Women’s Refuges: Creating New Forms of Welfare?

Abstract

The massive expansion of the social services has meant that the state has increasingly penetrated those areas of social activity which are concerned with the material and ideological reproduction of labour power. Activities which were thus once left to the family, now become the concern of the state. Education, housing, health and social security and the personal social services reach in both material and psychological senses into the lives of the population. Feminist writing reminds us that the burden of this reproductive labour, whether unpaid as in the family, or paid as in the lower echelons of the welfare apparatus or capitalist enterprise, is borne by women. Increasingly, feminist sociological writing on welfare (Land, 1976; Wilson, 1977) draws attention to the very clear conception of the relationship between social policy, the family and the position of women which was built into the foundations of the welfare state.