Welfare Feminism in Britain Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Welfare Feminism in Britain - Essay ExampleIt is vexed for us to perceive womans role as a job because of the surroundings in which it takes place, particularly the family. The institution of the family in modern, post-war society has been subjected to much sociological and psychological examination. During the onetime(prenominal) seven years it has too been a focus of controversy on the political Left, amongst feminists, socialists, and radicals of all kinds. It has come under attack it has been defended. Often this debate, originally political, has interpreted on a highly moralistic flavour, and while it is true that political passions are, ultimately, moral passions, morals about the family has all too often prevented a constructive analysis of this institution as it exists in our contemporary society. Yet it is not hard to understand why the subject should arouse passion the same former makes it hard to perceive womans role within it. (Wilson, 1977, p. 8)A woman has always be en subjected to physical care that is mediated by means of on-going worked up and physical relationships of the some intense kind whether sexual or parental, a woman in particular are reared almost from birth, certainly from early childhood, to conceive of happiness and emotional fulfilment in terms of their future relationship with husband and children. To many it therefore seems alien or even blasphemous to discuss these relationships as jobs undertaken for the capitalist responsibility. Nonetheless, such is the peculiar nature of the family. It plays what is in many ways a repressive role on behalf of the State, not only psychologically but also at the level of economic functioning, and yet at the same time offers the individual a unique opportunity for intimacy, comfort, and emotional support. According to Juliet Mitchell (1971) the individualistic combat of the wider modern society is truly a prison of love for woman. And the Welfare State has always been closely connected with the development of the family and has acted to reinforce and support it in significant ways. (Basch, 1974, p. 79) This it has through by offering various forms of service, both in money and in kind, and also by means of forms of social control and ideology. Thus the Welfare State is not just a set of services, it is also a set of ideas about womens role in society, in family, and not least important socially.In Victorian society women were, for the first time, valuable because they did not work. It was her status as a non-worker that gave woman as wife and mother a very exceptional ideological role. The single woman was societys reject, for celibacy was not highly valued (so that the attempts within the Church of England to start religious orders for women could be seen as radical) while the travel womans lot was to be completely outcast (Basch, 1974, p. 81). Yet work had to be found for the army of surplus middle-class spinsters and to them fell the task of teaching their i mpoverish married sisters how to be better wives and mothers. So grew up a paradoxical situation that still marks social work today whereby middle-class women with no direct experience of marriage and motherhood themselves took on the social task of teaching marriage and motherhood to working-class women who were widely believed to be ignorant and lack when it came to their domestic tasks. (Wilson, 1977, p.