ABSTRACT
The change in the pattern of women's employment in Sweden in the past twenty years has been nothing short of spectacular. In 1960 it was still the rule for married women to stay at home even after their children were grown. In Sweden the overall female labor-force participation rate slid downhill steadily after the age of 20, in contrast to the United States, where the curve began to rise to a second peak after 30 (see Figure 1, Appendix). As a Swedish economist, Siv Gustafsson, describes it: "The conditional equality attitude had conquered in the USA in 1960, whereas in Sweden the paternalistic attitude still dominated." 1 By 1975, however, Sweden's graph also showed a second peak at age 40-45, and the work-force participation rate for married women had risen to 67 percent, compared to 45 percent in the United States. Sweden had become the leader of the Western world as far as women's work outside the home was concerned (see Table 3) and was not far behind Eastern Europe. 2
