In the Shadow of the Swedish Welfare State: Women and the Service Sector

Abstract

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the country's service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of wel-fare-state policies. Yet women's self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.