This study examines the political regulation of the family in Sweden between 1930 and 2010, a period where a relationship has always existed between gender equality ideology and family policies to a greater or lesser extent, and where the two have sometimes even overlapped or have become mutually reinforcing. Despite this, the relationship has been complicated both to establish and to describe. The history of the Swedish family is therefore not one of linear progress from gender inequality to shared responsibilities under the auspices of the state, but rather one of false starts and contradictions between different and sometimes incompatible interests and goals. It is a history marked by policy paradoxes, of male-breadwinner ideals colliding with labour market demands, of individual emancipation clashing with role conservatism, of gender inequalities in the home and in the labour market, and of the gendered division of care work in the changing organisation of the welfare state, the market and the family.

This chapter returns to the major elements in the way Sweden has articulated and resolved these family policy paradoxes, with the aim of illustrating how they may be used to inform the hotly debated issue of balancing work and family commitments in contemporary Europe.

Modern family policy emerged in the early 1930s as an offshoot of population policy, a central policy area and a major political concern at the time. Without the massive interest in the ‘population question’, the family would probably not have been constituted as an object of political intervention.

The direction and content of family policy were transformed in the process, targeting the family as an organic unit. With the rise of new perspectives in population policy grounded in family sociology, the form and function of the family emerged as a key element in the ‘population question’. If the population question were ever to be ‘solved’, family formation and family development had to be embedded in a framework of public policies. The most poignant formulation of the new stance towards the family was Alva Myrdal and Gunnar Myrdal's (1934) Crisis in the Population Question, which encapsulated a new spirit of interventionism in family policy. The family was moving out of the private sphere, becoming instead an object of public intervention.

The interventionist tendency was reinforced by the political interest in the family beyond the confines of population politics.