Women faced similar circumstances and animosity against working married women in both countries during the 1930s. However, feminist movements in Sweden and the US have had different outcomes since then, largely due to different positioning of their discourses. In Sweden, women linked married women’s rights to work to larger social issues of declining population and increase in births outside marriage. They were able to frame mother’s rights as citizen’s rights and therefore, married women’s rights to work came to be understood simply as a citizen’s rights to work. This posed no threat to existing labor movements and their agenda and the Swedish feminist movement was able to form alliances and achieve “women-friendly” or egalitarian welfare policy provisions. On the other hand in the US, women framed the same issue as strictly economic needs, resulting in their exclusion from labor union and mobilizations. As a result, American women were not only pitted against the state but also male workers, resulting in no satisfying policy provisions for female
Women faced similar circumstances and animosity against working married women in both countries during the 1930s. However, feminist movements in Sweden and the US have had different outcomes since then, largely due to different positioning of their discourses. In Sweden, women linked married women’s rights to work to larger social issues of declining population and increase in births outside marriage. They were able to frame mother’s rights as citizen’s rights and therefore, married women’s rights to work came to be understood simply as a citizen’s rights to work. This posed no threat to existing labor movements and their agenda and the Swedish feminist movement was able to form alliances and achieve “women-friendly” or egalitarian welfare policy provisions. On the other hand in the US, women framed the same issue as strictly economic needs, resulting in their exclusion from labor union and mobilizations. As a result, American women were not only pitted against the state but also male workers, resulting in no satisfying policy provisions for female