Two
different but equally important types of work are fundamental to
the stability of our society and growth of the economy:
market work, which centers on the production of material
goods and profit-making; and care work, which maintains
the health and well-being of the population. (1)
Although we readily recognize
the need for care as intrinsically human and respect both giving
and receiving care as a natural right, our society only attributes
real value to the time, labor and resources devoted to market work.
As a result, the social and economic importance of caregiving is
severely underestimated in the public mind, and individuals who
routinely provide care as part of their daily lives are presumed
to be less productive— and are considered less socially and
politically significant— than other active citizens.
The devaluation of care
work and caregivers has a complex cultural history and widespread
repercussions which are expressed through both custom and contemporary
attitudes. Furthermore, the activity of caregiving— which
often takes place in the privacy of the family and is characterized
by attentive interaction, cooperation and interdependency—
conflicts with prevailing social ideologies that prize autonomy,
self-determination, and public achievement.
Even though the work
of caregiving typically requires an exceptional
investment of effort— including time, labor, resources and
intensive mental focus— the labor of caregivers remains largely
unstudied and unmeasured as a meaningful contribution to the common
good. Care work is universally underpaid or unpaid, and current
political priorities and employment practices frequently exclude
individuals with significant caregiving responsibilities from the public and private systems of support which protect other working
citizens from undue hardship. (2)
In a culture relentlessly dedicated to elevating
the prestige and social power of individuals who demonstrate the
greatest earning potential, the vital role of care work as a social
and economic asset— and the broader concerns of those who
provide care— are systematically discounted and dismissed.
Care work is further
stigmatized by a shared discomfort with the biological realities of human life. Individuals in dominant social positions, whether
male or female, are least likely to have daily responsibilities
that involve direct contact with the normal by-products of human
bodies. One of the functions of power and wealth in our society is
to expand the distance between privileged individuals and those who require
direct care. The void this creates in the caregiving chain is
generally filled by an unpaid or underpaid workforce of women and low-wage
workers. Seen from this perspective, the societal distribution of
care work is of critical importance to understanding the institutionalization
of inequality based on gender, race, and economic status. (3)
Motherhood
& Care Work
Motherhood is a highly cherished relationship in our culture, and
popular sentiment portrays the mother-child bond as the quintesessential
form of emotional attachment. A life that includes child-bearing
and child-rearing is deeply desired and strategically planned for
by many women, and the majority of American
women – over 81% — do become mothers.
Women may experience
motherhood as a powerful personal transformation, and many mothers gain a sense of emotional enrichment through nurturing their children. But cultural expectations of motherhood that emphasize
sacrifice and self-effacement as the baseline for ideal maternal
behavior often lead to disillusionment, particularly when mothers
discover they are disproportionately penalized by social conditions
arising from the low estimation of care work. Mothers who feel
entitled to fair treatment and unrestricted access to opportunity
are quickly learning that even though many barriers to women’s
equality were reduced or eliminated in the last century, a lack
of broad acknowledgement for caregiving as indispensable, productive work
remains a significant obstacle to advancing the economic and social
status of women who care for children or other dependents.
Mothers today are adversely
affected by any number of cultural, social and economic issues,
regardless of their level of participation in the paid workforce. Many of these factors have multiple dimensions and some are intertwined,
but almost all are related to the devaluation of care. (4)
- Caregiving has long
been considered women’s work, and the qualities and behaviors
associated with women are still viewed as less useful and less
valuable than the qualities and behaviors associated with men
and the individualistic pursuit of market work. As a result, the
personal and practical choices of mothers are effectively constrained
by narrow cultural assumptions about who mothers are and what
they do best. (A parallel claim must be made on behalf of fathers,
who are also constrained by cultural expectations— some
of which place unreasonable limitations on fathers’ ability
to devote time to caregiving.)
- Workplace standards
that require unlimited work on demand from the most valued employees
exclude mothers, fathers, and other individuals who wish to be
actively involved in caring for their families from good jobs
with good pay. Part-time work is often proposed as an ideal solution
to balancing paid work with the responsibilities of family care,
but most part-time jobs available in the existing market are poorly
paid, offer few or no benefits, and provide limited opportunities
for occupational advancement.
- Key U.S. policies
to promote social well-being were designed to support families
conforming to the traditional model of full-time breadwinner
father/full-time homemaker mother, but today only a minority of
American families fit this form. In any case, mothers who modify
their workforce participation to make more time available for
care work are especially vulnerable to economic hardship over
the course of a lifetime, but particularly in the event of divorce
or disability– primarily because their caregiving role is
assessed as having no economic or practical value.
- Although
American politicians voice tremendous concern about “family
values,” U.S. policies to support working families lag far behind
those of all other wealthy nations. For more than 30 years, proposals
for basic programs such as parental leave, expanded health care
coverage, improvements to early childhood education, and access
to affordable, high quality child care for all working families
have been repeatedly shunted aside from the national agenda. The
failure of public policy to support care work as well as paid
work is particularly detrimental to the economic and personal
well-being of mothers, who are typically responsible for the overwhelming
majority of family care in addition to any hours they spend in
paid employment.
As mothers become more
aware of the cause and effect of these overarching conditions, they
are in a powerful position to call out for what is right, and what
is fair. Mothers, and all citizens, deserve workplace practices
and public policies that acknowledge and accommodate all work
which is central to the strength of our society. Through concerted
collective action, mothers are poised to play a leading role in
creating a society which fully supports practices and policies that
successfully balance the needs and interests of those who work for
pay, those who give care, and those who do both.
Judith
Stadtman Tucker
mmo : December 2002 |
| Notes
1. Of course,
other classes of human activity are essential to a strong society,
including military service, which protects the nation from enemy
threat; creative and intellectual work that maintains the vibrancy
of the culture; vocations of faith that provide guidance for our
personal spiritual journeys; and charitable work that aids the most
vulnerable and those in crisis. However, the greatest polarity in
our societal estimation of productive work is demonstrated by expenditure
of public resources and cultural attitudes that grant the highest
priority to paid employment and profit making as a social and individual
imperative while completely neglecting the economic and social necessity
of caring work.
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2. Mothers
and others who take time out of the paid workforce for caregiving
are particularly vulnerable to poverty in the event of divorce or
disability and in old age, in part because of lower lifetime earnings
but also because primary social programs, such as Social Security,
do not offer credits for years devoted to care work. See Ann Crittenden’s
The Price of Motherhood (2001) for further reading.
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3. In Toward
a New Psychology of Women (1986), Jean Baker Miller argues
that societies typically cultivate an underclass or subordinate
caste to deal with human waste, blood, and infirmity as well as
the casual dirt and debris that accumulates in course of daily life.
Miller points out that women have historically occupied this devalued
social position, and she explores women’s psychological dynamic
in relation to their subordination. It is also worthwhile to note
that women continue to serve as the emotional “placeholders”
in the industrialized social order while men are expected to rely
on rationality and objectivity to perform effectively in the market
environment. The social construction of emotional care-taking as
a maternal priority is important to understanding cultural resistance
to granting mothers greater freedom and equality; the primal fear
is that if mothers are no longer obliged to assume responsibility
for caring for others, we would be fated to living in a cold, uncaring
and over-commodified world. A far more reasonable and humane expectation
is that caregiving would assume a larger and more rewarding role
in the lives of those other than mothers.
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4. The impact
of gender bias – which is still overwhelmingly prevalent in
our society– on the diminished social and economic status
of mothers cannot be underestimated. However, mothers face an additional
layer of discrimination over and above that which women without
children typically encounter, and this enhanced bias is derived
from social and cultural attitudes about care work.
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