1. What is the impact of a Confucian welfare regime upon lone mothers in Taiwan ?
- Author
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Lee, Ming-Yu and Lee, Ming-Yu
- Abstract
This study explores the impact of a Confucian Welfare Regime upon lone mothers in Taiwan, where the family is promoted as the major welfare provider for individuals. Since the 1980s, politicians and welfare scholars --whether New Right or Third-Way-- in the West, particularly in the UK, have been very keen to draw lessons from the Confucian Welfare Model in East Asia. The characteristics of this welfare regime are categorised as "conservative corporatism without Western-style worker participation, solidarity without equality, laissez-faire without libertarianism, far too much social control but too little citizenship, far too little state intervention in welfare provision but too much familial welfare responsibilities"(e. g., Jones 1993). The Confucian Welfare State is in fact much deeply familialised, and the family is "the super-major welfare provider" compared to Western welfare states. This thesis will examine the Confucian Welfare Regime from the point of views of gender, and will argue that its distinctive fractures cannot be understood within existing Western comparative typologies and have not been adequately analysed in East Asian studies. How do lone mothers meet their needs within this deeply familialised welfare regime in comparison with lone fathers? In search of an answer, a qualitative approach, a feminist perspective and an East Asian standpoint were employed to conduct this study in the form of semi-structured interviews in the Taiwanese Confucian social context. The participants included 30 lone mothers and 10 lone fathers with unmarried dependent children undertaking full-time education. The situation of lone parents in combining unpaid care work: and paid work makes them a strong case for understanding the gendering of welfare regimes in the West and in East Asia. Thus the Mother-Worker-Family-Outsider Welfare Regime is created on the basis of women's' status as lifetime family outsiders in the Taiwanese social context. An understanding of this s