public transfers are strongly income-redistributive, and many services are heavily subsidised or free of charge. Transfer and insurance schemes are usually universal. Unlike other redistributist welfare regimes, real or aspirational, policy has generally avoided means-testing, or has not focused on it. The few means-tested benefits, like the housing allowance and social benefit, have not been a big aspect of the welfare system and, unlike elsewhere, do not have so much impact on labour supply. There is a universal child allowance, with a supplement for the second child. Child allowances have largely kept pace with retail prices, adding about five per cent per child to the gross earnings of the industrial worker. In 1996 the amount was reduced. By 1997 the level of family allowance and the supplement for the second child were restored. At the time of writing the family allowance is €105 a month, with a €28 supplement for the third child, €84 for the fourth child, and €105 for each subsequent child.

However, payments in kind and, particularly, income replacement during maternity/parental leave account for more than 65 per cent of all family benefits in countries like Denmark and Sweden. Cash family benefits account for only 30 per cent of all child/family benefits, compared to well over 50 per cent in Italy and the UK.[xxxvi]

 

Parental leave

Parental leave income replacement programmes were intro­duced in 1974. In 1989, the duration of paid leave became 60 weeks. Payment during leave was 75 per cent to 90 per cent of earnings for 48 weeks, and then a minimum guaranteed amount. The rate for the first 48 weeks fell to 85 per cent in 1995 and to 75 per cent in 1996; to return to 80 per cent in 1998. The ‘eligibility interval’ also expanded, so that if a woman bears the next child within this interval, she is entitled to exactly the same benefits that she received for her previous birth. The interval rose from 12 months in 1974-77 to 30 months in 1986. In the 1970s, a woman had only the right to a second period of maternity leave without returning to work if the interval between births did not exceed 12 months—although it had already lengthened with holiday and sick leaves. With the period extended to 30 months, many parents could have two or three children reasonably close together to take advantage of all the benefits and easily remain on paid leave for five years or longer.

Since after-tax income does not allow one parent to stay home with children, the economy of the family is very much dependent upon the woman having a paid job—the insurance money from parental leave is aimed at refunding the income lost from paid work, not for having children to look after.

In 1995, one month of Swedish parental leave was earmarked for the father, since mothers were using most days (90 per cent or more in 1993-96). Despite all the propaganda and various pressures, men do not usually take parental leave, and role reversal is very rare. Men’s use of parental leave is also low elsewhere: one per cent in Norway, two per cent in Denmark, three per cent in Iceland, with a maximum of 13 per cent in Finland. Most mothers prefer not to share the care of a newborn with the father.[xxxvii] So men are being made to ‘care’, like it or not. Three-quarters of mothers and fathers were opposed to compelling men to take parental leave.[xxxviii] The new rule made little impact. By the late 1990s, fathers were still taking only 11 per cent of leave days, and half took none at all. Most of those men who took it worked in the public sector and had wives in high-status jobs. Despite all the enthusiasm for Swedish role reversal in the UK press, it is not a reality even in Sweden, only rhetoric.[xxxix] The work environment is hostile to workers in key posts or with special skills taking so much time off.

The parental leave system is used by more two-parent families than lone parents. In 1993, this was 93 per cent compared to 55 per cent. Until the child is 12 years old, parents are allowed to take time off work to stay at home when the child is ill, at the rate of 75 per cent of earnings, up to a maximum of 60 days per year.

In January 2002, the parental leave scheme was changed, to add a second daddy-month, on top of the existing allowance rather than at the expense of the mother’s allowance. In January 2003, the income guarantee level was raised again. The objectives of the reform were to enhance an early and close contact between father and child; to reduce employer discrim­ination against fathers and mothers on parental leave; and to promote a less unequal division of household and childcare responsibilities in order to achieve less unequal labour market outcomes. It was believed that increasing daddy-months in parental leave would have the long-term effect of reducing occupational segregation and the pay gap. Evaluation studies show a slightly increased fathers’ use of parental leave, although this still remains very low, at 17 per cent of all the leave available to couples—a very slow increase from seven per cent in 1987. However the biggest effect was to persuade most fathers to take at least a few days’ leave, rather than none at all. Before the change, over half of all new fathers took no daddy-leave days off work. After the change, total non-use was reduced to 20 per cent. One-third of new fathers took one month off work. Surprisingly, the change had no impact at all on fathers’ propensity to take time off to care for a sick child. Many fathers simply used the extra leave to top up their summer holiday and Christmas holiday allowances. Peak times for the use of daddy-leave days are in August and late December, especially as they can be taken at any time up to the child’s eighth birthday.[xl] Anecdotal evidence suggests that fishing trips are more popular than changing nappies. Unde­terred, the government is considering whether to force fathers to take one-third of all parental leave. However, it is reluctant to push through the change, because it could be sufficiently unpopular to be a vote-loser.

