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The essay is a slightly revised paper submitted at a seminar on Men in a Gender Perspective at the University og Copenhagen in 1999. As a starting point Niels Finn Christiansen suggests that three distinct periods, with changing relationsships between state and market, between private and public, and between gender and class are decisive in relation to the assesment of gender and class are decisive in relation to the assesment of gender and power in the Welfare State. In the first period up till 1914 market relations dominated, and women lacked political and public rights. In the second period, the interwar perios, a paradox emerged around women's formal public rights and the consolidation of the male breadwinner family. During the third period of the 1950s and 1960s women entered the public sphere as workers and as individual receipients of welfare facilities. Finally it is suggested that the result has been a win-win situation - a development in which both men and women have prospered.

Also in Denmark the Left failed to play a central role in the revolution of 1848. Despite the active engagement of many Danes in the European Left a socialist mass movement did not manage to establish itself in Denmark which still was a fundamentally agrarian society. Moreover, the Danish Left was a predominantly radical-democratic movement and, in spite, of adopting socialist ideas, particularly from France, it kept, of course, a marked distance to the radical-democratic Left in Europe. Social issues were addressed, but whilst basically taking anti-liberal stands the leading figures, nevertheless, favoured an evolutionary strategy of peaceful change, promoting education and enlightenment. In fact, liberty in the form of universal suffrage, a directly elected chamber of parliament, and a consequent antinationalist stand, were seen as the necessary prerequisites for solving the social question.