Family benefit and the experience of society
Finnish social security in between the old and new in the 1940s
Abstract
Benefits for families with children were among the first reforms which broadened social security beyond the stigmatized poor relief in Finland in the 1940s. The family benefit for large families (1943–1974) was a mixture of old and new: it was the first regularly paid mass-scale social benefit, but it was conditional and selective, and the use of the benefit-in-kind was controlled. I will focus on the short period in the 1940s during which the family benefit was the milestone for the new social security and analyse the individual-society relationship which the family benefit carried and framed. Based on the periodical
published for the family benefit receivers, legislation, handbooks and journals for social workers, the focus is on the ideal vision. My starting point is that during the rapid reforms in social security the individual-society relationship became particularly clearly articulated. Based on the conceptualisations of experience, temporality and multi-layered historicity of the welfare state, I argue that the family benefit constructed a new experience of a moral bond between families and society, ranging from the past to the future and emphasizing reciprocity in rights, responsibilities and trust.
Keywords: family benefit, social benefit, welfare state, citizenship, history of experiences
