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

Sweden often appears in political writings as the epitome of the welfare state, and it has been praised by many feminists internationally for its progressive policies on gender equality. According to this account, feminists from other countries can draw inspiration from Swedish welfare policies, which have enabled women's labor-force participation as well as a more equal division of domestic labor and childcare. This essay seeks to complicate this image of Sweden by insisting that Swedish society must be understood as fundamentally a capitalist society that shares many characteristics of other capitalist economies. This means that Sweden also shares the main traits of capitalist social reproduction—the way workers meet their own needs and organize care within capitalism.

Capitalist social reproduction has largely relegated care to the level of individual responsibility. Although public reproductive services were made available through the welfare state, the social reproduction of Swedish society thus continues to be reliant on the private household. Care outside the private household and some state institutions is scarce, and those who are not members of traditional families often bear the brunt of this scarcity. The welfare state's role in relation to the family is a complex one—while at times creating glimpses of a society beyond the constraints of capitalist domesticity and the nuclear family, many policies have in fact assumed and reinforced this family form.

To understand this, it is useful to turn to Marxist feminist theorizations of the role of the family in capitalist societies. The family has provided much of the care necessary to maintain people's capacity to work, and it has a central role in raising new generations of workers. More than a site of emotional attachment, it functions as an economic unit of resource sharing and reproductive labor. It has thus become a core institution of social reproduction. Most people rest, prepare food, clean themselves, raise children, and recover from illness within their private household. But we should be careful to avoid functionalist understandings of the nuclear family, as care and reproductive labor under capitalism can be and often has been arranged differently.

As M. E. O'Brien (2023: 113) points out, the nuclear family became the dominant site for social reproduction as a result of working-class struggle as much as its imposition from above by the bourgeois class. While the nuclear family became hegemonic across classes in the late nineteenth century, this process was not inevitable, nor has it ever meant that everyone lives in nuclear families. Importantly, the nuclear family form has never been self-sustaining—its hegemonic status has been reliant on state intervention of various kinds, including tax incentives, childcare arrangements, legal protections, low or nonexistent inheritance tax, and the construction and subsidization of one-family homes. While different nation-states have used different policies to encourage nuclear family formation, most capitalist countries have supported reproduction within families in some way.

Especially in times of crisis, capitalist states have often encouraged nuclear family formation. In the nineteenth century, the newly formed proletariat was increasingly struggling to reproduce itself, and many workers died very young. A more or less unregulated working day and the absence of childcare provisions meant that parents simply did not have the time to look after their children. Infant mortality was high, and slum conditions meant that infectious diseases were rampant (Engels 2009). Toward the end of the century, the trade union movement and bourgeois philanthropists united in the struggle for better sanitation, limits to the working day, improved housing conditions, and compulsory schooling. With these changes, there was also an increased political emphasis on the creation of working-class housewives, as trade unionists fought for the exclusion of women from many types of work and the family wage became the norm. Male workers thus demanded a wage high enough to support not only the worker himself but also a dependent wife and children attending school rather than working themselves (O'Brien 2023: 114).

Social democratic states such as Sweden have long had an ambivalent position on women and the family. They have tended to share the dominant trade union position that workers should have a right to the nuclear family, while simultaneously introducing forms of publicly funded social reproduction that have made it more possible to survive outside the family form. This speaks to a broader ambivalence within the form of the welfare state itself. Gøsta Esping-Andersen, the most prominent sociologist of the welfare state, has distinguished a number of different welfare regimes—some of which are more progressive and some of which reinforce the reproduction of capitalism and bourgeois social values. There is thus nothing inherently radical about welfare-state provisions, and we need to carefully consider exactly how the state organizes support for its citizens and other people residing in its territory. Moreover, Esping-Andersen (2008: 22) argues that most countries tend to have traits of multiple regimes of welfare operating at the same time. While often considered the most pure example of a progressive welfare state model, the Swedish welfare regime that developed in the twentieth century has always been internally contradictory and contained reactionary traits. This is especially apparent in the treatment of migrants and racialized groups within the country. As Paulina de los Reyes (2000) has argued, despite increased labor-force migration and women's increased labor market participation from the 1960s onward, the Swedish state created a segregated labor market in which migrants and women were subjected to persistent relegation to low-waged work.

