[Women's Organizing & Public Policy in Canada & Sweden]

Lind Briskin and Mona Eliasson, eds.Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1999; 408 pp.Reviewed by Miriam SmithDepartment of Political ScienceCarleton UniversityOttawa, Ontario.This important collection -- the fruit of a long collaboration between Swedish and Canadian researchers -- should be read by everyone who is interested in the comparative study of public policy and social movements. Along with such recent works as Sylvia Bashevkin's Women on the Defensive and O'Connor, Orloff and Shaver's States, Markets, Families, the articles in this collection demonstrate how to gender our approach to public policy. The collection explores public issues such as immigration, education, childcare, violence against women, and health policy but also examines the comparative politics of across diversity in two different 'national' contexts.Briskin and Eliasson's introduction and Briskin's essay, Thematic Considerations lay out the goals of the collection: to map the multiple forms and sites of women's in the Swedish and Canadian contexts. How do different political opportunity structures shape women's and how does women's shape public policies? Women's and representation is broadly defined as including not simply the formal organizations of the feminist women's movement such as NAC or the FFQ(1) (with which we are most familiar in Canada) but also women's and representation within other civil society organization, such as political parties and unions. By casting a wide net, Briskin and Eliasson and their contributors are able to provide an analysis of differences between integration and autonomy in movement orientations as well as the relationships between various types of women's organizing.One of the main differences to emerge between Canada and Sweden is that women in Canada tend to organize through autonomous women's organizations while women in Sweden tend to organize through political parties and unions. So, for example, while Cameron and Gonas found that there was a gender gap in response to the move towards economic integration in both countries (the Free Trade Agreement in the case of Canada and entry into the EU in the Swedish case), they also discovered that women organized differently in response to these challenges. In examining the ways in which women are represented in the policy process, Bergqvist and Findlay emphasize that Swedish women have tended to organize as insiders while Canadian women have organized as outsiders. Similarly, Briskin's analysis of unions and women's also found that Canadian women are more willing to organize separately within their unions as a strategy for change. Feldberg and Carlsson, writing of women's for health, also raise questions about the comparative politics of women's organizing. Beyond the insider/' outsider dichotomy, they point out there are profound differences between the two countries in the way that organizing is defined.Another interesting theme in this collection is the apparent paradox that the Swedish commitment to equality and social democracy has created a situation in which challenges to patriarchy have often been turned into issues of labor markets and class politics. Consensus rather than diversity is the key to the Swedish universe of discourse and while this has proven beneficial for certain aspects of welfare state development, as Mahon's article on childcare policy shows, it has also made the forging of distinctive women's voices problematic. Eliasson and Lundy, writing on the issue of violence against women, show how the emphasis on consensus in Swedish politics made it difficult for women to articulate the issue of violence. Similarly, as Ross and Lanstrom show, while the Swedish state's normalization of lesbian relationships might be the envy of some equality-secking lesbians in Canada, progress and normalization have been achieved to some extent at the expense of separateness, grassroots organizing, and distinctive identity-formation that have been the hallmarks of lesbian in Canada. …

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