Conjugal America by Allan C. Carlson

Author:Allan C. Carlson [Carlson, Allan C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351526623
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Family under “The New Totalitarians”

A philosophically related, if physically non-violent, campaign against marriage and family has also been waged by “The New Totalitarians,” historian Roland Huntford’s label for the Social Democrats of Sweden.31 This need not have been Sweden’s fate. Within the early Swedish labor movement, there were advocates for the natural family. For workers, they sought a “family wage,” a living income for the father and husband that would also support a wife and mother and her children at home. Welfare policies would also be built around this breadwinner-homemaker-child-rich home model. This was Swedish Social Democratic policy between 1940 and 1967. Relative to the family, it worked reasonably well.

But egalitarian feminist pressures for change grew during Sweden’s so-called “Red Years,” 1967-1976.32 Oddly enough, but with perverse wisdom, these social radicals turned their first attention to tax policy. The feminist writer Eva Moberg complained that the current tax system, resting on the joint return for married couples and the principle of “income splitting,” condemned educated women to “lifetime imprisonment within the four walls of the home.” Mathematician Sonja Lyttkens argued that the Swedish tax code had “a large discouraging impact on married women’s labor supply.”33 In 1968, a joint report by the Social Democratic Party and the trade union alliance (the LO) concluded that “there are…strong reasons for making the two breadwinner family the norm in planning long-term changes within the social insurance system.”34 The next year, the Social Democratic Party issued its “Report on Equality,” prepared by a panel chaired by the feminist Alva Myrdal. The document concluded that “[i]n the society of the future,…the point of departure must be that every adult is responsible for his/her own support. Benefits previously inherent in married status should be eliminated.” As part of this legal deconstruction of marriage, the Report called for a tax-policy that abolished the joint return, taxing instead individual earnings without preference for any so-called “form of cohabitation.”35

Analysts of modern Sweden are virtually unanimous in labeling this 1971 shift from “joint” to “individual” taxation as the most important policy change affecting Swedish social life during the last 40 years. Sven Steinmo calls it “the most significant” and “radical” reform of the turbulent 1970s, because “it meant that the Swedish tax system would ignore family circumstances.”36 Through this change, reports Anne Lise Ellingsaeter, the traditional male provider norm was “more or less eradicated.”37 The influential feminist author Annika Baude adds: “If I were to choose one reform which has perhaps done the most to promote equality between the sexes [in Sweden], I would point to the introduction of individual income taxation.”38 Using a different interpretive lens, it is fair to conclude that Sweden’s current regime of few and weak marriages, fragile homes, widespread cohabitation, extensive day care, a retreat from children, and universal employment of young mothers derives—to a significant degree—from this one change in tax policy.

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