The Peril and Promise of Care
Revisiting a familiar dichotomy
Do you know the joke about the boss who saddles his employee with a truly terrible assignment but tries to pass it off as an “opportunity”? Or perhaps you’ve seen (or been) the parent who attempts to convince their toddler that shutting the heck up is actually a really fun game in which siblings get to compete over who can stay quiet longest?
I sometimes feel like those of us in the household labor/care work space operate a bit like that boss or parent. This? This isn’t drudgery! This is a priceless opportunity to bond with your child. I would hate to deprive you of that privilege! We tell those with limited care responsibilities that we really don’t want them to miss out, that we’re concerned that their lives are poorer for their distance from the daily tasks of raising a child.
At least, that’s what we tell them when we’re not telling them that they’re jerks for saddling their mother/wife/girlfriend with all the grunt work while swooping in occasionally to be “Fun Dad.” No, you don’t get to spend the weekend golfing! It’s time for you to share in the hell that is watching Cocomelon on repeat, with intermittent diaper changes to spice things up!
This dichotomy reflects an unresolved tension within household labor discourse: are care tasks burdens that need to be distributed more equally, or privileges that more people should have the opportunity to experience? Finding a better way to square this circle—and stop sending hopelessly mixed messages—is an important step toward resolving what some have called the “care crisis” in this country.
I accidentally read two books back-to-back that come down on opposing sides of the burden-versus-privilege question, at least superficially. Journalist Elissa Strauss’s When You Care promises to detail the “unexpected magic of caring for others.” Meanwhile sociologist Jess Calarco—who is a friend and mentor, so I am not unbiased!—argues in Holding it Together that American women are “drowning,” because they’ve been forced to substitute their un- and underpaid labor for a missing social safety net.
I’ll admit that it was Strauss’s book I picked up with more skepticism, expecting to find an overly romanticized depiction of care. But while the text occasionally veers in this direction, Strauss largely won me over. I found her personal conversion story, detailed in the book’s introduction, particularly resonant. “I went into motherhood determined not to lose myself in it,” she begins. Her favorite feminist texts warned her in no uncertain terms that caregiving “gets in women’s way,” so Strauss developed rules she hoped would help preserve her essential self: e.g., no one could call her “mom” except her son.
Over the early months of parenthood, however, something shifted. Though she’d been well-prepared for the exhaustion, Strauss hadn’t expected the existentialism. “Our narratives about care have been so one-dimensional, so lacking in curiosity, so influenced by the patriarchy’s simple algorithm in which anything female equals uninteresting, that we’ve failed to see [care’s complexity and richness],” she writes. She makes the (to me, anyway) familiar case that care is a social good, the very backbone on which our society rests. But she also makes the more novel argument that it is also a personal good, one that enriches the lives of individual caregivers. “I had put so much energy into figuring out how not to lose myself to caregiving,” she muses, “that I completely ignored the possibility that I might, in fact, find some of myself there.”
If When You Care is a love story of sorts, Holding it Together is more akin to horror. Calarco deftly weaves together firsthand insights culled from hundreds of hours of interviews with (primarily) mothers, plus an impressive synthesis of others’ research and reporting (seriously, take a look at her endnotes – they are thorough). She makes the case that Americans are living in a “DIY society”—or at least, the illusion of one: “In essence, the US has decided that we can get by without a social safety net because women will protect us instead.”
That choice is not serving women well, Calarco argues. Through a combination of laws, norms, and capitalistic value systems, we push women into motherhood and then into shouldering primary responsibility for anything that goes wrong in their child’s life. Next, we limit their access to affordable childcare and shunt them into low-paying jobs, which further cement their role as primary caregivers. Women with class privilege may be able to avoid the worst of these financial traps, but they are instead forced into moral traps: the only way they can avoid precarity is by becoming complicit in the exploitation of other, more vulnerable women. Like I said, pretty bleak.
Initially, I marveled at the disjuncture between these two texts. They even use some of the same source material (e.g., Darwin’s writings) to come to totally different conclusions (Darwin valued care; Darwin believed women were inferior to men). But on a deeper level, both Strauss and Calarco seemed to be making a similar point—one that I think points to a possible resolution to the care-as-privilege vs. care-as-burden tug-of-war.
Calarco, for example, closes Holding it Together with a vision of an America in which care replaces achievement as “the primary measure of an individual’s contributions to society.” She waxes poetic about the way that care “links our fates” and solidifies our mutual human dependence. Meanwhile Strauss acknowledges that care, as commonly practiced in the US, is not very much fun. That’s partly because the “fictions of independence” (an interesting echo of Calarco’s ‘DIY society’), teach us that care is something women should be able to do on their own, without much governmental or community support.
In other words, care is not, in itself, a bad thing. In fact, as Strauss would argue, it’s quite special—magical, even, under the right circumstances. But that’s the rub: the “circumstances” in which American women are being asked to provide that care are pretty dismal. They’re expected to do it largely alone, with few of the resources needed to do the job well and/or maintain their own well-being. When things go wrong, they’re told that they are wrong, rather than that the system has failed them.
At other times in history, and in other places around the world today, it’s easier for the beauty of a care relationship to emerge. It is not disingenuous, then, to offer men (or anyone with limited care responsibilities) the “opportunity” to care. In the contemporary US, however, care skews more burden than privilege for all but a limited few whose money and luck insulate them, at least partially, from both precarity and isolation.
Perhaps, then, a better metaphor than the boss trying to hoodwink an employee is an entrepreneur trying to win over an early investor: It doesn’t look like much now, but just imagine what it could turn into if you and I worked together. I suspect that if we want to dramatically expand the network of people who engage in care, and who advocate for the needs of caregivers, we’ll need to combine honest appraisal of the status quo (bleak) with an optimistic take on the upside potential (high). Strauss and Calarco, each in their own fashion, can help point the way.