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The Incomplete Revolution: Adapting to Women's New Roles, by Gesta EspingAndersen. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2009. 214pp. $22.95 paper. ISBN: 9780745643168.
The sociologist Gasta Esping- Andersen presented three lectures on the welfare state under the rubric of the 2006 French Trois Leçons; in The Incomplete Revolution, he weaves these three lectures into a book. His core subject is what he calls the vmfinished revolution in women's roles, and his central thesis is that the incomplete nature of this transformation is worsening several facets of inequality and provoking harmful disequilibria with respect to fertility levels, disparities among children, and the distribution of income across households. Esping-Andersen argues that the gender revolution is the harbinger of these new inequalities because the change in women's roles is concentrated among highly-educated women and (due to marital homogamy) their higher-income families; social polarization is deepening because less privileged women and their families are left behind. Many women are not actually participating in the gender upheaval, he argues, but more worrisome is the consequent fact that children's life chances are growing increasingly disparate.
Not surprisingly, Esping-Andersen turns his attention to the role of the welfare state, both in creating and ameliorating these new inequalities. In the book's three core chapters, he makes the case for a specific configuration of welfare state reforms: a so-called new family policy aimed at accelerating the stalled revolution in women's roles, increased investments in children designed to mitigate inequalities in life chances,...