WELFARE SYSTEM

Welfare System

Welfare System

Modern welfare has its roots in the Great Depression, which was a worldwide event, and began to be constructed in the 1930s through full-fledged government programs aimed at reducing the impact of poverty. Until the 1920s, various private institutions and foundations were responsible for providing assistance to the needy.

Welfare Models

In 2006, a range of welfare systems exist whose goals are to alter social forces to attempt to produce greater equality among the people living in a state; however, some of the systems ameliorate the impact of gender inequality on poverty and others contribute to this inequality. The welfare state has been “conceptualized as a state committed to modifying the play of social or market forces in order to achieve a greater equality,” wherein it is “operationalized as the collection of social insurance and assistance programs that offer income protection to those experiencing unemployment, industrial accident, retirement, disability, ill health, death or desertion of a family breadwinner, or extreme poverty,” according to A. Orloff.

In many societies, equality may not be possible since societal structures give males more public power than females. Thus there is inherently a gender inequality in any public welfare system, which disadvantages women.

Much of the literature indicates that the implication of transforming a state to providing social welfare is linked to the symbolic transference of private patriarchy to public patriarchy, that is, it was used to promote the gender division of labor, with women being responsible for caregiving and household work, while men were held accountable for providing economic resources. This structure was supported along with a fam-ily-wage system and traditional marriage in the western European sense (nuclear family with father, mother, and dependent children).

Women's work in the household was seen as unpaid and, therefore, women's work had no economic status. If the male breadwinner left, the female householder most likely did not have skills to contribute to the working world and any wages she did earn were less due to “lack of experience,” to quote Orloff. Interestingly, although social insurance was given to those individuals whose breadwinners were injured or died early in the development of the welfare state, there was considerable stigma attached to receiving these benefits.

Restructuring public welfare has focused on urban poor in industrialized countries.

At the start of modern public welfare initiatives, public welfare was, and still is, aimed at men and women differently. For women, public welfare is conceptualized in terms of social assistance (to aid in taking care of the family), but for men, public welfare is thought of in terms of social insurance (to allow men to make claims because they are workers in a market system). Thus public welfare was originally conceptualized as a way to support the male breadwinner through services such as pensions, workers' compensation, and unemployment insurance in the post-World War II era. Since women's work was not paid, it was not seen as part of the larger work/policy scheme.

In the 1960s the Nordic countries, Belgium, and France began a policy shift so that ...