| Since the mid-1980s, until 1993, the feminist-led initiative to legislate a national family leave policy has been a perennial topic in Congress. This policy was originally intended to serve as a means to remove maternity-related obstacles for women's equality of opportunity in the work place by creating a gender-neutral family leave policy. In addition, it was intended to create a legal category for paternity leave. The original drafters of the legislation reasoned that by making the policy gender neutral, the potential for discrimination based on protective, gender-specific policy would be reduced. Despite these original legislative intentions, the legislative discourses surrounding the final version of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, and its legislative history, convey a contradictory intent, showing scant evidence of the original feminist rationale for the bill. Instead, dominant claims in Congress frame the family leave bill as a means for mothers to serve their traditional roles in addition to participating in the paid work force.;This dissertation employs an extended model of discourse analysis to examine shifts in discursive composition of the family leave policy debate in the U.S. Congress. It finds that the discursive shifts from feminist language to capitalistic and family-preservationist language were channeled by legislative history on women's labor and family issues, the composition of coalitions that pressed claims in the debate, the social organization of Congress, and the cultural context in which the debate occurred. |
