Wednesday
Mar302011
What revolution? Why haven't women pushed harder for caring work to be valued?
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
When I first got involved in blogging in the Spring of 2008 (coming up on 3 years), I started looking for other attachment parenting and feminist mothering blogs. The first feminist mothering blog that I came across and one that still holds a prominent place in my RSS reader today is blue milk. When I first discovered her blog, I found a post from 2007 called "What does a feminist mother look like" that included 10 questions for feminist mothers to think about and hopefully blog their answers to. I wrote my answers on feminist mothering here (way back in the day when no one commented on my blog). Since then, I've been reading and commenting on one intelligent and entertaining post after another. And now...I bring you the author of blue milk in this thought provoking guest post.
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Here is the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre delivering a memorial lecture on Women’s Work And The Limits of Capitalism. It’s fantastic. You should watch it. We should all be talking about it.
It’s also long (though the questions she is asked at the end by the audience aren’t brilliant so you can skip those and also, the introductions at the beginning of the clip go on a bit, so, Folbre doesn't actually commence her lecture until the 8 minute mark of the video so you can skip the first bit of the clip, too).
All in all, don’t read any further below if you want to listen to her lecture yourself because I am summarising, quoting and paraphrasing her lecture down there and it is so much better to see Folbre deliver these arguments herself. However, if you're going to skip the video entirely or you've watched it and now want to see what I am saying about it then keep right on reading.
Let's start with where we are today. Which factor is most to blame for the modern predicament of mothers - over-worked, exhausted, stretched to capacity, idolised yet invisible, and financially vulnerable - the patriarchy or capitalism?
Folbre says she used to think that 'patriarchy' was the noun and 'capitalism' the adjective but she now thinks it is the other way around. Capitalism is to blame. She goes on to deliver a brief history of the evolution of patriarchal systems, explaining that these systems suited certain labour-intensive stages of economic development, like warfare and agricultural societies, because patriarchal systems tend to result in higher population growth than do egalitarian systems. Folbre notes that "women are often held hostage by their concern for their children". Children have tended to weaken women's bargaining power and historically women have often gained more reproductive advantage from marriage than men. Therefore, women have tended to also pay a higher price for it, which resulted in unequal terms in the arrangement. The patriarchal household, she explains, forced women to over-specialise in care. She then goes on to talk about how economic theories of the firm can also be used to describe what occurs in the patriarchal household. I won't go into too much technical detail here about this, unless someone is desperate for me to do so and indicates as much in the comments on this post, but suffice to say that basically, these theories explain why the optimum outcome won't necessarily happen through negotiation and goodwill. The reason behind this is because of the different bargaining powers of the various parties involved and the various incentives they face according to the ways in which they're each rewarded. For instance, the owners of the firm are paid 'the residual' (ie. whatever is left over after all the factors of production have been paid for including labour costs) so they have an incentive to drive their labour hard and keep the residual as high as possible. At the expense of superior outcomes for the entire household, there is an incentive for men to force women to over-specialise in unpaid caring work because of women's inferior bargaining position and access to the household's 'residual'.
However, capitalism has eroded elements of the patriarchy, too - although, even with their tensions the two have brought about more mutual reinforcement than significant dismantling of one another. Or as Folbre jokes, it sometimes looks like the patriarchy and capitalism are getting ready to fight each other when what we are probably seeing is the two getting ready to mate. Capitalism, which emerged with the development of wage employment has undermined some aspects of the patriarchal family. If you can imagine life just before and after capitalism: families transitioned from living and working together in their homes and generally bartering, to the beginnings of industrialisation where men left the home to earn wages working in factories, and women and children (initially) stayed behind to perform the unpaid work of managing the family home - growing food, making clothes, tending to the sick and elderly, raising children, repairing the home, collecting fuel etc. This was when caring work became truly invisible. If you weren't paid a wage for the work in the new economy then the work no longer existed.
But capitalism, with its introduction of an 'individual wage' rather than the 'family wage' made a significant dent in the patriarchal wall - the 'individual wage' helped encourage women to seek self-ownership and also to engage in collective action. Now that individual efforts could be so readily identified and rewarded, women wanted to own themselves and the fruits of their own production (see here for a beautifully captured example of this). The only problem with all this revolution is that capitalism is dreadfully dependent upon the unpaid caring work of women. The breadwinner's wage (like, the Harvester Man concept in Australia) assumed the support of unpaid work from a wife in the breadwinner's home. It is the neo-liberal dilemma, as Folbre says, capitalism needs families but would prefer not to pay for them. However, we know that eventually women entered the workplace and became contributors to the household income, and finally that they even also challenged the notion of a breadwinner by fighting for equal pay.
As Folbre explains though, self-ownership hasn't been enough to guarantee gender equality. This is because, among other things, women continue to specialise in producing very worthwhile things (ie. human capital, or child-rearing as us mothers like to call it) that we cannot own. Capitalism does not provide payment for services and products that are not bought and sold in markets, and who, might we ask, does most of the work that happens outside of the marketplace? Women, of course. Folbre, also briefly at this point, touches on the introduction of the welfare state, a development which saw the socialising of some of the costs of caring for dependents and which greatly enhanced the lives of women. She highlights the ways in which the welfare state has been viewed as the feminised side of the economy; how it is referred to as 'the nanny state', for example; and more pointedly, how it is seen as something weak, spoiling, expensive, and needing to be controlled and disciplined.
“The position of women improves but the position of mothers deteriorates – pauperization of motherhood or “motherization of poverty,” Folbre explains as the next step which occurred in the evolution of the patriarchy. Why is it that women have gained in status in comparison to men, but mothers have remained so vulnerable? In other words, why hasn't the feminism of the last fifty years been enough? Why aren't mothers sticking together to force change? (The economic answer would be this: capitalist competition creates incentives to exploit resources that are unpriced, especially where competitors are doing the same thing; but you may be relieved to know that we can also explain the answer with less economic terms).
