Class and Gender Relations in the Welfare State : The Contradictory Dictates of the Norm of Female Autonomy

One debate among feminist scholars of the welfare state is whether it supports women’s subordination or emancipation. Since the 1980s, the French state apparatus has been experiencing a conflict of values, between feminism and familialism. The research presented here probed how these distinct institutional-level conceptions of gender might be manifest at the interactional level. Analysis is based on ethnographic research in four social service offices in France. The article explores the childrearing and behavioral norms that female social workers promote for mothers in regular contact with social services. It first shows how central the norm of female autonomy is in these social workers’ thinking, which in turn reveals their gendered expectations of the women they see, beyond their role of mother. It then demonstrates that this conception of female autonomy is closely tied to a class position, as it is a model from the middle classes. The article lastly examines how this unequal situation in terms of social class, but not of gender domination, influences professional practices relative to the working classes. Combining gender and class dimensions in analyzing interactions with the welfare state bureaucracy helps to identify the contradictions in the job of social worker, caught between the goal of emancipation and the mandate of social control.


Introduction
One debate among feminist scholars of the welfare state is whether the state reproduces or reduces gender inequalities-or in other terms, whether it supports women's subordination or fosters their emancipation (Orloff 1996;Morel 2007).In France, the welfare state was built on a patriarchal and familialist model (Lenoir 2003;Lewis 1992), although maternalist feminists also worked on lending legitimacy to state intervention in the family (Cohen 2012).In the 1970s, second-wave feminist movements and women's increasing access to paid employment started to change that.A standard of emancipation and equality emerged in the French state in the 1980s (Heinen 2004), alongside another prioritized standard assigning women to a specific role in the institution of the family (Commaille 2001).This "conflict of values between feminism and familialism within the state apparatus" (Revillard 2007, p. 211) has been creating contradictory dictates for women in employment, anti-poverty, and family policies ever since.The research presented here probed the extent to which, and how, these differentiated conceptions of gender at the institutional level might also be manifest in the relationship between social workers and the families they work with, as well as in the "status expectations" characterizing their interactions (Risman 2004).
The following analysis is based on research conducted in four social service offices in France.It is in line with research inspired by Michael Lipsky (Lipsky 1980) that explores the concrete processes of public policy implementation and studies the discretionary power of "street-level bureaucrats".The ethnographic approach chosen for this study is also meant to be a tool for critically exposing inequality and power relations (Dubois 2015) and their possible transformations and contradictions.My research on social workers (who were almost exclusively women in the studied offices) shows that there is a strong tension between the goal of emancipating women and the primacy given to their maternal role, but this tension is not solely a consequence of their internalized regimes and standards: it results from the very nature of the relationship between female state employees and the predominantly female social service clientele, a situation putting women of different social backgrounds in contact with each other.This relationship between service providers and applicants is structurally unequal in terms of social class, but not in terms of gender domination, which in turn raises questions about the expression of "non-convergent power relations" (Bessière 2003, p. 7) in a singular social relationship.The article demonstrates how class and gender relations influence the intensity of the family counseling provided and the forms it might take.

An Ethnographic Approach to the Relationship between Social Workers and Families
Several studies since the 1990s have stressed the need for in-depth research on the relationship between women working for the state and its female "clients" (Gautier and Heinen 1993, p. 11).This approach reflects an effort to avoid making women out to be a homogeneous group when analyzing their connections with the welfare state and to study gender intersectionally, as one kind of social relationship that is entangled with others, especially class.It is also a matter of analyzing the place of women in social policy by accounting for the range of ways in which they are implicated, as initiators, workers, or beneficiaries (Andrew 1984)."Local-level studies" are a favored approach to seeing how "gender relations inform policy development" (Haney 1988, p. 766).In France, introducing the gender dimension into analyses of state-exerted social control (Cardi 2010) is also an issue, as such analyses frequently emphasize the controlled public's working-class position more than the gendered dimension of practices of control (Donzelot 1977;Verdès-Leroux 1978;Bodin 2012).The gender dimension is partly overlooked as a consequence of the chosen analytical frames, often inspired by M. Foucault (Foucault 1977) or P. Bourdieu (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990).Another hypothesis is that this invisibility results from a methodological bias wherein sociologists prefer to work on immediately visible differences and neglect what, at first view, seems uniform and self-evident (in this case, the gender common to professionals and their public).Intersectionality is thus a heuristic approach for introducing variation into a single-gendered world and drawing attention to the potentially differentiated and contradictory effects of gender.
