Child care and mothers' right to work: New practices in crisis-ridden Europe

By examining the cases of Belgium, France, Italy, Sweden and the European U nion, this article describes the emergence of new child care policies for t he 0 to 3's. In the 1960s and 1970s rising rates of female labour force par ticipation were accompanied by ways of representing women's employment whic h put the accent on equality of access to the labour force. With the arriva l of economic crisis came new employment policies stressing flexible labour markets as well as decentralization of state responsibilities for social p olicies. Child care policies are now organised around principles which resp ond more to employment policy, neoliberal ideologies of "parental choice", and cost concerns than to the goal of gender equality. The result is that m others are often represented as the best care-givers for their children. Ot her policies incite parents to hire care-givers rather than use public chil d care centres. As well as threatening women's access to paid work, such po licies undermine the ideal of high quality child care as a public service a vailable to all.