Here is where Folbre's analysis is at its most useful.
We don't assign any value to unpaid caring work. We convince ourselves that mothering is so sacred it can't be valued, that counting it would diminish its worth - cheapen it somehow. Folbre explains that while economists and others do in fact acknowledge that unpaid work in the home exists and isn't counted, they also tend to assume that the consequences of this are not all that serious. This is wrong, Folbre argues. If we're interested in material living standards, and we very much are, then we should count caring work. Why? Because it is work, because someone is providing it, and because providing this work has costs. The magnitudes of unpaid labour are really high, using the American Time Use Survey for instance, Folbre is able to show that half of all the hours of work performed in the United States are unpaid. (However, she doesn’t provide a full clarification of these hours in her lecture so I wasn't able to determine their exact structure - do they include unpaid overtime by wage-earners as well, general work in the house, caring for the elderly, caring for people with disabilities in the home?) This means that half of the work done in the economy does not happen in the capitalist system. Folbre rightly notes that this unexamined work has really important implications for living standards.
Then Folbre throws the following puzzle to the audience.
Current measures of inequality treat both families exactly the same – but Family B is in fact worse off because they are obviously having to also purchase services which are otherwise being performed for free by a full-time homemaker in the other family. Namely, childcare. It is important, Folbre points out, to put some value on that unpaid work if you want to understand the relative living standards of different households.
When we look at women’s equality we are mostly concerned with our market income. With women entering paid employment, household incomes have risen. And market income has become more equally distributed across the sexes. But this is because we are comparing a time when women earned zero value in market income to a time in the present where they have been increasingly earning a market income for paid employment. What happens, Folbre asks, if you assign a value for non-market work and you ask not what happened when women started working but what happened when they changed the type of work they did from unpaid to paid work?
In general, women’s unpaid work has been pretty much of a similar value across women. (There were some big shifts when the world began to understand how human capital, and thus economic growth, could be increased by the education of children - mothers were consequently encouraged to be more specialised in their mothering. Mothering capabilities have been tied to education levels, too, but generally, a mother is a mother regardless of class, education and income).
While all of women's unpaid work has been of a similar value, women's paid work has not been. Some women are highly paid and highly educated (thanks to feminism) and others are not, and what we've seen in economies like America, is that overall living standards have become much more unequal now that more women are in paid work. In a way, the patriarchy was equalising. Every married man used to get an unpaid house-keeper and child-carer – and the services provided to him were roughly of the same value regardless of the income of the man. Why is there more race and class inequality among women now? In part, it is the success of feminism in a capitalist system. Women overall have gained more education, but a lot among us have not had access to these opportunities. Poor women have been trapped in disadvantage.
Now, back to the question of this post, which is why haven't women pushed harder for caring work to be valued? If we know that unpaid caring work - child-rearing, elder care, care of family members with disabilities - is stretching most mothers/carers to their limits why aren't we changing things? Why can't we get political change happening for mothers/carers? Folbre makes the rather devastating case, and I think she is right, that it is income inequality which has undermined efforts to seek change. “Higher paid women benefit from their ability to hire low-wage women to provide child care and elder care in the market". Even if we don't benefit directly we can still afford to ignore the plight of others. It is one of the reasons why the campaign for paid maternity leave was so slow to get going in Australia. A lot of women like myself, with education and good pay had already secured some form of paid maternity leave from our employers long before a national scheme was in place. It was women with lower incomes and less secure jobs who were least likely to have beem able to negotiate paid maternity leave in their jobs. (By the way, we finally got a Labor government who did in fact introduce a paid maternity leave scheme here).
Not only are there inequalities in financial capital but there have also been inequalities in human capital - that is, the educational opportunities of our children are not spread evenly. Increased fear and anxiety about the welfare of our children, and the competitiveness that goes with this discourages the co-operation between mothers that is needed to agitate on a political level for change. Or as Folbre explains, it is difficult to unify women around a systematic political agenda when countries like the United States of America are so fractured along lines of race and class and family structure. Increased inequality among women has contributed to a fear of collective action - in fact, the very idea of being associated with caring work is seen as unpalatable in the modern political economy. A lot has been invested in the myth of self-reliance. Caring for someone makes them dependent and being dependent undermines their self-reliance, a state of being seen as entirely repulsive in our economy and which we would prefer was privately and quietly dealt with by families in their homes on their own.
Inequality matters for political change – it affects decisions about pooling risk, redistributing income, and banding together - all parts of the solution to the problem of unpaid caring work. And inequality hurts the bottom of the income distribution the most, where it has huge legacy effects lasting generation after generation. Inequality breeds more inequality. Folbre contends that it is increased inequality among women which has led to the success of conservative movements like The Tea Party, where the political visibility of women has been striking. It is also interesting to note that this movement has been very much targeted at the welfare state - it is anti-state and individualistic. Take care of your own family first and don't worry about how other families are managing.
So, how do we begin to change all this? Well, as Folbre argues, nothing will change until we can rally a larger coalition and to do this we need to first document and explain inequality better, and to do that? - we need to start counting unpaid caring work!
“We need a more sustainable organisation of production and social reproduction” - Nancy Folbre, want more? Try her posts on The New York Times. And of course, you can buy her books.
This writer is an economist who writes about motherhood from a feminist perspective, she is the author of the blog, blue milk. She has presented at conferences on motherhood, work and family, feminism, and social media; has written for magazines and newspapers, and has had her work quoted on television. She is a contributing author to the soon-to-be-released book,The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Activist Mothers Speak Out On Why We Need To Change the World And How To Do It. She is also the mother of two children. She might sound like she has it together, but she so very much doesn’t. You can follow her on twitter @bluemilk.
-----
Here is the feminist economist, Nancy Folbre delivering a memorial lecture on Women’s Work And The Limits of Capitalism. It’s fantastic. You should watch it. We should all be talking about it.