 

Double income for lone mothers?

A problem with these arrangements is that equal pay and employment for men and women results in a living standard based on double incomes. This defeats the aim of equalising outcomes for lone- and two-parent families—since lone mothers only have one income to rely on. So the state makes a ‘child maintenance advance’ for lone parents, paid by the Social Insurance Office, which tries to claim a proportion of it back from the absent parent. The payment is additional and above the rate of child allowance.[xli] The government recovers about a third of the expenditure from fathers—something that became a matter of some debate in the 1990s. There are no such guaranteed payments in Britain, although they are an aim of the lone-parent lobby (and were proposed by the Finer Committee[xlii]). In Sweden, as in Britain, mothers on public assistance do not benefit from maintenance unless the payment lifts income above the benefit line. Giving lone mothers double incomes means that couples on one wage are going to be worse off than lone parents. With two children and average earnings, a lone parent in Sweden in 1996 was 35 per cent better off than a one-earner couple on average earnings. However, on a half of average earnings, the lone parent would have 92 per cent of the net income of the couple.

 

How much has it cost?

In order for the state to provide services socially that otherwise would be privately provided in the family, many ordinary, everyday personal services must be reckoned in monetary terms, tax revenues raised to finance them, and complex rules and conditions imposed to limit undesirable side effects.[xliii] In 1960, ‘real social expenditure’ in Sweden was around 16 per cent of GDP, just above average for OECD countries. In 1981, ‘real social expenditure’ accounted for almost 34 per cent of GDP, exceeded only by Belgium and the Netherlands. In the years 1975-1981, real social welfare spending increased four times as fast as the economy as a whole, and twice as fast as the OECD average in that period. Sweden’s general government outlay as a share of national output amounted to 59 per cent by 2003—a rise of nearly 28 per cent from 1960, with an estimated restrictive effect on output of 390 per cent.[xliv] By the late 1970s, a skilled worker on the average wage paid 50 per cent income in taxation—down to over 40 per cent in the late 1980s (34.2 per cent in 2000/2001 at an average production wage and 42.6 at twice average earnings).[xlv] Employers still pay around 40 per cent payroll tax for social welfare. The Swedish tax take has been overtaken by Denmark, Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands in the twenty-first century (if the employer’s social security liability is excluded).[xlvi] In practice, only a limited portion of what is paid as tax is redistributed between different groups; the ‘greater part really goes into a whirligig which transforms our money into political power over ourselves’.[xlvii] By 1990, the public sector accounted for 37 per cent of the labour force—more than manufacturing industry (20 per cent). Similarly, in Denmark the number of female homemakers declined by 579,000 between 1960 and 1982, as the number of employees in the public sector grew by 532,000, with most of the growth in daycare, elder care, hospitals and schools.[xlviii]

The Swedish system has been characterised as a system where the private sector maintains nominal control over its capital and labour, but the returns on the factors of production are so heavily circumscribed by regulations, directives and taxes that the state, or public sector, ends up effectively con­trolling them. A ‘sham form of mixed economy’, it has tradit­ionally been associated with Fascist regimes. This kind of gelenkte Wirtschaft (joined up) economy is popular with politicians and bureaucrats because all sectors of society are forced to keep on good terms with the state and its func­t­ionaries if they are to remain in business. Such ‘Third Way’ economies seem to be capable of generating good growth in their early years, as GNP is boosted by the public spending component. They eventually slow down and seize up as investors become aware of the ways in which their returns are being expropriated. All the regulations and controls create inefficiencies that, in turn, lead to more controls, until a point is reached when deregulation becomes necessary if the system is to survive.[xlix]

A perennial justification for putting all women into the labour force and into more productive work than childrearing is that this will make everyone richer: ‘To the extent that female participation remains at depressed levels due to market failures and policy distortions, (sic) removing these could lead to higher levels of welfare.’[l] In Sweden, between the mid-1970s to mid-1990s, disposable income increased by around 18 per cent, reckoned per consumption unit after taxes and transfers. Most of the increase is attributable to the roughly equivalent rise in employment rates among women, with rising incomes concentrated among joint households, particularly middle-aged (30-64 years) and childless households.[li] But there was little growth in real incomes for full-time employees (three per cent). People have simply been made to put more labour onto the market. They expend double the effort and are disabled from cooperating to exploit any division of labour or to specialise. If Swedish women take care of each other’s children in exchange for others taking care of theirs, how much additional output can come out of this?