Accordingly, this article explores the childrearing and behavioral norms that social workers promote for mothers who are in regular contact with social services 1 .The social workers studied here work in school and neighborhood-based services, and they are charged with solving a variety of problems, including budgeting, housing, health care access, childrearing, and conjugal violence.They are also charged with protecting child welfare, which puts them in the position of having to evaluate whether the childrearing habits of the families they work with are acceptable or need to be corrected.If they think that a child is "in danger" with his or her family (as defined in article 375 of the Civil Code) they must write a report to the juvenile court requesting intervention (the court may then establish educational assistance or temporarily remove the child from the family). 2 Such recourse to the justice system was a fundamental issue in the two-year ethnographic study, which I conducted 1 The type of social workers discussed here is more specifically what are called assistantes sociales ('social assistants') in France, an older occupation with more recognition than travailleur social ('social worker').Nationwide, 92% of assistantes sociales are women (nearly all were women in my field sites; the few men were not included in the study).They have the equivalent of a bachelors' degree (three years of training after the baccalauréat exam capping secondary schooling), and their income and educational levels are only slightly higher than the French working-population average.with approximately 60 female social workers in four social service offices in greater Paris.The aim was to understand the modalities and determinants of reporting 'endangered' children to the court: what criteria and contexts lead State-mandated agents to decide that their intervention in a family is legitimate and desirable?I thus assembled and qualitatively and statistically analyzed the hundred or so reports the studied services submitted to the juvenile court over the period of a year.I also studied social workers' ulterior decision-making process.To do so, I observed every formal and informal aspect of their professional life (work meetings, meetings with families, discussions with superiors and colleagues, the writing of reports), and I conducted in-depth recorded interviews with many of the social workers and their superiors (a total of 41 interviews) (for more detail, (Serre 2009)).Initially focused on a very specific professional act, the study took a wide-reaching approach.My position as long-term observer made it possible for me to note how social work professionals spoke of family situations in a variety of work contexts.The following understanding of the promoted child-rearing norms was thus based as much on analysis of reports as it was on the reconstruction of cases that social workers considered problematic on a day-to-day basis and that may or may not have been reported to the court.
In their work assessing situations of 'danger', social workers give particular attention to parental behavior, since judgments of danger are based on a principle of causality between the family and the child's situation.The advocated childrearing norms are primarily addressed to mothers, who are the main contact for social workers given the over-representation of single-parent households among poor families and the clientele of social services.I will first show how one of the dictates weighing on these mothers, that concerning their autonomy, goes beyond their child-rearing and maternal roles and is revealing of social assistants' broader gendered expectations of the women with whom they meet.I will then show that this conception of female autonomy is closely tied to a class position, and go on to examine how this connection influences professional practices with the working classes.

Female Social Workers and a Clientele of Mothers: The Gendered Dictate to Autonomy
The norms pressuring mothers are not only manifest in the place and role they should play as parents; their child-rearing abilities are also evaluated according to assessment of their ability to act.One especially strong and burdensome imperative is that they conform to the norm of autonomy.Specifically, this autonomy would take the form of mothers breaking free from violent spouses, calling on specialized institutions, or initiating separation procedures, in addition to resisting (or at least escaping) various forms of domination (usually masculine) that deprive them of decision-making power.This concern for autonomy is very present in social workers' everyday work, as I observed upon many occasions.They regularly orient women who are victims of domestic violence to shelters and advise them on filing charges.In a rare case, a social assistant even accompanied a young woman and her son to a hotel and refused to reveal her new residence to the very insistent grandparents, who were eager to regain control over their grandson's upbringing.This concern for autonomy can also be read between the lines in social workers' spontaneous suspicion of fathers requesting appointments in cases of divorce.For instance, after an interview with one such father, a social worker declared, "I don't get it, I don't understand why he came.He wanted at all costs to show he was a good father." 3Another was reticent before even meeting with the father, assuming from the outset that he wanted to see her "to say bad things about his wife".Fathers are subject to particular suspicion.Social workers' actions in favor of women's emancipation arise from an omnipresent gender solidarity, although it is rarely expressed in those terms.
