GENDER AND THE SOCIAL RIGHTS OF CITIZENSHIP - THE COMPARATIVE-ANALYSIS OF GENDER RELATIONS AND WELFARE STATES

State social provision affects women's material situations, shapes gen der relationships, structures political conflict and participation, an d contributes to the formation and mobilization of identities and inte rests. Mainstream comparative research has neglected gender, while mos t feminist research on the welfare state has not been systematically c omparative. I develop a conceptual framework for analyzing the gender content of social provision that draws on feminist and mainstream work . Three dimensions of qualitative variation suggested by power resourc es analysts are reconstructed to incorporate gender: (1) the state-mar ket relations dimension is extended to consider the ways countries org anize the provision of welfare through families as well as through sta tes and markets; it is then termed the state-market-family relations d imension; (2) the stratification dimension is expanded to consider the effects of social provision by the state on gender relations, especia lly the treatment of paid and unpaid labor; (3) the social citizenship rights/decommodification dimension is criticized for implicit assumpt ions about the sexual division of caring and domestic labor and for ig noring the differential effects on men and women of benefits that deco mmodify labor Two additional dimensions are proposed to capture the ef fects of state social provision on gender relations: access to paid wo rk and capacity to form and maintain an autonomous household.