It’s also long (though the questions she is asked at the end by the audience aren’t brilliant so you can skip those and also, the introductions at the beginning of the clip go on a bit, so, Folbre doesn't actually commence her lecture until the 8 minute mark of the video so you can skip the first bit of the clip, too).
All in all, don’t read any further below if you want to listen to her lecture yourself because I am summarising, quoting and paraphrasing her lecture down there and it is so much better to see Folbre deliver these arguments herself. However, if you're going to skip the video entirely or you've watched it and now want to see what I am saying about it then keep right on reading.
Let's start with where we are today. Which factor is most to blame for the modern predicament of mothers - over-worked, exhausted, stretched to capacity, idolised yet invisible, and financially vulnerable - the patriarchy or capitalism?
Folbre says she used to think that 'patriarchy' was the noun and 'capitalism' the adjective but she now thinks it is the other way around. Capitalism is to blame. She goes on to deliver a brief history of the evolution of patriarchal systems, explaining that these systems suited certain labour-intensive stages of economic development, like warfare and agricultural societies, because patriarchal systems tend to result in higher population growth than do egalitarian systems. Folbre notes that "women are often held hostage by their concern for their children". Children have tended to weaken women's bargaining power and historically women have often gained more reproductive advantage from marriage than men. Therefore, women have tended to also pay a higher price for it, which resulted in unequal terms in the arrangement. The patriarchal household, she explains, forced women to over-specialise in care. She then goes on to talk about how economic theories of the firm can also be used to describe what occurs in the patriarchal household. I won't go into too much technical detail here about this, unless someone is desperate for me to do so and indicates as much in the comments on this post, but suffice to say that basically, these theories explain why the optimum outcome won't necessarily happen through negotiation and goodwill. The reason behind this is because of the different bargaining powers of the various parties involved and the various incentives they face according to the ways in which they're each rewarded. For instance, the owners of the firm are paid 'the residual' (ie. whatever is left over after all the factors of production have been paid for including labour costs) so they have an incentive to drive their labour hard and keep the residual as high as possible. At the expense of superior outcomes for the entire household, there is an incentive for men to force women to over-specialise in unpaid caring work because of women's inferior bargaining position and access to the household's 'residual'.
However, capitalism has eroded elements of the patriarchy, too - although, even with their tensions the two have brought about more mutual reinforcement than significant dismantling of one another. Or as Folbre jokes, it sometimes looks like the patriarchy and capitalism are getting ready to fight each other when what we are probably seeing is the two getting ready to mate. Capitalism, which emerged with the development of wage employment has undermined some aspects of the patriarchal family. If you can imagine life just before and after capitalism: families transitioned from living and working together in their homes and generally bartering, to the beginnings of industrialisation where men left the home to earn wages working in factories, and women and children (initially) stayed behind to perform the unpaid work of managing the family home - growing food, making clothes, tending to the sick and elderly, raising children, repairing the home, collecting fuel etc. This was when caring work became truly invisible. If you weren't paid a wage for the work in the new economy then the work no longer existed.
But capitalism, with its introduction of an 'individual wage' rather than the 'family wage' made a significant dent in the patriarchal wall - the 'individual wage' helped encourage women to seek self-ownership and also to engage in collective action. Now that individual efforts could be so readily identified and rewarded, women wanted to own themselves and the fruits of their own production (see here for a beautifully captured example of this). The only problem with all this revolution is that capitalism is dreadfully dependent upon the unpaid caring work of women. The breadwinner's wage (like, the Harvester Man concept in Australia) assumed the support of unpaid work from a wife in the breadwinner's home. It is the neo-liberal dilemma, as Folbre says, capitalism needs families but would prefer not to pay for them. However, we know that eventually women entered the workplace and became contributors to the household income, and finally that they even also challenged the notion of a breadwinner by fighting for equal pay.
As Folbre explains though, self-ownership hasn't been enough to guarantee gender equality. This is because, among other things, women continue to specialise in producing very worthwhile things (ie. human capital, or child-rearing as us mothers like to call it) that we cannot own. Capitalism does not provide payment for services and products that are not bought and sold in markets, and who, might we ask, does most of the work that happens outside of the marketplace? Women, of course. Folbre, also briefly at this point, touches on the introduction of the welfare state, a development which saw the socialising of some of the costs of caring for dependents and which greatly enhanced the lives of women. She highlights the ways in which the welfare state has been viewed as the feminised side of the economy; how it is referred to as 'the nanny state', for example; and more pointedly, how it is seen as something weak, spoiling, expensive, and needing to be controlled and disciplined.
“The position of women improves but the position of mothers deteriorates – pauperization of motherhood or “motherization of poverty,” Folbre explains as the next step which occurred in the evolution of the patriarchy. Why is it that women have gained in status in comparison to men, but mothers have remained so vulnerable? In other words, why hasn't the feminism of the last fifty years been enough? Why aren't mothers sticking together to force change? (The economic answer would be this: capitalist competition creates incentives to exploit resources that are unpriced, especially where competitors are doing the same thing; but you may be relieved to know that we can also explain the answer with less economic terms).
Here is where Folbre's analysis is at its most useful.
We don't assign any value to unpaid caring work. We convince ourselves that mothering is so sacred it can't be valued, that counting it would diminish its worth - cheapen it somehow. Folbre explains that while economists and others do in fact acknowledge that unpaid work in the home exists and isn't counted, they also tend to assume that the consequences of this are not all that serious. This is wrong, Folbre argues. If we're interested in material living standards, and we very much are, then we should count caring work. Why? Because it is work, because someone is providing it, and because providing this work has costs. The magnitudes of unpaid labour are really high, using the American Time Use Survey for instance, Folbre is able to show that half of all the hours of work performed in the United States are unpaid. (However, she doesn’t provide a full clarification of these hours in her lecture so I wasn't able to determine their exact structure - do they include unpaid overtime by wage-earners as well, general work in the house, caring for the elderly, caring for people with disabilities in the home?) This means that half of the work done in the economy does not happen in the capitalist system. Folbre rightly notes that this unexamined work has really important implications for living standards.