The norm of autonomy directed at mothers also has implications for their role as housekeeper and their position in the division of labor, both domestic and professional.The family model usually 3 Quotations (other than references to academic works) are either from detailed field notes taken during meetings and fleshed out immediately afterward, or reports written by social workers and sent to the court.
promoted by social workers may be explicitly stated in meetings among peers to identify young children in situations of 'risk'.In one such meeting, for example, the discussion among the all-female social services staff in attendance went as follows: Social worker: I saw a young mom of 27 who's got four children, from four and a half to three months.
A colleague (sarcastically): And boom, on to the next one!Social worker: ( . . . ) She's a sweet mom, really nice, but overwhelmed, depressed.
Supervisor: The eldest is four?
A colleague (sarcastically): What a surprise she's overwhelmed!Social worker (in same tone): Moms are so disorganized!(Resuming her presentation) I suggested the cafeteria to her, she'd really like them to stay and eat at the cafeteria, but there's a problem with the meat-they have to eat Kosher.I told her that they could eat without meat, and that she could add some cheese in its place.But she said that complicates things with the principal and that they can't verify.For the two-year-old, I'm going to go for daycare twice a week.
Supervisor: The husband is around?Social worker: I asked her, "Your husband helps you?"She told me, "He sees that I cry, he wants to help me, but I was backward, I didn't want to delegate."The sarcastic and familiar comments in this discussion mark a distance from the described behaviors as much as they indicate benevolent sympathy for the young mother.The social worker presents her intervention as an emancipating action (the mother "put her life on hold") intended to teach this woman how to relativize certain housekeeping norms (like ironing everything).This conversation clearly shows how the question of fertility is intrinsically associated with sexual behavior (contraception), sharing domestic tasks in the couple, and use of institutional childcare alternatives (cafeteria, daycare).The social workers met during this study consider low fertility to be a condition of mothers' autonomy in the domestic sphere, but it is also a prerequisite ensuring greater availability and more individualized attention for the children.In this setting, female autonomy is in the service of child-rearing norms that shape the role of mother, and transgressions of these norms can be read in the court notifications.One such report thus concluded by stressing the fact that "it is difficult for Kevin to find his place and exist in peace" alongside his four older siblings, and another report emphasized that "Mrs.Y has difficulties in her relationship with her children.In particular, she has an especially hard time investing in both of them at the same time." The norm of autonomy is also measured by participatory behaviors, particularly seeking employment, since professional engagement is thought to be a way for women to avoid limiting their investments solely to their role of mother (especially in an excessive investment often critically called a 'fusional relationship' between mother and child, from a psychoanalytical reading of the situation).In fact, housewives and large families-those who break with the norms of low fertility and employment-are heavily over-represented among the families that end up being reported to the court, which indicates the particular suspicion reserved for them.Inversely, mothers that manifest an attachment to work arouse considerable compassion, as can be seen in the following presentation a social worker made in a meeting: It's the situation of a mother alone with five children.A single lady with five children, aged 13, 11, 8, 4, and 7 months.She just began a job at the education office a few days ago.Before, she got the RMI [a form of welfare payment].She has been a cleaning lady, a chambermaid, she always tried to work while in a difficult situation.[ . . .] Mr. X, with whom she had two children, is very violent.She has been housed in battered women's shelters [ . . .] She is willing, she absolutely wants to work, not just get the RMI.The problem is housing: 13m 2 on the ground floor, unhealthy, with a fold-out couch and a loft 50 cm from the ceiling, not for the claustrophobic . . .[ . . .] She isn't asking for anything, not even about money.[ . . .] She's sweet, this mom.
Child-rearing problems related to the number of children and housing conditions are not formulated as a danger for the children in this case, where the mother asserts her quest for independence in the marital and professional spheres.The norm of autonomy is not an exclusively constraining imperative for mothers; it can also be the basis of forms of complicity, sympathy, and support in the relationships they have with social workers.
