The effects of ideological decision making on the materiality of women's lives: a comparative study of child care subsidy policies and services in Australia and California

The intention of this thesis is to use a critical feminist theoretical framework to explore the relationship between government ideology, child care subsidy policies and services and the materialities of women's lives. This exploration is undertaken by: • Comparing child care subsidy policies and services in California and Australia. • Focusing on the experiences and accounts of women service users in California and Australia. These aims are consistent with feminist literature that encourages researchers to look for emerging representations of child care, and also to position child care issues in a range of gender equity and social justice discourses. Critical feminist theory informs all aspects of the study. It provides the context for framing the topic, choosing the methodology, and the analytical lens used for the interpretation of the literature and the data. The methodology is micro-level, cross-national comparative and qualitative. This study relies on in-depth interviewing as the primary data gathering method. Qualitative, cross-national comparative research that values feminist theorising provides a unique opportunity to explore child care policy. This study demonstrated that the ideologies that benefit patriarchy are embedded in subsidised child care policies and are active cross-nationally. In this study the impact of these ideologies differed only in degree, not in the patriarchal intent of the policies. The women’s material lives were shaped in different ways by their respective subsidy contexts. For the Californian women, accessing a scarce residual service required them to be highly resourceful. They were not able to choose the child care they preferred, change their child care arrangements if dissatisfied with the quality, or pursue employment advancement because the additional income would preclude subsidy access. The Australian women saw their semiuniversal subsidy service as an entitlement. The higher levels of subsidy meant they were more able than the Californian women to choose the care ...