Family Policy, Family Changes

This all endowed the expansion of the state and its educative pretensions with a natural legitimacy, and furthered the introduction of collectivist perspectives which demanded strong institutional uniformity and subordinated the rights of the individual to the best interests of the community.15 Sweden quickly took to twentieth century collectivist notions of the rule of ‘expert’ elites, possessed. [...] Also to consider as the aged inherited the earth, was the prospect of the debilitating and stultifying power of the elders. [...] Consumption, the last economic function left to the family, must be socialised.26 The Myrdals dominated political and social discourse in the interwar period to the extent that to engage in sexual intercourse was ‘to Myrdal’ and a sofa was a ‘Myrdal couch’.27 But the reform programme, with its daycare for children, went beyond the confines of Social Democratic policy-making and opinion in the 1930. [...] With the goals being the sameness of contribution and equality of outcome, attained by the break-up of the sexual division of labour in the home, and equal opportunities and affirmative action policies outside, the Social Democrats’ women’s organisation got them incorporated into the party’s ‘Programme for Equality’, adopted in 1969. [...] Similarly, in Denmark the number of female homemakers declined by 579,000 between 1960 and 1982, as the number of employees in the public sector grew by 532,000, with most of the growth in daycare, elder care, hospitals and schools.48 The Swedish system has been characterised as a system where the private sector maintains nominal control over its capital and labour, but the returns on the factors.