Because of its polysemy and malleability, the norm of female autonomy thus refers to a gender model with implications for many aspects of social life (marital relations, relationship with institutions, position on the employment market), extending beyond the role of mother.

A Socially Situated Model for Women's Emancipation
The gender model promoted by these social workers is not neutral: it is the model of the middle and upper classes.Statistical surveys from INSEE, the French national statistical institute, demonstrate that the employment participation rate is higher among women with educational degrees beyond the baccalauréat. 4In couples where the woman has educational degrees and works as a paid employee, chore distribution is less unequal and the time spent on domestic tasks is the lowest (Brousse 1999).Moreover, although the gap is narrowing, women in upper management and mid-level positions are also the most likely to use contraception, have a lower fertility rate, and use forms of infant and toddler care that do not rely on help from the family (Bajos and Ferrand 2005;Villaume and Legendre 2014;Mazuy 2002).The ideal of emancipation that is the basis for the gender solidarity between female social workers and mothers is built in reference to 4 In 2008, 80% of women aged 25 and up with a post-baccalauréat degree were active (either employed or seeking employment), as compared to 32% of women without any formal educational certification (Maruani 2017, p. 25). a conception of autonomy that is socially rooted in a specific lifestyle and living conditions.It supposes the possession of economic resources that provide the means to call on external resources and free the mind from the heaviest financial worries.This conception of autonomy also presupposes a conception of professional activity that a study on happiness at work (Baudelot et al. 2003) found to be stronger among the middle and upper classes-namely, considering work a source of satisfaction and an indispensible component in creating balanced happiness, while the working classes tend to see work as the means to an income.These practices and dispositions are even more particularly part of the ethos of the 'employee middle class '. 5 This ethos is far from being shared by the working classes, especially its most insecure fractions (Millet and Thin 2005).
This model of autonomy also includes specific expectations of fathers.Although the issue of keeping them away when violence is a problem, social workers also try to convert non-violent fathers taken as absent from certain childrearing norms.The norm of the permanence of the couple thus leads social workers to consider both parents as equals in raising children, even in cases of separation or distance.It is not unheard of for social workers to take the initiative and contact distant fathers so they can meet their child(ren) after years apart, or suggest that they organize fun activities.Once again, the model of fatherhood of reference is reminiscent of that of the middle and upper classes, with a father who is present and invested in certain aspects of parental labor.Indeed, it is "mainly among men of the higher social categories, right where their social status is not challenged, that we find those who use fathering to claim additional social status" (Ferrand 1984, p. 136).
There is thus a strongly gendered dimension to implementing the norm of autonomy that social workers advocate, since it is directed at women whose independence they aim to promote by getting them on the employment market and reducing their investment in domestic and household tasks.This gendered content can only be understood in relation to their own class position, however.Indeed, the gender norms defining maternal and paternal roles are not simple reflections of a specific early-childhood-sector professional ethic stemming from new equality standards subscribed to by everyone in the sector regardless of their educational level 6 .Research on nursery-school childcare providers with low educational attainments (a pre-baccalauréat BEP certificate) shows, to the contrary, that they are strongly attached to differentiated parental roles and the primacy of mothers in raising children (Blöss and Odena 2005).One eloquent example is their inclination to regularly telephone the mother when a child shows signs of being sick, even when the father has declared himself more available and works closer to the nursery school.This professional sector is rife with the widely observed social gap between women in the employee middle classes, distant from the traditional model of family roles, and working-class women, still attached to a gendered division of parental roles (Lepape 2009), since only social work professionals with post-baccalauréat degrees fully subscribe to this ideal of emancipation.The familial morality guiding social workers in identifying harmful situations for children is a morality of gender and class.

