Framing Care: Gender,Labour and Governmentalities

Introduction

Care has received growing public attention in the recent past. Evelyn Nakano Glenn relates this to a care crisis, earlier limited to poor families that now encompasses ‘even relatively affluent middle-class families [who] are experiencing a “time bind” and “stretch out” in their efforts to meet competing demands for income and caring’ (2010, p. 2). She gives a broad definition of care as ‘relationships and activities involved in maintaining people on a daily basis and intergenerationally’ (Glenn, 2010, p. 5). One may gloss this to include direct, person-to-person, physical and emotional care and services enabling this; indirect care such as maintenance of liveable habitations; and fostering of social relations. Care is work that takes place at the intersections of various social differentiations.

The fulcrum of the discussion on care is that of gender and, more specifically, women’s responsibilities. In most, if not all, contemporary societies, the connection between caring and gender appears natural and tenacious, even as care in the non-domestic realm has expanded. Unpaid family carers and paid care workers, especially at the ‘lower’ levels of pay and skill, are largely women. In many contexts, men who give care are taken as being poor, unskilled and/or feminine. This constant connection requires more than acknowledgement, for it is linked to the mutual devaluation of caring and women and to gendered oppression.

In this article, ¹ I delineate four thematic clusters, which focus on the work, relations, practices and political economy of care, elaborating on a few studies, arguments and what I call organising concepts. ² Each theme contains analytical streams and debates that provide framings of care that build on, link and question each other: the sexual division of labour, mothering, the economic and social value of women’s domestic work and the work/care regime; gendered critiques of welfare regimes and a care regime; the care economy, a sharpening care crisis and care deficit with neo-liberal policies and demands for a work–life balance; and the rationalities, biopolitics and governmentalities of the social organisation and morality of care. ³ An examination of the regulatory controls over populations and the disciplining of the human body and its capabilities is not unique to the idea of biopower. That the complex and multiple practices/technologies/strategies used with apparent freedom in the domination of others co-constitute the self has been suggested prior to their elaboration in ideas of governmentality. ⁴ Yet, even a limited citing of these dense concepts in the last thematic cluster compels us to conclude with the politics of the intertwined dynamics of interpersonal relations, subjectivities and political economy intrinsic to debates discussed through the article over gender, care relations and practices and hopes for transformation.

The Work and Labour of Care

Women’s work as socially necessary and of economic value and its extent and variety were among the early themes in gender sensitive and feminist scholarship. ⁵ Making women’s work visible was central to empirical and theoretical renditions of women’s subordination (Beneria & Sen, 1986; Boserup, 1974; Engels, 1972). Four related streams can be flagged.

In early theorisations, the gendered division of labour and women’s work within the domestic domain shaped gender relations and inequality. Some suggested the sexual division of labour in diverse societies and times as the basis of gender inequality (Brown, 1970), while others suggested diverse valuations and gendered implications (Draper, 1975). With the spread of the capitalist labour market, the commoditisation of labour power, the deepening of capitalist relations and colonialism, non-domestic spheres of work expanded and the family-household became ‘private’. Women’s direct access to livelihoods and paid work weakened, giving a new colour to earlier sexual divisions of labour and reshaping marriage and familial ties. The male earner-breadwinner and female homemaker model took form and was strengthened (Mies, 1998 [1986]). It was in this context that non-commoditised domestic work—unpaid and performed within the ‘private’ familial sphere by women—was denied economic value and, in parallel, social value. This negatively affected women’s economic independence and rights and power relations within and without the family.

Scholars and activists emphasised that much of what women did in the relatively opaque domestic sphere was necessary for social and personal life. They interrogated the naturalisation of the sexual/gender division of labour and women’s domestic work, the assumption that under capitalism the male breadwinner model was the normal practice and that the family was a sphere of altruistic goodness (Harris, 1981), as in the trope of the home as a ‘haven from the heartless world’ (Lasch, 1976). The housework/domestic labour debate that emerged in the 1970s (Molyneux, 1979), overshadowing comparative studies of the sexual division of labour, revolved around divergent positions on the significance of domestic labour for the capitalist economic system, on who benefitted and how gender equality could be achieved.