 

3. Have the Policies Worked?

Has Sweden solved the ‘lone parent’ problem?

In the UK, as throughout the Anglophone world, lone parents tend to rely heavily on public assistance, to be dispro­portionately economically inactive and to have a high propor­tion of their number under, at, or around the poverty threshold. It is repeatedly claimed that lone parents could be self-supporting if only they had the childcare and the jobs. Only lack of these is stopping them from working full-time, which they are supposedly desperate to do. Indeed, some have gone so far as to claim that the state could make a profit from providing childcare, which will get mothers off benefits and paying taxes instead.

Sweden has done more or less everything every good progressive says it should do to put mothers into work, abolish lone-parent poverty, rid them of dependence on the state or means-tested subsidies and ensure equal outcomes for different ‘family forms’. It allows us to test the hypothesis that it is marriage and children that make women poor. In this view, lone parents are not at risk of poverty because one person has all the parental functions. Instead, it is the family and its division of labour that are the main cause of the high poverty among lone mothers. Their plight mirrors and concentrates women’s diffi­culties as an economically disadvantaged group com­pared with husbands and fathers. Society could easily arrange to pass babies onto a child-rearing agency. This would get rid of women’s caring penalty (that is, all the money lost while looking after others), and enable them to accumulate greater income for them­selves.[lii]

So has the Swedish model lived up to expectations?

 

The growth in poverty

Compared with their position elsewhere, Swedish policy on lone parents is a success, since their poverty rate is low. In 1982-87, there was no significant difference between lone and couple-mothers in the prevalence of poverty. At this time, 23 per cent of children in lone-parent families lived in homes with below 40 per cent of the adjusted median income. This drops to two per cent when post-tax and transfer incomes are compared. For children in two-parent families this is 1.5 per cent. In the USA, at the same time, 54 per cent of children with lone parents experienced both low post-tax and transfer incomes.

In Sweden and Norway, lone-parent families had 85 per cent of the adjusted (equivalised) disposable income of members of two-parent families in 1995. In Germany, France and the UK it was between 65 and 76 per cent, and below 60 per cent in Australia, Canada and the US. The difference was due to the universal child allowance, an advanced maintenance benefit, subsidised childcare and parental leave insurance. A strong contributory factor for lone parents’ low incomes in other countries is that means-tested benefits serve as negative incentives for employ­ment, or (for those in employment) for moving from part-time to full-time work, or otherwise increasing earnings.

However, a large number of Swedish lone mothers have incomes only slightly above the poverty line. In the 1990s, Sweden saw a rise in poverty rates for lone mothers from four to ten per cent. Poverty has increased for both lone and couple-mothers, but from 1988-91 and up to 1995, lone mothers were more likely to be poor than couple-mothers, their situation having deteriorated after the late 1980s, both relatively and absolutely.

On the one hand, equivalent disposable income in the early 1990s developed more unfavourably for couples, compared with lone parents, since transfer payments cushioned the decrease in market income more for lone than couple-families. However, the mid-1990s saw general cuts in the benefit system, with rising costs for housing, childcare, health and social insurance. This affects those who are net receivers of transfers, principally lone mothers, even if they are still better protected by the benefits system.

On all indicators of economic security, the percentage of children living with lone parents who experienced inse­curity was roughly double that of children with two parents in 1995. Various groups were analysed in a report from the National Board of Welfare[liii] on the situation of vulnerable groups in relation to having three or more problems concerning housework, employment or earning a living. Among lone mothers aged 25-64, 27 per cent had three or more problems compared with ten per cent for the whole population. Among lone mothers aged 25-34, 36 per cent had three or more problems, rising to 51 per cent when they lived in big cities. Families generally had more economic problems. Overall, 28 per cent of all children aged 0-15, compared with 17 per cent of the population as a whole, lived in families which had difficulty in meeting expenses for food, housing and other basic requirements during the year preceding the interview.[liv]

While there was some recovery by the end of the cen­tury, poverty rates for lone mothers without work were still 34.2 per cent in 2000, and 5.6 per cent for those working. For two-parent families, the rates were 13.7 per cent where there was no worker, and 1.6 per cent where there were two—but a higher rate of 8.2 per cent where there was one worker.[lv] This testifies to both the precarious position of lone parents in the labour market, and the lack of support for one-wage, two-parent families, compared with the big subsidies going to lone working parents.

