Introduction: Perspectives on Child Care, East and West

Child care is perhaps the most protean of social policies, taking a variety of forms and being amenable to numerous rationales. Provisions can be justified in the name of gender equality, child development, welfare reform, labor market needs, or demographic crisis, and can take the form of anything from universal, state-subsidized child care centers to day-care mothers to privately employed nannies. These wide variations present a challenge to scholars, making it difficult to track and especially to compare child care policies over time and across cases. Scholars have tried (and often found wanting) several different typologies, ranging from Gøsta Esping-Andersen's welfare state regimes (1990) to Rianne Mahon's (2002) models for current welfare state redesign in Europe. Feminists have, of course, criticized Esping-Andersen for ignoring gender (O'Connor 1993; Orloff 1993; Hobson 1994), but they have also discovered that, even when gender is built in, his three types cannot account for variations in policies toward women among cases within specific regimes (O'Connor, Orloff, and Shaver 1999; Michel 1999).

Jane Lewis's (1992) concept of "male breadwinner regime" helps illuminate the motivation behind offering or withholding child care in specific cases, but because it focuses on a single factor, her concept breaks down when other considerations, such as labor markets and demography, enter the picture (on demography, see Peng 2002). Moreover, as Mahon (2002), Lewis (2001), and others have shown, the male breadwinner household is quickly becoming an artifact of the twentieth century. It is much more common today to speak of the dual-worker or two-adult-worker—or at least the 1.5-worker—household. Such households present new challenges when it comes to care. Mahon (2002) sorts responses into three categories—neo-familial, third-way,¹ and egalitarian—reflecting a new configuration of welfare state regimes.

The articles presented in this special issue both challenge and augment our current conceptual tools for analyzing child care policy. Perhaps the greatest challenge comes from the former Eastern bloc cases. For one, Marxism's commitment to absolute gender equality and (in its extreme form) the "withering-away of the family" (Kirschenbaum 2001) places it beyond the ideological pale of even social democracy, and thus outside the scope of Esping-Andersen's typology as well as its feminist variants. However, as is revealed in the discussions here of pre- and post-1989 Poland (Jacqueline Heinen and Monika Wator 2006), Hungary (Éva Bicskei 2006), and East Germany (Karen Hagemann 2006), as well as in studies like Lisa Kirschenbaum's (2001) history of the early Soviet Union, communist regimes themselves found it difficult to realize their ideals when it came to achieving gender equality through child care. In some instances, there was explicit opposition in the form of pre-existing institutions and entrenched cultural values, such as the Catholic Church and the ideal of the "matka Polka" in Poland (Heinen and Wator 2006). Often, however, a lack of resources (or, more likely, the state's unwillingness to allocate resources) stood in the way of adequate supplies of child care (Bicskei 2006). As in market societies, parents filled in the gaps with makeshift family arrangements or relied on sporadic revivals of pre-communist philanthropic services.

There is some indication that those societies whose pre-communist philanthropic and civil society infrastructures were less well-developed offered less resistance to communist policy innovation than those with more (Ghodsee 2006), but they also had fewer resources to fall back on when state policies failed. This, however, is a hypothesis that requires systematic investigation. As Bicskei notes, the study of socialist regimes has recently taken a "social turn," which enables scholars to probe the complexities and irregularities that lay beneath the surface of the putative "all-mighty" state and classless societies of communist regimes.² Given the growing body of literature this turn has produced, it should soon be possible for comparativists to develop useful typologies of communism or state socialism—typologies that will, one assumes, take full account of gender.

The articles in this issue suggest several different ways to think about why communism—despite its promises to...