It was argued that domestic work enabled and ensured profits and the maintenance of the capitalist system. Some emphasised that rather than focussing on capitalist value, it was necessary to think in terms of reproductive labour—work that reproduced human life and the social and economic formations of patriarchy and capitalism (Beneria & Sen, 1986). Most carework falls into or stems from the broad area of what was named as reproductive labour—rearing and socialising children and the production and daily maintenance of workers and of human beings (Edholm, Harris, & Young, 1977). A central question was how unpaid domestic labour and women’s work were to be recognised as economically valuable. At the least, the recognition of the haven created by women required a recognition of the social worth of that work.

Was this work to be given monetary value as was argued by those who advocated ‘wages for housework’? (Dalla Costa & James, 1975). This could be read as a classic case of the Wollstonecraft dilemma—would wages for housework lead to a transformation of gender relations or act to reaffirm them (cf. Pateman, 1989). While asserting the value of domestic labour, should not the gendered division of labour within the domestic domain be the primary target of transformative action? Could the determinative relation between the gender division of labour, in particular women’s unpaid domestic work, and gender inequality, which was being argued, be changed within a capitalist order or must the political economic system itself be the target of transformative action? (Davis, 1981; Eisenstein, 1978; Molyneux, 1979). In demanding wages for housework, who was to pay the wages? If it was the employer of the wage labourer, was this different from asking for an enhanced family wage? Or was the demand met with a bifurcation of the wage? What sort of political unit and action would this entail? If it was the husband who would pay the wage, what would this mean for inter-personal intimate relations? Would this not reduce the family to the heterosexual relationship?

Patricia Hill Collins’ (1994) discussion of motherwork and women of colour addresses the last and takes us from the economic to the social and the political, from domestic labour to care. Motherwork undoubtedly extracted high physical and political costs from women; but she cites Glenn’s 1986 study of Japanese immigrant women who saw themselves as working and caring for their family as a whole and not for the man/men in the family. Their analyses emphasise the critical importance of emotion, ideas of morality and self-hood in women’s doing of care, a theme discussed in the last section. Angela Davis (1981), Collins (1994) and Glenn (2010) found that the model in much of the discussion on motherhood/domestic labour was of white, middle-class housewives and a ‘decontextualised nuclear family’, neglecting differences of race and class in ‘family structures with quite different political economies’ (Collins, 1994, p. 46). It overlooked the long engagement of working class and coloured women in paid work, with or without their children, work that was necessary for the survival of their children and themselves.

Motherwork, she elaborates, challenges the binary of the private, female, domestic-familial sphere and the public, male, paid work sphere as well as of autonomy as ‘the guiding human quest’ (Collins, 1994, p. 47). Centring the experiences of mothering/caring by women of colour, she emphasises three themes: the physical survival of children and community, the dialectics of power and powerlessness in structuring mothering patterns—in having and keeping and socialising their children or not being able to do so—and the complexity of constructing individual and collective identity in a context of racial discrimination and the struggle for survival. Caring emerges as not just individual domestic labour, but that of multiple mothers/carers within and without the private/familial domain. ⁶ For Collins, motherwork is a struggle in which women both serve and resist relations of ruling, state institutions and misogynist notions from within their own culture and the dominant ideology. The work on women of colour and working-class women shifted the idea of domestic labour to a more complex notion of care, foregrounding the necessity to view the historicity and intersections of gender, class and race in domestic labour and care. At the same time, it is important to note that this labour of (giving) love is coerced through women’s ‘status duty’ and gendered systems of servitude (Glenn, 2010).

