FAMILY, WORK, AND WELFARE IN PAST AND PRESENT:
A Transatlantic Workshop

Friday, November 10, and Saturday, November 11, 2006
Location: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Institute for Arts & Humanities, Hyde Hall

Juggling work and family commitments is a major challenge for both parents and governments. Families looking for a work-life balance are deciding whether to have children, when, how many, and who looks after them – and whether to work full- or part-time. Governments potentially can promote family-friendly policies for numerous reasons: to reduce poverty and promote child development and family well-being, underpin economic growth, and bolster pension systems. The family-work balance is a highly gendered problem, because even today it is mainly women for the care work in the family, despite all the rhetoric about equal sharing of parental obligations. The workshop aims to analyze this problem in a comparative and interdisciplinary perspective: historians, political scientists and sociologists compare the historical and contemporary development in different Eastern and Western European Countries and North America and discuss the necessary consequences for a future oriented welfare state policy which helps families to combine work and life.