Abstract
Sweden is seen by many as a country of equality and equity, and the ideas of nannies and au pairs caring for children in the land of public and nearly cost-free day care are often met by disbelief. In the book Nanny Families, Sara Eldén and Terese Anving show that not only is this happening, but it is also constructed as a tool for achieving greater gender equality both by the state and by the families using nanny and au pair care.
We were particularly attracted to reviewing this book jointly as collaborating family researchers in the Umeå University–based research programme Critical Studies of Norms in Society. It is a much-needed contribution to research on domestic services and family life in Sweden and an important contribution to the readership of the European Journal of Women’s Studies for two reasons. First, it underlines that Swedish family life indeed is part of the global care chains discussed by many other researchers. What happens in Swedish families is therefore not just a ‘Swedish affair’. Second, it serves as an example of how gender equality is under reformulation in what is considered to be one of the most gender-equal countries in the world. Nanny Families thus serves as an example of how gender equality might take on very different meanings as a result of political interventions aimed at enhancing equality and equity by opening up employment opportunities for women and people who have difficulty entering the formal work market. This is an important lesson for those of us engaged in both gender research and activism.
An important context to Nanny Families is the transition that Sweden has undergone during the last two decades – from a public welfare state where care has been primarily provided by the state, to a market-oriented model where care and domestic services are increasingly provided by private actors in a more individualised market. In a Swedish context, where high tax rates have been widely accepted because they have funded a public welfare state accessible to all citizens, there is a particularly notable aspect of the growth of the private care and domestic services market: it is subsidised through tax deductions on domestic service, introduced in 2007 in the tax policy RUT, a tax deduction on household services brought into households. In effect, Swedish tax payers have, since the introduction of RUT, supported the growth of a private sector which we argue has changed the image of what it means to be Swedish in a social democratic sense. Swedish state interventions have a long history of aiming for increased equality and equity, but in present-day Sweden, we are facing a situation where tax is financing private families’ usage of domestic services as well as a precarious labour market for largely women domestic workers (Kvist, 2013).
There is a small but growing body of research on this transition, and Nanny Families makes an important contribution to the field. Eldén and Anving set out, in their words, to hear and listen to the three categories of members of nanny families – the parents, the nannies/au pairs and the children – and in doing so closely investigate everyday nanny care situations.
Through in-depth interviews, diaries and drawing activities, Eldén and Anving produce rich data on a relatively new form of care in the Swedish context. In three separate chapters, the reader gets to know the parents, the nannies/au pairs and the children. Through their narratives of the nanny care situation, the authors highlight two main arguments, namely that care is simultaneously a practical and an emotional activity, and that care is a complex ‘doing’ of the everyday, mainly left to the nannies/au pairs and the children to handle.
The narratives of the nannies/au pairs make visible that nanny care, despite it being described as an easy task by both parents and nannies/au pairs, requires hard practical work and also intensive emotional labour. The nanny/au pair has to form relationships with both parents and children in order to handle everyday life in the families, which requires not only ‘sentient activity’ (Mason, 1996), that is, noticing, acknowledging and acting on others’ needs, but also the skills to handle conflicting preferences expressed by both parents and children. In that sense, the nanny/au pair must act in ways that are acceptable to both parents (e.g. being flexible about work hours and duties to perform) and children (e.g. being emotionally invested in and attentive to the child and by engaging in the child’s activities) and negotiate this in relation to the nanny’s/au pair’s own views about how to care for a child in the best possible way.
In examples such as these, the authors show how members of nanny families ‘do’ care in complex power relations where most often the ones at the top of the hierarchy, the parents, set agendas for the nannies/au pairs and the children, who often in the absence of the parents have to negotiate the relations of care being played out in the everyday. The narratives become especially striking when Eldén and Anving highlight how parents, nannies/au pairs and children narrate and negotiate the same contexts of care and how differently a care situation can be described by the members of the same nanny family. There are numerous examples of how borders are under constant negotiation: When is the nanny/au pair an employee and when is she (it is always a she in the book) a family member? Is good-quality parenting an issue of quantity or quality? Is good care performed through the making of a snack or by arranging a family life free from conflict and arguments (between the parents and between the parents and the children)?
Herein lies the strengths of the book, namely how Eldén and Anving through thick descriptions show how a snack is not just a snack but a doing of relations, of care and of caring. They show how a snack can alienate a child from an au pair when the snack served is a raw vegetable, which the au pair, unbeknownst to the children, serves on instruction from the parents. The rich data give the reader a very acute sense of what is at stake relationally. The parents in a sense practise involved parenthood from a distance, negotiating how the quality time they spend with their children makes up for shrinking quantity. The nannies/au pairs struggle with wanting to be there for the family. They need to create positive relationships with the children to make the quantity time they spend together tolerable for all, and they also need to form functioning relationships with the parents who after all are their employers and not their family members. On the contrary, they are fully aware that for many of them, the actual duties they perform go well beyond the terms of their contracts, without due compensation.
In many narratives, the children show understanding of the parents and appreciation of the kinds of lives their hard work makes possible. They also narrate the deep and important relationships they develop with their nannies/au pairs, but at the same time they describe how they avoid forming relationships with their nannies/au pairs as a means of resistance to a way of doing family they have not chosen and do not want. Their narratives further underline how practical care and emotions are intertwined in the mundane doings of everyday life and that it is hard labour continuously to have to form such relationships with new nannies/au pairs.
Nanny Families thus clearly shows the complexity of a growing care context in Sweden. Class, gender, age and ethnicity are ever present in the book but also somehow strangely silent at times. As the authors point out, the RUT tax policy, enabling Swedish families to buy domestic services at a subsidised cost, has ‘created a discursive change [. . .] where buying such services is a legitimate way of solving the ‘jigsaw puzzle of life’’ (p. 148). The extent to which this legitimation is also a backward step in relation to Swedish aspirations of equality and equity is discussed by Eldén and Anving in terms of doing inequality and reformulating equality. As researchers engaged in critical studies of norms in society, and in particular everyday doings in family life, we would, have liked to see more of these analyses to better understand what life in nanny families does both to permanent and temporary members of nanny families and, maybe more importantly, to society at large. What will happen to the notion of Swedish gender equality if it is reformulated to mean women’s rights to work on the same terms as men, but if it no longer includes men’s participation in unpaid care work? How will Sweden as a society, with a history of active measures to lessen social class effects, change if state-driven measures legitimise notions of ‘upstairs’ and ‘downstairs’ that support a precarious labour market marked by inequalities? What will it mean to family practices and ultimately to the citizens raised in nanny families if family life becomes chore-free? All these questions are touched upon in the book drawing on Eldén and Anving’s rich data. Nanny Families is undoubtedly thought-provoking. We very much hope that it stimulates further research and publications in this area. We would particularly welcome deeper intersectional analyses of these issues.