 

Declining employment

In 1979, Swedish lone mothers were more likely than couple-mothers to be employed: 83.5 and 79.3 per cent respectively. In the mid-1980s, employment was 85 per cent for both groups. Reversal happened in the 1990s. In 1994, the participation of lone mothers in the labour market was 70 per cent and for married and cohabiting women it was 79 per cent. Similarly in Britain, the proportion of lone mothers who were employed declined to 42 per cent compared with 65 per cent of couple-mothers in 1992-5. Long-term unemployment increased for both lone and couple-mothers, but rates of unemployment increased among lone mothers from 4.8 in 1979 to 11.9 in 1992-5. Lone mothers have a three-times higher risk of unemployment than couple-mothers.[lvi] The proportion economically inactive was also higher in lone than couple-mothers; peaking in 1992-5 with 8.3 of lone mothers and 3.6 of couple-mothers. Between 1990-95, the proportion of children living with two gainfully em­ployed parents, married or cohabiting, decreased from 84 to 67 per cent. The proportion of children living with a lone mother who was employed declined from 72 to 58 per cent between 1985 and 1995, and with a full-time employed lone mother from 36 to 31 per cent.

Lone mothers are part of a trend whereby the pro­portion of people finding themselves outside the labour market increased over the 1980s and 1990s, despite a shortage of manpower. The risk of unemployment falls with rising education and lone mothers have poorer educational levels compared with married mothers. How­ever, even with the same educational attainment, the ‘risk’ of unemployment is double for lone mothers. Lone mothers may have a weaker bar­gaining position in the labour market,[lvii] and face more discrimination, even in Sweden. They consider them­selves to have less secure jobs than married mothers, and report less understanding attitudes towards their parent­ing role if, for example, they have to stay at home with a sick child. Sympathetic employment in the private sector is precarious, and the limits to public sector employment have been reached.

An egalitarian wage structure and taxes, rather than the welfare state’s negative effects on work, savings and investment via means-tested benefits (as in the UK, Aus­tralia and New Zealand), undermine Swedish women’s incentives to work more hours, or to upgrade and invest in skills. Scandinavian public employment offers good pay and security, but imposes a growing tax burden. With high rates of productivity growth the system can be sus­tained; when productivity or private investment is slug­gish, severe cost problems emerge. Sweden in the mid-80s faced declining fiscal capacity combined with rising pres­sures on public job creation and/or income main­tenance. Wage differentials have since grown, and adjust­ments to benefit entitlements have aimed to reduce disin­centives and high absenteeism. Replacement rates for sickness, parental leave and unemployment benefits have been trimmed, and the second tier pension system over­hauled. Pension contri­bution years have been extended and benefits are now more tightly related to contri­butions.

 

The fiction of self-sufficiency

Tendencies to decreasing workforce participation levels, decreasing disposable income, and vulnerability to pov­erty as well as welfare dependency, suggest that the position of lone parents is precarious in Sweden, as elsewhere, and raise questions about the capacity of Swedish policies concerning lone parents to make them self-supporting, if not affluent.

Making lone parents ‘self sufficient’, let alone econ­omically equal to couples, means that their incomes are maintained with immense subsidies from the state. Couples are positive or net contributors to the public purse; lone parents are massive recipients of transfers. Transfers ensure that the adjusted income for lone mothers is approximately 85-87 per cent of the corresponding income for intact two-parent families. If no income redistribution occurred it would be 55 per cent, given the same labour market participation. All in all, adjusted disposable income is higher than the factor income for lone mothers, and substantially lower for intact families with children (who are making the big transfer to lone mothers). By 1985, public transfers of different kinds accounted for 40 per cent of the overall net income of lone mothers, compared with eight per cent for families with two earners. Even so, transfers only covered two-thirds of the gap between divorced mothers and intact families. By 1993, in more difficult times, lone-parent families received 55 per cent of their gross income from the market, and 45 per cent as transfer payments. The proportions for couples with children were 79 per cent and 21 per cent respectively.

