Joyce Outshoorn

Changing State Feminism

The second wave of feminism challenged the state in post-industrial democracies with its demands; in response, states set up women’s policy agencies to improve women’s status. Studies from the 1980s and 1990s have shown that ‘state feminism’ exists: many agencies are important in realizing women’s movements’ demands in policy-making and in gaining access for women to decision-making arenas. The starting point for this book is the restructuring of the political context, where state feminism is situated, over the last decade. As a result, both ‘the state’ and ‘feminism’ have changed in significant ways. On the one hand, there have been major developments, such as globalization, regionalization, welfare state restructuring, privatization and the rise of multilevel governance. On the other hand, state feminists have to deal with new gender equality policies that include a focus on diversity and gender mainstreaming. Both developments demand rethinking state feminism and new empirical research and comparative analysis on the topic.

Debating Prostitution in Parliament A Feminist Analysis

In 2000, the Netherlands became the first European country to legalize prostitution, a policy supported by Dutch feminists. It distinguishes forced from voluntary prostitution, defining the latter as ‘sex work’, in contrast to feminist positions viewing it as ‘sexual domination’. This article examines the discourses used by parliamentarians in the debates since the 1980s and charts the shift from a traditional moral view to the sex-work frame, creating new meanings of ‘ prostitutes’, ‘clients’ and ‘brothel keepers’ in the process. The new discourse allows for an active female sex worker but desexualizes the nature of the prostitution exchange. Neither does it offer an account of why it is mainly men buying sex from (mainly) women. The analysis also highlights the contradictions created by the forced/voluntary distinction when speaking of the trafficking of women from poor countries and current anti-migration discourse, as well as the near obliteration of the racial differences between ‘clients’ and ‘workers’ in parliamentary discourse.

The Provision of Home Care as a Policy Problem

Abstract The problem of home care for the growing number of elderly people no longer able to take of themselves has long been overshadowed by the debates on pensions and rising medical costs. Taking the feminist critique of the welfare state as point of departure, this article examines in how far the breadwinner-caretaker model still informs ageing policies in the Netherlands (a prime example of this model) and takes women as carers for granted, despite changes in the family and womens growing labour market participation. Overall, policies since the 1990s have shown remarkable continuity, defining informal care, mainly done by women, as the cornerstone of home care policy, with state-provided care seen as strictly supplementary and rationed to cut costs. This is consistent with the welfare mix of the conservative welfare state, but contradictory to a more individualized welfare state in which womens labour market participation is becoming essential to maintain welfare state benefits in the face of the ageing issue.

Remaking Bodily Citizenship in Multicultural Europe: The Struggle for Autonomy and Self-Determination

Since the rise of the new wave of feminism in the 1960s, issues concerning the body have been at the heart of the challenge posed by womens movements. The female body has always been a contested s ...

Dutch Decay: the Dismantling of the Women’s Policy Network in the Netherlands

In comparative research on women’s movements and women’s policy agencies, the Netherlands gained the reputation of having a rather successful movement and an effective women’s policy agency willing to advance movement goals and enhance access of women into decision-making arenas (McBride Stetson and Mazur, 1995; McBride Stetson, 2001a; Outshoorn, 2004a; Lovenduski et al., 2005; Hausmann and Sauer, 2007). Over the years the agency employed many women who had strong ties with various branches of the movement, making for an open attitude towards feminist demands, which were often directly incorporated into its policy papers. Although relations between women’s movement groups and the agency were never free from tension, numerous women’s initiatives and institutions were funded generously by the agency, ranging from the indispensable International Institute and Archives of the Women’s Movement (IIAV) to organizations against sexual violence, feminist publishing and film ventures and small-scale cultural projects (IPM, 1986).