The Fraught Intersection of Gender Proximity and Class Distance
Female social workers' gender norms are thus specific to their social class and do not necessarily overlap those of the working-class women they see through their work.The latter may have other normative preferences (in terms of fertility, for example) or run into difficulties implementing this gender model when they do subscribe to it (due, for instance, to the way the job market works, assigning unskilled women to unemployment or insecure jobs and irregular and unusual working 5 In France as early as the 1970s, the "employee middle classes" have been identified by a particular ethos, referred to as "cultural liberalism," which extols the virtues of gender equality and sexual freedom (Schweisguth 1983).This ethos sets them apart from the working classes, the self-employed, and part of the upper classes (the grande bourgeoisie remaining faithful to the model of the stay-at-home woman and large families, for instance).

6
This new standard of equality in family policy is manifest, for example, in the establishment of paternity leave in January 2002, but these provisions for paternal involvement remain rare and have little real effect (Boyer and Céroux 2010).hours that are not especially compatible with steady personalized supervision of children).Class distance functions as a criterion of differentiation between women, and it has consequences on how social workers assess maternal behavior.
As we have seen, the emancipatory process encouraged by social workers infers a gender proximity that expresses itself in various forms of help and benevolence.This solidarity may even in certain conditions justify a decision to not notify the court about children that they still think are endangered.For instance, in a case where the father was described as a "tyrant" imposing a reign of "terror" and who repeatedly and brutally beat his children, the social worker did not signal them to the juvenile court because the mother had started the separation process.The anticipated end of violence takes the upper hand over the reality of the present.This understanding is not perfect, however, and the supportive relationship can shift to a more restrictive supervisory relationship.
This shift can be seen over the course of a meeting that was held to discuss the situation of two boys, aged five and seven.Their mother, introduced as a "housewife", "prostrated at home," was first described by social workers as a victim, "terrorized," "quite frightened by death threats and blows", "straightjacketed by her husband and her culture."The discussion then proceeded to build another image of this woman: she was "letting herself go", "does not react to anything", and ended up "unable to take care of her children."Initially, while she was living in a shelter and appearing to be receptive to what social workers had to say, this mother was seen as a victim with a violent husband in need of support, but she ultimately ended up being thought dangerous to her children, due to her "pathology" and "inability to act" once she returned home and had to take care of them by herself.It was thus deemed necessary to take recourse to the justice system, not only to stop the husband's violence but also to find a restrictive intermediary, since the social workers decided she was impossible to work with.This mother's inability to think and act became the main argument in the change in the register of the social-work relationship and the transition from support to constraint.
More generally, in many of the reports of endangered children to the juvenile court, the mothers' inability to act is evoked by a variety of expressions, such as "helpless", "intellectually limited", and "deficient", as the following report to the court concerning another family illustrates: Madame appears to be quite deficient.She seems limited in terms of intellect and unable to make decisions without input from the gentleman, who completely dominates her.She seems to encounter significant difficulties in doing ordinary tasks alone and appropriating even simple ideas.
The conception of the "quite deficient woman" used in this report reveals a strong class-centrism toward this stay-at-home mother, who the social worker sees as completely dominated.The psychological register that tends to attribute women's passivity to their personalities in turn hides the impact of their objective living conditions.A materialist analysis reveals how much energy is required by domestic and household activities-in this case, care for five children from two months to seven years old-and how exhausting they are."The fact of being constantly responsible for children is not only physical labor-whose value is frequently overlooked-but also constant mental work, and furthermore alienating mental work, or at least limiting to thought" (Mathieu 1991, p. 161).Statistical surveys show the division of parental labor is still characterized by a significantly higher time investment from women, whether they have paid employment or not (Champagne et al. 2015).This unequal division of domestic work is compounded by the inequalities of the employment market itself, which assigns the least skilled women to the most insecure and futureless jobs, in the process encouraging their departure from employment (Battagliola 1988) and strengthening their attachment to a gender model that makes their role as mother their only source of symbolic value (Schwartz 1990).The patriarchal 'gender regime' is still partly inscribed in bodies and structures, to the extent to which it is internalized by some of the working-class families met during the study and re-enforced by the gendered workings of the job market.For lack of a material basis allowing these women access to a fulfilling symbolic alternative, the model thus "resists" (to use Pierre Bourdieu's term (Bourdieu 2001, p. 103) social workers' efforts to redefine it.
