The Maternity Package and the Materialized Experience of the Finnish Welfare State since the 1930s

Abstract

This article explores the role of materiality as a medium for experiencing the welfare state through the case of the ‘maternity package’ (or ‘baby box’). The state has been providing Finnish families with these packages, containing various items for the new-born and the mother, without interruption since the passing of the Maternity Grants Act in 1937. Drawing from a diverse body of source material, mainly 90 written reminiscences collected in 2020/21, the article examines the ways in which the maternity package, through its use and adaptations over the decades, has become embedded in everyday life and produced relationships between the various actors and scales of the welfare state. While the baby box experience is far from universal, the package has had recurring utopian potential in the production of a shared sphere of experience: as a health tool, an everyday emotional experience and care practice, and a symbol of the Finnish welfare state. Throughout its history, the baby box has included a set of assumptions on how to parent a child, how to be a citizen or how to encounter welfare services. It has brought these expectations and wider welfare-state meanings into interaction with bodies and human relations, along with the materialities of homes and families’ intergenerational childcare practices, all the while negotiating between individual and collective experiences.