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The Crisis in the Care Economy [1]

['Maia Silber', 'Elissa Strauss', 'Allison J. Pugh', 'Sam Gustin', 'Elie Mystal', 'Chris Lehmann', 'Sumaya Awad', 'Yasmina Price', 'Kate Wagner', 'Jorge Cotte']

Date: 2024-10-16 09:00:00+00:00

Books & the Arts / The Crisis in the Care Economy How was care commodified? And what has that meant for an undervalued but increasingly important workforce.

Vintage illustration of a couple in bed adjusting their futuristic home automation system; screen print, 1955. (Photo by GraphicaArtis / Getty Images)

At the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, visitors crowded outside a small, white clapboard house with a peaked roof and a wide front porch. Inside was a kitchen, outfitted with a slow-cooking oven, a gas table, and other innovations designed to produce maximally nutritious meals with minimal fuel. Over the course of two months, the kitchen—staffed by experts trained in the science of food preparation—fed 10,000 visitors low-cost, calorie-dense meals: Boston baked beans, pea soup, beef broth, and escalloped fish. Despite its outwardly domestic appearance, the clapboard house was a public kitchen, open to all: The MIT chemist Ellen Swallow Richards imagined that activists might set up such establishments in working-class neighborhoods, serving inexpensive meals to the families of wage-earning women who didn’t have time to cook.

Books in review When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring for Others Buy this book

Buy this book The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World Buy this book

To Richards and other “material feminists” of her era, writes the historian Dolores Hayden, public kitchens and other forms of collective housekeeping solved two related problems: the overwork of women and the undernourishment of the nation’s poor. At the turn of the 20th century, new technologies had facilitated a shift from the production of goods in households to their mass manufacture in factories. But the work of cooking, cleaning, and childcare remained largely confined to the home, understood not as labor that might contribute to social and economic progress but as the innate functions that women always performed. The remedy to the naturalization of both women’s work and household poverty, the material feminists believed, was technology that would usher essential services out of the home and into the modern industrial world. If household work could be industrialized, it could, many of them believed, ultimately be socialized as well.

Richards’s vision did not come to pass. In the early 20th century, new household technologies such as vacuum cleaners and washing machines promised to lighten housewives’ loads—but they also raised standards for cleanliness as well as women’s emotional investment in homemaking. These new tools of domestic efficiency created “more work for mother,” as Ruth Schwartz Cowan has argued, and more work for the mostly Black and immigrant household workers that some homemakers paid. In the second half of the century, women increasingly resisted the obligations of paid and unpaid domestic labor and fought their way into work outside the household. As they did so, commercial establishments—sometimes buttressed by public spending—emerged to meet demands for the work that women had once performed at home. The number of childcare centers tripled between 1967 and 1990. Hospitals are the largest employers in many states. More than 1 million elderly Americans reside in nursing homes. More recently, these establishments have also sent care labor back into the private home: Agency-hired health aides, cleaners, and nannies—most of them still Black and immigrant women—constitute the new domestic labor force.

Through all of these changes, the care economy has remained structured by an ever-increasing wealth gap: Workers put in long hours for low wages, and yet adequate care remains unaffordable for many who need it. The Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated these pressures, spurring many already overtaxed workers in deliberately understaffed establishments, from hospitals to schools, to go on strike or find other employment. We have called this phenomenon “the care crisis.” Now, many of the same establishments that created this crisis are promising to remedy it with more technology, introducing applications of artificial intelligence that policymakers and companies say will reduce costs and workloads.

How did we get here, and what are we to do? Two new books offer diagnoses of the care crisis that shed light on how feminists’ dream of emancipation from the unequal burdens of housework gave way to the commodification of care. The journalist Elissa Strauss’s When You Care: The Unexpected Magic of Caring argues that cultural narratives—including those of some feminists—have often discounted the value of intimate caregiving, economic and otherwise. The sociologist Allison Pugh’s The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World offers a more materialist explanation. She shows how employers have long sought to standardize the interactive service work that she calls “connective labor,” degrading its quality and disempowering workers in the process.

Together, Strauss and Pugh make a compelling case for valuing care as a societal good and as skilled labor. Yet, even as care has moved into a modernizing commercial economy, the problems that the material feminists identified persist: Those who perform it are still overworked; those who need it are still underserved. So untenable did such inequality seem in the 19th century that feminists were sure a fundamental transformation was on the horizon. “There is wealth enough now to house the whole people in palaces,” one suffragist magazine predicted in 1871. “The Grand Domestic Revolution is going to take place.”

Strauss first wondered what it might mean to value care after she had her oldest son. As the mother of a young child, Strauss feared that caregiving would consume not only her time but also her identity: As a journalist, she warned women not to let motherhood “colonize their otherwise wild and interesting minds.” But as Strauss’s first son grew older and she had a second, she found that caregiving did not diminish her intellectual life but rather fueled new insights into economics, politics, and philosophy. Caregiving has been “a transcendent experience that has challenged me and enlightened me,” Strauss writes. “Why did nobody tell me it could be like this?”

The societal failure to take care seriously, Strauss observes, stems in part from a Western cultural narrative that associates wisdom and heroism with independence. But she also attributes her initial failure to appreciate care to what she sees as the limitations of feminism itself. Strauss’s genealogy of this tradition runs from Virginia Woolf’s novels of domestic confinement to Betty Friedan’s famous characterization of the American suburban home as a “comfortable concentration camp,” to Shulamith Firestone’s vision of a world in which the invention of a mechanical womb would eliminate the need for biological reproduction. As Strauss sees it, these widely divergent thinkers agreed that “care and women’s liberation were in opposition.”

This is a somewhat oversimplified assertion. Firestone, for instance, aimed to eliminate the necessity of biological reproduction not because she hoped to eradicate care but because she hoped it would facilitate the inclusion of people of all genders and ages in the child-rearing process. The “cybernetic socialism” that Firestone imagined in her 1970 manifesto The Dialectic of Sex seemed even more fantastical than the World’s Columbian Exposition, but as the critic Sophie Lewis has written, Firestone had engaged in a serious study of experiments in communal living. In this, she was not alone among second-wave feminists. Even Friedan, as the historian Daniel Horowitz has noted, was a former labor journalist who toyed with the idea of communal living and wrote admiringly about a cooperative daycare in a housing project in Queens. In The Feminist Mystique, Friedan argued that work “serving a real purpose in the community”—not mere waged employment—was the key to psychological fulfillment. The feminism that Strauss really takes issue with, it seems, are Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In and other corporatized, pop-culture variants. “It was Woolf, Beauvoir, Friedan, Sandberg, Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte that I found the most convincing recipes for smashing the patriarchy and living a fuller, more complete, life,” she writes, the latter four names referring to the protagonists of Sex and the City.

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[1] Url: https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/care-work-strauss-pugh/

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