Then Folbre throws the following puzzle to the audience.
Say there are two families, both with two parents and two pre-school aged children, and both with a household income of $50,000.
Family A – is comprised of one wage earner working full-time earning $50,000 and one full-time home-maker.
Family B – is comprised of two parents working full-time, both earning $25,000 each.
Which family is better off?
Current measures of inequality treat both families exactly the same – but Family B is in fact worse off because they are obviously having to also purchase services which are otherwise being performed for free by a full-time homemaker in the other family. Namely, childcare. It is important, Folbre points out, to put some value on that unpaid work if you want to understand the relative living standards of different households.
When we look at women’s equality we are mostly concerned with our market income. With women entering paid employment, household incomes have risen. And market income has become more equally distributed across the sexes. But this is because we are comparing a time when women earned zero value in market income to a time in the present where they have been increasingly earning a market income for paid employment. What happens, Folbre asks, if you assign a value for non-market work and you ask not what happened when women started working but what happened when they changed the type of work they did from unpaid to paid work?
In general, women’s unpaid work has been pretty much of a similar value across women. (There were some big shifts when the world began to understand how human capital, and thus economic growth, could be increased by the education of children - mothers were consequently encouraged to be more specialised in their mothering. Mothering capabilities have been tied to education levels, too, but generally, a mother is a mother regardless of class, education and income).
While all of women's unpaid work has been of a similar value, women's paid work has not been. Some women are highly paid and highly educated (thanks to feminism) and others are not, and what we've seen in economies like America, is that overall living standards have become much more unequal now that more women are in paid work. In a way, the patriarchy was equalising. Every married man used to get an unpaid house-keeper and child-carer – and the services provided to him were roughly of the same value regardless of the income of the man. Why is there more race and class inequality among women now? In part, it is the success of feminism in a capitalist system. Women overall have gained more education, but a lot among us have not had access to these opportunities. Poor women have been trapped in disadvantage.
Now, back to the question of this post, which is why haven't women pushed harder for caring work to be valued? If we know that unpaid caring work - child-rearing, elder care, care of family members with disabilities - is stretching most mothers/carers to their limits why aren't we changing things? Why can't we get political change happening for mothers/carers? Folbre makes the rather devastating case, and I think she is right, that it is income inequality which has undermined efforts to seek change. “Higher paid women benefit from their ability to hire low-wage women to provide child care and elder care in the market". Even if we don't benefit directly we can still afford to ignore the plight of others. It is one of the reasons why the campaign for paid maternity leave was so slow to get going in Australia. A lot of women like myself, with education and good pay had already secured some form of paid maternity leave from our employers long before a national scheme was in place. It was women with lower incomes and less secure jobs who were least likely to have beem able to negotiate paid maternity leave in their jobs. (By the way, we finally got a Labor government who did in fact introduce a paid maternity leave scheme here).
Not only are there inequalities in financial capital but there have also been inequalities in human capital - that is, the educational opportunities of our children are not spread evenly. Increased fear and anxiety about the welfare of our children, and the competitiveness that goes with this discourages the co-operation between mothers that is needed to agitate on a political level for change. Or as Folbre explains, it is difficult to unify women around a systematic political agenda when countries like the United States of America are so fractured along lines of race and class and family structure. Increased inequality among women has contributed to a fear of collective action - in fact, the very idea of being associated with caring work is seen as unpalatable in the modern political economy. A lot has been invested in the myth of self-reliance. Caring for someone makes them dependent and being dependent undermines their self-reliance, a state of being seen as entirely repulsive in our economy and which we would prefer was privately and quietly dealt with by families in their homes on their own.
Inequality matters for political change – it affects decisions about pooling risk, redistributing income, and banding together - all parts of the solution to the problem of unpaid caring work. And inequality hurts the bottom of the income distribution the most, where it has huge legacy effects lasting generation after generation. Inequality breeds more inequality. Folbre contends that it is increased inequality among women which has led to the success of conservative movements like The Tea Party, where the political visibility of women has been striking. It is also interesting to note that this movement has been very much targeted at the welfare state - it is anti-state and individualistic. Take care of your own family first and don't worry about how other families are managing.
So, how do we begin to change all this? Well, as Folbre argues, nothing will change until we can rally a larger coalition and to do this we need to first document and explain inequality better, and to do that? - we need to start counting unpaid caring work!
“We need a more sustainable organisation of production and social reproduction” - Nancy Folbre, want more? Try her posts on The New York Times. And of course, you can buy her books.
This writer is an economist who writes about motherhood from a feminist perspective, she is the author of the blog, blue milk. She has presented at conferences on motherhood, work and family, feminism, and social media; has written for magazines and newspapers, and has had her work quoted on television. She is a contributing author to the soon-to-be-released book,The 21st Century Motherhood Movement: Activist Mothers Speak Out On Why We Need To Change the World And How To Do It. She is also the mother of two children. She might sound like she has it together, but she so very much doesn’t. You can follow her on twitter @bluemilk.
Reader Comments (84)
Yes, very true. I think that the value that many WOC place on their own caring work, for their own families, is because their motherhood has been denied in so many ways because of racism. White motherhood is held up as the "standard", much like European beauty standards prevail as the standard. WOC have been (and in many ways continue to be) separated from their own families in order to provide caring services to white people. Mammy stereotypes persist for a reason. So WOC with greater opportunities to care for their families appreciate it more. Plus, on the white end, as an earlier commenter put it, the work that women left as a result of the First Wave was not accorded value. That is, women and men alike were trained to devalue it, no matter who does it.
Oh upon submitting, I realised I should note, lest I was unclear: I think Mammy stereotypes persists not because they are true but because the stereotyping serves Whiteness.
