The welfare institutions that were established in post-war Sweden had counterparts elsewhere in Europe, and the ideas behind the welfare policies were primarily imported from elsewhere. The Beveridge Report, which shaped many debates and policy practices in the immediate post-war, is a case in point (Beveridge, 1942). As time went on, international policy trends filtered down into national institutional and political trajectories. One such trajectory was the Swedish model and the template for conflict resolution that had been devised in the 1938 Saltsjöbaden Agreement, which was complemented and sustained by an active labour market policy, social insurance and, later, the expansion of social services.

A centrepiece in the post-war welfare ‘harvest time’ was family support. Beginning in the 1930s with housing policy measures, improved standards in healthcare for mothers and children and measures to reduce insecurity for women in the labour market, ambitions grew in the 1940s, accompanied by a significant change in social policy discourse. While 1930s social policy was embedded in population policy, the link between the two weakened after the war. Instead, a new discourse and policy practice replaced population policy and its various sub-policies targeting fertility levels. Instead, social policy measures were framed in terms of justice and equality. This was a harbinger of a new welfare era.

This did not mean that the new welfare model emerged without friction. Supporting families with children is a case in point, as the evolution of family policy was torn between two strong and, as argued in the previous chapter, paradoxical forces in Swedish politics – securing the role of women in the labour market while simultaneously improving housewives’ standing and situation. In effect, Sweden was now experiencing the battle between two family policy paradigms: the dual-income model and the male-breadwinner model.

Hence, the debate focused on the role of women in the household and in the labour market, sparked off by the book Women's Two Roles by Alva Myrdal and her British colleague Viola Klein (Klein and Myrdal, 1957). They highlighted the family policy paradox: the male-breadwinner–female-housewife ideal on the one hand and the desire to improve working conditions for employed women on the other. The paradox showed not only in the ideological deliberations, but also in policy practice.