Professor Sarah Wiliarty kicked off the Center for the Humanities’ spring series on domesticity Monday night in Russell House. Her lecture, “Listening to Mothers? Parental Leave in Four European Countries,” explored the details of welfare in other countries, some similar to the United States.
“As we’ll see, the government’s policies have a very big effect on a mother’s decision to stay home or return to work after the birth of a child,” said Wiliarty, an assistant professor of government and a tutor for the College of Social Studies.
Professor Wiliarty was careful to make a distinction between parental leave policy and maternal leave policy, the latter being what is only medically necessary to recover from the act of childbirth, whereas the former could be for either gender and for the sake of childcare. All four of the countries discussed—Austria, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands—have similar maternal leave policies, offering women fully paid leaves that last between 14 and 20 weeks. The only significant difference is that Italian women get the longest leaves but receive only 80 percent pay.
“One thing that I really wanted to take home was that there is extensive variation in European welfare,” Wiliarty said. “I think it’s very important to understand that, especially if we wish to transform our own welfare state, it is important to move beyond the model of ‘the Americans don’t have it and Europeans do.’ It’s much more complicated than that.”
Using a slide show, Professor Wiliarty explained the parental leave policies of the four democratic countries, as well as the politics behind them. She divided welfare states into three kinds: liberal, social democratic, and Christian democratic.
“The liberal welfare state is the kind that we would be familiar with in the United States,” she said, citing examples like Canada, Australia, and Britain.
Wiliarty explained that there is usually an incentive to avoid the public services offered by liberal welfare state markets, since such services are often stigmatized for being of low quality. Since these states also provide childcare, the choice is decidedly left up to the mother whether or not to continue working after having children. This system is in stark contrast with how social democratic welfare states work.
“When Americans think about European welfare states, they often have the social democratic model in mind,” Wiliarty said.
While liberal welfare states have a minimum standard of living that citizens should not fall below, social democratic welfare states believe that everyone should be at an optimum, and thus they are sometimes called universal welfare states. In these cases, the state provides leave plus childcare but also expects that mothers should return to work. Examples of two social democratic states are Norway and Denmark.
The third kind of welfare state, the Christian democratic, provides complete life insurance for everyone. Services come from the state and the family, and do not have the same negative stigma as in liberal welfare states. Yet the purpose of these services is not distribution.
“Christian democratic welfare states tolerate inequality quite well,” Wiliarty said. “However, for any particular person or family, there is an idea that their station in life should never be allowed to drop too far below where they started.”
While these services have a different aim than the other two kinds of welfare states, Wiliarty emphasized that they are nonetheless comprehensive.
“There is a reinforcement of the status quo,” she said. “Even in cases of disability or unemployment or retirement, the state will step in and provide for that family to make sure that they still remain in their station in life.”
But while the state provides leave, little childcare is available because popular belief holds that mothers should stay at home with their children. Austria, France, Germany, and the Netherlands are all Christian democratic welfare states.
Many found the lecture informative.
“I wasn’t really expecting it to be a political science lecture, which I thought was interesting, putting domesticity in the context of political science,” said Sarah Leonard ’09.
“I thought [the lecture] was really good because it pulled together some stuff we talked about in class.” said Lauren Barth ’09, who is a member of Wiliarty’s “Gender and the Welfare State” course.
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