Appreciation is SO important. And it's also SO hard, considering that a lot of domestic work is invisible, even within the household. Does anyone know when I've vacuumed the fridge's coils? Why would someone who's not in charge of shopping (even because of an agreed and equitable division of labour) be aware of the amount of mental inventory keeping involved in there always being milk in the fridge but not enough that it goes sour etc... I'm often left crossing my fingers that even if the work is not recognised, it is still appreciated.
It seems to me that this is socialism not feminism.
It appears you attack and attack the free market of capitalism, but ignore the massive pitfalls of socialism. The most obvious one is that it is not sustainable.
There is no ethical absolute that says taking another person's money and giving to some else is morally just or right. It's a theory, but it's a theory that starts with the "Taking" of something from someone with out their permission.
That's your philosophical zero that you're happy to live with.
Some people believe free trade is better and they see it as freer and fairer. Examples of socialism are littered with the lack of productivity a society creates when they benefit so little from the fruits of their own talents, risks and effort.
Increases in technology will make older people live longer.
We will reach a critical mass.
In thirty years time we can not afford to have 1 person working to support 2 elderly, and 2 women on maternity leave.
It's not sustainable under any economic model or proposal I have ever seen and I have seen many (many).
Responsibility for choices is a necessary "evil" (I feel ridiculous saying that, but that's what so many people think) to make life and economics sustainable.
This socialist version of feminism replaces man works - women looks after kids, with man works to look after elderly women(who live longer) and maternity leave paid women.
I don't like any of it and it reeks of unfairness.
Unpaid work in the home is not subject to the scrutinies of expected productivity and goal demands. Not to mention that often more than half of the tasks performed are for the very person doing them.
Judith Warner hitting the proverbial right on the head:
"We’ve internalized the notion of rugged individualism so deeply that we believe we are solely responsible for our children’s health and well-being. And we believe that this belief, instead of being a sign of hubris or of despair, is an entirely normal and natural thing. This leads us to place terrible pressure upon ourselves – and gets our society almost entirely off the hook as far as responsibility for children and families goes.
Our “post-feminist” generation grew up believing we could do and be anything – and as young women it’s fair to say that we pretty much could. But all this ran aground once we had children. For many women it became very difficult to reconcile not just “work” and “family,” but our pre-motherhood and post-motherhood selves. The equal partnership marriages so many of us believed we’d entered into (so naturally that we didn’t even articulate it to ourselves at the time) changed once we became parents. Many women found themselves sweeping up Cheerios, picking up boxer shorts, and contemplating their husbands at the breakfast table through the protective screen of “his” newspaper. Many began to nurse a simmering rage".
If you don't already know of O'Reilly's book then this might interest you:
http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2011/04/01/what-does-feminist-motherhood-look-like-when-black-mothers-are-defining-it/
And there is something quite devastating in an argument with your partner when you realise that it isn't recognised/appreciated by them - when you realise that you've been kind of martyring yourself doing the work and thinking, well someone has to do it, and look at me, keeping this whole family together, what would they do without me, it isn't fair that I am doing all this, but my partner must be so thankful that I am somehow managing to get all this done .. and then you have a moment with them where you get to see that they have absolutely no idea about this work you're doing or that it is even significant now that they do know about it... and oh my god, the fury and the sense of stupidity when you get to that point.
"It appears you attack and attack the free market of capitalism, but ignore the massive pitfalls of socialism. The most obvious one is that it is not sustainable".
I am an economist, I believe the marketplace works pretty damn well but it fails spectacularly at times, too. By the way, market failure tends to be pretty unsustainable as well. The answer to negative externalities (costs that arise from a transaction which aren't paid for by the parties to that transaction) is to build them into the marketplace, not to remove the marketplace, so I am not advocating anarchy here, I am saying that these caring costs should be structured into the marketplace.
"There is no ethical absolute that says taking another person’s money and giving to some else is morally just or right. It’s a theory, but it’s a theory that starts with the “Taking” of something from someone with out their permission".
That is exactly what Folbre is arguing here: not taking something from someone without compensation or consideration, and in this case it is caring work being taken by an economy.
"In thirty years time we can not afford to have 1 person working to support 2 elderly, and 2 women on maternity leave".
Maternity leave is about keeping women in the workforce. We need maternity leave to keep women in the workforce particularly where we have diminishing labour supply/skill shortages/ageing workforce. Women before, after and during their maternity leave pay taxes. Parents with parental leave recover from birth, establish their babies, bond with their babies and provide essential early nurturing to their babies. Babies with this kind of parenting are healthier and better adjusted, and this has obvious benefits for their productivity later in life.
"Responsibility for choices is a necessary “evil” (I feel ridiculous saying that, but that’s what so many people think) to make life and economics sustainable".
Which choices are those? The choice to be disabled? The choice to have an elderly parent with dementia? The choice to have a child with a disability? The choice to develop depression? The choice to have a partner who develops depression? The choice to be pregnant (because getting pregnant is not a choice, you can do things to try and make it happen or to try and prevent it but you don't control it, it is a biological outcome, and for the vast majority of the world unplanned pregnancy is simply the outcome of being a human being and doing regular human things like having sex)? Exactly what choices are your necessary evil?!
"Unpaid work in the home is not subject to the scrutinies of expected productivity and goal demands. Not to mention that often more than half of the tasks performed are for the very person doing them".
This post is specifically about unpaid caring work for others and not caring for one's self (though self-caring work is pretty important work also, particularly if you are a person with a disability or serious illness or you're elderly). So, we're not talking about the work of re-arranging the furniture around your new flat-screen TV, we're talking about day-and-night, physically exhausting, mentally tiring, emotionally depleting caring work. And quite frankly, you have a hide to say that unpaid caring work isn't quality work because it isn't meeting some sort of ridiculous KPIs. Try watching "In My Shoes" if you don't know much about what caring work looks like..
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2008/s2238820.htm
This. ExACTly.
I did some research on this in Ed. school and, at least in the US, there seems to be a definite change in the perception of teachers right after the Civil War...just the time when it became "women's work".