The Gender of Welfare Systems

A second thematic cluster emerged through a focus on welfare systems in developed countries. The intentionality of the welfare state was seen to be basic equality and the reduction of hard labour, especially as the class inequality of the market would remain. The early sociological theorisation of T. H. Marshall (1964) traced the significance of the welfare state in the broadening and deepening of citizenship to cover civil, political and social rights; but he looked only at commodified labour, assuming it would expand to cover both women and men and saw protective rights for women as antithetical to their full citizenship (Holmwood, 2000). ⁸ For Alva Myrdal, in contrast, women’s right to employment was central to their equal citizenship and required the public provisioning of childcare, which would be beneficial for children’s welfare and encourage the greater participation of men in domestic work (Holmwood, 2000).

Analyses of welfare regimes pulled together issues of state-economy interaction, social stratification, labour regimes and socio-political movements, concerns of scholars such as Marshall and Polanyi. Gosta Esping-Andersen’s comparative study (1990) formulated a typology of welfare regimes with differences in outcomes—decommodification and defamilialisation of labour and reduction in economic inequalities. Feminists argued that he generalised from the commoditised and defamilialised labour of the male citizen-worker (Lewis, 1992, 1997; Orloff, 1993). The naturalised connection between women, family and carework in grounding welfare states (Pateman, 1989) was unrecognised. Economic policies, institutional structures and even well-developed social democratic welfare regimes assumed women’s unpaid work in general and women’s care work in particular (Folbre, 1994). The life course dimensions of women’s unpaid and paid work—marriage, motherhood and elderly parents—(Kabeer, 2010; Ochiai & Moloney, 2008) were naturalised and not factored in. The domestication of care and notions of family solidarity and morality led to the exclusion of care from citizenship rights (Fraser, 1989). In the process, the sexual division of labour, women’s secondary economic status, the gender gap in earnings and their double burden were reinforced.

It is crucial to acknowledge that social democratic welfare regimes had enabled women from a broad range of classes to enter higher education, professional training and opt for paid work, to question women’s economic dependence and live lives against the traditional grain. Some aspects of caring were professionalised and moved into institutions. There was a large and growing presence of women employees in schooling, medical care, elderly care, day care for children and government departments administering unemployment, sickness, old age and other benefits. Changing social mores regarding the individual and family life, marriage and parenting were both effect and catalyst (Risseeuw, Ganesh, & Palriwala, 2005). Yet, evident from the above, much of the expansion of paid employment for women had been in occupations akin to their domestic and care work; ⁹ this was even more true for women of colour and working class backgrounds.

A Care Economy and Work–Life Balance

Central to the retraction of the welfare state were neo-liberal assertions of the economic inefficiency of public institutions and absence of democratic choice in what was called the ‘nanny state’, as against the market. Critiques of the welfare state were framed within liberal theory, some drawing on a Foucauldian construction of biopolitics. Advocates of neoliberal economics coopted feminist critiques of extant capitalism and the ‘patriarchal’ welfare state (Fraser, 2013). It was argued that an overprotective state had made citizens dependant, demanding and ‘calculative’ (Knijn, 2000, pp. 237–238). An ‘untrammelled’ and growing market would fracture the breadwinner model, the increased demand for labour would give the family more choice and citizens and women would become autonomous and responsible. To enable this process, domestic and international economic competition were to be encouraged through deregulation, privatisation and a roll back in welfare benefits, simultaneously addressing demographic constraints and investments in human resource development.

With globalisation, women had entered the paid workforce as cheap industrial labour in emerging economies (Ong, 1987). Such a feminisation of work ¹³ was also stimulated in developed economies by women’s demands for economic independence and equality in work, earnings and property. Exacerbated class, race and ethnic disparities among women was part of this process: cuts in benefits and the push for workfare pressed single mothers into low wage, part-time employment, likely without sick or parental leave (Glenn, 2010; Risseeuw et al., 2005). Other women entered precarious employment under the pressure to enhance familial earnings with declining real income or men’s unemployment. In many developing contexts, poor women had to expand their unpaid work to replace goods and services that they could not afford. Cuts in public services again made familial and private care necessary. The social effects were contradictory—a furthering of ideas of individualisation with the maintenance of social and kinship networks so to enable care.

