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Article Excerpt
Who cares about care? Feminist scholars and activists have long highlighted the importance of care, as well as gender inequalities in the provision of care. Nevertheless, mainstream scholarship has often ignored the centrality of care in various societies, assuming that such universal nonmarket work is effortlessly and altruistically produced and does not require further exploration. However, the care deficit-created by an increasing demand for care and a diminishing supply--has placed carework more centrally on the political agenda. Numerous changes have contributed to the care deficit. As women have achieved greater access to paid work, they are less able or willing to provide extensive care within families. Families are also changing, with fewer extended family members able to pitch in when care is most needed. This change has occurred in part because of the geographical mobility required by the economy. At the same time, the population of the aged needing care and single-parent families needing additional support for care has grown. Given this opening, feminist analyses have the potential to play an important role in defining problems and framing equitable and effective solutions regarding care.
The most recent feminist literature has moved from recognizing the gendered division of care to developing a nuanced understanding of how carework reinforces inequalities for caregivers and care recipients, including devaluation of the care that racial/ethnic minority women provide. In addition, this literature examines the complex interrelationship among states, markets, and families in the provision of care and the ways that these institutions shape care provision. Several new books in carework illustrate this trend.
Recent Trends in Carework
In Madonna Harrington Meyer's anthology, Carework: Gender, Labor, and the Welfare State, the authors detail how care is distributed among families, markets, and the welfare state, and how care can be best distributed in a balanced and effective way across these institutions. One of the major arguments running through the volume is that the distribution of care should allow families to make choices about when to provide care and when to rely on market, or state-based institutions to help provide care, so that family members are not pressured to provide more or less care than they would like. Along with finding ways to compensate public and private sector careworkers more appropriately, such a distribution would alleviate many inequalities in care across gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
The first section of Harrington Meyer's volume focuses on the social construction of care over time and by gender, class, race, and ethnicity, providing historical analyses of carework as well as illustrations of how women redefine their caregiving identities in organizing politically. The second section addresses the blurring of boundaries between public and private cave. In particular, it shows that emotional work, although not necessarily viewed as professional-can be critical to quality care. The third section of the book explores the dramatic effects of welfare-state retrenchment for families with children and for the elderly. Finally, the last section features attempts to reorganize carework through policy changes (including privatization) and alterations in community and family networks.
The articles in Carework are unusually strong; indeed, the volume provides a superb mix of scholarship on carework that should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic. Moreover, Harrington Meyer includes an effective mix of theoretical and empirical chapters from scholars in a range of disciplines; these authors do an unusually good job of contextualizing carework in innovative and productive ways. For example, Rannveig Traustadottir's piece on providing services for the disabled within the community stresses how this provision impacts caregiving work. Traustadottir places policy reform in the context of a division of care organized around gender inequality. Despite the physical and emotional difficulties of providing care, society expects women to be caregivers, whether they wish to do so or not. Many caregivers must juggle caring, work, and other responsibilities due to a lack of affordable options and because of gendered ideologies about appropriate roles for women. In this context, Traustadottir develops an important theoretical argument about women's carework: "Caring is more than feelings women have; it is a specific kind of labor that women perform that requires that women constantly organize and arrange their lives to meet the needs of others ... a life-defining phenomenon in women's existence and a medium through which women are accepted into and feel that they belong in the social world" (269). The gender division of labor has placed women in caregiving roles, and required women to be responsible for providing care for their families and kin, including care for children, the ill, the disabled, and the elderly. By noting that "caring marks the point where social, economic, and gender relations intersect" (269), Traustadottir helps define caring and carework as central to the social order.
In addition to examining how care reinforces gender inequality, the authors also suggest that care reinforces inequalities of race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, and nation. The commodification of care, for example, reinforces certain inequalities; one-fifth of the paid labor force in the United States, for instance, is involved in professional care services (i.e., hospitals, health services, education, social services). Not surprisingly, most of these workers are women; many are racial or ethnic minority women. (1) Gender and race systems have historically devalued these women's care of their families while appropriating their labor for the care of white families. (2) This system benefits middle- and upper-class heterosexual white women who--released from onerous care obligations--enjoy more choices about the care that they provide. Economic resources also play a key role in determining care. Families with greater resources can buy higher quality care (i.e., top preschools, leading medical facilities, loving nursing homes) or can forego paid work to provide care for their family members. Hence, inequalities also include different levels of access to providing care for loved ones. Some groups (perhaps most vividly illustrated by slaves) have not had the same opportunity...
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