I find all the economic, materialist analysis terribly fascinating but also think there is a status piece. There are plenty of underpaid professions...but they are viewed as higher status, being the province of white men. Of course pay is often linked to status perception...but not always.
I don't think I have a hide anymore than your own self righteous belief that you could sling such a phrase my way on the back of of your personal opinion.
If you try and attach a market value to something I don't think it's a stretch for market results to be expected.
The issue of caring for children is a personal one and I believe that the value placed on it is purely at the discretion of the person involved.
Caring work isn't valued any lower or higher than paid employment. I like to see some reputable study that says otherwise.
If it is more important one could easily argue that it is exponentially more rewarding on an emotional level.
Clearly in a couple situation the person working hard in paid employment finishes their week an the money goes to the family. They get no more monetary bonuses or financial compensations that the sharing partner does not, being that they share the resources of the earnings.
The person who is in the predominant caring role gets time with the children/child that the other partner does not and due to the fact that we are emotional beings and we love and we by and large care, the resultant time spent with the child can be a bonus, depending on the opinion of children and love involved by the couple.
So putting a value on either party's input is harder for those not involved because the intrinsic value is completely subjective to those who are.
When the subject of the disabled comes up, it's as though charities never existed. You think so little of human kind that in a free market and in the absence of theft via tax that good people wouldn't help.
I have more faith in people.
As for going on the externalities offensive, there are no business related externalities in capitalism. A business pays for its use of roads, water, utilities as it already does with taxes and rates and levies and charges and duties.
Except of course no socialist system in history has or ever will compete with the efficiency of business.
"Which choices are those?"
To be clear - Choices people make.
People should be responsible for these and develop more responsibilities and have some foresight.
In a productive society there is always enough there to look after the needy.
I argue that capitalism is so much more productive than socialism, as of yet I've never heard a decent counter point to individual productivity.
"The choice to be pregnant (because getting pregnant is not a choice, you can do things to try and make it happen or to try and prevent it but you don’t control it, it is a biological outcome"
The choice to speed in a school zone, the choice to eat unhealthy foods; don't these all have different potential outcomes, but still fall under the responsibility of the person doing them.
How is having sex (unless you don't understand biological reproduction) any different?
What you are basically advocating is that if you choose to have sex under the knowledge that you might get pregnant or get someone pregnant, that you should not be responsible for this.
Why this particular example and why not any other myriad of plausible areas where self responsibility need not control the actions of a fully functional sentient being?
When you deny responsibility you axiomatically deny a person the freedom to be 100% accountable for their choices and rewarded or punished with fair appropriation instead of randomly arbitrated notions of societal approved actions.
You have clearly thought out your arguments and I completely respect your need to be just.
I however find any form of attacking individual freedom unjust.
Just because something is socially accepted does not make it right.
I have been thinking about this interesting discussion a lot. I have more questions than answers, and mostly I think there are a number of assumptions made that need to be questioned.
I agree that higher paid women benefit from women earning lower wages doing the caring work in their lives. But, the lower paid women also benefit from the fact that they have a job and they are earning money. I am not an economist but I hazard a guess that Western economies are composed in large part of the care industry. I'm not sure what the post is pushing for - should these care jobs be abolished? (then who would do them? and where would these people work? and it would push women, and some men, back to the unpaid care work at home) should the wages be increased? (then fewer would be able to pay them, again forcing many women, and some men, back to unpaid care work at home) Or should we instead be making care jobs more accessible for people who need the help? (and how would that be done? and if more accessible would that increase the pauperisation of motherhood?
I get and agree with the point about recognizing and valuing care work. However, this point has been made before but generally without much behind it. How exactly could/would it be valued? Should a salary be designated to use in a tax form? How would that figure be arrived at? Each person's caring load is different. From my perspective what is more important is to have services more accessible, this would make a bigger difference than getting a tax break that will give you a bit more money back, and you still have to hire the services under criteria that are not helpful. I've seen this happen in the of my grandmother as she became older and more frail and it was quality services that we needed most.
Here is another thing. Technology has made life longer for the majority and had made it possible for people to live with medical conditions that in previous times (and in other societies with less accessible health care) would have killed them much faster. This has in general increased the care load there is to carry for certain families and for a society as a whole. (Please note this is not an anti-disability comment, rather an observation of the increase of the care load). This means that there is often less time for those in caring roles for other things apart from the caring work.
Lastly, I have to say that I am uneasy with this idea of caring work in the family as a job. I do think it is work, a lot of hard thankless work, but it is not a job. I didn't strive to be wiping poopy bums or cleaning puke because that was my idea of a job, but I accept that it is part of the work that I do for my family, because that is what it means to be part of a family, it takes work. It is when we outsource it, that it becomes a job. Because someone else has found themselves in a position, like it or not, that this is what they do for money. I have no problems with people doing care work for money, it is part of how any society rolls, and I often think that by having discussions about how care work is not valued, we are not valuing it as well. Rather than undoing it, it should be better paid, in better conditions, more accessible. Western societies have this tendency to want to put things in an individual framework where we should be able to do it all. And the fact is, we can't nor should we have to, and most other societies accept this and care work is part of the way of life (again, pay and conditions should definitely improve).
There's a lot here, and I'm honestly reeling a little.
I'm an engineer. This means that I was a highly-paid professional woman who benefited from feminism and, arguably, capitalism.
Then I was laid off, and now I work from home. It is HARD. There is stigma. It is not valued. I find myself pointing out that I was an engineer to justify my value. A big part of this is because the work I'm doing right now (and make no mistake, it is work) isn't viewed as "work". In fact, it's often implied that I'm just having a non-stop party over here.
And yet, I find a lot of the tools that come up with a "wage" that I should be making for the work I do to be a little bit patronizing. It's almost like a way of placating me. I feel that it's saying, "There, there dear, you ARE important, see? Now would you mind driving carpool?"
So, for me, I'm not entirely sure HOW to value the caring work. I suppose I've just absorbed the idea that cleaning my toilets isn't valuable, and so I'm almost at a loss when I consider the alternative.