This ambivalence has been present throughout the history of Swedish social democracy. In Sweden in the 1930s, the pioneering Social Democratic feminist politician Alva Myrdal developed models for more collective forms of social reproduction, while simultaneously espousing eugenic theories about what “good” reproduction looked like—one that sought to ensure that racialized or disabled people and people with mental illnesses did not have children. Forced sterilizations of various groups of people took place throughout several decades of the Swedish welfare state and were ended only in the 1970s (Ekerwald 2001). The interconnection of ideas of social democracy and eugenics is not as contradictory as it sounds, if we take seriously the eugenic belief in a better form of reproduction and social democracy's emphasis on the health of the people.

Myrdal in many ways encapsulates the politically ambiguous status characteristic of the Swedish welfare state as a whole. She pioneered ideas for the collective house—a form of housing that would include access to collective forms of care. Locating childcare, health care, and collective food provision within the communal spaces of the building, the collective house sought to undo some of the privatization of the household and create more communal forms of social reproduction. The aim of this experiment was to reduce some of the burden of individualized social reproduction, in which mainly women spent a second shift each day ensuring that family members’ needs were met.

Other more collective forms of housing emerged in the following decades. Architecture scholar Dolores Hayden writes that collective housing emerged in the Stockholm area in the 1950s. In these buildings, residents ate in shared dining halls, and childcare was provided in the building. In the 1970s, these buildings changed management, and the new managers refused to continue the shared meal service, as it was not profitable. According to Hayden, this process of decollectivization, through which the original tenants were evicted, led to an impression that the model of collective houses was inherently cumbersome and difficult to manage. But the residential buildings had been operating successfully for decades, and it was the introduction of a profit motive that made the project fall apart (Hayden 2002: 113). Since then, the collective house model has had an increasingly marginalized role in Swedish society, and mid-twentieth-century experiments in more communal models of social reproduction have largely disappeared. Housing historian Michael Harloe (1995: 512) argues that social democratic parties have rarely supported cooperative forms of housing, opting instead for models of public housing provision managed by the state. These housing forms were also based on normative models of the private household, in which each household was responsible for its own well-being. This emphasis on the family within social democratic thinking and policy marks a missed opportunity to move toward a genuinely collectively managed model of social reproduction, which could have challenged some of the individualization that characterizes life under capitalism.

Collective models of daily life thus never became dominant in Sweden. Health care and education were publicly managed, free and available to all, but much of social reproduction still remained the responsibility of the household—typically the nuclear family. This family form retained its normative status even as Swedish society became more influenced by feminist ideas. From the 1960s onward, the state encouraged dual-earner families and women's participation in the workforce, for example by changing taxation of dual-income households and expanding state-subsidized childcare provision (de los Reyes 2000: 32). A state feminism emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, which privileged equal access to education and work. While women were still predominantly working in what were considered women's jobs—such as health care and education—the idea that a woman's place was in the home was replaced by a more modern ideal of the working wife and mother.

Gradually, a greater emphasis on equality in the home also emerged. Men were encouraged to be involved in childcare and share household tasks. Sweden was the first country in the world to introduce shared parental leave (Duvander and Cedstrand 2022: 263). Compared to most other developed capitalist countries, these are all positive developments. But the problem is that these reforms retained the private household, structured around a heterosexual couple and its children, as the key provider of care. As I have argued elsewhere (Gotby 2023: 114), equality is often a limited framework for feminist politics because, in practice, it often means equality between two partners of different genders. While men are encouraged to do their fair share of housework, within heterosexual couples, the overall responsibility for coordinating household activities tends to fall to women. As Cameron Lynne Macdonald (2011: 5) writes, attempts to encourage fathers to play a more active role in child-rearing tend to be based on the assumption that the nuclear family is an “isolated unit with its own limited resources.” Moreover, while the welfare state encouraged a more equal division of domestic labor between spouses, there were few attempts to collectivize that labor. The nuclear family simply had to make do as best as it could, supported by state benefits and collective provision of health care and childcare. As the more self-managed and collective versions of domesticity became increasingly marginalized, then, the nuclear family was strengthened. It retained its status as the main social institution able to provide a decent life to its members. This is in line with social democratic ideology, which was based on late nineteenth-century trade union struggles for a working-class nuclear family. A century later, in late twentieth-century Sweden, less conventional models of family started to appear, and there was less of an emphasis on lifelong heterosexual marriage as the only model of family life. But the private household itself has not lost its status as the institution most capable of supporting people through periods of limited labor-market participation, whether in childhood, education, child-rearing, illness, or old age. Various welfare institutions were designed to complement and strengthen the private household as the site of social reproduction, rather than replace it.