When women do not pursue autonomy to the extent that social workers would like, it is a blow to their value system.The staff of the psychiatric hospital studied by Erving Goffman felt personally offended when patients did not conform to the "reasonable" conduct expected of them as human beings, precisely because those staff members were able to feel solicitude, camaraderie, and even friendship with them (Goffman 1961, p. 81).Mothers' transition from subscription to distance prompts a comparable shift from solicitude to censure in the social workers.In analogy with Goffman's analysis, one might speak of female "compassion traps" 7 : while gender proximity fosters benevolence, perceived non-conformist reactions to the requirement of autonomy may lead to distance and recourse to the justice system as a tool of constraint.The female compassion trap shuts when the mother goes from being an 'active' victim trying to change her situation to a 'passive' victim incapable of protecting her children.For women from working-class backgrounds, the expected autonomy is reduced to a minimum: the ability to protect their children and make their own decisions (especially the decision to separate from a spouse).Unable to respond to the 'active' behavioral norm in its economic form in the public sphere, working-class mothers are at the very least supposed to have psychological autonomy, amounting to an 'activation' of their responsibility within the family sphere.For women at the bottom of the social hierarchy, lacking employment and financial resources, the norm of female autonomy weighs heavily as a limitation.Claiming an ability to act is not manifested in free choice, but in the assumption of individual responsibility within the family.Female compassion traps reflect the challenges of articulating gender solidarity and class distance, which are further exacerbated in respect to working-class housewives.Gender solidarity with dominated women can only take hold when they demonstrate their desire for emancipation and subscribe to the middle-class model of autonomy offered by female social workers.

Conclusions
While its specific expressions depend on particular gender representations and class moralities, the norm of autonomy is very influential in social workers' cognitive work, which includes identifying family situations harmful to children.It also has an impact on the kind of relationship that exists between social workers and the social services' clientele.Although the norm of autonomy favors a gender-based closeness between female social workers and the mothers they work with, rooted in an ideal of female emancipation and the rejection of male domination, it also raises specific expectations that may push them apart.This type of understanding, found in welfare services and its practical consequences, reveals a tension that is typical of this particular relationship between women, which fluctuates between help and control, gender solidarity and class domination.Combining gender and class dimensions helps to identify the contradictions in the job of social worker, which is neither static and automatic assistance nor uniform social control exerted by the dominant classes.An ethnographic approach attentive to interactions in the welfare state bureaucracy reveals the "contradiction in gender expectations" (Ferree 2010, p. 427): bearing the ideals of equality and emancipation, the norm of female autonomy also tends to make women responsible for their potential inaction while overlooking the material conditions of their situations.Social workers' everyday actions fostering the independence of beneficiary women run up against their obligation to observe families under their mandate to ensure child welfare.The gender model resulting from the norm of autonomy varies in its many facets (conjugal, domestic, professional, psychological) for women with a certain social standing, but for working-class women it may be reduced to the sole requirement of responsibility that considers them exclusively as mothers.The analysis of gender models and their social-class variations proves fruitful for thinking about how relations of class and gender concretely interact in specific work contexts and revealing of their possible contradictions.While this study within social services agencies showed how 7 The term "compassion trap" was added as a section heading in the French translation (Goffman 1968, p. 129) and is not found in the original English-language version.a middle-class gender model may serve as the standard to which working-class women are held, the next step would be to systematize the approach and devote deeper study to how dominant models for femininity are perceived-and potentially rejected-by women in the working classes (Skeggs 1997).

2
Since the law of 5 March 2007, recourse to the court comes second, after notifying children's services (Aide Sociale à l'Enfance).
Supervisor: She's not that backward!Social worker: That's what I told her. ( . . . ) I brought up the subject of ironing.Since she irons all day long, I asked her if she thought that it changed anything at school if a T-shirt is ironed or not.( . . . ) They are both young, it's a young couple.Supervisor: What does the dad do?Social worker: He's a locksmith.( . . . ) She wants to work again, because she's fed up just doing the ironing.A colleague: She worked before?Social worker: Yes.Pharmacist's assistant.Supervisor: Oh, right!So she put her life on hold to become a housewife.( . . . ) Social worker: I told her, "You had children really close together, is that what you wanted?" "No, I was just taking a break and . . ." A colleague: There's no contraception.