I have noticed a few comments now saying what would valuing care work look like. And some here with the anxiety of wondering if my revolution is about dismantling the marketplace might be kind of asking this question, in their own special way, too.
I am going to compose an answer to that good question and come back and post it soon-ish... will sleep in the meantime, and also get kid to school and other kid to music class and self to clean house etc, Thanks for your patience and for the discussion.
I read The Price of Motherhood. And these were my biggest questions on finishing the book. What happened to fighting for mothers rights? How did fighting for womens entry into the workplace become the definition of the feminist fight?
I fantasise about being able to study this formally. Where can I start to read more?
I do SAH, despite my education. For many reasons. And I am angry that my work is not counted.
Lower class women doing the caring work for higher class women. Their families could be at a higher risk for suffering. Someone has to pick up the slack. Whether it is another family member, siblings. Someone. In South Africa it was often grandparents who cared for the children of the Nanny in the white suburban household. She got to see her kids on special occasions. Women who work in foreign countries to send money home for their children. Someone has to be caring for those children.
And now I shall go back to lurk and learn. I have so much to learn on this topic.
@bluemilk, I would love to read your thoughts on how care work would be valued, because again I have seen very little on the specifics of this.
On that thought, one thing I do wonder/worry about is whether providing monetary value to care work is doing us a favour, or is it another way of oppression of the capitalist system? (inner marxist speaking I guess). If we assign a salary, then does that mean we are now valued and we weren't before? And if so, is this saying the only way we value care work is by making it be paid? Shouldn't there be more than money, especially in this kind of work?
This is connected to the implicit question, in my earlier comment, that is essentially: at what point does care work performed within the family become a job? Because, as I said, it is work but not a job until you get paid for it. And if we get paid for it, then what effect does that have on our relationships with the people we care for who are family? Money complicates things, the old adage 'don't mix business with pleasure' comes to mind.
Again, more questions than answers.
At the risk of branding myself as an extremist. Since reading The Price of Motherhood, I found a book called Radical Homemakers.
I am reading through it slowly (I have a large pile of books I am working my way through.) And I have to admit that I find the idea of becoming self sufficient/supporting local economy very appealing.
I like the idea of not relying on a company that has questionable ethics for my food, clothing, children's toys etc. I like the idea of making choices that are sustainable. I also like it that my children see me making some of the things we need and use (a tiny fraction of the things we need and use, but I am making an effort to make things at home with regard to food, toys, clothing, home items).
I am curious what an economist has to say about self sufficiency and supporting local economy as opposed to supporting the international market. Am I am hopeless idealist?
[...] in my to-read list for quite some time. I have no idea where I first heard of this book, but in a recent guest post at PhD in Parenting, blue milk provided an excellent explication of many of Folbre’s ideas [...]
There are lots of ways that care work could be better valued and some ideas floated by those in this area of economics include: a universal basic payment; transitional labour market programs to help cover workers who come in and out of paid work while meeting substantial caring obligations; compulsory parental leave; a more progressive tax system; a disability insurance scheme; minimum lifetime requirements for care obligations in order to access full retirement benefits.. but the main thing is measuring invisible care work so that existing and emerging policies take these extra hours of work into account and do not penalise the people performing that work - an example used by Folbre in her work is hospitals changing policies to have earlier discharge of patients and whether this just transfers caring work from the public health books to families who have to either take time off to be home and care for family members or pay someone to do that task for them - have you really increased the efficiency of the system, if you don't count the care work at home then it appears yes when in fact the answer may be no.
Changing existing institutional arrangements so that they take into account caring work - eg. school start and finish times and holidays and locations with respect to workplaces; more opportunities for part-time work and better regard for part-time work so that it doesn't carry such a career penalty with it; flexible work arrangements - so, essentially we're talking better social policies and better work/life policies.
Few are actually arguing for a payment for family work or for it to be treated in exactly the same way as market-based work, but rather that what should happen is that for those who do provide this care work to be given the institutional arrangements and public facilities that they need to support them in providing proper care work. Co-ordination between public policy and family reality. Acknowledge that this work is being done - caring for children, the elderly and people with disabilities and then let's get the hell out of the way for them, let's not make it really difficult for those people taking on that caring work.
When people resist this kind of change you need to ask yourself are they somehow winning out of caring work being unvalued, will they lose something if caring work is valued? Because change will be about some new winners and losers and that doesn't mean that their desire not to lose is in any way more just than the desire for those performing caring work not to be so badly exploited.
Yes, the chain of caring work.
"Goes something like this ... All very ‘logical’ except the woman then loses ..."
So you predicted the whole thing. Why not publish this sequence in a newspaper, just so people don't make that mistaken sequence you just described. Sounds like if they knew more in advance then they would make a better decision.
"No, the pleasure golfer is not performing work, paid or otherwise. Raising children, taking care of elderly parents, supporting a disabled brother is work:" This I don't understand. What is the economic definition of work?
Exercising consumer choice is one of the most powerful ways to seek ethical change. I say go for it.
I find the Radical Homemakers idea pretty interesting though I think there is some flawed thinking among some participants in the movement. I touched on that on my blog here: http://bluemilk.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/yeah-speaking-of-privelege/
Sounds like the problem is guys doing 180 degree flops then? Must be an epidemic that girls date guys, get to know them, find them wonderful, everything you'd want for a father and a husband except then they turn into 100% losers right after marriage or childbirth. That makes lots of sense. I think it's totally reasonable to believe that people act one way their whole lives to trick a prospective and innocent wife into marrying them so they can oppress them.
Hey, I agree with some of this wholeheartedly!
I think that paid jobs should be modernized. There should be flexibility and no penalization for part-time or full-time work. Most jobs don't need a 9-5 nowadays, and you often don't even need to be physically present at a specific location -- at least knowledge jobs. This is coming fast as the new generations of free and entitled coupled with lower population will cause the workplace to bend over backwards to get anyone.