A heterogeneous, commercial care sector has multiplied in size, levels, variety of enterprises and domains of activity, including what Arlie Hochschild (1983) named emotional labour. In itself, commodification does not contest gender divisions in carework and the domestic/familial domain or social hierarchies of labour, earnings and public recognition. Despite the earlier expansion of public schooling, nursing/medical and elderly care services, which employed women in significant numbers and the growing presence of men in nursing and care-related occupations, care labour tends to be paid less and is viewed as feminine, low skilled and ‘easy’. Over the last 25 years, paid domestic workers and home carers have increased paralleling the widening disparities that have accompanied neo-liberal capitalist expansion. In India, they are largely low-paid migrants to urban areas, who enhance the time for paid work or leisure for middle-class and elite families and women (Palriwala & Neetha, 2010, 2011). With the upward mobility of some women in paid employment, market-led capitalism, globalisation and welfare cuts, global care chains have emerged, reflecting global inequalities (Ehrenreich & Hochschild, 2002; Parrenas, 2001). They are a structured dislocation of relations of direct care in institutions and the home; further up the chain, caregivers are women of a poorer class and region and/or different race, caste and ethnicity than the care-receivers and down the chain they are older or poorer female relatives. The possibilities of receiving and giving care, as in the affordability of purchase or the possibility of the gift of care, are differentiated—products and creators of economic and social inequalities (Palriwala & Neetha, 2011).

The domestic labour debate and a questioning of the public–private divide, of the male breadwinner model and other critiques of welfare/social policies interwove in considerations on the economic and social value of carework. With the expansion of commodified care services, often building on the professionalisation that the welfare state had prompted and at times undermining it, ¹⁴ the care economy has gained traction as an organising concept. Bringing ‘private’ work into a free market of paid labour could give economic significance to carework. However, as indicated, a noticeable feature of the care economy is its feminisation—whether in public or private, not-for-profit or commercial enterprises. Furthermore, in the Indian context, monitoring and regulation of even formal facilities of care—both private and public—are minimal; the supposedly ‘better’ private crèches, schools and hospitals are very expensive and often with lower pay for the direct care workers, mostly women. This is integral to neo-liberal policies and their effects—deregulation of labour conditions, informalisation of the economy, growing part-time work and longer hours to earn the minimally required income. ¹⁵ The care economy mobilises the gendering of carework, social hierarchies and cultural practices to underwrite profit. The extant care economy and its wages do not undo the social and economic dependence and inequality of carers and women.

A care deficit (Hochschild, 1995) has emerged, in the developing and advanced capitalist world, as women scrounge around to make ends meet. With the paring of public health, education, nutrition and other services and a possible and consequent decline in health and nutrition levels, care needs increase even as care work shifts back to family members. Given the finitude of individual labour time and the limits to increasing productivity in carework, the low levels of earnings bring the time spent on obtaining livelihoods into conflict with time spent on and quality of immediate care of family members. This adds up to a care crisis for the middle classes, who are unable to hire private care workers, and a relative and absolute care deficit among poor, working class, migrant families.

The policy response to the apparent implications of structural adjustment—poverty and ‘deficits’ in care—is safety net programmes for ‘vulnerable’ categories. The focus is on the needs of the poor and ‘at risk’ groups, based on constructions of their biological/bodily and contingent vulnerabilities, as well as public risk. Poverty is an artefact in itself, rather than a structural and relational outcome of economic processes and inequalities. In seeming to equate the poor, children, the elderly, the ill and the disabled, poverty and care become a life cycle contingency. This is also a return to some categories that various welfare regimes had made provisions for. Thus, the biopolitics of the welfare state is revived, but in the context of a market logic and with additional specifications in the populations to be recognised. The focus in developed economies shifted to the very elderly and the chronically ill as against the old and the ill. Although quality care for children and child development may be a universally expressed value, the state, market and voluntary sectors made little provision for child care services in India or even in the Netherlands and Germany till women’s part-time labour had to be mobilised for the market.

