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Abstract
This paper explores the gendered relationships among reforms to social assistance policy, concurrent transformations in citizenship rights to benefits, and low-income parents' experiences of these changes in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan. Policy discourse in all three provinces increasingly constructs mothers and fathers as ‘responsible risk takers’ who are entitled to income support conditional on their employability efforts (for example, attendance in welfare-to-work programmes) or market citizenship. Qualitative interviews with 41 mothers and five fathers illustrate how this ‘gender-neutral worker-citizen’ model can be gendered in application and is contradicted by parents' gendered identities and everyday realities when living on social assistance. Using the theoretical perspective of gender as a social structure, the paper draws upon these findings to provide empirical support for a dominant theoretical argument in feminist scholarship – that gender-neutral policy is gendered and has deeply gendered consequences.
Acknowledgements
A version of this paper was presented at the ‘Citizenship, Identity, and Social Justice’ Conference, 17 May to 19 June 2007, Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Research presented in this paper was made possible by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and a University of Alberta Dissertation Fellowship. The author would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of this paper for their helpful suggestions and comments. In addition, the author gratefully acknowledges the parents who volunteered to share their stories about living on social assistance.
Notes
1. According to Marshall (Citation1963), civil citizenship related to liberty and freedom and dates back to the eighteenth century. It encompasses individuals' legal (for example, freedom of speech) and property rights. Political citizenship developed in the middle of the nineteenth century and included individuals' rights to participate in the democratic process through election and rights to vote. Finally, social rights of citizenship developed in the twentieth century and in Marshall's envisioning, included individuals' rights to economic welfare, universal education, and social services or security provided by the state. Although an individual's citizenship did involve their upholding of certain duties and responsibilities (for example, engaging in paid work), Marshall believed that social rights of citizenship had the potential to dampen individuals' experiences of inequalities in capitalist societies because they represented a relationship between individuals and the state that was not conditional, contractual, or tied to the market (Benoit Citation2000, Dwyer Citation2004).
2. In Canada, suffrage was granted to female citizens who were British subjects at federal and provincial levels (except Quebec) between 1916 and 1922, much later than the granting of political rights to men (Hamilton Citation2005).
3. Throughout this paper, aside from using the terms ‘social citizenship’ and ‘market citizenship’, I use several terms and phrases to convey my focus on individuals' citizenship rights and relationships to state support. These include: ‘entitlement’; ‘basis to claim’; and ‘claims-making’.
4. In many ways comparative to the British Beveridge Report, Marsh's Report on Social Security, written in 1943, offered recommendations for the package of social policies and programmes to be administered by the post-war welfare state. It focused on key ideas of state social insurance, children's allowances, and national investment (see Rice and Prince Citation2000, for a more detailed discussion).
5. Although this social contract was to be universally applied and experienced by all citizens, it did not eradicate race, gender, and class-based inequalities.
6. Several researchers argue that this model of the family was embedded in pre-1970s social policy. It is known by a variety of names, including the patriarchal model (Eichler Citation1997), the male breadwinner/female caregiver model (Baker Citation2001), and the breadwinner model (Sainsbury Citation1994).
7. For example, the federal government department, the Policy Research Initiative, has devoted considerable time and attention to developing policy recommendations to facilitate individuals' social and human capital. Its mandate is to advance research on emerging issues that concern all levels of government. See the website: http://www.policyresearch.gc.ca/
8. Like the patriarchal/breadwinner model, this model has been variously termed the individual responsibility model (Eichler Citation1997), the individual model (Sainsbury Citation1994), the egalitarian model (Baker Citation2001), and the adult worker family model (Lewis and Guillari Citation2005).
9. Qualitative data collected for this study occurred in 2004. In other work, I present different findings from this study that stem from my other major research questions; these articles varyingly focus on parents' experiences specific to one province (Gazso Citation2006), parents' experiences across provinces (Gazso Citation2007a) or mothers' experiences alone (Gazso Citation2007b).
10. I have used this approach in other research (see Gazso Citation2004), where I also explain that the levels most often understood to represent the gender perspective by several scholars are the ideological, institutional, interactional and individual. As others agree, the division of apparently indivisible influences on women's and men's experiences of social reality is for the sake of presenting complex ideas in a straightforward manner as possible. Interconnected relationships are assumed across all levels.
11. Parents who volunteered to be interviewed were recruited at food banks in a major city in each province.
12. Twelve mothers self-reported their race/ethnicity as Aboriginal or Métis.
13. Following a discussion of their perceptions of entitlement and eligibility to social assistance to contextualize my interest in their gendered experiences, I then asked parents: (1) How do you think your experiences as a mother or father on social assistance are different that than the experiences of other mothers or fathers?; and (2) What are some ways you think mothers and fathers are treated differently or similarly in terms of getting social assistance and being on social assistance? These questions were worded in this way in an attempt to invite discussions of citizenship entitlement in everyday jargon-free language. At times, there were variations in the way or when these questions were asked of each parent, a not unlikely occurrence when using a semi-structured interview guide.
14. As of the 2005 federal budget, the CHST was divided into two separate provincial/federal funding arrangements, the Canada Social Transfer and the Canada Health Transfer. Because these changes occurred after the period of interest here, 1993–2004, reference to their implications for social assistance restructuring are beyond the scope of this paper.
15. It must be noted that even under CAP, the entitlement relationships individuals had with social assistance policy did not preclude provincial programmes from encouraging their workforce preparation and attachment.
16. BC social assistance policy limits the amount of time individuals can access assistance to two out of five years. Single individuals can access only two years of support before they may become ineligible for assistance, primarily by not adequately engaging in job searches or attending welfare-to-work programming. In contrast, as applied to parents, time limits mean that they have two years to find employment once their youngest child turns three. The introduction of 25 exemption criteria in February 2004 lessened the harshness of this policy regulation (Gazso Citation2006).
17. Fathers are placed in brackets to acknowledge how a greater proportion of lone mothers have been on the social assistance caseloads in all three provinces than lone fathers over the period of interest and so have experienced these changes to a greater extent.
18. When I met Stephen, he had been on continuous assistance (disability) for seven months due to having suffered a heart attack.
19. Wind Dancer is a non-profit agency offering support services to Aboriginal people in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
20. Janice was exempt from seeking work when interviewed because she had recently fled an abusive relationship.
21. LaRossa (Citation1995) defines the culture of fatherhood as norms, values and beliefs surrounding men's parenting. The conduct of fatherhood is the actual parental behaviours of men. Over a decade ago, LaRossa observed the asynchrony between the culture and conduct of fatherhood. Although a new discourse was suggesting fathers' increased involvement in the care of their children (and therefore a new ‘culture’), LaRossa maintained that such things as women's primary responsibility for domestic labour and men's tendency to engage in ‘play’ activity with children over other responsibilities revealed that fathers' conduct was not equal in responsibility and time to that of the conduct of mothers.
