Abstract
Research on care work has blossomed in the last 10 to 15 years in the United States and Europe, inspired by a growing cadre of academics, policymakers, and advocates who seek to understand and render visible the labor of paid and unpaid caregiving. With some notable exceptions (Abel & Nelson, 1990; Duffy, 2011; Harrington Meyer, 2000), scholars within the field of care tend to focus on specific types of caregivers, such as mothers, adult children, home care aides, childcare workers, or registered nurses. While invaluable, these case studies lack a clear sense of how—comparatively— the experiences of caregivers vary by work context and how paid care differs from unpaid care. Given this gap, Nancy Folbre’s edited volume For Love and Money is an extremely important contribution to the study of care work in the United States. The volume, which calls on the expertise of a number of well-known economists and sociologists (Paula England, Eric Olin Wright, Suzanne Bianchi, Kristin Smith, Janet Gornick, Candace Howes), provides a much needed overview of how care is defined, what motivates workers to provide care, and what the differences are between paid and unpaid care. The book also dedicates three chapters (nearly half of the volume) to reviewing and critiquing policies related to care and how these policies might be transformed to better the lives of caregivers. As such, For Love and Money deserves high praise for its empirical exhaustiveness as well as the attention it gives to applied questions of care.
From the outset of the volume, we are asked to consider how care work is customarily defined and how it might be conceived of differently (Chapter 1). In their own formulation, Folbre and colleagues suggest it is necessary to distinguish between interactive care (“activities in which concern for the well-being of the care recipient is likely to affect the quality of services performed in interaction with that person”), support care (“services undertaken to enable interactive care”), and supervisory care (being on-call to provide care). The distinctions drawn between these three types of care allow the authors of the volume to expand their comparative lens as widely as possible, without being unnecessarily beholden to the conventional view that care work is a form of labor that primarily serves the needs of dependent others (Waerness, 1984). The volume goes on to review what motivates individuals to provide paid or unpaid care (Chapter 2), and then explores at length what it looks like to provide paid and unpaid care in the United States (Chapters 3 and 4). These chapters on paid and unpaid care are data heavy and will be a useful tool for any scholar of care who is seeking up to date information about who provides care, for how many hours and for whom they provide care, if/how they are compensated, and what costs and stresses are associated with the different forms of care work.
The second half of the book reviews the various care policies in the United States (Chapter 6), and then goes on to examine how policies reinforce, often inadvertently, disparities of income and geography (Chapter 7). The final chapter of the book (Chapter 8) lays out a very clear and compelling agenda for “policy relevant research.” I need not tell anyone who studies care how very confusing and muddy discussions of policy can be. One of the real gifts of this book is that the authors identify existing policies, address the inequalities that pervade the current policy landscape, and then suggest ways in which we can move toward more comprehensive policy change.
Precisely because this book goes to great lengths to detail the work conditions of paid and unpaid caregivers and the policies that affect their lives (using mostly quantitative, descriptive data), it is not what I would call a “page turner.” That said, the book poses some very compelling and complex questions about the provision of care that help focus and punctuate the data presented. For example, readers are asked to contemplate the following questions: What challenges do families face when providing care and how does this vary by gender, class, and race/ethnicity? How can we assign economic value to care that encompasses both paid and unpaid work? How do we move beyond a love versus money frame when it comes to the provision and recognition of care work? Questions like these are at the heart of current scholarship about care, and the volume in no way shies away from addressing them. For this reason alone, For Love and Money would be an appropriate addition to any sociology graduate course that deals with work and occupations, care work, or gender and work. Outside of the classroom, this book is a reference “must have” for anyone who regularly researches and writes about women and work, feminist economics, and/or caregiving. As a scholar of care myself, I am relieved and excited to have such a volume at my disposal.