The reworkings of public services, as in cash transfer programmes, recast the care-receiver as a consumer, concerned with her/his ability to buy quality care, with choice and dignity, rather than a beneficiary or a right-bearing citizen. ¹⁶ In practice, given the amount and terms for cash transfers, there was little material dignity, choice and quality in the care that could be availed of for those with little or no insurance or pension (Risseeuw et al., 2005)—often women, unskilled workers, the chronically ill and migrants. Significantly, the discussion on the rights and conditions of paid or unpaid caregivers remained minimal. The care crisis was as much a crisis for the caregiver as it was for those who required care. It was the right to give care with dignity and choice that the political advocacy for policy initiatives to enable a ‘work–life’ balance brought to the fore.

Governmentalities and Politics of Care

The everyday of women’s lives has grounded much scholarly work and political action contesting women’s subordination, including the framings of care described above. Yet, the diversity, inequality and shifts in everyday practices and social relations in the doing of care—that give force to the social and interpersonal that Collins or Glenn discuss—often recede to the background in policy and analyses. This section brings together varied conceptualisations of care that enable analyses of care practices. They simultaneously express philosophic concerns and engage with the social and cultural rationalities of modern power, governmentality and the biopolitics of practices and valuations of care, threads in the scholarship and advocacy discussed in the previous sections. The social organisation of care, the relational character of caring and its significance in any understanding of life and humanity are emphasised. The difficulties in ensuring that both the giving and receiving of care are experienced as good and affordable remain concerns.

The social rationalities shaping care practices are significant in the dynamics of the demarcated, but interacting institutional fields of the care diamond and its concrete outcomes. Knijn (2000) elaborates the distinct, overlapping and conflicting logics that operate in the market, state and familial domains in the Dutch welfare system, each problematic in some aspect. Welfare state systems, she argues, operated with a combination of a bureaucratic logic pinned on ideas of justice, fairness and equal treatment to citizens and the logic of the expertise of the professional in a personal relation with patients/clients. The standardisation of administrative procedures and democratic processes were to control professional ethics first, and second the standards. They relied more than was usually acknowledged on the logic of the moral claims of kinship, of personal reciprocity and dependency in the ‘private’, familial domain, a logic that embraced gendered personal relations (2000, p. 235). These logics were tied together by the state ideology and cultural politics of corporatism, which gave primary responsibility for welfare to the smallest unit—the household—and social solidarity, which upheld public responsibility. Through the case of homecare, Knijn traces the implications of the shift in balance once ‘marketisation’ enters. The logic of the market derives from the postulates of efficiency and effectiveness driven by profit and consumers’ demands rooted in ‘real needs’; it is controlled through the economic rationality of demand and supply and managerialism (Knijn, 2000). Intended to disrupt the bureaucratic logic that had governed non-familial care, market rationalities replaced direct, everyday care professionals with temporary, semi-skilled or untrained workers. The gender composition of carers changed little, but new strains on family and ‘voluntary’ carers and quality and accessibility of care were evident, with harsher working conditions of paid workers. Rather than enabling choice in care packages, profit and budget concerns determined a roster of changing carers performing bounded and standardised tasks; care was fragmented and relations made temporary (and stressful). The ideology of social solidarity was pushed to the background by the ideology of individualisation and care as a private concern. This was a process of disciplining caregivers and care-receivers, reiterating women’s secondary citizenship (Fraser, 1989) and obscuring the complexity of caring.