Also, I totally agree that the trend is to offload the responsibilities of state systems, the medical system for example as you mentioned, but education, justice, and others. I think that the state has very little accountability for any outcomes, they push that all onto citizens yet the state continues to tax and spend the money Unqualified citizens have to heal themselves and their families because hospitals kick them out earlier, they have to buy locks and door bars and alarms because the police cannot stop crimes, they have to buy water filters because the state can't supply clean water, they have to deal with special or even average education needs because the education system is designed for the lowest common denominator, citizens must repair their cars more because the state doesn't keep up the roads, etc. I don't necessarily disagree with decentralizing some of these services, but the state has kept the resources. It's a way of cutting budgets. Keep the money, reduce the service. it's a trend across all groups except perhaps military, not just caring work. That's Canada, not sure about US although US has it's budget troubles as well, so I'm pretty sure it's about the same.
I don't want to get stuck in a loop with you and I am not sure that our conversation is going to be productive until you do some reading in the area, so I hope you will understand why I am going to make this my last reply to you.
Here are some of the key areas in which I think you have a misunderstanding about economics:
"The issue of caring for children is a personal one and I believe that the value placed on it is purely at the discretion of the person involved".
It is possible for economics to estimate a value for it and this has been done many times over.
"Caring work isn’t valued any lower or higher than paid employment. I like to see some reputable study that says otherwise".
There are many many many many economic studies that show this.. I suggest Google-ing it or going to your local library and asking them for some assistance. Alternatively there have also been several books recommendations in this thread.
"If it is more important one could easily argue that it is exponentially more rewarding on an emotional level".
Yes, caring work has an intrinsic value for the person performing the work for a loved one and it is not the same as other forms of work. However, it is still work and many people also find paid work emotionally rewarding. This was covered in the thread already.
"So putting a value on either party’s input is harder for those not involved because the intrinsic value is completely subjective to those who are".
We are not talking about the emotional value you get from knowing that your children are being cared for, we are talking about the value of that work were it to be outsourced instead, and the contribution that this caring work makes to the economy through human capital development.
"When the subject of the disabled comes up, it’s as though charities never existed. You think so little of human kind that in a free market and in the absence of theft via tax that good people wouldn’t help.
I have more faith in people".
It is difficult to know where to start with this one, except to say that neither side of politics argues for a moment that disability care is currently adequate. They argue about how this is best resolved but not that it isn't a problem. You have a lot of reading to do in this area - start with what is your country's disability pension? what criteria do you need to meet in order to be eligible for it? what proportion of disabled soldiers in your country live below the poverty line? what is the average waiting list in your country for significant health services? what employment programs currently exist for people with a disability? how much funding do they receive? is it under threat? what is the average cost of monthly medication for the most common disabilities in your country? does your country provide adult diapers for free, if not, what is the lifetime cost of adult diapers? does your country have a carers' allowance, if so, how much is it? what is the rate of sexual abuse for children with disabilities in institutional care in your country? what percentage of carers in your country are children, how many of them are able to go on and finish higher education in combination with their responsibilities? etc etc etc.
"As for going on the externalities offensive, there are no business related externalities in capitalism. A business pays for its use of roads, water, utilities as it already does with taxes and rates and levies and charges and duties".
The business community would not agree with you, nor would the many corporate lawyers who make a living out of fighting for compensation for their business clients on account of negative externalities. And there is fierce debate on how best to ensure air and water are paid for - you might have heard of the climate change debate and emissions trading, for instance.
"In a productive society there is always enough there to look after the needy".
Yes, but how to ensure that the needy actually receive support - that is an area of market failure and it requires intervention and regulation - the market is not able to deliver this itself. This is not to say that intervention and regulation can't also be prone to problems, we need to be careful of the ways we implement intervention so as to guard against waste, inefficiency and corruption, too.
Hey, 75 comments later and we got there. ; )
I think you should have wrote that comment as the piece! Would have been able to engage my brain onto solving time travel or perpetual motion :) Great discussion piece anyway, bravo.
You're right about it being a loop, with a forecast of rainy left wing right wing ideology stand offs.
You obviously put a lot of work into your faith in socialism, unfortunately for me, I have absolutely no faith in it due to historically obvious scenarios.
At the end of the day I am not comfortable with the idea that anyone has the right to take anything from anyone, just because they perceive it could be used better.
No one has that right. That's about what it comes down to isn't really? You are comfortable to see a system that takesaway the preservation of the freedoms of those from which it usurps . I completely understand the need to cover areas where business has no interest, but I firmly believe, like you stated below that consumers decide the behaviour of the businesses.
If we demand more social charity from business and reward them with patronage then that can work. The system at the moment does not and wont any time soon.
Social change should be about pressure and never, ever, ever about force, because when it is then what moral standpoint can you truly defend retribution from?
I hope it's not too late to say this... but...
I am advocating for the end of the marketplace. And capitalism.
See, the only reason why capitalism has "worked so well" is because the cost of "things" (from labour to oil) do not reflect their real value. In simple terms, the rich get more than they give. If workers were paid for all the work they carry out, there wouldn't be any profit for the employers. And it's the exact same thing with the caring for children and housework. I have read somewhere that if unpaid care (for children, elderly, disabled, etc) and unpaid housework were to be paid, it would bankrupt the economy.
I'm sure it isn't what we all want to hear, but to me it's the only solution to the problem. Getting rid of capitalism. And I'm not necessarily advocating for socialism, unless it's run by women.
[...] posted from PhD in Parenting This blog is part of the #HERvotes blog carnival [...]
[...] the way, I have summarised, quoted and paraphrased Folbre’s lecture here if you are unable to view the video but would like to know what she is on [...]
[...] the value of women’s work and the limits of capitalism, feminist blogger blue milk writes: If we’re interested in material living standards, and we very much are, then we should count [...]
[...] What revolution? Why haven’t women pushed harder for caring work to be valued?, PhD in Parenting [...]