could adopt to support caretaking. And it turns out that the kind of public support that the
state makes available for caretaking has a great impact on sex equality. In this section, I
want to discuss the ways that the supportive state can best gear its support of caretaking
to further sex equality.
As Nancy Fraser argues, welfare systems are inevitably constructed on a
particular normative vision of social organization.
The New Deal era introduced a
model of the welfare state that dominated for more than three generations, and that was
built on the presumption that citizens lived in families comprised of a breadwinner
married to a caretaker and their biological or adopted children. Events in recent years
have at least partially forced the demise of this breadwinner-married-to-caretaker model,
as policymakers were confronted with the recognition that it did not conform to the far
more varied groupings in which people lived their lives. Yet rather than moving toward a
model that better accommodates citizens’ lived reality, recent revisions of welfare policy
have turned to a model that presumes that everybody should be a breadwinner.
In
adopting this new “universal breadwinner” model, current welfare policy fails to give
caretaking the support it both requires and merits.
Yet if both the traditional breadwinner-married-to-caretaker model and its
successor, the universal breadwinner model, are predicated on problematic normative
conceptions, on what alternative conception should the welfare state be premised? The
supportive state model that I have advocated permits two different answers, depending on
the types of public programs that the state implements. In the first of these, the “direct
subsidy” approach, the state directly subsidizes caretakers for performing carework in
family settings. Welfare payments that allow mothers to stay at home to take care of
children, or paid parental leave by the state are two public policies that comport with the
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