LIBRI DI BIRGIT PFAU-EFFINGER

The "housewife model of the male breadwinner marriage" is a specific cultural family model based on two main ideas: a separation of the "public" and "private" spheres, which in turn implies a corollary location for both genders, and the notion of protected childhood within the privacy of the household. It is considered to be the cultural basis of conservative family policies, but its influence differed across West European countries in the 1950s and 1960s. In the present chapter the Author discusses how these crossnational differences can be explained, paying particular attention on the specific relevance played by religious values. In this regard, it is a common assumption that the housewife model is embedded in Catholic religious values, whereas the Protestant religion supports more modern family models. In this essay, by contrast, it is argued that there was no direct link between the dominance of Catholic or Protestant religion and the cultural basis of the family policies in a given country. The Author shows that the origins and development of the housewife model were not connected with Catholic values and that its main supporter, in fact, was the urban bourgeoisie. This cultural model of family laid the ground for the overall gender culture, and gave a common trait to the different religious pillars of the Catholic, Calvinistic, and Lutheran religions. We surmise that factors other than differences in the dominant religion/s per se played a pivotal role, including the social role of the urban bourgeoisie, socio-economic structures, and the density of settlement.

The first part of this article briefly outlines the ways in which childcare is organised in European societies. In the second part, an explanatory framework for cross-national differences will be introduced, namely the theoretical approach of the arrangement of work and family. This approach emphasizes the mutual, and in part contradictory, interrelations and dynamics between culture, institutions, social structures and action, which form the societal context for the structures of care work in a society. In the third part, it will be outlined how the differences in the cultural context and welfare state policies in different European societies and the ways in which these interact make a particular contribution to explaining differences in the degree to which childcare is organised in society and in the gender division of labour within the family. There are clearly cross-national differences in European societies in relation to the ways in which care work is organised. In this article, a theoretical framework for the explanation of such differences was introduced. It is based on the assumption that the specific ways in which cultural, institutional, and socio-economic factors interact in the specific ‘arrangement of work and family’ in a society are crucial for the explanation of cross-national differences. The example of the patterns of the organisation of childcare in European societies was used as an example. It was shown how particularly the ways in which welfare state policies on the one hand and cultural models of the family on the other interact can contribute to explaining the differences between these patterns. It was also addressed how far this explanatory framework is adequate for the explanation of international differences in housework. It was emphasized that additional sets of cultural values should be taken into account here, like the degree to which a tradition of a ‘servant culture’ exists as well as the degree to which specific household tasks are defined as ‘female’ or ‘male’ and the extent to which change is on the way.