Assessing changes in state feminism over the last decade

In the mid-1990s most countries in this research had national women’s policy agencies with a broad mandate, often in conjunction with a policy network around gender equality issues. Not all of these were strong or effective; sometimes they were dependent on political incumbency, such as in Italy, Austria and France, or relatively new and less experienced, as in Spain or Belgium. The Netherlands and particularly Australia had well-established units, the latter’s cross-sectional model and instruments such as gender budgeting were actually feminist export products in the 1970s and 1980s. Thus, it is not a coincidence that the word ‘femocrat’ was coined in Australia, the term denoting those feminists who entered the state bureaucracy to work in these institutions. Finland, Germany and Sweden all had well-developed gender units, with those of Germany extending to the regional and the local level. In addition, several of these countries, including, for example, Sweden and the Netherlands, had an advisory policy council, in which women’s movement organizations were represented, along with a commission monitoring sex discrimination law. Often the women’s policy agencies had close ties to the women MPs, as in Finland, and strong support from party women’s organizations, as in Austria.

Women’s Movements and Bodily Autonomy: Making the Case for Bodily Citizenship

In this chapter we return to the major aims of the book and to our significant questions. We present a comparison of our four country cases, based on our theoretical approach, and, taking into account our research findings, we return to the issue of citizenship, in particular bodily citizenship. Our aim has been to analyse the contribution of women’s movements in four different European countries in achieving the right to bodily integrity for women, and to argue that the concept of bodily citizenship is important in this struggle, as well as being a useful tool for the analysis of women’s issues in politics and public policy. We intend to show how earlier policy legacies structured the political context which the new women’s movements encountered when framing their demands about women’s bodily autonomy, but also show that, despite these legacies, policy change proved possible because of new political configurations, new discourses and framings, and organisation. We also provide answers to our major questions: how have women’s movements contested state governance and dominant political discourses about the female body, and changed ‘problem definitions’ and policies impeding women’s bodily self-determination in different political systems? And how have the growth of multicultural societies in Europe, notably the increase in migration, and the process of Europeanisation impinged on political debates about the body, and possibly impacted on attempts to enhance women’s rights to bodily integrity?

Women’s Movements and Bodily Integrity

‘Citizenship is not a word I would use’ was the phrase that best summarised the major findings of the analysis by Line Nyhagen Predelli, Beatrice Halsaa and Cecilie Thun in the project Gendered Citizenship in Multicultural Europe (FEMCIT) of how women’s movement activists viewed the concept of citizenship (Nyhagen Predelli et al., 2012:188). The activists used other framings to formulate their demands, using the language of human rights, equality or social justice. This central finding corresponds with the findings of the FEMCIT project, which focused on bodily citizenship (Outshoorn et al., 2012:135–138). The activists engaged in the campaigns for abortion rights framed the issue in terms of autonomy and self-determination, while those involved in changing prostitution legislation used self-determination alongside competing framings of gender equality, power between the sexes or human rights. Paralleling the gap that Nyhagen Predelli et al. noted between the concept of citizenship in feminist theory and the ‘lived experience’ of activists (2012:208–210), there is a gap between the central notion of bodily integrity underlying the claims of autonomy and self-determination, and the usual understandings of citizenship which do not include women’s claims to bodily integrity.

The Struggle for Bodily Integrity in the Netherlands

Since the late 1960s the Netherlands has had a lively and multifaceted women’s movement which has addressed a wide range of issues and developed numerous groups and organisations, including mobilisation within established organisations such as political parties, trade unions and professional associations. Issues concerning the female body have figured on its agenda since its beginnings, and their framing was drawn from a new discourse that stressed self-determination and autonomy, both of which were essential in the new feminist analysis that couched the relations between women and men in terms of power. As we have shown elsewhere, women’s groups and organisations did not resort to the language of citizenship to frame their demands (Outshoorn et al., 2012); moreover, in the Netherlands body issues were initially also not framed in terms of rights. The legalisation of abortion was a top priority of the new women’s movement, and after the new Abortion Act of 1984, which more or less met the demands of the feminist abortion campaign, women’s movement organisations remained alert about its implementation. Prostitution was never a high priority for the overall movement, but was a matter of concern to specialised feminist interest groups until the legalisation of prostitution in 1999. While they remained active after this event, they only attracted a larger and newer feminist audience in recent years when the legalisation started to be called into question, as we shall see later in this chapter.