Family Life and Individual Welfare in Post-war Europe - Britain and Italy Compared (Electronic book text)

What makes a family ? As traditional definitions of what constitute a family seem to be increasingly challenged in public debates, Stefania Bernini explores which factors were most influential in shaping dominant notions of family life in the post-war period. Taking Britain and Italy as comparative cases, she shows how in both countries the family was used in the post-war period as a privileged means of pursuing political interests, partly as a consequence of the new political landscape created by the emergence of the welfare state. However, approaches to the regulation of family life ultimately diverged in Italy and Britain, as a result of long established cultural differences and contingent political factors. The book identifies the main areas in which this divergence was apparent, and discusses the long term consequences of the different routes followed by the two countries after the Second World War