The State and the Family: Privatizing Care and Welfare in Contemporary Sweden

This essay starts from a theoretical perspective developed by Marxist feminists, who have argued that the family has a central role in capitalist societies. Families provide much of the care that people need to maintain their own capacity to work, and they also function as the most important institution for rearing children. We can also apply this perspective to the welfare state and look at how the family and the state interact to ensure a particular type of reproduction. Exploring the welfare state as one way of sustaining a capitalist economy, this essay seeks to unpack some assumptions about Swedish society. It looks at missed opportunities to more radically transform the institution of the family in the earlier periods of Swedish social democracy, and how that laid the groundwork for increasingly privatized forms of care provision in contemporary Sweden. Arguing that the Swedish family continued to be based on white and heterosexual norms that hindered attempts to create greater gender equality, the essay looks at more progressive alternatives to the family form.