Dependence on transfers makes lone parents vulner­able to cuts in programmes. The recession during the early 1990s resulted in frozen or reduced levels of state benefits, and a stricter policy towards social welfare assistance. As workers, lone parents are one of the first groups to be affected by adverse macroeconomic develop­ments, even if they have low levels of poverty in Sweden compared with other countries. The decline in their fortunes was detectable by the end of the 1980s as their position in the labour market deteriorated, and they faced decreasing real wages and rising childcare costs, as child­care institutions were forced to reduce staff and raise costs. This has had a knock-on effect, since universal benefits, for sickness, unemployment, etc., are based on labour market performance.

 

Growing welfare dependency

The proportion of households that are dependent on social assistance, whether at any time or for long periods, has grown, particularly for lone mothers.[lviii] Over time, they are six times more likely to receive social welfare and twice as likely to get unemployment benefits. In 1970, 25 per cent of lone mothers received social assistance, and by 1995, this was more than every third lone mother, compared to around five per cent of couple-mothers. As such, 70 per cent of lone mothers received means-tested allowances or transfers of some sort, like housing assis­tance, compared with 22 per cent of couple households. While means testing in Sweden has been comparatively limited compared to the UK, the proportion of lone mothers receiving a housing allowance was 81 per cent in 1993, compared to 20 per cent of couples with children. High participation in the housing benefit system means that a lone mother considering increasing her labour supply faces reduced housing benefits, with composite marginal tax rates reaching 90 per cent.

As elsewhere, lone mothers, along with immigrants, are far more likely to be long-term welfare recipients. During the period 1983-1992, nearly 14 per cent of lone mothers received social assistance for three out of ten years, compared to just over five per cent of couple-mothers. The picture was worse for lone fathers, at 19 per cent.[lix] All in all:

...data... indicate that the ‘feminisation of poverty’ is now emerging as a phenomenon in Sweden as it has in many other countries. Low-paid jobs are a part of this picture, as is the increased precariousness of lone mothers’ attachment to the labour market and discrimination against them—particularly when they have small children.[lx]

The growth of welfare dependency is part of a pattern of growing drop-out from the labour market and increasing housing segregation, where the dream towns of the urban planners have become, as elsewhere, sinks of disadvantage. The pattern was spreading in the 1980s, a time of high overall employment and economic growth, and was decisively reinforced by the recession of the early 1990s. Between 1988 and 1997, employment among young people aged 16-34 fell off by about 400,000; only a minority of this was due to educational expansion. In ‘disadvantaged’ districts, or areas where low-income earners are at least ten times as numerous as high-income earners, nearly one-third of all households with children in 1990 were lone-parent families, compared with one-tenth in areas of high income. In some districts, nearly half of the children and young people were recipients of social allowance.

Given the persistence, and even growth, of problems, despite the assumption that all family forms are equal, or made so by progressive policies: ‘The national discourse on lone mothers in Sweden could be interpreted as moving from an emphasis on lone mothers as part of a lifestyle change, towards lone mothers as a social prob­lem. Lone mothers are increasingly portrayed as one of the groups that have fared less well than others during the restructuring of the economy in Sweden since the 1980s.’[lxi]

By the 1980s, claimants for social assistance also included a high proportion of single, young and often childless people, a situation now emerging in the UK. Sweden has one of the biggest unemployment gaps between the majority population and non-European immigrants of all industrialised nations. At seven per cent, the poverty rate among non-elderly households without children was higher in Sweden than in the UK. The reasons lie in alcohol/drug abuse, and mental or physical illness, plus refugees from outside the Nordic area and assorted drop-outs who do not fulfil the criteria for mainstream benefits and who cannot, or do not want to, work. Single men without children make up about a third of Sweden’s welfare caseload.

There has been some reduction in welfare dependency since the late 1990s, and in 2001 a target for ‘social justice’ was set substantially to reduce the numbers whose income is lower than basic subsistence, halve the sick leave rate by 2008, and cut dependence on social assistance by a half by 2004—an ambitious programme involving a reduction on the level of 1990.[lxii]

 

Divorce is disadvantageous—even in Sweden

Divorce still disadvantages Swedish women. They earn less than men, and, given economies of scale, the division of the household into two implies than an increase in total income is necessary to maintain former living standards. If there had been no welfare benefits or other prog­rammes, the income of divorced women would have been only two-thirds that of individuals in intact families in 1990. After divorce, men contribute less to supporting their children and former spouse.[lxiii] The situation of  Swedish women without children is even worse after divorce than it is for mothers since they do not qualify for the income transfers.

As much as lone parenthood is still disadvantageous in Sweden, so marriage remains advantageous. In all countries, from Japan to the USA, married couples see income and wealth grow over time, compared to lone adult fam