Non-Discrimination: Sex, Social Policy, and the State in the European Community, 1975-1992

This dissertation is a history of the legal norm of ‘non-discrimination on the basis of sex’ in the European Economic Community (EEC) between the introduction of ‘non-discrimination’ in the Equal Pay Directive of 1975 and its codification as a “Fundamental Norm" of the European Union in the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992. The EEC had been tasked with ensuring ‘equal pay for equal work’ in the Treaty of Rome of 1957. Whereas the earliest efforts by the EEC to remedy unequal wages between men and women had focused on the wage contract, ‘non-discrimination' held that inequality in the workplace was but one expression of the sex discrimination embedded in both national welfare infrastructures and the structure of the labour market. Between 1975 and 1992, the EEC therefore began to issue a series of far-reaching Directives that called on Member States to revise long-standing social and economic policies in order to erase legal distinctions between men and women and to affirm the principles of ‘non-discrimination’. By examining the history of these ‘non-discrimination’ Directives in the context of national and international transformation, this research seeks to demonstrate that a social issue seemingly just about women must also be understood as a crucial and contradictory feature of the transformation of social policy in both the state and the EEC in the 1970s and 1980s.This project thus extends existing work on gender equality in the EEC and other international institutions by evaluating ‘non-discrimination’ not only in terms of its improvement to the status of women but also for its impact on national and international policy and competence more broadly. To do so, it draws together sources from national archives, international institutions, and personal papers to reconstruct negotiations over and the implementation of Directives and legal decisions on Equal Pay (1975), Equal Treatment (1976), Social Security (1979-1989), Working Time (1982-6), and Family Policy (1980-1992). Combining an archive-based account of negotiations with a comparative assessment of social policy, I assess how the Directives triggered changes in both national policy and international law. Rather than a triumphant narrative of gender equality, my objective is to provide a critical analysis of the ways that new norms around gender and equality contributed to the reformulation of the welfare state in the economic austerity of the 1980s and the formation of the European Union in the 1990s.