In the above, we can see shifts in the biopolitical governmentality of welfare and care. Michel Foucault’s (1997) genealogy of technologies and care of the self appears far from our present concerns pertaining to the labour of care of the body of others or of self in the everyday. His discussion is also markedly androcentric. However, as Nancy Fraser has argued, his descriptions of the technologies of power were also an announcement of the ‘politics of everyday life’ (1989, p. 28) and could lead to a focus on quotidian, mundane care. He argues that the biopolitic government of populations is both totalising and individualising and that subjectivity and subjectification are made through the micro-physical capillaries of power relations and under the shadow of state technologies. This can be a point of entry in understanding feminine commitment to carework, its apparent inescapability for women and their ‘voluntary’ care labour even in hyper-individualising societies.

The understanding of power as relations can ensure that the essentiality of relationships does not lead to a Gilliganesque romanticisation of women’s care ethics and an uncritical acceptance of existing care practices as a ‘labour of love’. Fraser’s analysis of the ‘politics of need interpretation’ and the gendered nature of the juridical-administration-therapeutic apparatuses of the modern welfare state in constructing ‘dependent’ women and devaluing carework critiques the biopolitics and power/knowledge regimes of modern governmentality (1989, pp. 144–158). She suggests that an apparent stance of normative equivalence in Foucault, which leaves little space for political action and advocacy, can be set aside. A much cited passage resonates with discussions on the social relations of care and political struggle: ‘Society and the institutions which frame it have limited the possibility of relationships because a rich relational world would be very complex to manage. We should fight against the impoverishment of the relational fabric’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 158).

In the concern with an ethics of care, rooted in relationality, Gilligan’s (1982) revision of developmental psychology is among the more significant and cited. She argued that ‘women speak in a different voice’ in their moral thinking based on their articulations of concerns for relations, care, responsibility and context in their interpersonal life. Important as it was in revalorising women’s ways of being, it carried the danger of an essentialised, universal and ahistorical construction of womanhood and care. From this vantage point, women devoted to caring would be the most moral, naturalising the connection, obscuring the structural features that demand or stop many women doing so and diluting the politicomoral urgency to transform social relations through a transformation of the gendering of care.

Tronto argues that this was because Gilligan accepted the boundary between morality and politics, containing care in the private (1993, pp. 77–97). Questioning this, she maintains that the notions of individualism, autonomy and the ‘self-made man’, hegemonic in contemporary times, cannot admit the degree to which care makes it ‘all’ possible (1993, p. 111). She argues for a radical political and ideational project centred on the revaluation of care and suggests a framework that enables an empirical analysis of the micro practices, social organisation and political economy of carework. Together with Fisher, she defined four phases of care. ¹⁷ Caring involves both thought and end-directed action—a form of practical rationality. ‘Caring about’ is a culturally, politically and individually shaped recognition that particular forms of care are necessary. In the next phase—‘taking care of’—responsibility is assumed for the identified need and determining how to respond to it. Providing money—whether as a breadwinner or through state budget allocations—is a form of ‘taking care of’ and depends on ‘caring about’. It is distinct from caregiving, which is the third phase of care—the direct physical labour of care, which usually requires physical contact or proximity between caregivers and the receivers/objects of care. In the fourth phase—‘care-receiving’—the object of care responds to the care received; it is this phase rather than caregiving that is recognised in today’s discourses of rights and safety nets. Without the labour of caregiving, the recognised care needs and the provision of resources made for them cannot be realised for the care recipient. In other words, it is in a relation akin to that between labour and capital that labour produces care.

This delineation foregrounds the process and labour of caring at levels of the interpersonal, macro-economics and state-citizen relations: all shape care needs, the material resources and time required in caregiving and who will be the caregivers—unpaid women and/or men in the family, state institutions, privately hired or public workers. Limiting care to a dyadic, inter-personal relationship naturalises, individualises and romanticises carework. In such a framing, the mother in particular and women in general, who find giving care difficult, become unnatural or deficient. Tronto emphasises that care can and does involve conflict between each of the four phases, between various caregivers and between caregivers and care-receivers. There are differences of perceptions and claims over needs, societal and personal resources—material goods, time, skills—required for good care and structural inequalities in accessing and controlling them. The strains and needs of the caregiver, in particular, are too often obscured or viewed as selfish.