For a long time, the Swedish model of social reproduction seemed a very successful one. Sweden became internationally known for its gender equality as well as for its high-quality welfare state provision. Importantly, as Esping-Andersen (2008: 26) points out, this model retained a broad base of electoral support because it was designed to cater to the middle class as well as the working class. But in contemporary Sweden, the more radical elements of the welfare state have been gradually dismantled. Like in many other European countries, this shift was initiated by the conservative Moderate Party but partially carried out by Social Democratic governments. In 2006 the country elected a center-right coalition government that proceeded to cut taxes and benefits, making it harder to survive outside waged work. Those who had previously received welfare benefits, including cancer patients and disabled people, were forced to look for employment despite being unable to work. There was also a push toward austerity and privatization of welfare-state provision of reproductive services such as childcare and eldercare, making it even harder for low-income households to reproduce themselves. When in power, the Swedish Social Democratic Party (Socialdemokraterna) largely failed to challenge the legacy of right-wing governments.

One controversial policy created by the center-right coalition government was the introduction of tax credits for domestic services. This was criticized partly because of a long-standing Swedish discomfort with overt class differences, and thus a widespread reluctance to hire domestic workers. The so-called maid debate (pigdebatten) was waged in Sweden as the tax credits were introduced, and both sides of the debate claimed feminist grounds for their arguments. Proponents of the tax credits argued that this was a way to further gender equality by providing a solution to the double shift of wage work on the one hand, and childcare and domestic labor on the other (Bowman and Cole 2009). But both sides of the debate largely took the private household for granted. In this context there was also a greater emphasis on public debate on policies helping families to deal with the life puzzle (livspusslet)—the question of how to find sufficient time to raise children and care for a household while both parents were in full-time employment. Individualized solutions to this dilemma largely continue to assume a nuclear family structure, rather than seek to create more collective forms of social reproduction, which could minimize the overall amount of work that goes into meeting people's need for care and support throughout their lives.

As state spending has been shifted away from the provision of reproductive services, and Swedish society has increasingly come to accept the privatized provision of health care and eldercare, the family has become increasingly important as a site of social reproduction. Perhaps because the fuller socialization of reproduction never took hold in Swedish society, it has been relatively easy to move to the increasingly individualized market provision of the things and services we need to lead good lives. Social reproduction was already considered largely the responsibility of the private household, supported by the state, rather than the domain of a self-organized collective capable of meeting its own shared needs.

It is in the light of this ambivalence of the welfare state that we can best understand the relation between state and family in Sweden. While much of the welfare-state provisions of care and resources, and efforts to secure gender equality, are enviable when compared to many other capitalist countries, the Swedish state still sits solidly within the framework of capitalist reproduction. Johanna Brenner criticizes the limited horizon of some American feminists who seek to copy Scandinavian models of welfare and gender equality, arguing that the Left needs to look to efforts to truly collectivize the responsibility for care. She writes: “Although [Scandinavian welfare] policies do socialize some of the responsibility for caregiving work, they leave in place the family/household as the major institution for organizing care. Relying on the family/household for the work of care limits possibilities for moving toward gender equity and undermines social solidarity, especially under conditions of relative scarcity” (Brenner 2017). Brenner proposes various ways of integrating social reproduction with more collective forms of housing, thereby starting to undo the central position of the family as an institution of social reproduction. That would not only remove the strain that is currently placed on the family—as the social unit responsible for meeting almost all our needs—but also make sure that those who are not part of stable family arrangements can access the care they need. It could foster a spirit of cooperation in which the work of care can be more equitably distributed and resources can be shared.

In this context, we can also return to earlier examples of collective housing as models to draw from. These were never perfect examples of collectivized social reproduction—they were often solidly within the social democratic paradigm of organizing reproduction to facilitate a more humane form of capitalism. And as we have seen, mid-twentieth-century social democratic ideas were hardly free from reactionary influences, which equated good social reproduction with a society in which racialized and disabled people were prevented from having children. But the idea that we should move away from the individualized household as the main institution responsible for meeting people's needs is key for a more genuinely anti-capitalist struggle. This will also allow people to organize reproduction according to their own collective needs and preferences, rather than having services provided for them by the welfare state—a state that has often assumed the white, heterosexual nuclear family as the most desirable form of household. It is only by moving beyond the private household that we can move toward a more deeply feminist vision of society and find a way out of the current scarcity of care.

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