Between Family and Market – A Feminist Story about Individual versus Joint Taxation in Relation to Swedish Business Taxation 1928-1977

A general bias in most welfare states has been to use public revenues to deal with inequality in social and economic programmes. However, tax policies and regulatory tax reforms very seldom consider that gender norms and practices have had profound effects in shaping tax systems, which has become hindrance for achieving economic gender equality. By applying a gender perspective on family and business taxation we want to show that breadwinning and support of the family are common dominators for how the modern income taxation was constructed. A common understanding is that the consequence of this transformation from family economy to market economy also lead to a permanent and clear cut between these two spheres of economy. We will show that this idea of separation is more of a fiction than the reality.