Microsoft Word Socialized Choices 31-12 pod docx

Socialized Choices - Labour Market Behaviour of Dutch Mothers 
34 
changes in the home – can be understood by the fact that the former seem to be 
more comfortably received by both men and women than altered roles at home. 
“Women may feel that criticism of domestic inequality constitutes a personal 
attack on the men in their lives” (Kane and Sanchez, 1994, p.1081-1082).  To 
criticise inequalities in the labour market seemed more distant and less specific to 
their men.  
Hochschild (1989) characterised the cultural situation in the ‘80s as a ‘stalled 
gender revolution’. The fact that mothers had started to do paid work outside the 
home was revolutionary. Yet the delay in the revolution came from the fact that 
neither women’s jobs nor their men changed as rapidly or profoundly. Brinkgreve 
argued that since the division of labour at home only changed with some 
difficulty, and since the abolishment of the housewife ideal had not led to a new 
archetype or fresh guidelines for behaviour, by the end of the 1980s, the 
liberation of women also gradually became viewed as a burden (Brinkgreve, 
1988). Mothers with jobs, who were now occupied both as housewives and 
employees, had actually doubled their workload. A relatively small group of 
feminists who had managed to ‘break through’ the accepted fabric of social life 
and escape the trap of becoming a housewife were faced with three possible 
disillusions: living alone involuntarily, being childless involuntarily, or being a 
single parent involuntarily (Stacey (1986) in Brinkgreve, 1988, p.11).  
With respect to the present study, it is worth mentioning that the women who 
became mothers during the ‘70s were, almost without exception, daughters of 
traditional mothers. In other words, they had no parental example of how to 
combine motherhood and work, and no example of how to share household and 
childcare tasks with their partners. This led to psychological tensions between old 
and new life perspectives, since there were discrepancies between the ideals and 
normative standards of how these women were raised as young girls, and the 
liberty and claims they could now make as young adults (Brinkgreve, 1988, p.16). 
It is also noteworthy that it was these very mothers in the ‘60s and ‘70s (who 
could have been single or working mothers but most likely (65 per cent) were 
‘just’ traditional housewives) whose daughters went on to become the mothers 
with young children being addressed in this present research.         
1.4 
1990-2010 A new consensus: the modified bread-winner model 
In the ‘90s, the emancipation process gradually changed from moral to practical 
idealism. The liberation of women from their homes and their economic 
dependence on men was no longer an ideological question, but became above all 
an economic argument. An important symbolic turning point was the report of the 
scientific Council for Government Policy entitled ‘A Working Perspective’ 
(WRR 1990).  “The report stated that in the Netherlands a large amount of 
human capital was wasted because women were largely inactive, and for the 
sustainable welfare state, particularly in the light of the aging society, it is 
crucial to invest in female labour market participation” (Kremer, 2007, p.92). 

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Chapter 1 - Socio-structural developments in the Netherlands 1945-2012 
35 
Work was now being seen as the best way both to emancipate and to become 
financially independent (Kremer, 2007, p.128). In 1990 every Dutch citizen was 
expected to be financially independent (Kloek, 2009, p.213). In 1996, this also 
included single mothers. And, as mentioned, the Government introduced several 
measures to legally protect part-time work, resulting in the Working Hours 
Adjustment Act of 2000, under which an employer could only refuse a request 
from an employee for a part-time contract if they could prove that this would 
jeopardise the company’s interests (Plantenga, 2002; Van Doorne-Huiskes and 
Schippers, 2010).  
The report of the WRR also advised the state to strongly invest in childcare. 
And in the ‘90s, all political and corporatist parties agreed that childcare was 
necessary in order to raise women’s productivity, resulting in the commencement 
of various parental leave schemes and childcare arrangements.  
Parental leave was introduced in 1991 and had a typically Dutch design: the 
leave could only be taken on a part-time basis and was exclusively aimed at those 
working more than 20 hours a week, thus excluding many women (Kremer, 2007, 
p.143). The leave was generally unpaid - only about 5 per cent of the collective 
agreements included paid leave, and state employees were compensated as well 
(75 per cent of their wage). This measure was also used as a temporary payment 
for part-time work (Kremer, 2007, p.149). In the present day, the Dutch parental 
leave scheme (mostly) contains a 26-week unpaid allowance for men and women, 
which is scarce compared to neighbouring countries (Plantenga, 2008, p.29). 
Additionally, primary school schedules are not synchronised with work 
schedules, so parental leave arrangements are often used to fill these time gaps. 
Since the 1990s the Dutch government has invested structurally in childcare, 
culminating in the implementation of the Childcare Law in 2005 (Bommer, 
2010). This law is perceived as a modern law, since its logic is to create a 
professional and competitive market among day-care centres via the demands and 
actions of parents, thereby increasing the centres’ overall quality and price. 
Parents themselves decide on which day-care centre they choose and also the 
number of hours they purchase, and in return, depending on their income, they 
receive a tax contribution from the government. However, the view that childcare 
is primarily parents’ own responsibility is, as we have seen, not so modern. 
Moreover, there is still a lack of explicit public care and family policy in the 
Netherlands (Plantenga, 2008). Similarly, tax contributions towards childcare 
have recently been decreased in the state budget (Budget Ministry of Social 
Affairs and Employment, 2012).   
At the end of the last century, an alternative to the male breadwinner model, 
known as the ‘combination scenario’ was developed by the ‘Future Scenarios 
Reallocation of Unpaid Work’ Commission (Onbetaalde zorg gelijk verdeeld, 
1995). The idea behind the scenario was that women work more, and men care 
more: part-time work of four days each, combined with three days of professional 
care. In the same period, social politics focussed on the role of boys and fathers, 
who were encouraged and ‘trained’ to do their share of caring responsibilities 

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