Ingela Naumann

Child care and feminism in West Germany and Sweden in the 1960s and 1970s

Feminist welfare-state research has repeatedly pointed to the link between women’s social rights and the extent to which they are freed from family obligations. Thus the availability of sufficient extra-familial child care in order to combine work and family life should be a central claim of women activists. Swedish child-care politics of the 1960s and 1970s reflects this logic well: Swedish feminists lobbied intensely for the expansion of public child care. In West Germany, however, second-wave feminists made no major demand for child-care services: German feminist politics does not fit with the assumptions about women’s interests underlying most feminist research on welfare states. Rather than assuming a fixed set of women’s interests, this paper argues for a dynamic and contextualizing approach to women’s collective agency in modern welfare states. It is argued that national variations in feminist politics concerning women’s social rights are the result of differences in women’s collective identity formation and their reactions to historically specific political and discursive opportunity structures.

Towards the marketization of early childhood education and care? Recent developments in Sweden and the United Kingdom

Extensive public debate is being waged across mature welfare states as to whether social services are best provided by the state or the market. This article examines developments in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) policy in Sweden and the United Kingdom, identifying trends towards marketization and universalization of ECEC that suggest a complex picture of competing policy logics and goals in the restructuring of welfare states. This article first discusses two models of early-years provision, the market model, and the universal model, outlining underlying assumptions, tensions, and implications of market and state provision of ECEC. A comparison of recent reforms in Sweden and the UK highlights how similar ideas and trends play out differently in different national contexts. In Sweden an integrated public ‘educare’ programme gradually developed over time, and market mechanisms introduced in the 1990s have so far had limited effect on the system overall. In the UK ideas about universal early childhood education became influential as part of a new social-investment agenda in the 1990s but have, owing to their restricted implementation, not fundamentally altered the existing childcare market. Historical policy trajectories continue to matter, yet tensions and incoherencies between policies can open spaces for change.

Commentary to Part II: Internationalising Early Childhood Education, or Embedding International Children into Local Contexts?

In this conclusion to the section on early years and primary education, Ingela Naumann emphasises that factors promoting internationalisation practices have emerged historically in quite different ways for the early years sector, when compared to the higher education field. She also highlights the critical point that early years education is often governed and funded by different state actors than other education phases, and that the purpose of the former can be quite different. All this affects how the drive for internationalisation is interpreted and implemented by early years providers. Ingela Naumann also stresses that increasing processes of marketisation may alter the ways internationalisation practices are manifested within the early years sector and the impact this has.