All human beings need some care that will have to be met by others in modalities constructed within a social, political and cultural economy. Tronto argues that caring about (thinking) and taking care of (livelihood provision) are the roles of the powerful, whether within the family or in public domains, seen as resting on a wider knowledge and universal morality. Caregiving and care-receiving are left to the less powerful, to private and local concerns and to the social domain—women, family members, paid domestic workers, nannies and nursing aides. The relatively powerful are not threatened by recognition that they need care from others, as long as it is evoked within its ‘properly contained social place’, as peripheral, unskilled, natural and private (Tronto, 1993, p. 122). The social organisation and practices of caring are imbricated in a matrix of gender, class, race and caste relations.

Tronto concludes that an economic recognition of care is insufficient; what is required is a new ethic of care. This begs many questions as to how to arrive at such an ethic, even with her insistence on politics and without romanticising an iniquitous past or silence over the violence and lack of care that can take place in familial and/or institutional care. Will it sideline the materialities of caring? In a capitalist economy, can carework be valued without imbuing it with the ethics of the market—that is, profit and calculation of returns—as Hochschild (1983) found? Is the validation of private care practices to be achieved through asserting their intrinsic moral worth or by making care a social, public responsibility or by combining these paths (a version of Wollstonecraft’s dilemma)? How can people be given the right to give and receive care, the right to share that care with public institutions and the right not to give care? How can institutions provide the good and loving care that is desired and that is assumed families give? How is the move from the recognition of women’s care work to the recognition of care as essential labour to be made into an ethics that matters?

Concluding Remarks

A focus on care variously critiques contemporary ideologies of social relations, the individualising society and dichotomies of modern, capitalist society: altruism versus instrumentalism; unpaid care work versus paid labour; extra-market morality versus commodification; familial love versus the paid stranger; emotion versus rationality. The premise that all human beings are social beings and the extent to which this is consonant with the contemporary emphasis on individuation and individualisation is a political dilemma. Citizen rights have largely been conceived as rights of individuals. In this line of thinking, democratisation is furthered by individualisation. Yet, undoubtedly, care implies dependencies between individuals, whether voluntary or formal. Does this make for less autonomous citizens? Women have been particularly constrained in their individualisation by sociocultural codes of familial care. Caring relations are simultaneously personal and institutional bonds of love and power, separated from but dependent on the instrumental world of paid work. What may not be sufficiently recognised is that in an economy based on commodification and profit, a moral–political recognition of women’s care labour or book value to her labour is not sufficient to fight the inequalities of work and its returns, the gendered allocation of care labour, its devaluation in its ‘containment’ and women’s economic dependence.

Returning to the concern with the care crisis, which this article has raised at various points, Fraser (2016) goes further. She argues that this crisis is rooted in the social contradictions of capitalism, inherent in the raison d’être of profit-maximisation, but acutely so in its contemporary financialised form. Then, taking the concerns and practices of care seriously is crucial in the struggle against women’s subordination and gender inequalities in concert with a struggle against the central ethos, rationale and structures of capitalism itself. Social policy reform will not be enough.

Tronto asserts, ‘just as Marxists argued that the 40-hour week was the starting point for a revolution that took workers seriously, so, too, we need to insist that the physical, emotional and relational care that humans need should set the limits within which other concerns: economic growth, “work”, social institutional organisation, take their frame’ (2012, p. 34). A concern with care and the de-gendering of carework, along with its revaluation based on an acceptance of the essential relatedness of people and of life itself, forms part of the unfinished agenda of equality, welfare and development. This entails a politics oriented to breaking class, caste, racial and gender hierarchies that frame care and life in its different locations.