How do social workers use biographies in designing social welfare intervention? How can biographies be useful in analyses of the ideological dimensions of welfare practices? These are questions that I will elucidate in this chapter. My discussion is based on a study that I conducted of how Venetian social welfare services interpret their lone mother recipients’ needs and respond to them. First, I locate social welfare services in the feminine subsystem of welfare programmes and discuss how the feminine subtext defines the status of its beneficiaries. I then go on to delineate the analytical framework adopted to examine discursive and ideological dimensions of welfare states through professional research narratives, as well as basic interpretive concepts.

The rest of the chapter is dedicated to answering the questions posed at the beginning of this chapter. In the study of the Venetian social welfare services, biographies surface insofar as they are the tools by which professional social workers define and reframe mothers’ needs and claims, and shape the policy intervention. Professional constructions of biographies constitute normalising knowledge that is used to produce desired policy goals. From a biographical viewpoint, one of the policy outcomes of social welfare intervention is normalising welfare recipients’ biographies.

Welfare dualism and its gender subtexts

Focusing on the duality of the US welfare system, Nancy Fraser (1989, p 149-51) differentiates between two major gender subtexts in welfare programmes that reflect the ideology of gender-specific ‘separate spheres’ of society at large, including its gender norms and assumptions. The duality model, to a varied extent, can be applied to other western welfare societies too, inasmuch as they are divided into two distinct spheres along gender lines.

On the one hand, there is the masculine subsystem, which is implicitly related to the primary labour market. On the other hand, there is the feminine subsystem, with an implicit link to the family/household. These two gender subtexts define the status of their welfare recipients differently as programmes have distinctive administrative identities. The beneficiaries of the feminine or family-based programmes are not individualised, but familiarised. They are often ‘defective families’, that is, families without a male breadwinner. The ideal-typical adult client is female, and she makes claims for benefits on the basis of her status as an unpaid domestic worker, or a mother-homemaker, but not as a paid worker in the labour market (a family-located identity).